I guess it all depends on which version of reality Lucas is peddling at any given time. One day it was three trilogies, then two, now it's nine trilogies plus unrelated add-on movies.
Not to be pedantic, but 9 trilogies would be 27 films.
Unions are only as strong as their members make them. The USA is one of the least unionised countries in the developed world; the unions there just don't have the power to get their way. They want a raised minimum wage, they campaign for a raised minimum wage, but they just haven't achieved it.
Saying you won't join a union because they are too weak to achieve their aims, means that unions don't have enough members, which means that unions are too weak to achieve their aims. It's a vicious cycle.
I can't speak much about American unions, but here in the UK- our unions (generally via the TUC) are colossally vocals campaigner for raising the minimum wage, for the "living wage" (look it up if you care), and for general workers' rights. Short of changing their name to "The Organisation For Increased Minimum Wages", I don't know what else you expect them to do. Lots of minimum wage workers are in unions, so even at the most selfish level, it is in the unions' interests to raise the minimum wage so as to raise the wages of their own members. And that's ignoring the fact that the TUC (the overarching union body) is ideologically committed, explicitly, to improving workers' rights in general, not just the rights of their members...
Socialist is not synonymous with "evil Communist" (although obviously they aren't mutually exclusive either).
In the UK, the trade unionist movement explicitly backs, and is backed by, the Labour Party (which is a socialist party). But you can't get much less revolutionary or radical than the Labour Party- they are more or less the definition of "centre left" socialism. The Labour Party basically replaced the old Liberal Party as the party of the left as soon as it was born.
The unions are the organisations that care most about workers' rights, and the Labour Party is the party which (historically at least) cares most about workers' rights too. There is no great conspiracy about it.
As the GP said, the "red scare" nonsense in the States was all about stigmatising the parties who stood up for the workers, and very little about Stalin and Mao. It's basically what stopped the Democrats being replaced by a genuine left wing party in the way that happened in most of Europe at the same time.
Good to hear you know all about what my job and industry are, but... yes, your sarcasm aside, I do work in a technology industry field where talent is differentiated. I don't have my employer over a barrel, and the company will survive just fine without me. But I have promotions and bonuses to show for my performance, and I would prefer not to trade that in for making the same wage (minus union dues) as everyone else in my group, regardless of performance. I know it's crazy and radical, but I actually *like* being paid based on my performance, and I believe that I can go work somewhere else if my company doesn't want to pay men what I'm worth. Yes, I know, crazy and fascist and so forth.
You have clearly never worked in a unionised company if that's what you think it means. That's a crazy amount of misinformed.
I work in IT, and I work in a company that is quite heavily unionised (far more so that the average for our industry). We still have bonuses, performance ratings, performance-related pay rises, promotions, and all that other stuff. But IN ADDITION to that we have decent minimum pay and conditions for the people at the bottom of the pile, excellent working conditions, sensible work patterns/shift pay/on-call terms, fair contract terms, good job security, and (if all else fails) good conditions for redundancy, TUPE, relocation etc.
None of that list of union-won stuff detracts from our top guys being paid lots more than our non-top guys. It just means there's far fewer cases of people being shafted.
Our company is currently going through one of those "outsourcing phases", with much of the hard IT graft (testing and dev, for example) going to firms like IBM and TCS. The union isn't able to stop most of this outsourcing (it's just not in the position to win that sort of battle); but the people affected are being very well looked after by our employer in terms of relocation, reassignment, redundancy and TUPE. The company really couldn't be more accommodating to them (except maybe by not outsourcing their jobs at all, of course). I am in no doubt that if it weren't for the union, the company would be doing its bare statutory minimum for these people and not an inch more. And I'm sure each and every one of those developers felt sure that they were special flowers with unique talents, backed up by years of good performance ratings; it didn't stop their job going to India, and it wouldn't stop them getting minimum statutory redundancy...
You just wait until the outsourcing train comes to town. We're currently outsourcing most of our in-house Dev and Testing resource, and most of it is going to India. Our union can't stop it- but they have managed to negotiate great TUPE, relocation, reassignment and redundancy terms for the poor sods affected. I'm guessing that our employer wouldn't be acting nearly as kindly and generously to those people if our union wasn't breathing down their neck.
India and other developing countries have got hundreds of thousands of highly trained and motivated students graduating from high quality universities- if you think you and your "individual negotiating skills" can compete with that you've got another thing coming. Maybe you'll survive your redundancy on poor terms and manage to re-skill into a different job, but I'd rate my chances a lot better with a union behind me arguing the terms.
(And note- if you're reading this from a comfy tech job in India and think you're immune- you just wait until the same thing happens to you and the next developing country. There are a lot of big economies in South Asia and Africa which are starting to mature nicely...)
Unfortunately, what you're talking about there is organised labour going on a general strike- that is, trade unions.
And unfortunately, the same people in America who always talk a big game about "holding the government to account" and "overthrowing tyrants" are also the ones who have pushed hardest for the complete destruction of the trade union movement in the States. America has one of the least unionised workforces in the developed world, and that means that the workers have no power.
If you want to protect your rights (whether you're an American or not), you should join a union. If you don't like any of the unions available to you, you should start your own.
It'll do you a lot more good in the long run than hoarding high-powered rifles...
I use Calc all the time at home, and Excel all the time at work. Calc is great, but it's not as polished or feature-rich as Excel by a long shot.
Calc is good enough (more than good enough, in fact) for home use; it does everything I need it to, as quickly as I need it to, with features to spare. But Excel is still the better programme. If I had to do serious data crunching in Calc day in and day out, I'm sure it would drive me nuts.
Arguably, Excel is the only truly good programme in the MS Office suite (possible exception of Visio). I mean the rest (notably Word and PowerPoint) are fine and all, but there's just no clear benefit to them over the competition. There is literally not a single feature in Word that I can think of that is both useful to me and missing from LibreOffice; maybe there are word processor "power users" out there who might disagree with me, but for my usage I could easily live without it.
I've made dozens of edits over the years, some big and some small- and never had my changes rolled back unreasonably.
Might I suggest that if your edits are continually being rolled back then it might have more to do with the quality of your edits, rather than the editing process as a whole?
There's also the intuitiveness and cleanness of the UI in Chrome.
That's subjective. I can't stand the stripped-down Chrome-style UI. In fact one of my biggest complaints about Firefox (still my main browser) over the last couple of years have been the "Chromification" of the UI.
If you think it's a good idea to invest in a company which is demonstrating zero governance oversight and an inability to deal with incompetent board members, just because they might go up again if they ever sort all their problems out, then I highly suggest that you don't go near the stock market ever again. That'd be like betting on the team at the bottom of the league on the assumption that they've got to start winning some time...
Interestingly, my employer (big UK national, 21,000 employees or so, branch network, etc.) is leaving the Windows 7 upgrade to the extreme last minute. I believe the project is due to get the last of the deployed machines off it by February 2014, with a couple of months contingency (they're something like 20% of the way through it right now). Cold dead hands, and all that. My guess is that Windows 7 is going to see a big market spike from now until April while other companies do the same, which will probably outstrip Windows 8 growth for a while; which is going to be pretty embarrassing for MS.
Well if you compare it with OSX, iOS and Ubuntu's Unity, metro is not THAT bad. It's when you compare it with a proper desktop environment like Xfce or Windows 7's Aero that Metro is terrible.
Unity is way better than Metro- and that's making a statement and a half. At least Unity is just a task bar with icons (like Win7) and a menu (not full screen) with text search (like Win7). The manual filtering in the Dash is still pretty stupid, but no more so than the classic Windows Start menu's folder structure.
Compared to that, Metro is a phone interface on a 22" screen- it's ridiculous, even if you can get used to it. And also, I hate menu "hot spots". Hated them in Gnome 3, hate them in Win8. That is a GUI paradigm that just needs to crawl away and die.
Yeah; monopolies are the best! Who wants any of that stinking choice and competition?
Currently, mobiles are pretty much a two horse race- Android and iOS. There is no credible third player- Windows and Blackberry are both down to the margins. Personally, I'd love to see that two horse race become a three or four horse race. And for vague philosophical reasons, I'd rather that those extra two horses weren't either Windows or Blackberry.
Personally I'm hoping that Sailfish or Ubuntu will do well. But hey, nothing wrong with Mozilla. If they can pull off a decent OS, then more power to them- I'd buy it, if it were any good.
Ah, so the Army are worried that Chinese spies might hack into their base network, gain access to a soldier's personal computer, and look through their web browser cache in order to get the precious super-secret information PUBLISHED BY THE GODDAMNED GUARDIAN? A newspaper that doesn't even have a paywall between you and their complete archives on their website?
In any larger development house, that is the job of the Analysts. They should be doing their job and finding out what use cases need catering for. The developer then just needs to build it. If the developers spots something that they think has been missed, they should get their Analysts back on it to verify whether this is actually a "missed requirement", or is in fact "not a requirement". If you are doing double duty as coder and Analyst, it's your job to do this leg work and find out what you need to be coding for.
Obviously developers are good at spotting specific fallover and marginal cases that nobody else has, by the nature of the beast, and that is good. But too many developers get into "the zone" and think they're building some magnum opus of wonderful complexity, when all they've been asked for is something for parsing XML forms...
Seeing as you've picked out that quote, I can only assume that your read the article but are so blinded by anti-Islamic sentiments that you've missed the point.
1) The riots were started by the Buddhists. A Buddhist was the first to die, but it was in violence that they instigated. 2) The original spark was a disagreement and punch-up between the Buddhist customer and Muslim owner of a gold shop. Hardly "ethnic cleansing" material. 3) "At least 43 people were killed in this dusty city of 100,000, just 80 miles north of the capital of Naypyitaw. Nearly 13,000 people, mostly Muslims, were driven from their homes and businesses.". Sounds like a reasonable response! 4) "An examination of the riots... reveals the dawn massacre of 25 Muslims in Meikhtila was led by Buddhist monks - often held up as icons of democracy in Myanmar. The killings took place in plain view of police, with no intervention by the local or central government. Graffiti scrawled on one wall called for a 'Muslim extermination.'" Extermination of all Muslims- what lovely people! 5) Just a one-off, maybe? "Although 42 people have been arrested in connection to the violence, monks continue to preach a fast-growing Buddhist nationalist movement known as '969' that is fueling much of the trouble.". Apparently not.
People are bastards all over the place- and being a Buddhist doesn't stop that. You get bastards of every flavour.
Ad Words gets you the results you want, but not ONLY the results you want. If I take out an Ad Word for a link to a site "patch86isthegreatest.com", that won't stop the next result being "patch86sucks.org".
If what you're after is stifling criticism, you need more than paid for ads.
There's always the BBC. The BBC are bound by law to be unbiased (both by the laws that govern all British television news, and by their own charter). While I'm not sure if the former technically applies to US television (BBC World News America), the latter certainly does. That should counteract the "news as entertainment" ruling that plagues the rest of the American media landscape.
We do have massively improved steam engine technology; do you think that applications where steam is still used are still using technology from the 19th century? Steam turbines are THE key technology in the vast majority of electricity-generating power plants in use today. All that happened there was that new and better technology supplanted it in the "vehicle power" space.
In the space travel field, we're massively more advanced than we were a few decades ago. We have deep space vehicles with ION engines. We have a Mini Cooper sized robot on Mars which was landed by a rocket-powered hover crane. We have a football-pitch sized permanent outpost in LEO. We have a deep space probe about to make the first ever flyby of Pluto and exploration of the Kuiper Belt and Outer Solar System. Since 2008 the first and only probe in history to make a near approach of Mercury has been happily orbiting and collecting data (note: Mercury is officially the most difficult planet in our Solar System to reach).
There hasn't been much Moon golf in the last few years, admittedly, but that doesn't mean that space technology hasn't been making huge leaps forward.
If someone said that "politicians have all sold their souls", I'd call that hyperbole too. "Hysterical overblown nonsense" might be a more applicable phrase, but I'm trying to be polite.
Claiming that an entire global profession are corrupted and paid-for shills (or worse- actively evil (depending on how metaphorical/literal the phrase has been meant)) is somewhere between inflammatory rhetoric and tinfoil-hat conspiracy.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's face it- the Taliban got knobbled for less than that...
I guess it all depends on which version of reality Lucas is peddling at any given time. One day it was three trilogies, then two, now it's nine trilogies plus unrelated add-on movies.
Not to be pedantic, but 9 trilogies would be 27 films.
Radioactive pizza/time machine/black hole/kessel run if need be for story line.
I find your ideas intriguing an would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Unions are only as strong as their members make them. The USA is one of the least unionised countries in the developed world; the unions there just don't have the power to get their way. They want a raised minimum wage, they campaign for a raised minimum wage, but they just haven't achieved it.
Saying you won't join a union because they are too weak to achieve their aims, means that unions don't have enough members, which means that unions are too weak to achieve their aims. It's a vicious cycle.
I can't speak much about American unions, but here in the UK- our unions (generally via the TUC) are colossally vocals campaigner for raising the minimum wage, for the "living wage" (look it up if you care), and for general workers' rights. Short of changing their name to "The Organisation For Increased Minimum Wages", I don't know what else you expect them to do. Lots of minimum wage workers are in unions, so even at the most selfish level, it is in the unions' interests to raise the minimum wage so as to raise the wages of their own members. And that's ignoring the fact that the TUC (the overarching union body) is ideologically committed, explicitly, to improving workers' rights in general, not just the rights of their members...
Socialist is not synonymous with "evil Communist" (although obviously they aren't mutually exclusive either).
In the UK, the trade unionist movement explicitly backs, and is backed by, the Labour Party (which is a socialist party). But you can't get much less revolutionary or radical than the Labour Party- they are more or less the definition of "centre left" socialism. The Labour Party basically replaced the old Liberal Party as the party of the left as soon as it was born.
The unions are the organisations that care most about workers' rights, and the Labour Party is the party which (historically at least) cares most about workers' rights too. There is no great conspiracy about it.
As the GP said, the "red scare" nonsense in the States was all about stigmatising the parties who stood up for the workers, and very little about Stalin and Mao. It's basically what stopped the Democrats being replaced by a genuine left wing party in the way that happened in most of Europe at the same time.
Good to hear you know all about what my job and industry are, but... yes, your sarcasm aside, I do work in a technology industry field where talent is differentiated. I don't have my employer over a barrel, and the company will survive just fine without me. But I have promotions and bonuses to show for my performance, and I would prefer not to trade that in for making the same wage (minus union dues) as everyone else in my group, regardless of performance. I know it's crazy and radical, but I actually *like* being paid based on my performance, and I believe that I can go work somewhere else if my company doesn't want to pay men what I'm worth. Yes, I know, crazy and fascist and so forth.
You have clearly never worked in a unionised company if that's what you think it means. That's a crazy amount of misinformed.
I work in IT, and I work in a company that is quite heavily unionised (far more so that the average for our industry). We still have bonuses, performance ratings, performance-related pay rises, promotions, and all that other stuff. But IN ADDITION to that we have decent minimum pay and conditions for the people at the bottom of the pile, excellent working conditions, sensible work patterns/shift pay/on-call terms, fair contract terms, good job security, and (if all else fails) good conditions for redundancy, TUPE, relocation etc.
None of that list of union-won stuff detracts from our top guys being paid lots more than our non-top guys. It just means there's far fewer cases of people being shafted.
Our company is currently going through one of those "outsourcing phases", with much of the hard IT graft (testing and dev, for example) going to firms like IBM and TCS. The union isn't able to stop most of this outsourcing (it's just not in the position to win that sort of battle); but the people affected are being very well looked after by our employer in terms of relocation, reassignment, redundancy and TUPE. The company really couldn't be more accommodating to them (except maybe by not outsourcing their jobs at all, of course). I am in no doubt that if it weren't for the union, the company would be doing its bare statutory minimum for these people and not an inch more. And I'm sure each and every one of those developers felt sure that they were special flowers with unique talents, backed up by years of good performance ratings; it didn't stop their job going to India, and it wouldn't stop them getting minimum statutory redundancy...
You just wait until the outsourcing train comes to town. We're currently outsourcing most of our in-house Dev and Testing resource, and most of it is going to India. Our union can't stop it- but they have managed to negotiate great TUPE, relocation, reassignment and redundancy terms for the poor sods affected. I'm guessing that our employer wouldn't be acting nearly as kindly and generously to those people if our union wasn't breathing down their neck.
India and other developing countries have got hundreds of thousands of highly trained and motivated students graduating from high quality universities- if you think you and your "individual negotiating skills" can compete with that you've got another thing coming. Maybe you'll survive your redundancy on poor terms and manage to re-skill into a different job, but I'd rate my chances a lot better with a union behind me arguing the terms.
(And note- if you're reading this from a comfy tech job in India and think you're immune- you just wait until the same thing happens to you and the next developing country. There are a lot of big economies in South Asia and Africa which are starting to mature nicely...)
Doesn't the US have "criminal negligence" on the statute books?
Unfortunately, what you're talking about there is organised labour going on a general strike- that is, trade unions.
And unfortunately, the same people in America who always talk a big game about "holding the government to account" and "overthrowing tyrants" are also the ones who have pushed hardest for the complete destruction of the trade union movement in the States. America has one of the least unionised workforces in the developed world, and that means that the workers have no power.
If you want to protect your rights (whether you're an American or not), you should join a union. If you don't like any of the unions available to you, you should start your own.
It'll do you a lot more good in the long run than hoarding high-powered rifles...
I use Calc all the time at home, and Excel all the time at work. Calc is great, but it's not as polished or feature-rich as Excel by a long shot.
Calc is good enough (more than good enough, in fact) for home use; it does everything I need it to, as quickly as I need it to, with features to spare. But Excel is still the better programme. If I had to do serious data crunching in Calc day in and day out, I'm sure it would drive me nuts.
Arguably, Excel is the only truly good programme in the MS Office suite (possible exception of Visio). I mean the rest (notably Word and PowerPoint) are fine and all, but there's just no clear benefit to them over the competition. There is literally not a single feature in Word that I can think of that is both useful to me and missing from LibreOffice; maybe there are word processor "power users" out there who might disagree with me, but for my usage I could easily live without it.
I've made dozens of edits over the years, some big and some small- and never had my changes rolled back unreasonably.
Might I suggest that if your edits are continually being rolled back then it might have more to do with the quality of your edits, rather than the editing process as a whole?
There's also the intuitiveness and cleanness of the UI in Chrome.
That's subjective. I can't stand the stripped-down Chrome-style UI. In fact one of my biggest complaints about Firefox (still my main browser) over the last couple of years have been the "Chromification" of the UI.
If you think it's a good idea to invest in a company which is demonstrating zero governance oversight and an inability to deal with incompetent board members, just because they might go up again if they ever sort all their problems out, then I highly suggest that you don't go near the stock market ever again. That'd be like betting on the team at the bottom of the league on the assumption that they've got to start winning some time...
Interestingly, my employer (big UK national, 21,000 employees or so, branch network, etc.) is leaving the Windows 7 upgrade to the extreme last minute. I believe the project is due to get the last of the deployed machines off it by February 2014, with a couple of months contingency (they're something like 20% of the way through it right now). Cold dead hands, and all that. My guess is that Windows 7 is going to see a big market spike from now until April while other companies do the same, which will probably outstrip Windows 8 growth for a while; which is going to be pretty embarrassing for MS.
Well if you compare it with OSX, iOS and Ubuntu's Unity, metro is not THAT bad. It's when you compare it with a proper desktop environment like Xfce or Windows 7's Aero that Metro is terrible.
Unity is way better than Metro- and that's making a statement and a half. At least Unity is just a task bar with icons (like Win7) and a menu (not full screen) with text search (like Win7). The manual filtering in the Dash is still pretty stupid, but no more so than the classic Windows Start menu's folder structure.
Compared to that, Metro is a phone interface on a 22" screen- it's ridiculous, even if you can get used to it. And also, I hate menu "hot spots". Hated them in Gnome 3, hate them in Win8. That is a GUI paradigm that just needs to crawl away and die.
Yeah; monopolies are the best! Who wants any of that stinking choice and competition?
Currently, mobiles are pretty much a two horse race- Android and iOS. There is no credible third player- Windows and Blackberry are both down to the margins. Personally, I'd love to see that two horse race become a three or four horse race. And for vague philosophical reasons, I'd rather that those extra two horses weren't either Windows or Blackberry.
Personally I'm hoping that Sailfish or Ubuntu will do well. But hey, nothing wrong with Mozilla. If they can pull off a decent OS, then more power to them- I'd buy it, if it were any good.
Are you sure? That does mean changing the light bulb.
Ah, so the Army are worried that Chinese spies might hack into their base network, gain access to a soldier's personal computer, and look through their web browser cache in order to get the precious super-secret information PUBLISHED BY THE GODDAMNED GUARDIAN? A newspaper that doesn't even have a paywall between you and their complete archives on their website?
In any larger development house, that is the job of the Analysts. They should be doing their job and finding out what use cases need catering for. The developer then just needs to build it. If the developers spots something that they think has been missed, they should get their Analysts back on it to verify whether this is actually a "missed requirement", or is in fact "not a requirement". If you are doing double duty as coder and Analyst, it's your job to do this leg work and find out what you need to be coding for.
Obviously developers are good at spotting specific fallover and marginal cases that nobody else has, by the nature of the beast, and that is good. But too many developers get into "the zone" and think they're building some magnum opus of wonderful complexity, when all they've been asked for is something for parsing XML forms...
Just FYI, I would watch that movie.
Seeing as you've picked out that quote, I can only assume that your read the article but are so blinded by anti-Islamic sentiments that you've missed the point.
1) The riots were started by the Buddhists. A Buddhist was the first to die, but it was in violence that they instigated. ... reveals the dawn massacre of 25 Muslims in Meikhtila was led by Buddhist monks - often held up as icons of democracy in Myanmar. The killings took place in plain view of police, with no intervention by the local or central government. Graffiti scrawled on one wall called for a 'Muslim extermination.'" Extermination of all Muslims- what lovely people!
2) The original spark was a disagreement and punch-up between the Buddhist customer and Muslim owner of a gold shop. Hardly "ethnic cleansing" material.
3) "At least 43 people were killed in this dusty city of 100,000, just 80 miles north of the capital of Naypyitaw. Nearly 13,000 people, mostly Muslims, were driven from their homes and businesses.". Sounds like a reasonable response!
4) "An examination of the riots
5) Just a one-off, maybe? "Although 42 people have been arrested in connection to the violence, monks continue to preach a fast-growing Buddhist nationalist movement known as '969' that is fueling much of the trouble.". Apparently not.
People are bastards all over the place- and being a Buddhist doesn't stop that. You get bastards of every flavour.
Ad Words gets you the results you want, but not ONLY the results you want. If I take out an Ad Word for a link to a site "patch86isthegreatest.com", that won't stop the next result being "patch86sucks.org".
If what you're after is stifling criticism, you need more than paid for ads.
There's always the BBC. The BBC are bound by law to be unbiased (both by the laws that govern all British television news, and by their own charter). While I'm not sure if the former technically applies to US television (BBC World News America), the latter certainly does. That should counteract the "news as entertainment" ruling that plagues the rest of the American media landscape.
We do have massively improved steam engine technology; do you think that applications where steam is still used are still using technology from the 19th century? Steam turbines are THE key technology in the vast majority of electricity-generating power plants in use today. All that happened there was that new and better technology supplanted it in the "vehicle power" space.
In the space travel field, we're massively more advanced than we were a few decades ago. We have deep space vehicles with ION engines. We have a Mini Cooper sized robot on Mars which was landed by a rocket-powered hover crane. We have a football-pitch sized permanent outpost in LEO. We have a deep space probe about to make the first ever flyby of Pluto and exploration of the Kuiper Belt and Outer Solar System. Since 2008 the first and only probe in history to make a near approach of Mercury has been happily orbiting and collecting data (note: Mercury is officially the most difficult planet in our Solar System to reach).
There hasn't been much Moon golf in the last few years, admittedly, but that doesn't mean that space technology hasn't been making huge leaps forward.
If someone said that "politicians have all sold their souls", I'd call that hyperbole too. "Hysterical overblown nonsense" might be a more applicable phrase, but I'm trying to be polite.
Claiming that an entire global profession are corrupted and paid-for shills (or worse- actively evil (depending on how metaphorical/literal the phrase has been meant)) is somewhere between inflammatory rhetoric and tinfoil-hat conspiracy.