You didn't state where you work or what industry you work in, but there is a totally reasonable understanding in most workplaces that everybody maintain a professional business atmosphere. It might sound ridiculous to most of us, but displaying images of weapons and the shambling undead make some people uncomfortable. Businesses, generally by law, need to maintain a work environment free of those kinds of things.
I'm to the point that I have only one non-work related item up in my cubical.
Again I don't know what your organizational culture is like, but at most places I've worked personal items were extremely rare (i.e. pictures of kids, that sort of thing). Unless you have a legitimate business need to show off your zombie paraphernalia, it's usually a good idea to leave that stuff at home.
Space exploration is the right thing to do, but we don't yet have the knowledge or technology to make meaningful manned missions.
We didn't have the knowledge or technology prior to 1961 either. But spending money to learn how to do those things was the right thing to do.
IMO the goal of our space programs isn't just to put humans into space. It also serves to dump piles of money into US science an tech development. Our space program is an investment in the US that allows us to maintain a technological edge. We've lost hope of outproducing developing countries like China, out best chance now is to keep ourselves ahead of them technologically. We can't do that unless we are keeping our scientists and engineers working and advancing our sci/tech industry.
The PS3 device and PSN access are totally different products. The terms of sale for the console has no guarantee that you will agree to the PSN terms of service. This is intentional, and AFAIK a fairly standard practice.
Is there a significant power savings there? Lasers seem like an overly complicated replacement for spark plugs, especially considering the inevitable degradation of the sparky end. Or are they part of a totally different engine design?
HP has a new notice up on their website intimating that they received a huge number of sign-ups for that notice. I'm not sure the small number of Touchpads still in the pipeline will be enough to satisfy all of that interest. I'd keep a close eye on your email over the next few weeks and be ready to jump right on that.
Fingers crossed though. I too would really like to get my paws on one.
I'm also a New Englander (Mainer now living in Boston). And I'll agree that we overreacted, but I understand why.
In New England we understand winter storms. We build our homes and roads, and buy our cars so that we can withstand cold and snowfall. We are totally comfortable shoveling snow and dealing with no power for a few days.
You make a good point about how we don't really know earthquakes. I think we have similar inexperience with hurricanes. We see the really tragic ones on the news, but we rarely have to deal with them ourselves. The last one most of us can remember was Bob back in the early '90s. Extreme winds and mandatory evacuations are things that we aren't used to. We can shelter in place and stay warm just fine, but most of us have never planned what we would do if our homes were destroyed and we had to leave. Considering the damage we saw from tornadoes a little while back, and how our local media hyped the hell out of this storm, it's not surprising that people were a little scared.
Full disclosure: I myself bought a small pile of D cells for my camp lantern and was really close to buying a crank radio.
I think an unspoken assumption you are making is that the evolution of life "advances" toward intelligence linearly at a common rate. This isn't really accurate. Advanced life does not necessarily mean intelligent life.
Life may well exist on Europa, and may well have existed for just as long as life on earth. We can look for examples in the communities surviving around deep ocean thermal vents (which are likely the best analog we have for the environment in Europa's oceans). Those environments are teaming with life in a fairly small area. That life isn't intelligent, and may never face the evolutionary pressures that will lead to the development of intelligence, but is very very highly adapted to an extremely harsh environment. That level of evolution can be considered every bit as "advanced" as our intelligence.
Even if the numbers aren't correct (and I have no reason to suspect they are not), the point is valid. Our military spends more in a year than NASA has spent on the entire US space program.
5. went to community college first as opposed to go straight to college and was willing to leave
with parents as much as possible vs racking up an additional $25-$35K (or even more) on loans just to be on a dorm on a 4-year college more often than not needlessly far away.
Maybe it's worthwhile to save the commute and spend the extra time studying grammar?
I kid. 4-year colleges don't teach grammar anymore either.
mowing to the center causes a big problem though as your constantly re-chopping the same grass and pushing it in the center
It's not an issue if your mower catches your clippings. Or you can simply run with the ejector on the outside. As a kid my parents had about 4 1/2 acres that was roughly circular, and this was exactly what I did. Because I was blowing the clippings to the outside of the circle it left a rather nice uniform layer of dead grass with a bald spot in the center.
At least in the US, Price Gouging is only considered criminal if it is anticipation of a national emergency or affects critical goods (food, water, medicine, etc).
Borders $30 DVD's might meet a more relaxed slashdot definition of gouging, but there is certainly nothing forcing you to buy them.
You go in, do the very least you can to not get fired, and go home at night. You don't go out of your way to teach everyone to replace you. You don't "cross-train" so that you can fill two or three roles without a raise. You certainly don't answer calls when you're off duty.
Hooray, you are a disengaged employee. You've got a terribly toxic attitude and you do the bare minimum you can to get by. Not surprisingly, this makes you a poor candidate for investment and advancement. Shocking. Understand that this is often a reinforcing situation, in fact it is an archetypical organizational systems dynamics problem.
I don't know where you have worked or what has happened to you to make you so jaded about employment, but trust me that it doesn't need to be that way. Maybe you had bad managers that missed opportunities to keep you engaged. Maybe you are just a terrible employee. Either way, your view of employee-employer relations is entirely too cynical. Plenty of healthy organizations exist that appropriately reward motivated employees.
opened fire and shot the lady... at point blank range!
Your outrage over the "point blank range" is misplaced. That term refers to the maximum distance a round can be fired without having to compensate for bullet drop. For a 9mm that's probably about 25 yards.
Also, and more to the rest of your post, the reason cops hate recordings is because people like yourself expect that every single one of them is a murderer. Good cops hate to be cast in the same light as the bad ones. Being that they are human, they tend to resent when self-righteous jackasses get in their faces trying to catch, or fabricate, evidence of them making mistakes. If you came into my office with that kind of attitude, I'd probably smash your camera too.
But you can't ask people to stop eating and drinking.
As an average American, I respectfully disagree. Most of the first world consumes far more food and water than we need. We can't stop, but we could certainly consume less. Then it is simply a question of how deeply food production will fall, and if some reasonable austerity in first world nations will be enough to compensate.
A US citizen is also usually responsible for 10 to 20 times more resource and energy production than a Chinese or Indian citizen
Citation needed.
So why aren't you calling for a citation from the GP as well? Both statements seem equally imprecise (meaning that I'm willing to accept their truthiness even though they may not be completely accurate). Are you implying that the parent's statement is incorrect? Do you have any evidence, or does it just conflict with your worldview?
God forbid someone fail to exhaustively research and cite their arguments in a casual conversation...on the internet.
The use case I imagined right away was charging it up from a laptop battery in the event of power failure. But in other situations I think the adaptation of USB as a standard device charging format makes a lot of sense (USB being Universal and all).
Call of duty 3 looks like it will have a monthly fee to play online without a handicap.
No handicap. The Elite subscription fee gets you access to (pretty extensive) online stats tracking and bonus content, but the info I've read is really specific that not subscribing will not handicap you in any way. It sounds like your fear is that there will be weapons/perks available only to paying subscribers, but all the info I've found specifically says that won't be the case. I expect the subscribers will get goodies like weapon and player skins, and possibly deals on the DLC.
Can't speak for BF 3 though. If indeed they set up a system for paying real world money for weapon upgrades I expect people will freak. One of the early and lesser played XBox titles Chromehounds had that and people hated it.
The relationship between humans and the various races of the Covenant is far from settled. The Arbiter doesn't speak for all the Elites, let alone the Brutes, Jackals, etc.
And don't underestimate the Flood either..
Plus the Human government was dealing with colonial rebellions and pirate organizations at the beginning of the story. Plenty of potential bad guys there.
It's a lot cheaper to let the personally distant folks warm up to you than it is to train someone from scratch.
I mean no insult, but my experience has been quite different. You can sometimes coax socially distant folks out of their shells. But my personal experience has been that while you can usually train up a person's knowledge base it is often harder to modify someones social behavior. Most of us have spent a lifetime developing those habits and secretly resent when our managers tell us we need to change them.
Of course you said "cheaper", and I think it really depends on how selective your organization can afford to be. Companies like Google can afford both to be picky
about personality and spend time/money on training. Smaller shops might just have to take who they can get.
If the Doctor is any good, he/she will take the time to explain their diagnosis and treatment and make sure to answer any and all questions before the patient leaves. A decent Doctor IMO should be counseling the person on their medical decisions rather than dictating them. We're a pretty well educated nation and we should be inquisitive enough to really try to understand our own healthcare (while of course recognizing the expertise of the provider).
Personally I do feel qualified to review my Doctor, but that's because I expect my Doctor to share his knowledge and help me understand his thinking. I'm also so disappointed with most of humanity that I don't put too much stock in what people write on the internet.
The best way for a doctor or dentist to prevent bad exposure is to make clear that they want to fix anything if you have a bad experience. Always give the merchant a chance to turn things around. If they still fail, then they deserve the bad review.
Just so you know, I agree with your service recovery model. It just really disappoints me that we have started looking at health care providers as merchants.
If I get bad service during an oil change I feel free to bitch and moan and light them up on Yelp. I would like to hold my Doctor to a higher standard.
It was a little inconvenient during the outage. Even though "it still worked" you had to let it fail on a couple of logins first. And for me on some nights it just didn't work at all. During the outage I wound up using an Xbox for Netflix streaming. I didn't want to have to futz with it every time I started it up.
I'm back to using the PS3 now of course. But I too am concerned about the networks security and how much I can count on future service availability.
Ofcourse, this depends on which level and with what sort of clients you work and which sticks well. But I can imagine you'll lose your pitch if you're aiming for a contract where money, timing and experience are a large factor. You wont convey your client you have the weight and expertise to pull it if you are talking about "gooey" things in your meetings.
A key component to clear communication (especially from a contractor's perspective) is adjusting your language to suit your target audience and, as you say, to help convey whatever image you are trying to project. If the client organization uses terms like "gooey", then use "gooey". And to your point above, if your client uses really technical jargon then you should use it too. At the very least it lets the client feel hip and/or smart for having used the appropriate terminology.
Neither the formal or informal voice are inherently better than the other, it only matters that you can communicate to your audience in a mutually understood language.
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't state where you work or what industry you work in, but there is a totally reasonable understanding in most workplaces that everybody maintain a professional business atmosphere. It might sound ridiculous to most of us, but displaying images of weapons and the shambling undead make some people uncomfortable. Businesses, generally by law, need to maintain a work environment free of those kinds of things.
I'm to the point that I have only one non-work related item up in my cubical.
Again I don't know what your organizational culture is like, but at most places I've worked personal items were extremely rare (i.e. pictures of kids, that sort of thing). Unless you have a legitimate business need to show off your zombie paraphernalia, it's usually a good idea to leave that stuff at home.
Space exploration is the right thing to do, but we don't yet have the knowledge or technology to make meaningful manned missions.
We didn't have the knowledge or technology prior to 1961 either. But spending money to learn how to do those things was the right thing to do.
IMO the goal of our space programs isn't just to put humans into space. It also serves to dump piles of money into US science an tech development. Our space program is an investment in the US that allows us to maintain a technological edge. We've lost hope of outproducing developing countries like China, out best chance now is to keep ourselves ahead of them technologically. We can't do that unless we are keeping our scientists and engineers working and advancing our sci/tech industry.
TL;DR: We must do this in the name of SCIENCE!
The PS3 device and PSN access are totally different products. The terms of sale for the console has no guarantee that you will agree to the PSN terms of service. This is intentional, and AFAIK a fairly standard practice.
Is there a significant power savings there? Lasers seem like an overly complicated replacement for spark plugs, especially considering the inevitable degradation of the sparky end. Or are they part of a totally different engine design?
I am intrigued.
HP has a new notice up on their website intimating that they received a huge number of sign-ups for that notice. I'm not sure the small number of Touchpads still in the pipeline will be enough to satisfy all of that interest. I'd keep a close eye on your email over the next few weeks and be ready to jump right on that.
Fingers crossed though. I too would really like to get my paws on one.
I'm also a New Englander (Mainer now living in Boston). And I'll agree that we overreacted, but I understand why.
In New England we understand winter storms. We build our homes and roads, and buy our cars so that we can withstand cold and snowfall. We are totally comfortable shoveling snow and dealing with no power for a few days.
You make a good point about how we don't really know earthquakes. I think we have similar inexperience with hurricanes. We see the really tragic ones on the news, but we rarely have to deal with them ourselves. The last one most of us can remember was Bob back in the early '90s. Extreme winds and mandatory evacuations are things that we aren't used to. We can shelter in place and stay warm just fine, but most of us have never planned what we would do if our homes were destroyed and we had to leave. Considering the damage we saw from tornadoes a little while back, and how our local media hyped the hell out of this storm, it's not surprising that people were a little scared.
Full disclosure: I myself bought a small pile of D cells for my camp lantern and was really close to buying a crank radio.
I think an unspoken assumption you are making is that the evolution of life "advances" toward intelligence linearly at a common rate. This isn't really accurate. Advanced life does not necessarily mean intelligent life.
Life may well exist on Europa, and may well have existed for just as long as life on earth. We can look for examples in the communities surviving around deep ocean thermal vents (which are likely the best analog we have for the environment in Europa's oceans). Those environments are teaming with life in a fairly small area. That life isn't intelligent, and may never face the evolutionary pressures that will lead to the development of intelligence, but is very very highly adapted to an extremely harsh environment. That level of evolution can be considered every bit as "advanced" as our intelligence.
[citation needed]
Even if the numbers aren't correct (and I have no reason to suspect they are not), the point is valid. Our military spends more in a year than NASA has spent on the entire US space program.
5. went to community college first as opposed to go straight to college and was willing to leave
with parents as much as possible vs racking up an additional $25-$35K (or even more) on loans just to be on a dorm on a 4-year college more often than not needlessly far away.
Maybe it's worthwhile to save the commute and spend the extra time studying grammar?
I kid. 4-year colleges don't teach grammar anymore either.
mowing to the center causes a big problem though as your constantly re-chopping the same grass and pushing it in the center
It's not an issue if your mower catches your clippings. Or you can simply run with the ejector on the outside. As a kid my parents had about 4 1/2 acres that was roughly circular, and this was exactly what I did. Because I was blowing the clippings to the outside of the circle it left a rather nice uniform layer of dead grass with a bald spot in the center.
At least in the US, Price Gouging is only considered criminal if it is anticipation of a national emergency or affects critical goods (food, water, medicine, etc).
Borders $30 DVD's might meet a more relaxed slashdot definition of gouging, but there is certainly nothing forcing you to buy them.
You go in, do the very least you can to not get fired, and go home at night. You don't go out of your way to teach everyone to replace you. You don't "cross-train" so that you can fill two or three roles without a raise. You certainly don't answer calls when you're off duty.
Hooray, you are a disengaged employee. You've got a terribly toxic attitude and you do the bare minimum you can to get by. Not surprisingly, this makes you a poor candidate for investment and advancement. Shocking. Understand that this is often a reinforcing situation, in fact it is an archetypical organizational systems dynamics problem.
I don't know where you have worked or what has happened to you to make you so jaded about employment, but trust me that it doesn't need to be that way. Maybe you had bad managers that missed opportunities to keep you engaged. Maybe you are just a terrible employee. Either way, your view of employee-employer relations is entirely too cynical. Plenty of healthy organizations exist that appropriately reward motivated employees.
3) Official officer Radio/PC traffic often have private citizens information that should often be protected.
I have a lot of reasons to think that cops should be monitored while on duty. This is a concern I hadn't thought of. Thank you.
All cops should be videotaped, 24/7. Any complaint, and the tape gets reviewed. Same for politicians.
Are you seriously saying that cops should be subject to recording when they are off duty? Say, when they are home taking a shit?
opened fire and shot the lady... at point blank range!
Your outrage over the "point blank range" is misplaced. That term refers to the maximum distance a round can be fired without having to compensate for bullet drop. For a 9mm that's probably about 25 yards.
Also, and more to the rest of your post, the reason cops hate recordings is because people like yourself expect that every single one of them is a murderer. Good cops hate to be cast in the same light as the bad ones. Being that they are human, they tend to resent when self-righteous jackasses get in their faces trying to catch, or fabricate, evidence of them making mistakes. If you came into my office with that kind of attitude, I'd probably smash your camera too.
But you can't ask people to stop eating and drinking.
As an average American, I respectfully disagree. Most of the first world consumes far more food and water than we need. We can't stop, but we could certainly consume less. Then it is simply a question of how deeply food production will fall, and if some reasonable austerity in first world nations will be enough to compensate.
Citation needed.
So why aren't you calling for a citation from the GP as well? Both statements seem equally imprecise (meaning that I'm willing to accept their truthiness even though they may not be completely accurate). Are you implying that the parent's statement is incorrect? Do you have any evidence, or does it just conflict with your worldview?
God forbid someone fail to exhaustively research and cite their arguments in a casual conversation ...on the internet.
The use case I imagined right away was charging it up from a laptop battery in the event of power failure. But in other situations I think the adaptation of USB as a standard device charging format makes a lot of sense (USB being Universal and all).
Call of duty 3 looks like it will have a monthly fee to play online without a handicap.
No handicap. The Elite subscription fee gets you access to (pretty extensive) online stats tracking and bonus content, but the info I've read is really specific that not subscribing will not handicap you in any way. It sounds like your fear is that there will be weapons/perks available only to paying subscribers, but all the info I've found specifically says that won't be the case. I expect the subscribers will get goodies like weapon and player skins, and possibly deals on the DLC.
Can't speak for BF 3 though. If indeed they set up a system for paying real world money for weapon upgrades I expect people will freak. One of the early and lesser played XBox titles Chromehounds had that and people hated it.
The relationship between humans and the various races of the Covenant is far from settled. The Arbiter doesn't speak for all the Elites, let alone the Brutes, Jackals, etc.
And don't underestimate the Flood either..
Plus the Human government was dealing with colonial rebellions and pirate organizations at the beginning of the story. Plenty of potential bad guys there.
It's a lot cheaper to let the personally distant folks warm up to you than it is to train someone from scratch.
I mean no insult, but my experience has been quite different. You can sometimes coax socially distant folks out of their shells. But my personal experience has been that while you can usually train up a person's knowledge base it is often harder to modify someones social behavior. Most of us have spent a lifetime developing those habits and secretly resent when our managers tell us we need to change them.
Of course you said "cheaper", and I think it really depends on how selective your organization can afford to be. Companies like Google can afford both to be picky about personality and spend time/money on training. Smaller shops might just have to take who they can get.
If the Doctor is any good, he/she will take the time to explain their diagnosis and treatment and make sure to answer any and all questions before the patient leaves. A decent Doctor IMO should be counseling the person on their medical decisions rather than dictating them. We're a pretty well educated nation and we should be inquisitive enough to really try to understand our own healthcare (while of course recognizing the expertise of the provider).
Personally I do feel qualified to review my Doctor, but that's because I expect my Doctor to share his knowledge and help me understand his thinking. I'm also so disappointed with most of humanity that I don't put too much stock in what people write on the internet.
The best way for a doctor or dentist to prevent bad exposure is to make clear that they want to fix anything if you have a bad experience. Always give the merchant a chance to turn things around. If they still fail, then they deserve the bad review.
Just so you know, I agree with your service recovery model. It just really disappoints me that we have started looking at health care providers as merchants.
If I get bad service during an oil change I feel free to bitch and moan and light them up on Yelp. I would like to hold my Doctor to a higher standard.
It was a little inconvenient during the outage. Even though "it still worked" you had to let it fail on a couple of logins first. And for me on some nights it just didn't work at all. During the outage I wound up using an Xbox for Netflix streaming. I didn't want to have to futz with it every time I started it up.
I'm back to using the PS3 now of course. But I too am concerned about the networks security and how much I can count on future service availability.
Ofcourse, this depends on which level and with what sort of clients you work and which sticks well. But I can imagine you'll lose your pitch if you're aiming for a contract where money, timing and experience are a large factor. You wont convey your client you have the weight and expertise to pull it if you are talking about "gooey" things in your meetings.
A key component to clear communication (especially from a contractor's perspective) is adjusting your language to suit your target audience and, as you say, to help convey whatever image you are trying to project. If the client organization uses terms like "gooey", then use "gooey". And to your point above, if your client uses really technical jargon then you should use it too. At the very least it lets the client feel hip and/or smart for having used the appropriate terminology.
Neither the formal or informal voice are inherently better than the other, it only matters that you can communicate to your audience in a mutually understood language.