Indeed, it's strange that the summary says that when the same company makes ones ten times the price. And they come with a shiny silver vacuum tube amplifier (I think that's what they are) that would to me kind of defeat half the purpose of having headphones: portability.
I'm hoping at least a few people who bought them are using them just to listen to their low-quality MP3s.
I found this page on making your own vacuum tube amplifiers, for anyone interested in trying to make something similar for a lot less than $15k: http://diyaudioprojects.com/Tubes/tubes.htm
Oh well.. I tried to go legit, but time to fire up bittorrent again, I guess. They are just shooting themselves in the foot.
And that justifies downloading the movies? If you're going to do that, then do it, don't act as if netflix committing one sin is justification. I don't like the MPAA or the RIAA, but that's not why we download music or movies without paying for them. We do that because we can and it's cheaper than paying for it. Pointing to things netflix is doing wrong and saying "that's why I'm doing this" is just rationalization.
Well thats technically your fault for believing what a uninformed manager told you and not reading corporate policy.
Why would he not believe the manager? Why would he read corporate policy when the manager is answering his question? It's not like the manager said anything outrageous, like "it's okay if you steal money from the register." Pretty much everyone would accept the manager's word as authoritative, it would be weird to double check with corporate policy (which often isn't too accessible at retail jobs like that). The "fault" clearly lies with the manager and corporate, not the victim here.
Not defending them just trying to get the buyer/worker to be aware.
It sounds a lot like you're just pointlessly trying to rub it in and in fact defending the manager and blockbuster. Looking at the corporate policy isn't exactly a silver bullet, and it probably wouldn't have worked here either. There are probably a lot of contradictions between what is written on paper at blockbuster and what actually happens. It's not like America's best and brightest management works at blockbuster.
The next time I went to rent from them, it was at a store in a different city; I'd moved.
I've been confused by their tracking policy for a long time. I worked for them briefly in '01, one day a lady came in wanting to set up a new account. The computer pulled up her old account information, from Bulgaria a year prior. I guess they're just trying to make sure no one takes the easy way out and moves to a different continent rather than paying their late fees.
That same store about a month before I joined, a woman ran up a $70 late fee somehow. Her son got hired there and worked only one shift, during which time the fees mysteriously disappeared from the computer system. He quit at the end of the day. The rumor was that they had since been checking applicants for late fees.
There were many things wrong with that particular store, most of which were because of management at various levels. It was closed less than 6 months after I left.
I then turn in my new online one and get another in-store rental and have a new online one sent.. so I now have 2 in-store rentals and 2 online.. rinse and repeat and I can have infinite in-store rentals?
Infinite? No, they won't tell you, but Blockbuster has fewer than infinity movies. There's always a catch.
Temperature is the wrong problem to focus on. Liquid nitrogen is relatively inexpensive & easily handled.
That's relative to liquid hydrogen I guess. For other applications you'd want to use superconductors though, no, it's really not. For instance, I'm not any kind of engineer, but it seems like superconducting long distance high-voltage power lines would be one thing that would be nice, and cooling miles of wire with liquid nitrogen seems like a big hassle.
2. To scare people into a panic by pretending there is a real danger when there is not. (for lulz).
I'm having a hard time bending my brain to somehow apply this logic to leaving buildings unblurred.
Maybe he is worried that google will snap a picture at a time when a small cloud is over a building, and someone in said building will think "Hey, I wonder what my building looks like on google earth!" and will see the cloud and think "Ohmigod! The building is on fire!" and, I don't know, jump out a window.
While that makes no type of sense, it's important to keep in mind we're talking about a california state politician, so it doesn't have to.
Hardly news, since this'll certainly be struck down \ overturned in future rulings.
Most punditry is wrong, according to at least one scientific paper, most scientific papers are wrong, most current event news items will become irrelevant and or not current within a day. You're saying this isn't news because it will be overruled eventually? That to me doesn't make it not news, that makes it more like the other news stories.
Will they even be honest enough to give you the service or support you paid for? I wouldn't even trust them that far.
I'm not very familiar with people who make malware, but I'd imagine/hope the "support" would look something like this:
Customer: Yes, I'm having problems with your product, the Malwarator 1000 Anonymous support: LOL FUCK YUO NOOB!!1
If it offends any malware writers to be stereotyped like that, particularly the guys behind antivirus 2009, give me your home address and I'll mail you an apology.
Don't know how google are expected to continue providing free search, maps, mail and all, if they can't get revenue from somewhere else.
By not expanding their tracking. I mean, that seems to be working just fine for them up to now. In all honesty, are they going bankrupt or losing money, or is it just "Hey, we're making boatloads of money, I bet we could make... uh... aircraft carriers of money if we invaded people's privacy!" Because I suspect it's the latter, although since I'm not an investor in google, I haven't been paying attention.
Personally, I'm not interested in the varying methods that big game houses can extract revenue from their sweatshop produced big titles.
Personally, I'm less interested in the buisness or the open-source aspect of it and more interested in getting frags in Quake Live and still having enough money to buy necessities. Like porn and beer, which should also be free. Someone should work on that.
... Oh great, fucking non-editable replies, I meant no one was saying anything like "Monkeys are just as smart as us." Well, that pretty much ruins MY day.
I suppose that's one way to think about it. Another is that since those drugs are illegal, they tend to be supplied by large drug-smuggling operations.
I run a mom-and-pop drug smuggling operation, you insensitive clod!
Great! Point me to a local, non-national chain store to buy a netbook or MID (or laptop, for that matter) and I'm totally there.
Do you happen to live in Richfield, Minnesota? Because if that non-national part isn't a sticker, there's this company there called Best Buy you should look into.
It would be interesting if we could know two things: 1) Exactly how much Office Depot makes by selling overpriced "protection" plans. 2) How much it will cost Office Depot because of stories about the company being abusive on Reddit.com [reddit.com], Digg.com [digg.com], and Slashdot.
Not only that, but it seems to me that they're doing it wrong if they're pushing an extended warranty with the hard-sell. Its supposed to be an impulse buy that customers don't really care one way or another about, so they'll agree to another nickel and dime.
I worked at gamestop for a while, they have their version of the extended warranty that was for 1 year on new and used games, for something like three dollars I think. The trick was telling the customers they wanted to spend just a tiny bit more rather than trying to convince them it was in their interest. I guess some people see gamestop employees as authorities on games and listen to them, which is silly.
If Office Depot is having problems pushing the extended warranties on people, they're charging too much, and possibly offering too much, making it something people actually think about rather than just saying "sure, I don't care." Maybe they should offer the same warranty that the manufacturer does for like $20 or $10, and in the fine print say something like we'll ship it to the manufacturer for you, you'll get your replacement in 4-6 weeks.
And by "should" I mean "they're clearly without morals, so this is just doing it smarter, and they'd go to hell quicker for doing it."
While this is an annoying policy on paper, there are several ways I could see this actually playing out, and none of them really seem to work.
Scenario 1
Customer: "Hi, I want to buy this laptop" Clerk: "You wanna buy an extended warranty?" Customer: "No thanks" Clerk: "We don't have any in stock" Customer: "Uh... then yes I do?" Clerk: "We just got some in right now!" Customer: "Then I'll take one without the warranty." Clerk: "Aw, what a shame, we just sold out."
Scenario 2
Clerk: "Hey, you seem interested in that there laptop, you want to buy one?" Customer: "Sure." Clerk: "Extended warranty?" Customer: "No thanks" Clerk: "Sorry, I just checked, we're out of stock" Customer: "But... you didn't go anywhere, you didn't even act like you were looking in the stock room" Clerk: "Uh... Telepathy!"
Scenario 3:
Customer: "I want this laptop." Clerk: "You want extend waranty." Customer: "No" Clerk: "No computer in stock" Customer: "Yes you do, this box right here, in my hand, I want to buy it." Clerk: "Me ring up" Customer: "Okay here" (Customer hands computer to Clerk, Clerk smashes the computer with a primitive club) Clerk: "No computer in stock."
Then again, I haven't worked in retail for a long time, maybe my "Lying to strangers" skills are rusty.
They seem to err on the side of caution, or rather, err on the side of not giving money to things they don't understand. Unless your grant proposal is seeded with enough words from the following non-exhaustive list
Nano Biofuel Terorrism Bioterrorism Renewable energy Alternative fuels AIDS Cancer
Years ago I read about some animal sanctuary where they were trying to keep chimpanzees in captivity. They had to run the place like a real jail for humans. If you forget to lock a door in (say) the elephant enclosure at the zoo you would be okay for a while. Not so with chimps.
I am surprised that anybody is surprised by this.
I think the key here is that the chimp anticipated future events and planned rather than just showing an understanding of the current situation, which are dramatically different capabilities. A chimp realizing the door is unlocked is one thing, that is interesting enough given what we usually think of non-human intelligence (I'd say ignorance rather than arrogance, I'm not around a lot of chimps). It's another to demonstrate that the chimp can forecast events that haven't occoured yet, this is something that humans seem barely capable of.
Maybe something in TFA backs me up on this... Holy crap, suprise of suprises, IT DOES!
"These observations convincingly show that our fellow apes do consider the future in a very complex way," said the author of the report, Lund University Ph.D. student Mathias Osvath. "It implies that they have a highly developed consciousness, including lifelike mental simulations of potential events."...
The observations confirmed the result of a staged laboratory experiment reported in 2006 by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. In that case orangutans and bonobos were able to figure out which tool would work in an effort to retrieve grapes, and were able to remember to bring that tool along hours later.
To be honest, I'm suprised that you're suprised that people who study chimps are suprised by this. These seem to be people who know chimps pretty well, if this were an old result, you'd think they wouldn't be wasting their time. Whenever I've thought an expert in a field I don't know as well is wasting their time, I usually come to realize that I was actually not understanding the situation.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, it's strange that the summary says that when the same company makes ones ten times the price. And they come with a shiny silver vacuum tube amplifier (I think that's what they are) that would to me kind of defeat half the purpose of having headphones: portability.
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/ces200211.htm
I'm hoping at least a few people who bought them are using them just to listen to their low-quality MP3s.
I found this page on making your own vacuum tube amplifiers, for anyone interested in trying to make something similar for a lot less than $15k:
http://diyaudioprojects.com/Tubes/tubes.htm
You'd be paying that anyway, as you have to have a connection for netflix streaming, so bittorrent would still be cheaper.
Oh well.. I tried to go legit, but time to fire up bittorrent again, I guess. They are just shooting themselves in the foot.
And that justifies downloading the movies? If you're going to do that, then do it, don't act as if netflix committing one sin is justification. I don't like the MPAA or the RIAA, but that's not why we download music or movies without paying for them. We do that because we can and it's cheaper than paying for it. Pointing to things netflix is doing wrong and saying "that's why I'm doing this" is just rationalization.
Well thats technically your fault for believing what a uninformed manager told you and not reading corporate policy.
Why would he not believe the manager? Why would he read corporate policy when the manager is answering his question? It's not like the manager said anything outrageous, like "it's okay if you steal money from the register." Pretty much everyone would accept the manager's word as authoritative, it would be weird to double check with corporate policy (which often isn't too accessible at retail jobs like that). The "fault" clearly lies with the manager and corporate, not the victim here.
Not defending them just trying to get the buyer/worker to be aware.
It sounds a lot like you're just pointlessly trying to rub it in and in fact defending the manager and blockbuster. Looking at the corporate policy isn't exactly a silver bullet, and it probably wouldn't have worked here either. There are probably a lot of contradictions between what is written on paper at blockbuster and what actually happens. It's not like America's best and brightest management works at blockbuster.
The next time I went to rent from them, it was at a store in a different city; I'd moved.
I've been confused by their tracking policy for a long time. I worked for them briefly in '01, one day a lady came in wanting to set up a new account. The computer pulled up her old account information, from Bulgaria a year prior. I guess they're just trying to make sure no one takes the easy way out and moves to a different continent rather than paying their late fees.
That same store about a month before I joined, a woman ran up a $70 late fee somehow. Her son got hired there and worked only one shift, during which time the fees mysteriously disappeared from the computer system. He quit at the end of the day. The rumor was that they had since been checking applicants for late fees.
There were many things wrong with that particular store, most of which were because of management at various levels. It was closed less than 6 months after I left.
I then turn in my new online one and get another in-store rental and have a new online one sent.. so I now have 2 in-store rentals and 2 online.. rinse and repeat and I can have infinite in-store rentals?
Infinite? No, they won't tell you, but Blockbuster has fewer than infinity movies. There's always a catch.
Temperature is the wrong problem to focus on. Liquid nitrogen is relatively inexpensive & easily handled.
That's relative to liquid hydrogen I guess. For other applications you'd want to use superconductors though, no, it's really not. For instance, I'm not any kind of engineer, but it seems like superconducting long distance high-voltage power lines would be one thing that would be nice, and cooling miles of wire with liquid nitrogen seems like a big hassle.
2. To scare people into a panic by pretending there is a real danger when there is not. (for lulz).
I'm having a hard time bending my brain to somehow apply this logic to leaving buildings unblurred.
Maybe he is worried that google will snap a picture at a time when a small cloud is over a building, and someone in said building will think "Hey, I wonder what my building looks like on google earth!" and will see the cloud and think "Ohmigod! The building is on fire!" and, I don't know, jump out a window.
While that makes no type of sense, it's important to keep in mind we're talking about a california state politician, so it doesn't have to.
The dumbed down version: all news is temporary, so even if it will be overruled, this is news.
It seems to be slashdotted. Maybe it has a cord, or the whole finger is detachable, or you could take the USB port out of the prosthetic.
Hardly news, since this'll certainly be struck down \ overturned in future rulings.
Most punditry is wrong, according to at least one scientific paper, most scientific papers are wrong, most current event news items will become irrelevant and or not current within a day. You're saying this isn't news because it will be overruled eventually? That to me doesn't make it not news, that makes it more like the other news stories.
I'll be the first to admit: I did not research that joke at all.
Will they even be honest enough to give you the service or support you paid for? I wouldn't even trust them that far.
I'm not very familiar with people who make malware, but I'd imagine/hope the "support" would look something like this:
Customer: Yes, I'm having problems with your product, the Malwarator 1000
Anonymous support: LOL FUCK YUO NOOB!!1
If it offends any malware writers to be stereotyped like that, particularly the guys behind antivirus 2009, give me your home address and I'll mail you an apology.
Don't know how google are expected to continue providing free search, maps, mail and all, if they can't get revenue from somewhere else.
By not expanding their tracking. I mean, that seems to be working just fine for them up to now. In all honesty, are they going bankrupt or losing money, or is it just "Hey, we're making boatloads of money, I bet we could make... uh... aircraft carriers of money if we invaded people's privacy!" Because I suspect it's the latter, although since I'm not an investor in google, I haven't been paying attention.
Why do you hate the free market?!
Because in soviet russia, market hates YOU!
Duh, the americans count for nine people each, the russian doesn't count.
Personally, I'm not interested in the varying methods that big game houses can extract revenue from their sweatshop produced big titles.
Personally, I'm less interested in the buisness or the open-source aspect of it and more interested in getting frags in Quake Live and still having enough money to buy necessities. Like porn and beer, which should also be free. Someone should work on that.
... Oh great, fucking non-editable replies, I meant no one was saying anything like "Monkeys are just as smart as us." Well, that pretty much ruins MY day.
We're still the bosses round this neck of the woods.
Since no one was saying anything of the sort, I can only conclude that you are yourself a monkey trying to troll and not doing a good job of it.
I suppose that's one way to think about it. Another is that since those drugs are illegal, they tend to be supplied by large drug-smuggling operations.
I run a mom-and-pop drug smuggling operation, you insensitive clod!
Great! Point me to a local, non-national chain store to buy a netbook or MID (or laptop, for that matter) and I'm totally there.
Do you happen to live in Richfield, Minnesota? Because if that non-national part isn't a sticker, there's this company there called Best Buy you should look into.
If not, I'm 100% out of ideas.
It would be interesting if we could know two things: 1) Exactly how much Office Depot makes by selling overpriced "protection" plans. 2) How much it will cost Office Depot because of stories about the company being abusive on Reddit.com [reddit.com], Digg.com [digg.com], and Slashdot.
Not only that, but it seems to me that they're doing it wrong if they're pushing an extended warranty with the hard-sell. Its supposed to be an impulse buy that customers don't really care one way or another about, so they'll agree to another nickel and dime.
I worked at gamestop for a while, they have their version of the extended warranty that was for 1 year on new and used games, for something like three dollars I think. The trick was telling the customers they wanted to spend just a tiny bit more rather than trying to convince them it was in their interest. I guess some people see gamestop employees as authorities on games and listen to them, which is silly.
If Office Depot is having problems pushing the extended warranties on people, they're charging too much, and possibly offering too much, making it something people actually think about rather than just saying "sure, I don't care." Maybe they should offer the same warranty that the manufacturer does for like $20 or $10, and in the fine print say something like we'll ship it to the manufacturer for you, you'll get your replacement in 4-6 weeks.
And by "should" I mean "they're clearly without morals, so this is just doing it smarter, and they'd go to hell quicker for doing it."
While this is an annoying policy on paper, there are several ways I could see this actually playing out, and none of them really seem to work.
Scenario 1
Customer: "Hi, I want to buy this laptop"
Clerk: "You wanna buy an extended warranty?"
Customer: "No thanks"
Clerk: "We don't have any in stock"
Customer: "Uh... then yes I do?"
Clerk: "We just got some in right now!"
Customer: "Then I'll take one without the warranty."
Clerk: "Aw, what a shame, we just sold out."
Scenario 2
Clerk: "Hey, you seem interested in that there laptop, you want to buy one?"
Customer: "Sure."
Clerk: "Extended warranty?"
Customer: "No thanks"
Clerk: "Sorry, I just checked, we're out of stock"
Customer: "But... you didn't go anywhere, you didn't even act like you were looking in the stock room"
Clerk: "Uh... Telepathy!"
Scenario 3:
Customer: "I want this laptop."
Clerk: "You want extend waranty."
Customer: "No"
Clerk: "No computer in stock"
Customer: "Yes you do, this box right here, in my hand, I want to buy it."
Clerk: "Me ring up"
Customer: "Okay here"
(Customer hands computer to Clerk, Clerk smashes the computer with a primitive club)
Clerk: "No computer in stock."
Then again, I haven't worked in retail for a long time, maybe my "Lying to strangers" skills are rusty.
They seem to err on the side of caution, or rather, err on the side of not giving money to things they don't understand. Unless your grant proposal is seeded with enough words from the following non-exhaustive list
Nano
Biofuel
Terorrism
Bioterrorism
Renewable energy
Alternative fuels
AIDS
Cancer
Years ago I read about some animal sanctuary where they were trying to keep chimpanzees in captivity. They had to run the place like a real jail for humans. If you forget to lock a door in (say) the elephant enclosure at the zoo you would be okay for a while. Not so with chimps.
I am surprised that anybody is surprised by this.
I think the key here is that the chimp anticipated future events and planned rather than just showing an understanding of the current situation, which are dramatically different capabilities. A chimp realizing the door is unlocked is one thing, that is interesting enough given what we usually think of non-human intelligence (I'd say ignorance rather than arrogance, I'm not around a lot of chimps). It's another to demonstrate that the chimp can forecast events that haven't occoured yet, this is something that humans seem barely capable of.
Maybe something in TFA backs me up on this... Holy crap, suprise of suprises, IT DOES!
To be honest, I'm suprised that you're suprised that people who study chimps are suprised by this. These seem to be people who know chimps pretty well, if this were an old result, you'd think they wouldn't be wasting their time. Whenever I've thought an expert in a field I don't know as well is wasting their time, I usually come to realize that I was actually not understanding the situation.