But what's valuable isn't the house, it's the land under the house.
When they pay more for property taxes, what additional police protection do they get for the land? Does it require constant police vigilance to prevent someone from stealing the land from under their home?
Considering the lots are typical suburban lots with actually fewer trees than most lots because of the views, there's not even an increased fire protection demand.
Their kids don't get additional school services, either, so there's no greater consumption of services there, either.
The problem is, property valuations are driven just like the realtor said, by location, location, location.
I've seen houses of a similar style and size to mine on a large recreational lake in the metro area, and their property taxes are 5-10 times what mine are because the desirable location drives up the price.
The thing is, their house doesn't use more services than mine does -- the state DNR manages the lake resources and the lake is open to public boating, so presumably all of those costs are spread among all the possible lake users.
Yet they face extremely high property taxes because their property is considered more valuable. How is this fair? They don't get or consume more services.
This ONLY makes any sense if they announce at the same time that they have made new agreements with all the studios to put all their catalog available for streaming.
That didn't happen, so now they are divorcing the service that actually *has* all the titles you want to watch from their primary brand and associating that brand with all the crappy titles you don't want to watch on streaming.
Corporate suicide -- how do they get all those apparently smart people to go along with this at once?
a few people bought Windows Mobile devices but by and large these were a fairly dismal failure.
I think that depended on where you were in terms of business size.
I think big businesses probably weren't interested in jumping off, either from a we've-just-figured-this-out perspective or because they had a bunch of money pumped into a BES/Blackberry infrastructure (devices, BES servers, BES software, licenses, etc).
At the small-business level, I think ActiveSync and WinMobile gained a lot of traction in a short amount of time. I saw a number of clients with small Blackberry investments (handhelds and no or only a couple of BES licenses) ditch Blackberry or other proprietary solutions (Treo 650 with Goodlink) for 'free' ActiveSync on WinMobile.
iPhone probably helped push big businesses towards ActiveSync more as internal demand for iPhone support grew with iPhone adoption.
But I agree overall -- RIM made a strategic decision to stick with the data model that routed all data through RIM and BES servers vs. the client/server model ActiveSync uses and this I think killed their longterm growth.
We have friends from Chicago who are African American. They laugh at Peanut Allergies and the like and say "Poor people don't have food allergies, they eat anything."
Aren't MREs that the military uses basically the same thing, minus whatever is done to suit the specific environment of low-Earth orbit?
IIRC, MREs have a shelf life of about 10 years, require no refrigeration or reheating, although I think some come with heat tablets/packs that can warm the meals to make them more palatable.
The there's the whole world of hiker/mountaineering food, which is probably somewhere between MREs and the kind of packaged stovetop meals you can buy at the grocery store.
Besides whatever is taken into consideration for low gravity, about the only thing space food might do differently would be nutritional content. MREs I think are very high calorie and oriented towards young people doing strenuous work (soldiers in the field). Space food is probably more oriented towards lower calorie needs of astronauts who have less physical exertion and are generally older.
The right of ownership is to the intellectual property, the ephemeral content that is on every piece of media containing a copy, not any specific copy they might or might not own or have in their possession. It's the ideas, artistic works, etc.
Aren't there plenty of "lost" negatives, master recordings, to movies, TV shows, records, etc? It's not like the people who own the copyright lose their copyright claims simply because they can't account for a copy of the media.
We took a woman into custody who worked at a drugstore; she had been stealing lottery tickets at the register and they had 4 DVDs of videos from the security system. The store had called the cops, called her in, shitcanned her and made her wait for the squad.
While the real cop was up searching her, handcuffing her and bringing her down from the office the store manager hands over all this evidence to me and starts explaining it. I took it from and and just listened and then told him I was just a ridealong. He kind of laughed and said "I thought you might be the detective."
I asked my friend why everyone kept thinking I was either a detective or his boss, and he laughed and said that thinking I was a cop made sense -- when people call the cops and two guys show, you're a cop.
He thought maybe the reason they thought I was his boss was that he did all the work and I just kind of look like I supervised and asked a few questions (my friend the cop encouraged it, actually). He said supervisors and training cops sometimes didn't wear patrol uniforms, too, but it's not like civilians would know that.
Non-cops, ex-cops, bad guys -- impersonating an officer has gone on forever, especially among detectives and security guys. You almost have to give ex-cops a break, acting coplike is probably a tough habit to break.
Generally speaking, white, middle class people do exactly what they're told when a "cop" tells them what to do.
I did a ride-along with a friend who is a cop and it was almost hilarious. Upstanding white people did EXACTLY what I suggested, in a "Is-this-OK?" manner, despite the fact that the cop was in uniform and I wore civilian clothes.
I work for a small IT consulting company. One of the owners is my age or a year older (I'm 44) and one is ten years younger.
One or two are 5 years younger but with similar life situations (married, working wife, young children) but most of them are late 20s, single and unmarried.
When you talk to these guys its almost like you have nothing in common outside of technology; several work events seemed really tailored towards this age group (ie, Christmas party held at Dave & Busters). I chose just not to go -- either I went without my wife, or we spent $50 on a babysitter to drive to a video game place I would probably amuse myself in but wouldn't seek out and where my wife would flat-out refuse to go.
I sometimes wonder if this kind of "age gap" isn't part of the problem -- younger tech managers want a "company spirit" and somehow find older workers uninterested in the video games, nerf guns and all the other frankly immature bullshit that passes for "employee engagement".
I think something like that makes sense, if only because so many of the people with "autism awareness" also seem to be the kinds of people who jump on diet trends, either out of concern for health or simple vanity.
Given that pregnancy can significantly alter a woman's body (weight gain, sag, etc) it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of women didn't increase consumption of low-fat foods in an attempt to avoid weight gain.
And further, since there's so much hype about childhood obesity, it wouldn't surprise me if these same parents also started feeding their children low-fat food.
It's a great safety concept for civilians, but in military and law enforcement circumstances you don't always have an opportunity to point your gun at the target when you intend to shoot it without the target shooting first.
Which is why the police commonly will draw and point their weapons at a suspect without actually shooting the suspect.
And even for civilians, in self-defense situations it belies the reality that simply brandishing a firearm can often result in effective self defense without actually shooting anyone.
I'm sure there is a creepy factor to men, but IMHO (at least at this stage of my life) is that there is to women, too, you just tend not to notice it when you are younger and more sexually focused.
My friend who complained about the skewed ratio said that if you didn't hit a 'new' girl immediately, you were fucked, so I can see where the form letter kind of stuff comes from, but then again, that may just be people playing the averages.
As for the gender balance, I don't doubt that overall there's some kind of gender balance, but I wonder how many female accounts were one-off accounts that they never actively used? I also wonder if OKC doesn't have an incentive to skew gender balance -- if you go to the site and find out the stats are men 4:1 women, why bother?
I'm sure there's some kind of tipping point for female interest as well -- you didn't say, but how many of the women you are getting interest from are much younger than you?
I strongly think that women in their twenties are really operating in something combining Cinderella fantasy with something approaching an instinctive search for economic support; it might be because like everyone else in their 20s, they are struggling economically and a man to support them seems like an easy and familiar way out.
Unfortunately, men in their 20s are just as bad off and even if they have that first cube job, they aren't seen as a good source of support. "Older" men, even slightly older, may give off some kind of aura of economic security (slightly better car, apartment, clothes) that appeals to them.
...two theories from e-dating users. They're somewhat contradictory.
1) The gender balance is skewed, leading to women shopping from a large pool of available men. This makes sense, as it seems to follow typical mating behavior in American culture (ie, men solicit women, women choose which man to accept) as well as following a sort of larger skew of technology use.
It was also thought that younger women (under 35?) of average or better appearance generally have more real-world dating options than men do as they are more likely to be solicited by men than women in day-day life, thus reducing their interest in online dating.
The first opinion came from a friend of mine who'd I'd describe as generally attractive and in great physical shape but overly picky. I think he used match.com and e-harmony. I think if he had been less picky, or had taken profile answers with a grain of salt (ie, assuming that some answers may have been weakly held preferences instead of assuming they were zealously held beliefs, cast in stone) he might have had a bigger pool to draw from.
2) Once you get outside the pool of women looking for a husband (ie, over 35-40, with white-collar careers and either never married or divorced, the chances of getting dates goes up significantly.
The theory behind this is that this pool of women are (no longer?) interested in the fairy tale of husband, kids, house in the suburbs, etc and are more interested in general companionship, casual dating, etc. They have good paying jobs and are generally comfortable in their single status and don't "need" a man for economic and social security. They're also on the declining side of physical attractiveness, and thus are less likely to believe they can be picky, especially if they are competing with women 10 years younger. I've heard this theory before and it makes some sense.
The second theory was from a guy who I would describe as of below-average appearance -- moderately overweight, and neither a snappy dresser or well-groomed. He seemed happy and said he went on "first dates" every couple of weeks and occasionally second and third dates but said he was more interested in having fun than finding a life partner.
My guess is that if you choose from the right pool and aren't overly picky, you'll do OK. It probably sucks to be 29 and trying to use online dating as I think the expectations of young women are really unrealistic.
I get that it works for you, but why do people who never use a smartphone feel the need to comment on a topic based around people who use a smart phone and use it a lot? I see this in almost every Slashdot story about cell phone service.
"Well, I use a disposable flip phone with prepaid service from Trac, never send texts, don't access the Internet and make 2 calls a month." Great. Do you also live above Grandmas garage, collect aluminum cans for a living and otherwise not participate in the same world the rest of us do?
No offense, but who the fuck cares? You're not batting in the same league as everyone else so your low-budget opinion about your cheap-ass lifestyle is wholly irrelevant.
Sure, it's possible to have a cell number and get by on $5 a month, but not if you're running a whole business (email, voice, etc) off a smartphone, which is what a lot of people are doing and why they care about data caps and billing practices.
My experience has been that it's a little easier to run vCenter outside of the cluster it manages. It works to virtualize it, but there are times where it is a nuisance.
What's great if you can get away with it is to run vCenter on a standalone esxi box. You get the independence from the cluster and you can run a backup dc in a separate vm, so even if you lose the whole cluster you at least have something you can work with to get it up.
My SSID is "SHOCKING PORN" and when my sister-in-law got wifi, I made sure she understood there was a password and we set the SSID to "Fuck Off, Freeloaders!"
My general experience is that most of the time the immediate neighbors on both sides wifi bleeds in/out at about 1 "bar" of strength, so its not like anybody even sees the SSIDs unless they are in my house or outside.
What's surprising is that you CAN wreak havoc with VMware environments pretty easily in ways that junior admin staff might not be able to fix but that seasoned people could fix trivially.
You COULD remove a VM from inventory (not delete it, just make it appear gone), rename a.vmdk or edit the text.vmdk file so that the actual disk container wasn't pointed at right and appeared corrupted. With either of these, VMs give weird errors, don't start or aren't even there.
It'd be trivial to fix all of these issues if you knew what you did. Instant hero.
Even more surprising is that he was able to permanently delete anything. Most places I work with have pretty extensive VM backups and offsite VM backup repositories regularly. Entire system restores aren't complicated at all.
Slashdot Mirror
But what's valuable isn't the house, it's the land under the house.
When they pay more for property taxes, what additional police protection do they get for the land? Does it require constant police vigilance to prevent someone from stealing the land from under their home?
Considering the lots are typical suburban lots with actually fewer trees than most lots because of the views, there's not even an increased fire protection demand.
Their kids don't get additional school services, either, so there's no greater consumption of services there, either.
Will it be self-made? Will there be hot PETA chicks doing porn?
The problem is, property valuations are driven just like the realtor said, by location, location, location.
I've seen houses of a similar style and size to mine on a large recreational lake in the metro area, and their property taxes are 5-10 times what mine are because the desirable location drives up the price.
The thing is, their house doesn't use more services than mine does -- the state DNR manages the lake resources and the lake is open to public boating, so presumably all of those costs are spread among all the possible lake users.
Yet they face extremely high property taxes because their property is considered more valuable. How is this fair? They don't get or consume more services.
This ONLY makes any sense if they announce at the same time that they have made new agreements with all the studios to put all their catalog available for streaming.
That didn't happen, so now they are divorcing the service that actually *has* all the titles you want to watch from their primary brand and associating that brand with all the crappy titles you don't want to watch on streaming.
Corporate suicide -- how do they get all those apparently smart people to go along with this at once?
a few people bought Windows Mobile devices but by and large these were a fairly dismal failure.
I think that depended on where you were in terms of business size.
I think big businesses probably weren't interested in jumping off, either from a we've-just-figured-this-out perspective or because they had a bunch of money pumped into a BES/Blackberry infrastructure (devices, BES servers, BES software, licenses, etc).
At the small-business level, I think ActiveSync and WinMobile gained a lot of traction in a short amount of time. I saw a number of clients with small Blackberry investments (handhelds and no or only a couple of BES licenses) ditch Blackberry or other proprietary solutions (Treo 650 with Goodlink) for 'free' ActiveSync on WinMobile.
iPhone probably helped push big businesses towards ActiveSync more as internal demand for iPhone support grew with iPhone adoption.
But I agree overall -- RIM made a strategic decision to stick with the data model that routed all data through RIM and BES servers vs. the client/server model ActiveSync uses and this I think killed their longterm growth.
Mild sedatives like Xanax? Beta blockers? Anti-depressants? Anything to make the emotional dynamic range lower?
We have friends from Chicago who are African American. They laugh at Peanut Allergies and the like and say "Poor people don't have food allergies, they eat anything."
This struck me as insightful.
Aren't MREs that the military uses basically the same thing, minus whatever is done to suit the specific environment of low-Earth orbit?
IIRC, MREs have a shelf life of about 10 years, require no refrigeration or reheating, although I think some come with heat tablets/packs that can warm the meals to make them more palatable.
The there's the whole world of hiker/mountaineering food, which is probably somewhere between MREs and the kind of packaged stovetop meals you can buy at the grocery store.
Besides whatever is taken into consideration for low gravity, about the only thing space food might do differently would be nutritional content. MREs I think are very high calorie and oriented towards young people doing strenuous work (soldiers in the field). Space food is probably more oriented towards lower calorie needs of astronauts who have less physical exertion and are generally older.
At least show a sense of humor --
"Mine is Linux, running on a pretty generic Dell laptop, IP address 10.0.0.1."
The right of ownership is to the intellectual property, the ephemeral content that is on every piece of media containing a copy, not any specific copy they might or might not own or have in their possession. It's the ideas, artistic works, etc.
Aren't there plenty of "lost" negatives, master recordings, to movies, TV shows, records, etc? It's not like the people who own the copyright lose their copyright claims simply because they can't account for a copy of the media.
I remember my Dad shaking/waving them -- I'm not sure what this did, but it could have been with the Kodak copy.
IIRC, wasn't there an earlier Polaroid film that had a layer you had to peel back after a certain amount of time?
We took a woman into custody who worked at a drugstore; she had been stealing lottery tickets at the register and they had 4 DVDs of videos from the security system. The store had called the cops, called her in, shitcanned her and made her wait for the squad.
While the real cop was up searching her, handcuffing her and bringing her down from the office the store manager hands over all this evidence to me and starts explaining it. I took it from and and just listened and then told him I was just a ridealong. He kind of laughed and said "I thought you might be the detective."
I asked my friend why everyone kept thinking I was either a detective or his boss, and he laughed and said that thinking I was a cop made sense -- when people call the cops and two guys show, you're a cop.
He thought maybe the reason they thought I was his boss was that he did all the work and I just kind of look like I supervised and asked a few questions (my friend the cop encouraged it, actually). He said supervisors and training cops sometimes didn't wear patrol uniforms, too, but it's not like civilians would know that.
Non-cops, ex-cops, bad guys -- impersonating an officer has gone on forever, especially among detectives and security guys. You almost have to give ex-cops a break, acting coplike is probably a tough habit to break.
Generally speaking, white, middle class people do exactly what they're told when a "cop" tells them what to do.
I did a ride-along with a friend who is a cop and it was almost hilarious. Upstanding white people did EXACTLY what I suggested, in a "Is-this-OK?" manner, despite the fact that the cop was in uniform and I wore civilian clothes.
Haha, that's funny. What's even more funny about it is that I can drink most of these kids under the table, one at a time.
I work for a small IT consulting company. One of the owners is my age or a year older (I'm 44) and one is ten years younger.
One or two are 5 years younger but with similar life situations (married, working wife, young children) but most of them are late 20s, single and unmarried.
When you talk to these guys its almost like you have nothing in common outside of technology; several work events seemed really tailored towards this age group (ie, Christmas party held at Dave & Busters). I chose just not to go -- either I went without my wife, or we spent $50 on a babysitter to drive to a video game place I would probably amuse myself in but wouldn't seek out and where my wife would flat-out refuse to go.
I sometimes wonder if this kind of "age gap" isn't part of the problem -- younger tech managers want a "company spirit" and somehow find older workers uninterested in the video games, nerf guns and all the other frankly immature bullshit that passes for "employee engagement".
I think something like that makes sense, if only because so many of the people with "autism awareness" also seem to be the kinds of people who jump on diet trends, either out of concern for health or simple vanity.
Given that pregnancy can significantly alter a woman's body (weight gain, sag, etc) it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of women didn't increase consumption of low-fat foods in an attempt to avoid weight gain.
And further, since there's so much hype about childhood obesity, it wouldn't surprise me if these same parents also started feeding their children low-fat food.
It's a great safety concept for civilians, but in military and law enforcement circumstances you don't always have an opportunity to point your gun at the target when you intend to shoot it without the target shooting first.
Which is why the police commonly will draw and point their weapons at a suspect without actually shooting the suspect.
And even for civilians, in self-defense situations it belies the reality that simply brandishing a firearm can often result in effective self defense without actually shooting anyone.
I'm sure there is a creepy factor to men, but IMHO (at least at this stage of my life) is that there is to women, too, you just tend not to notice it when you are younger and more sexually focused.
My friend who complained about the skewed ratio said that if you didn't hit a 'new' girl immediately, you were fucked, so I can see where the form letter kind of stuff comes from, but then again, that may just be people playing the averages.
As for the gender balance, I don't doubt that overall there's some kind of gender balance, but I wonder how many female accounts were one-off accounts that they never actively used? I also wonder if OKC doesn't have an incentive to skew gender balance -- if you go to the site and find out the stats are men 4:1 women, why bother?
I'm sure there's some kind of tipping point for female interest as well -- you didn't say, but how many of the women you are getting interest from are much younger than you?
I strongly think that women in their twenties are really operating in something combining Cinderella fantasy with something approaching an instinctive search for economic support; it might be because like everyone else in their 20s, they are struggling economically and a man to support them seems like an easy and familiar way out.
Unfortunately, men in their 20s are just as bad off and even if they have that first cube job, they aren't seen as a good source of support. "Older" men, even slightly older, may give off some kind of aura of economic security (slightly better car, apartment, clothes) that appeals to them.
I think he meant his apartment, not supplying his store.
...two theories from e-dating users. They're somewhat contradictory.
1) The gender balance is skewed, leading to women shopping from a large pool of available men. This makes sense, as it seems to follow typical mating behavior in American culture (ie, men solicit women, women choose which man to accept) as well as following a sort of larger skew of technology use.
It was also thought that younger women (under 35?) of average or better appearance generally have more real-world dating options than men do as they are more likely to be solicited by men than women in day-day life, thus reducing their interest in online dating.
The first opinion came from a friend of mine who'd I'd describe as generally attractive and in great physical shape but overly picky. I think he used match.com and e-harmony. I think if he had been less picky, or had taken profile answers with a grain of salt (ie, assuming that some answers may have been weakly held preferences instead of assuming they were zealously held beliefs, cast in stone) he might have had a bigger pool to draw from.
2) Once you get outside the pool of women looking for a husband (ie, over 35-40, with white-collar careers and either never married or divorced, the chances of getting dates goes up significantly.
The theory behind this is that this pool of women are (no longer?) interested in the fairy tale of husband, kids, house in the suburbs, etc and are more interested in general companionship, casual dating, etc. They have good paying jobs and are generally comfortable in their single status and don't "need" a man for economic and social security. They're also on the declining side of physical attractiveness, and thus are less likely to believe they can be picky, especially if they are competing with women 10 years younger. I've heard this theory before and it makes some sense.
The second theory was from a guy who I would describe as of below-average appearance -- moderately overweight, and neither a snappy dresser or well-groomed. He seemed happy and said he went on "first dates" every couple of weeks and occasionally second and third dates but said he was more interested in having fun than finding a life partner.
My guess is that if you choose from the right pool and aren't overly picky, you'll do OK. It probably sucks to be 29 and trying to use online dating as I think the expectations of young women are really unrealistic.
I get that it works for you, but why do people who never use a smartphone feel the need to comment on a topic based around people who use a smart phone and use it a lot? I see this in almost every Slashdot story about cell phone service.
"Well, I use a disposable flip phone with prepaid service from Trac, never send texts, don't access the Internet and make 2 calls a month." Great. Do you also live above Grandmas garage, collect aluminum cans for a living and otherwise not participate in the same world the rest of us do?
No offense, but who the fuck cares? You're not batting in the same league as everyone else so your low-budget opinion about your cheap-ass lifestyle is wholly irrelevant.
Sure, it's possible to have a cell number and get by on $5 a month, but not if you're running a whole business (email, voice, etc) off a smartphone, which is what a lot of people are doing and why they care about data caps and billing practices.
My experience has been that it's a little easier to run vCenter outside of the cluster it manages. It works to virtualize it, but there are times where it is a nuisance.
What's great if you can get away with it is to run vCenter on a standalone esxi box. You get the independence from the cluster and you can run a backup dc in a separate vm, so even if you lose the whole cluster you at least have something you can work with to get it up.
My SSID is "SHOCKING PORN" and when my sister-in-law got wifi, I made sure she understood there was a password and we set the SSID to "Fuck Off, Freeloaders!"
My general experience is that most of the time the immediate neighbors on both sides wifi bleeds in/out at about 1 "bar" of strength, so its not like anybody even sees the SSIDs unless they are in my house or outside.
What's surprising is that you CAN wreak havoc with VMware environments pretty easily in ways that junior admin staff might not be able to fix but that seasoned people could fix trivially.
You COULD remove a VM from inventory (not delete it, just make it appear gone), rename a .vmdk or edit the text .vmdk file so that the actual disk container wasn't pointed at right and appeared corrupted. With either of these, VMs give weird errors, don't start or aren't even there.
It'd be trivial to fix all of these issues if you knew what you did. Instant hero.
Even more surprising is that he was able to permanently delete anything. Most places I work with have pretty extensive VM backups and offsite VM backup repositories regularly. Entire system restores aren't complicated at all.