I had some pretty good success cracking some Unix passwords with a password list. It was an exercise for a computer security course, where we actually had to break into a target machine. Out of about 40 user accounts I recovered approximately half.
Stock prices don't affect revenue and assets (except for the stock held by members of the company) of a company who issues the stocks, its the other way around. Netflix took a hit to its stock because people are not confident they will continue to grow as a company, however there was not an instantaneous change in their revenue. They still had as many subscribers after the stock took a hit as before +/- a few thousand probably.
8.75 percent is considered amongst the highest here. Houston is just a dirty city with a huge disparity in wealth and its visible in how the infrastructure is handled in the rich and poor areas, as well as in the sheer number of homeless that walk the streets. I'm originally from Kalispell, Montana which is damn near Canada, so understandably I have sort of a midwest / northwest mentality for how clean a city should be, but having lived in three other metro cities, and now residing in Denver, I can say that Houston is the dirtiest place yet unless you go to sub-cities in it like Sugar Land which is damn near unaffordable unless you have connections to get a good job. The city is still rife with separation between races, as well as between socio-economic classes. I can't say its bad everywhere, but its bad in enough places that its not my kind of place. In Denver, its a very clean city, and less separated between socio-economic classes. You don't see as many "black", "white" or "hispanic" areas of town, nor do you see many establishments where only white people seem to be welcome. There are plenty of restaurants frequented by poor, wealthy, and middle class at the same time, with actually good food. Its not just places that cater to one or another class. Of course there are rich areas and establishments, but its nothing even close to like living in Houston.
Pretty sure they factored that it and still found them to be more expensive.
Actually they factored in the extra 40% cost of benefits on top of the government employees salaries and the private contractors were still 1.5-2 times more expensive. The people doing this study weren't so dumb as to not factor that in:
Because the contractor billing rates published by GSA include not only salaries but also other costs including benefits contractors provide their employees,[66] POGO added OPM’s 36.25 percent benefit rate to federal employee salaries[67] and BLS’s 33.5 percent loading to private sector employee salaries to reflect the full fringe benefit package paid to full-time employees in service-providing organizations that employ 500 or more workers.[68] All supporting data for this study are found in Table 1 and Appendices B through D.[69]
You assume the government is a benevolent entity without self-interest. Most "projects" benefit one set of people or another at the expense of others. For example, the head (maybe former, I haven't followed it since) of the Homeland Security department was instrumental in getting the naked-body scanners in Airports, and lo-and-behold he owned part of the company that makes them. Government is full of shit like that. Most of their legislation is meant to keep us all happy while maintaining the status quo. I.e. keep the rich getting richer, and make sure we all can't get rich as easy since thats more money for them.
Yep. A state with the 5th largest gap in the entire US in wealth between the rich class and middle class really must be a progressive state. http://www.cbpp.org/files/4-9-08sfp-fact-tx.pdf . I lived inside the loop, and though there are neighborhoods like you said, the majority of what I saw were people renting poorly maintained apartments, with poorly maintained infrastructure around it. There were pot holes, sidewalks breaking apart, dangerous street drains that were about to collapse, and more fucking homeless people everywhere than I have ever seen in my entire life prior or since. Then, you go to a "wealthy" neighborhood and the streets are all well maintained and the houses dwarf everything else by about 10 fold. The sales tax is ridiculous at over 8 percent on everything including food, and the rent isn't all that cheap unless you want to live in a cockroach infested hell-hole with drug addicts living next door. If you want to live in the suburbs and work at a reasonable job you have to either own a car, or use the shittiest city transit system in existence. To top it all off, just going out to get a beer, or a decent meal, or even groceries cost about 1.5 times as much as it does anywhere else I have been partially due to the sales tax, and partially due to the fact that businesses liked to charge a lot for things that cost much less. Im glad you like it there, but my experience there pretty much sucked.
What pisses me off is that he decided to make a stand NOW, when there is no chance of his proposal passing with a Republican controlled House. Obviously its political posturing before the election campaign. Hes a fucking joke. He didn't do anything his entire presidency except pass a health care bill that sucked ass and was severely hamstrung by Republicans. At least try to make it make sense if you are going to try to pass it at all. If I was him, I would have vetoed every damn bill the Republicans passed until they started playing nice, and I would have proposed increasing capital gains taxes three years ago. Obviously Im sort of liberal, in other areas I am quite conservative like with guns and fiscal policy (with the exception that I would propose additional taxes on things that make sense like capital gains as well as propose massive spending cuts), but I just wanted to rant to show you us perceived as "Liberals" are just as pissed off at him.
Im American, worked as an RA. The principal investigator of our department would troll overseas for foreigners because they ended up being free labor essentially. Though in my department they would actually work and contribute, they still pushed out domestic students because of it.
I worked at two different Universities before, and I can tell you its a common theme to have people who are getting paid to do something someone else easily could add to their job responsibilities, especially since both of them only actually work a quarter of their day and spend the rest of it fucking around.
In my experience, most conservatives see anything other then themselves as liberal. I tend to be quite moderate about everything, and Im starting to get pissed off about getting labeled a "Liberal" by these assholes.
Generally, the smarter you are the more likely you are to be moderate. In this country, moderates are considered liberal. I've had my share of shitty teachers as well, but they typically were in something like Humanities. I had one mathematics professor that actually had reasonable arguments when he went on tangents about politics, even if I disagreed.
Having lived in Houston, Texas, Im pretty sure its more about maintaining the status quo. After all, the wealthy Texans all go to Rice or Texas A&M. I have never seen an area more blighted by a huge disparity in wealth. There are areas with massive mansions or town-homes, then everything else is shitty apartments.
There are people that exchange money you know. Furthermore, how is it beneficial to spend all our dollars overseas so they can own us with debt while printing more money and devaluing the currency each American holds? Its not. The whole system is geared so wealthy stay wealthy and everyone else gets poorer. Wealthy people creating jobs is a myth. Sure, they create "Some" jobs, but they will only spend a dime if it will let them take a dollar from someone else. There is effectively no loop back so that a dollar gets recirculated once a rich person has it.
I would agree with you if it weren't for the fact that the top 10 percent of earners have 90 percent of all the money, and continue to get wage increases in spite of the average American losing their job or maintaining the same wage for decades. If they truly were "job creators" then they wouldn't hoard money nor get huge fucking wage increases like they do. Removing labor laws and making Americans accept lower wages will just make our situation worse since it is a blatant myth that wealthy people create as many jobs as Republicans claim. My father manages to employ 6 people and is not wealthy, other wealthy people essentially hoard most of their money and only spend a dime if it will let them steal a dollar from the average American. Im all for removing corporate and business taxes, but wealthy people should be taxed at least at a flat rate on ALL EARNINGS, and not be allowed to have 15 percent on capital gains, and numerous loop-holes to jump through to shield their already massive holdings and earnings.
That's always their first line of defense in arguments. "Well, if you are so smart start your own business", "Well, if you don't like it start your own business". Same old shit. They never ever look at it from someone else's shoes and just think because they make bank everyone else just must be lazy or stupid. I didn't buy piles of shit either in college and I am strapped with student loan debt. Its not possible to survive of 300 a week when your rent is anywhere between 500-700 dollars. Even when I shared an apartment that was considered cheap in College it was 400, and I only could find jobs making about 9 an hour part time. How the hell are you supposed to pay 5000 dollars in tuition on top of that every semester? Right now Im significantly better off since I work full time and go to school for my PhD, but I still can't afford my tuition on my wage as it would eat up about half of my yearly salary, which is an about average salary for a single guy (even though Im married). I can't seem to find a job that will pay me what I should be getting statistically with a MS in Applied Math, programming skills, and good grades. Why is that?
Wealth destruction due to greed, which is the basic tenant of capitalism. Why pay your employees twice as much in the US when you can get someone in China to do it and make more money for yourself? We hemorrhage our money out all over the world so there is no surprise the Fed's have to print more of it for domestic use. You can model it with a differential equation. Essentially, if you have some resource that is continually depreciating (i.e. a dollar due to printing, inflation, whatever) and you spend more of it than you take in, there is less value overall even though you may have the same number of resources in circulation in your own nation. After WWII, we weren't the ones that had our industrial centers bombed to rubble, so we supplied the world with products since we had the capacity. Money flowed mostly INTO the US. Lo-and-behold we had 50 years of prosperity until China stepped up and replaced us as the major manufacturer for the world. Politicians don't seem to want to do anything about that.
You can't just start a business without capital. Right-wingers always assume people have the ability to gather savings when they are under-paid and/or under-employed, then start businesses in fields with such large capital requirements that it would be impossible. Just try to start a cellular provider, or internet provider, or restaurant, etc. You pretty much have to find a rich person to finance you, and that is also not as easy as Right-wingers always assume it is. Simply put, the middle class has been eroded and pressured so badly there are not many capable of doing this. If you look at the number of "entrepreneurs" attempting to start businesses over the last 30 years it has been a steady decline mostly due to people not being able to survive let alone save anything on the wages they make. We live in a capitalist society with less-and-less markets capable of being exploited due to massive corporations, off-shoring, and the money supply being concentrated into only a few hands. Then, if you want a good job, you need a good education and thus are slapped with crippling debt for the rest of your life. How can you start a business when all your savings go to paying off interest?
This is quite true. My parents were involved in a long drawn out trial in which it was determined their investment money was obtained fraudulently. They currently get about 50 bucks a month from the individual of the 50,000 USD they invested since the individual cannot afford to pay anyone anymore after going bankrupt. It was found the criminal was liable only for the principal without taking into account inflation, nor interest. It was from a typical investment scam, and though we may scoff at it now, it was 50 years ago before pop-culture could take lessons like these and spin them into comedies like "Party Down"'s episode ""Investors Dinner". Their investment was actually for something which is ridiculously wide-spread now as well, MRI's.
Just make the roller-coaster carriage launch off the end of the track into a open pit land fill. Problem solved, and it would be a spectacular site to see. You could charge admission.
Slashdot Mirror
I had some pretty good success cracking some Unix passwords with a password list. It was an exercise for a computer security course, where we actually had to break into a target machine. Out of about 40 user accounts I recovered approximately half.
Stock prices don't affect revenue and assets (except for the stock held by members of the company) of a company who issues the stocks, its the other way around. Netflix took a hit to its stock because people are not confident they will continue to grow as a company, however there was not an instantaneous change in their revenue. They still had as many subscribers after the stock took a hit as before +/- a few thousand probably.
8.75 percent is considered amongst the highest here. Houston is just a dirty city with a huge disparity in wealth and its visible in how the infrastructure is handled in the rich and poor areas, as well as in the sheer number of homeless that walk the streets. I'm originally from Kalispell, Montana which is damn near Canada, so understandably I have sort of a midwest / northwest mentality for how clean a city should be, but having lived in three other metro cities, and now residing in Denver, I can say that Houston is the dirtiest place yet unless you go to sub-cities in it like Sugar Land which is damn near unaffordable unless you have connections to get a good job. The city is still rife with separation between races, as well as between socio-economic classes. I can't say its bad everywhere, but its bad in enough places that its not my kind of place. In Denver, its a very clean city, and less separated between socio-economic classes. You don't see as many "black", "white" or "hispanic" areas of town, nor do you see many establishments where only white people seem to be welcome. There are plenty of restaurants frequented by poor, wealthy, and middle class at the same time, with actually good food. Its not just places that cater to one or another class. Of course there are rich areas and establishments, but its nothing even close to like living in Houston.
Im not sure why it should ever be illegal or legally discouraged to unionize. Seems like a violation of your rights.
Actually they factored in the extra 40% cost of benefits on top of the government employees salaries and the private contractors were still 1.5-2 times more expensive. The people doing this study weren't so dumb as to not factor that in: Because the contractor billing rates published by GSA include not only salaries but also other costs including benefits contractors provide their employees,[66] POGO added OPM’s 36.25 percent benefit rate to federal employee salaries[67] and BLS’s 33.5 percent loading to private sector employee salaries to reflect the full fringe benefit package paid to full-time employees in service-providing organizations that employ 500 or more workers.[68] All supporting data for this study are found in Table 1 and Appendices B through D.[69]
That was posted by Lunix Nutcase above.
You assume the government is a benevolent entity without self-interest. Most "projects" benefit one set of people or another at the expense of others. For example, the head (maybe former, I haven't followed it since) of the Homeland Security department was instrumental in getting the naked-body scanners in Airports, and lo-and-behold he owned part of the company that makes them. Government is full of shit like that. Most of their legislation is meant to keep us all happy while maintaining the status quo. I.e. keep the rich getting richer, and make sure we all can't get rich as easy since thats more money for them.
Yep. A state with the 5th largest gap in the entire US in wealth between the rich class and middle class really must be a progressive state. http://www.cbpp.org/files/4-9-08sfp-fact-tx.pdf . I lived inside the loop, and though there are neighborhoods like you said, the majority of what I saw were people renting poorly maintained apartments, with poorly maintained infrastructure around it. There were pot holes, sidewalks breaking apart, dangerous street drains that were about to collapse, and more fucking homeless people everywhere than I have ever seen in my entire life prior or since. Then, you go to a "wealthy" neighborhood and the streets are all well maintained and the houses dwarf everything else by about 10 fold. The sales tax is ridiculous at over 8 percent on everything including food, and the rent isn't all that cheap unless you want to live in a cockroach infested hell-hole with drug addicts living next door. If you want to live in the suburbs and work at a reasonable job you have to either own a car, or use the shittiest city transit system in existence. To top it all off, just going out to get a beer, or a decent meal, or even groceries cost about 1.5 times as much as it does anywhere else I have been partially due to the sales tax, and partially due to the fact that businesses liked to charge a lot for things that cost much less. Im glad you like it there, but my experience there pretty much sucked.
What pisses me off is that he decided to make a stand NOW, when there is no chance of his proposal passing with a Republican controlled House. Obviously its political posturing before the election campaign. Hes a fucking joke. He didn't do anything his entire presidency except pass a health care bill that sucked ass and was severely hamstrung by Republicans. At least try to make it make sense if you are going to try to pass it at all. If I was him, I would have vetoed every damn bill the Republicans passed until they started playing nice, and I would have proposed increasing capital gains taxes three years ago. Obviously Im sort of liberal, in other areas I am quite conservative like with guns and fiscal policy (with the exception that I would propose additional taxes on things that make sense like capital gains as well as propose massive spending cuts), but I just wanted to rant to show you us perceived as "Liberals" are just as pissed off at him.
Im American, worked as an RA. The principal investigator of our department would troll overseas for foreigners because they ended up being free labor essentially. Though in my department they would actually work and contribute, they still pushed out domestic students because of it.
I worked at two different Universities before, and I can tell you its a common theme to have people who are getting paid to do something someone else easily could add to their job responsibilities, especially since both of them only actually work a quarter of their day and spend the rest of it fucking around.
Statistically, unemployment levels drop as education level increases, as does salary. It seems the most optimal level (given student loans vs. salary expectations) is either "Some College" or "Bachelors". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States
In my experience, most conservatives see anything other then themselves as liberal. I tend to be quite moderate about everything, and Im starting to get pissed off about getting labeled a "Liberal" by these assholes.
Generally, the smarter you are the more likely you are to be moderate. In this country, moderates are considered liberal. I've had my share of shitty teachers as well, but they typically were in something like Humanities. I had one mathematics professor that actually had reasonable arguments when he went on tangents about politics, even if I disagreed.
Having lived in Houston, Texas, Im pretty sure its more about maintaining the status quo. After all, the wealthy Texans all go to Rice or Texas A&M. I have never seen an area more blighted by a huge disparity in wealth. There are areas with massive mansions or town-homes, then everything else is shitty apartments.
There are people that exchange money you know. Furthermore, how is it beneficial to spend all our dollars overseas so they can own us with debt while printing more money and devaluing the currency each American holds? Its not. The whole system is geared so wealthy stay wealthy and everyone else gets poorer. Wealthy people creating jobs is a myth. Sure, they create "Some" jobs, but they will only spend a dime if it will let them take a dollar from someone else. There is effectively no loop back so that a dollar gets recirculated once a rich person has it.
I would agree with you if it weren't for the fact that the top 10 percent of earners have 90 percent of all the money, and continue to get wage increases in spite of the average American losing their job or maintaining the same wage for decades. If they truly were "job creators" then they wouldn't hoard money nor get huge fucking wage increases like they do. Removing labor laws and making Americans accept lower wages will just make our situation worse since it is a blatant myth that wealthy people create as many jobs as Republicans claim. My father manages to employ 6 people and is not wealthy, other wealthy people essentially hoard most of their money and only spend a dime if it will let them steal a dollar from the average American. Im all for removing corporate and business taxes, but wealthy people should be taxed at least at a flat rate on ALL EARNINGS, and not be allowed to have 15 percent on capital gains, and numerous loop-holes to jump through to shield their already massive holdings and earnings.
That's always their first line of defense in arguments. "Well, if you are so smart start your own business", "Well, if you don't like it start your own business". Same old shit. They never ever look at it from someone else's shoes and just think because they make bank everyone else just must be lazy or stupid. I didn't buy piles of shit either in college and I am strapped with student loan debt. Its not possible to survive of 300 a week when your rent is anywhere between 500-700 dollars. Even when I shared an apartment that was considered cheap in College it was 400, and I only could find jobs making about 9 an hour part time. How the hell are you supposed to pay 5000 dollars in tuition on top of that every semester? Right now Im significantly better off since I work full time and go to school for my PhD, but I still can't afford my tuition on my wage as it would eat up about half of my yearly salary, which is an about average salary for a single guy (even though Im married). I can't seem to find a job that will pay me what I should be getting statistically with a MS in Applied Math, programming skills, and good grades. Why is that?
What you speak of certainly does not sound like capitalism at all.
Wealth destruction due to greed, which is the basic tenant of capitalism. Why pay your employees twice as much in the US when you can get someone in China to do it and make more money for yourself? We hemorrhage our money out all over the world so there is no surprise the Fed's have to print more of it for domestic use. You can model it with a differential equation. Essentially, if you have some resource that is continually depreciating (i.e. a dollar due to printing, inflation, whatever) and you spend more of it than you take in, there is less value overall even though you may have the same number of resources in circulation in your own nation. After WWII, we weren't the ones that had our industrial centers bombed to rubble, so we supplied the world with products since we had the capacity. Money flowed mostly INTO the US. Lo-and-behold we had 50 years of prosperity until China stepped up and replaced us as the major manufacturer for the world. Politicians don't seem to want to do anything about that.
You can't just start a business without capital. Right-wingers always assume people have the ability to gather savings when they are under-paid and/or under-employed, then start businesses in fields with such large capital requirements that it would be impossible. Just try to start a cellular provider, or internet provider, or restaurant, etc. You pretty much have to find a rich person to finance you, and that is also not as easy as Right-wingers always assume it is. Simply put, the middle class has been eroded and pressured so badly there are not many capable of doing this. If you look at the number of "entrepreneurs" attempting to start businesses over the last 30 years it has been a steady decline mostly due to people not being able to survive let alone save anything on the wages they make. We live in a capitalist society with less-and-less markets capable of being exploited due to massive corporations, off-shoring, and the money supply being concentrated into only a few hands. Then, if you want a good job, you need a good education and thus are slapped with crippling debt for the rest of your life. How can you start a business when all your savings go to paying off interest?
Yep. This is Capitalism, where workers are forced to accept the same wages for over a decade while costs for everything continue to rise.
Belgium is pretty much a Non-Country. Im an American, but this guy pretty much rocks : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ6rfxoEFI4
This is quite true. My parents were involved in a long drawn out trial in which it was determined their investment money was obtained fraudulently. They currently get about 50 bucks a month from the individual of the 50,000 USD they invested since the individual cannot afford to pay anyone anymore after going bankrupt. It was found the criminal was liable only for the principal without taking into account inflation, nor interest. It was from a typical investment scam, and though we may scoff at it now, it was 50 years ago before pop-culture could take lessons like these and spin them into comedies like "Party Down"'s episode ""Investors Dinner". Their investment was actually for something which is ridiculously wide-spread now as well, MRI's.
Just make the roller-coaster carriage launch off the end of the track into a open pit land fill. Problem solved, and it would be a spectacular site to see. You could charge admission.
I'd probably pull a Benjamin, from "Leaving Las Vegas".