I've learned to only buy CDs if it's the "greatest hits" album. Although some CDs like Depeche Mode's "Violator" or Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation" are good from start-to-finish, they are the rarity not the norm. Most CDs are 1-2 hit songs followed by a bunch of mediocre songs that were never played on the radio because they were poorly-produced.
So for example, rather than buy all 5 of Eminem's or Avril Lavigne's recent CDs, I'll just wait for the greatest hits album. It's ~80% cheaper that way.
>>>When independent economists calculated the price of a CD, on the shelf in the store, being ~10 cents less than the LP. That included paying off investment in 5 years... >>>
Yes but even more damning - when the U.S. Federal Trade Commission investigated they discovered that the record companies were colluding to prop-up prices, and threatening discount stores like Walmart, "Sell for $12 and higher, else we'll cut off your supply to all music-related items." The U.S. FTC filed charges of forming an illegal cartel.
The companies knew they were guilty, so instead of letting the trial finish, they offered to give a refund to all consumers that asked for one. The FTC agreed and I got an $18 check, ditto my mother, and ditto my brother.
That was circa 2002. Shortly thereafter, after the cartel had been broken-up, the prices of just-released CDs at Walmart dropped as low as $8.
The Chief Economist of PRS was found dead in his home, apparently of autoerotic asphyiation, with ropes tied around his neck and completely naked.
The UK police are stumped. "We did find a card with the word 'RIAA' on it, but we decided to ignore it and call this a suicide. A sex game gone wrong." Outsiders call this a case of corporatism - the government and the corporations colluding to cover-up a murder. "It be fascism, that's what it be," said a local man who refused to identity himself.
Actually America, as conceived, is not about freedom. It's about the individual and protection of his rights from overarching, overbearing politicians sick with power. That's why these individual rights (ownership of self, right to self-protection, right to privacy, et cetera) are encoded into the U.S. and 50 State Constitutions - to block the government and keep it under control, so the individual can live a life without being hassled at every turn.
Unfortunately in their rush to control everything like petit-dictators, the Congresscritters have decided to ignore the Supreme Laws. The phrase "shall be secure in their persons and papers" means nothing if Congress can look at your bnk account whenever they feel like it. "The two worst diseases are avarice and ambition - love of money and love of power. Leaders suffer from both." - Benjamin Franklin
>>>how long before US considers perfectly legal and reasonable acts to be terrorist acts??
If we deposit $10,000 or more in an account, the government makes a note of it and investigates. One local fellow was depositing $9900, $9500, $9600 in cash in order to avoid that requirement, but a suspicious Nazi... er, teller reported him anyway because he was "close enough". Then the stormtroopers... er, FBI arrested him for trying to avoid the $10,000 legel requirement.
This is the kind of society that the scared American people have created. "Any who would give up Essential liberty for temporary security deserves neither." - Benjamin Franklin. All these problems would disappear if we simply enforced the Constitution as written. No warrant; no search of people or their effects (papers/bank accounts).
Someday U.S. taxpayers will have to pay-off that enormous debt, which is now the equivalent of $105,000 hanging over every home.
It would be nice if our politicians would grow-up, stop acting like teenagers with credit cards, and reduce spending. But no, instead they want to saddle us with a giant Uncle Sam healthcare program that we can not afford. By the end of Obama's term, that debt will have risen to ~$150,000 per home.
Pretty soon the entire U.S. will be like bankrupt California.
- If I drive to the store to buy a book, I waste 3 dollars on gasoline on the trip. - If I buy from amazon.com the same book, I waste 0 dollars because shipping is free.
Okay well let's suppose I bought $200 worth of digital books from amazon, and then suddenly they erased them from my Kindle.
From my point-of-view amazon just stole 200 dollars my money. They took the cash, and I have nothing. IMHO a way to compensate myself is to take 200 dollars worth of physical books from the amazon webstore - that way things will be even again.
by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27, @08:30PM (#28845833) Maybe they just read some of your posts on slashdot and figured that the $500 was the tax you get to pay to continue being a douchebag.
Okay what's so special about 1979? It's not as if PCs didn't exist prior to that point. Wasn't the Apple II released two years earlier? And Atari 400/800 PCs one year earlier. Contrary to Gate's revisionist history, the revolution did not start with Microsoft.
Even a year later in 1980 the world wasn't really any different - people still watched analog television recorded onto analog VHS tapes (or Betamax). Some had laserdiscs which were... also analog... or RCA videorecords that used 100-year-old needle technology.
Sorry but I don't see 1979 as any "magic" date. A more pivotal moment, IMHO, is 1994 when Microsoft finally succeeded in killing-off its competition: Atari, Commodore, and Apple (almost) leaving itself as the virtual monopoly.
Other pivotal moments:
- 1980 was when Usenet was born. It allowed people to connect to local free BBSes and yet talk to other human beings across an entire nation, and even around the world, about various subjects such as rec.arts.startrek. It was the text-only precursor to the modern web. (Another similar organization was FidoNet discussion groups.)
- 1982 the year Commodore introduced a ~$100 PC that eventually sold 30 million units and brought computing to the home. The C=64.
- 1984 when Apple introduced the mouse-based OS. What had been a text-only world quickly turned graphical as everyone scrambled to create Mac-like OS clones in 1985.
- 1985 Commodore/Amiga introduced the world's first multimedia PC (i.e. it could play CD-quality music and photorealistic video). Also preemptive multitasking and coprocessing. The Amiga 500 eventually became the second-best selling computer (after the C=64).
- 1993 Mosaic - the first web browser usable on home PCs. Mosaic turned the web from an academic experiment into a new medium used by common people. It eventually evolved into the Netscape browser.
- 1995 - Microsoft finally produced a usable Windows. They did it by abanoding their old cluttered groups philosophy, and basically copying the Mac OS (trashcan, a usable desktop, and a finder for task-switching). It was also the second OS with the ability to do preemptive multitasking (the first being the Amiga ten years earlier).
Isn't WiFi broadcast at several watts of power? Not really low-level. For comparison, television is in mere microwatts by the time it hits your television.
If only I knew what WiFi was. Is it anything like SciFi? Does it come with my AMD K5 laptop, or do I need a separate device? Does it work anywhere, or only in certain locations like coffee shops?
Aside-
Other "free" things we privileged members of Verizon get include access to espn360.com and disneyconnection.com. Try to contain your excitement.
For those who disbelieve that EM waves can have an affect on organic tissue
- disable the "door open" safety feature on your microwave - insert head - press start - remove head when the pain begins
Wi-Fi signals may be similar to bitter tastes. Some people think broccoli tastes bitter; others think it tastes fine. This is natural variation in the tastebuds and it's entirely possible that the ultrashort EM waves are having a similar unpleasant effect on 1% of humans.
It's a common mistake to think salary is set by "value". It's set by supply-and-demand. Yes teachers do a very valuable job, but they also suffer from an overpopulation of employees that can do the work. That drives-down the salary and also drives-up the requirements (you should have greater than 3.5 average else you'll never get a job).
Vice-versa engineers/programmers are relatively rare and hard to find, so that drives salaries upward.
>>>Having a child will actually completes you and make you happy.
Yep. And then the child hits circa age 25, and they leave you to get married and never come to visit. Then sometime around age 50 your child throws you into an old person's home, because they decide you're too much hassle to take care of.
Makes you wonder why you bothered putting so much effort into that project. 20-25 years investment, and little return, because they grow-up and treat you as not worthy of their time.
Japanese and Italian studies show that wearing a bra makes the breast ligaments atrophy, similar to what a cast does for a broken leg. Not wearing a bra makes them firmer.
I disagree with your "women don't work as hard" theory. Yes maternity leave does have a negative impact, but I think we can trace the true source back to college. When I was at Penn State I noticed my engineering & science classes were virtually all men, and yet the university had a 50-50 ratio, so I wondered where all the women could be.
One day I found them. The hallways and classes of the Health & Human Development College were filled with nothing but women and just 1-2 guys. These are the types of careers women prefer, but unfortunately they don't pay as well as engineering or science majors.
Hence the gap in average salary.
But again if you compare like-to-like, such as a 20-year-experienced male nurse versus a 20-year-experienced female nurse, you find the woman's income will be 1-2% higher. Basically equal.
Yes men are becoming taller. I am the same height as Napoleon, but whereas he was considered "average" height 200 years ago, I am considered short.
Although I think that height difference is mainly caused by better nutrition. Perhaps the same is true for women too - not better genes, just better energy sources to build better bodies.
I don't know - some of the 1930s ladies were pretty hot. I recall watching one scene where two girls are living together, and suddenly they strip-down to their undides. That made me sit-up and take notice.
And of course there's that infamous Tarzan scene where Janes swims naked. She looks quite nice as well.
>>>Nope..I can NOT do saggy, floppy titties. 100% turnoff.
Yeah see, that's my point. I agree with you now, but if you had asked me that same question twenty years ago (pre-internet), I would have said floppy is okay with me. With age and exposure to more female photos, I've grown more picky.
>>> I consider Paris Hilton ugly and Jessica Alba beautiful, and others disagree.
Huh.
I consider them both beautiful, just in different ways. Jessica has nice large firm breasts with a big round butt*, and Paris has small firm breasts with a tiny backside. It's all look good to me!:-)
* * (It's worth noting Jessica didn't always look like that. If you watch old episodes of Flipper she has a body shape identical to Paris Hilton - thin with small chest.)
P.S. Rewatching that video makes me wonder how they make love without the girl getting smashed. Yah I know that's mean. But funny. But mean.... and funny... and also kinda hot.
Slashdot Mirror
I've learned to only buy CDs if it's the "greatest hits" album. Although some CDs like Depeche Mode's "Violator" or Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation" are good from start-to-finish, they are the rarity not the norm. Most CDs are 1-2 hit songs followed by a bunch of mediocre songs that were never played on the radio because they were poorly-produced.
So for example, rather than buy all 5 of Eminem's or Avril Lavigne's recent CDs, I'll just wait for the greatest hits album. It's ~80% cheaper that way.
>>>When independent economists calculated the price of a CD, on the shelf in the store, being ~10 cents less than the LP. That included paying off investment in 5 years...
>>>
Yes but even more damning - when the U.S. Federal Trade Commission investigated they discovered that the record companies were colluding to prop-up prices, and threatening discount stores like Walmart, "Sell for $12 and higher, else we'll cut off your supply to all music-related items." The U.S. FTC filed charges of forming an illegal cartel.
The companies knew they were guilty, so instead of letting the trial finish, they offered to give a refund to all consumers that asked for one. The FTC agreed and I got an $18 check, ditto my mother, and ditto my brother.
That was circa 2002. Shortly thereafter, after the cartel had been broken-up, the prices of just-released CDs at Walmart dropped as low as $8.
The Chief Economist of PRS was found dead in his home, apparently of autoerotic asphyiation, with ropes tied around his neck and completely naked.
The UK police are stumped. "We did find a card with the word 'RIAA' on it, but we decided to ignore it and call this a suicide. A sex game gone wrong." Outsiders call this a case of corporatism - the government and the corporations colluding to cover-up a murder. "It be fascism, that's what it be," said a local man who refused to identity himself.
Actually America, as conceived, is not about freedom. It's about the individual and protection of his rights from overarching, overbearing politicians sick with power. That's why these individual rights (ownership of self, right to self-protection, right to privacy, et cetera) are encoded into the U.S. and 50 State Constitutions - to block the government and keep it under control, so the individual can live a life without being hassled at every turn.
Unfortunately in their rush to control everything like petit-dictators, the Congresscritters have decided to ignore the Supreme Laws. The phrase "shall be secure in their persons and papers" means nothing if Congress can look at your bnk account whenever they feel like it. "The two worst diseases are avarice and ambition - love of money and love of power. Leaders suffer from both." - Benjamin Franklin
>>>how long before US considers perfectly legal and reasonable acts to be terrorist acts??
If we deposit $10,000 or more in an account, the government makes a note of it and investigates. One local fellow was depositing $9900, $9500, $9600 in cash in order to avoid that requirement, but a suspicious Nazi... er, teller reported him anyway because he was "close enough". Then the stormtroopers... er, FBI arrested him for trying to avoid the $10,000 legel requirement.
This is the kind of society that the scared American people have created. "Any who would give up Essential liberty for temporary security deserves neither." - Benjamin Franklin. All these problems would disappear if we simply enforced the Constitution as written. No warrant; no search of people or their effects (papers/bank accounts).
Someday U.S. taxpayers will have to pay-off that enormous debt, which is now the equivalent of $105,000 hanging over every home.
It would be nice if our politicians would grow-up, stop acting like teenagers with credit cards, and reduce spending. But no, instead they want to saddle us with a giant Uncle Sam healthcare program that we can not afford. By the end of Obama's term, that debt will have risen to ~$150,000 per home.
Pretty soon the entire U.S. will be like bankrupt California.
Someone can't read.
- If I drive to the store to buy a book, I waste 3 dollars on gasoline on the trip.
- If I buy from amazon.com the same book, I waste 0 dollars because shipping is free.
Got it?
Okay well let's suppose I bought $200 worth of digital books from amazon, and then suddenly they erased them from my Kindle.
From my point-of-view amazon just stole 200 dollars my money. They took the cash, and I have nothing. IMHO a way to compensate myself is to take 200 dollars worth of physical books from the amazon webstore - that way things will be even again.
by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 27, @08:30PM (#28845833)
Maybe they just read some of your posts on slashdot and figured that the $500 was the tax you get to pay to continue being a douchebag.
Now I know why they call them "cowards"
Okay what's so special about 1979? It's not as if PCs didn't exist prior to that point. Wasn't the Apple II released two years earlier? And Atari 400/800 PCs one year earlier. Contrary to Gate's revisionist history, the revolution did not start with Microsoft.
Even a year later in 1980 the world wasn't really any different - people still watched analog television recorded onto analog VHS tapes (or Betamax). Some had laserdiscs which were... also analog... or RCA videorecords that used 100-year-old needle technology.
Sorry but I don't see 1979 as any "magic" date. A more pivotal moment, IMHO, is 1994 when Microsoft finally succeeded in killing-off its competition: Atari, Commodore, and Apple (almost) leaving itself as the virtual monopoly.
Other pivotal moments:
- 1980 was when Usenet was born. It allowed people to connect to local free BBSes and yet talk to other human beings across an entire nation, and even around the world, about various subjects such as rec.arts.startrek. It was the text-only precursor to the modern web. (Another similar organization was FidoNet discussion groups.)
- 1982 the year Commodore introduced a ~$100 PC that eventually sold 30 million units and brought computing to the home. The C=64.
- 1984 when Apple introduced the mouse-based OS. What had been a text-only world quickly turned graphical as everyone scrambled to create Mac-like OS clones in 1985.
- 1985 Commodore/Amiga introduced the world's first multimedia PC (i.e. it could play CD-quality music and photorealistic video). Also preemptive multitasking and coprocessing. The Amiga 500 eventually became the second-best selling computer (after the C=64).
- 1993 Mosaic - the first web browser usable on home PCs. Mosaic turned the web from an academic experiment into a new medium used by common people. It eventually evolved into the Netscape browser.
- 1995 - Microsoft finally produced a usable Windows. They did it by abanoding their old cluttered groups philosophy, and basically copying the Mac OS (trashcan, a usable desktop, and a finder for task-switching). It was also the second OS with the ability to do preemptive multitasking (the first being the Amiga ten years earlier).
Isn't WiFi broadcast at several watts of power? Not really low-level. For comparison, television is in mere microwatts by the time it hits your television.
If only I knew what WiFi was. Is it anything like SciFi? Does it come with my AMD K5 laptop, or do I need a separate device? Does it work anywhere, or only in certain locations like coffee shops?
Aside-
Other "free" things we privileged members of Verizon get include access to espn360.com and disneyconnection.com. Try to contain your excitement.
For those who disbelieve that EM waves can have an affect on organic tissue
- disable the "door open" safety feature on your microwave
- insert head
- press start
- remove head when the pain begins
Wi-Fi signals may be similar to bitter tastes. Some people think broccoli tastes bitter; others think it tastes fine. This is natural variation in the tastebuds and it's entirely possible that the ultrashort EM waves are having a similar unpleasant effect on 1% of humans.
It's a common mistake to think salary is set by "value". It's set by supply-and-demand. Yes teachers do a very valuable job, but they also suffer from an overpopulation of employees that can do the work. That drives-down the salary and also drives-up the requirements (you should have greater than 3.5 average else you'll never get a job).
Vice-versa engineers/programmers are relatively rare and hard to find, so that drives salaries upward.
>>>"Are more women OK with watching porn?" - oprah.com
I have a homemade video of a college girl masturbating to a porno video of a woman masturbating. Talk about resursive hotness!
>>>Having a child will actually completes you and make you happy.
Yep. And then the child hits circa age 25, and they leave you to get married and never come to visit. Then sometime around age 50 your child throws you into an old person's home, because they decide you're too much hassle to take care of.
Makes you wonder why you bothered putting so much effort into that project.
20-25 years investment, and little return, because
they grow-up and treat you as not worthy of their time.
This is the place for you (warning - naked Euro-teens):
Dirty Old Man's Association - http://www.domai.com/
Japanese and Italian studies show that wearing a bra makes the breast ligaments atrophy, similar to what a cast does for a broken leg. Not wearing a bra makes them firmer.
I disagree with your "women don't work as hard" theory. Yes maternity leave does have a negative impact, but I think we can trace the true source back to college. When I was at Penn State I noticed my engineering & science classes were virtually all men, and yet the university had a 50-50 ratio, so I wondered where all the women could be.
One day I found them. The hallways and classes of the Health & Human Development College were filled with nothing but women and just 1-2 guys. These are the types of careers women prefer, but unfortunately they don't pay as well as engineering or science majors.
Hence the gap in average salary.
But again if you compare like-to-like, such as a 20-year-experienced male nurse versus a 20-year-experienced female nurse, you find the woman's income will be 1-2% higher. Basically equal.
Yes men are becoming taller. I am the same height as Napoleon, but whereas he was considered "average" height 200 years ago, I am considered short.
Although I think that height difference is mainly caused by better nutrition. Perhaps the same is true for women too - not better genes, just better energy sources to build better bodies.
I don't know - some of the 1930s ladies were pretty hot. I recall watching one scene where two girls are living together, and suddenly they strip-down to their undides. That made me sit-up and take notice.
And of course there's that infamous Tarzan scene where Janes swims naked. She looks quite nice as well.
>>>Nope..I can NOT do saggy, floppy titties. 100% turnoff.
Yeah see, that's my point. I agree with you now, but if you had asked me that same question twenty years ago (pre-internet), I would have said floppy is okay with me. With age and exposure to more female photos, I've grown more picky.
>>> I consider Paris Hilton ugly and Jessica Alba beautiful, and others disagree.
Huh.
I consider them both beautiful, just in different ways. Jessica has nice large firm breasts with a big round butt*, and Paris has small firm breasts with a tiny backside. It's all look good to me! :-)
*
* (It's worth noting Jessica didn't always look like that. If you watch old episodes of Flipper she has a body shape identical to Paris Hilton - thin with small chest.)
P.S. Rewatching that video makes me wonder how they make love without the girl getting smashed. Yah I know that's mean. But funny. But mean.... and funny... and also kinda hot.
If this fat guy can can attract this beautiful thin woman to marry him, then there's still hope for the rest of us.
We just need to learn how to dance - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QujA8YYgTWU ;-)