>>As someone who lives in Japan, that doesn't surprise me one bit. MOST Japanese people are extremely honest, they may borrom your umbrella from the stand at the convenience store if it's pouring out but they'll return it on the next day.
A lot of the hotels in Japan have spare umbrellas in the stands by the front door for you to take, on an honor system of returning it later.
It helped that we were moving in a new direction as a company, but the owner really thought he had value in all that code Matt wrote for him for two years. What he had was a mess that would have taken someone competent about 4-6 months to write. "So, yeah boss: Matt basically overcharged you for a shitty product, perhaps 1% of which has any real persistent value to us going forward." He wasn't happy to hear it. Was rough, but now we have an actual build system, automatic documentation, unit tests, automated deployment, backups, change lists you can actually use... all manner of wonders.
While "Matt's version control system" sounds ridiculously stupid, it's a pretty common thing for new coders to just throw away everything old they find, because they can't understand it.
But if the code they hand you isn't in working shape, then it's usually easier to just recode than try to wade through piles of code that don't make any sense.
>>There's one argument that "Arms" in the parlance of the time referred to man-portable weapon systems, and other ordnance (artillery and such) would not be included
Private citizens definitely could and did own artillery at the time, and nobody batted an eye at them, called them terrorists, or AFAIK, abused their artillery "rights" by shooting up a schoolyard.
They were called cannons, and were mounted on private ships.
Without them, private enterprise would have been vulnerable to pirates, and the French. Read the story of Pulo Aura at some point if you haven't (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Pulo_Aura) - a bunch of heavily armed East Indiamen chased off a French commerce-raiding fleet.
And now, here in California, we can't even bear arms.
>>Yes, I suppose you are right, the article also links to the fact that Brown took a sizable amount of donations from various police organizations for his reelection campaign.
Which also explains why California just banned open carry. (http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20118261-503544.html)
I love how they can take the second amendment, which guarantees the right to "bear" arms, and then pretend that word simply doesn't exist.
>>The word "average" is not in your sentence. Fuckwit.
I said, "When you have guys out of high school making more money than, let's say, pharmacists..." that implies average. Of course, the notion is so preposterous you obviously assumed I was talking about experienced longshoremen vs. new pharmacists, but hey, nice to know you agree with me.
>>And the CEO of publisher Gannett just retired with a $37 million retirement package,
Why do you keep talking about CEOs? I'm talking about normal-person wages.
>>whining that a fraction of a percentage of the American blue collar workforce can make more than someone who went to college.
High school grads that make nearly triple the median household average in America, putting them in the top 5% of all income earners for doing nothing more than driving forklifts around. Please, fuck-twat, please try to justify that to me.
If you add together all the longshoremen, the total drain on our economy is much greater than that of some shark CEO.
>>There are literally 10's of thousands of sales tax jurisdictions in the US, pretty much every county at a minimum, and often each city or town inside of the county.
Sure. A national sales tax would probably make more sense, especially if it would end local and state sales taxes, though that's a bit more of a pipe dream. Split the tax between the two local areas and their states, have the fed manage it, but not get a dirty penny out of it (or they'll expand it grossly, just like they did with the national income tax).
Unless we end up doing something a little more drastic and just moving to something like Herman Cain's flat tax proposal.
>>At this point, I've had enough of their confused thrashing, and will still be cancelling my subscription.
So they listened to their customers, abandoning the fucktarded Netflix/Qwkster split idea (though Qwkster would have made for a great Scrabble triple word score once it became genericized), and... you're cancelling over that?
I'm actually debating cancelling my cable TV. I never watch it, and only bought it to entertain my wife for when I'm playing video games. But now she spends all night watching Dr. Who and TNG episodes on Netflix, and hasn't turned on the cable box in over a month.
>>That's because you're a sophist pretending the exception is the rule, and comparing a guy fresh out of college to someone who has accumulated how many years of experience and seniority?
No. Idiot.
I was comparing average salaries, one from a manual labor job, the other from one requiring 9 years of college and passing boards.
Average wage for a pharmacist in Los Angeles is $110k. Average for a longshoreman in LA in 2002 was (only) $120k, so they went on strike to protest their low wages. Now they make $140k.
Ain't unions great?
>>Yes, I will. You're attitude makes perfect sense if you're in the top 1% of 1%. Otherwise, you're no more intelligent than a crab.
Michael Moore on the radio yesterday said that, quote, "Unions invented the middle class". (So there was no middle class before the 1800s, Moore? Lol.) I guess if you're one of those Moore-ons, then I can see why you'd have such a topsy-turvy way of thinking, where it's *right* for a manual laborer to make more money than someone with a lot of training. Since they're union, they deserve to make over twice the national median average?
>>This is why I have one folder called "work stuff" where everything I save goes.
Heh, I have one for "receipts" and then one for everything else called "old". It actually works reasonably well.
Besides my junk mail directory, I also filter out one of my relatives who always forwards chain letters to me into his own special directory, and some mailing lists get their own filters, but keeping all my email in one directory seems to work a lot better than sorting people into folders.
>>OTOH, conservative extraction costs for so-called shale oil, the better name is tar pits, is $75 dollars a barrel
Estimates range "from $12 to $95/barrel" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale_economics)
>>If the oil companies sell at a comparative markup, this means that the selling price would be $300 a barrel.
From the same link, says that it's competitive between $10-$30/barrel.
So you're only off by, you know, a factor of 10x.
>>Therefore shale oil is not an indication of a long term prosperous oil economy, but a clear signal that oil is becoming too costly to base an economy on.
Eh. There's a LOT of oil shale and even more coal reserves lying around the country.
>>Thirty years ago, yes it was possible if not common to buy a house, a car, and support a stay-home mother based on a single union salary.
Because longshoremen deserve six digit salaries for all the time they put in in college, am I right? (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06207/708719-96.stm)
When you have guys out of high school making more money than, let's say, pharmacists that put in 9 years of undergrad and pharmacy school, I consider that to be an inversion of how things should be.
>>Then the Reagan tax cuts, corporate trade, and morans
>>Loyalty to your employer? Are you kidding? They would fire your ass in a heartbeat as soon as the numbers exhibit a downturn.
Weird concept, I know, but not all companies are like that. While, yeah, sure, if a company is losing money eventually it has to either increase revenue or decrease costs, a number of corporations have made pledges of "no layoffs" during the current recession, and occasionally do other things that aren't quite evil.
Corporations are run by people, and not all people in corporations are the horrible soulless monsters that you think they are. To be fair, there's a lot of sociopaths in upper management (it selects for it), but it's not 100%.
If TFA talks about the guy being friends with the management, you shouldn't immediately leap to the conclusion that he's lying about this fact.
>>Also, the "I've got a better offer" is only a ploy you can use once.
Who says? Get the offer in writing, and show it to your boss if they don't believe you.
I had a former friend/boss/manager (who now works at Facebook of all places), who did this about once a year, and got a raise every time. I was an intern, and certainly couldn't do all the stuff he did. But he was a very smart guy, with a skillset that not many people had in the mid-1990s (OpenGL coding, and in particular, writing flight simulator software) which meant that competing companies were always trying to hire him, and at increasing offers every year.
After about five years, my company decided to not make their annual raise/counteroffer to him, and so he went to work for the competitor at a substantial salary increase.
>>Apple did recently remove the option to rent HD television episodes at $1.99, but you can buy full seasons ("season pass") which typically offer decent savings.
When Caprica was first coming out, the iTunes store had the Caprica pilot on sale. And then they had the Caprica pilot + "the complete first season" for $1 more. I was like, hell, ok. So I spent the extra dollar.
But when the first season actually rolled out much later, Apple conveniently forgot about that purchase entirely. Unfortunately, I deleted the receipt from my inbox so I had to leg to stand on when I called up Apple to complain, they said that they had no record of the transaction (at all). "Ok, why is the pilot sitting here in my downloaded files category, then?" "We have no idea, sir."
Sony likewise has fucked up DLC purchases - my wife loves Little Big Planet, and she's got a set of outfits that she (legally) downloaded that don't work any more. When she tries to put on the Chun Li outfit, for example, it says "You need to buy the Metal Gear Solid DLC". Sony said they'd only issue a refund if I could show the purchase, which, again, doesn't exist in their online records. "How the hell do I have the outfit downloaded if I didn't buy it?" "We have no idea, sir."
We've moved far beyond the elimination of the right of first sale. We're now in a time period where you can lose access to things you've legally bought because someone fucked up a database entry.
>>I lost all respect for Sony after Sony Entertainment Group pushed the hardware teams into implementing DRM. I don't buy Sony anymore, nor do I recommend it to friends and family.
What, it wasn't when they installed rootkits on your computers (that you wanted to listen to audio CDs on how dare you) or when they secretly added a "you can't sue us" clause to their PS3 EULA? Oh, and if you don't agree to the updated terms, you can't play any games online, use the internet browser, stream Netflix, or patch your single player games? Or when they decided to make every multiplayer game come with a code, meaning that used games will cost you an extra $10 to play online (paid to Sony) and that normal, non-used game buyers and sellers will be fucking annoyed by having to punch in a long code every time they buy a game?
The problem with boycotting Sony is that there's sooo many reasons to do so.
As a UCSD (University of California at San Diego) grad, I know there's no law school there. The professor who posted the analysis is from USD (University of San Diego), not UCSD.
>>And yes, magnetic fields should have zero effect on electronic equipment
You never used a TV before flatscreens, I take it?
The electrons being shot out by a CRT are pretty sensitive to magnetic fields, and a strong source nearby definitely can warp or distort the scene being displayed. Permanently, too, if you are dumb enough to directly stick a magnet to the box.
>>the US is historically paying very little in taxes.
Liberal talking point. Not true.
The percentage of GDP in receipts has stayed surprisingly constant since the 1940s, especially given the drastic changes in the tax code, medicare, and so forth since then.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Quality science fiction authors (not the pulp hacks)...
You must have missed the fact that Christopher Paolini was included in the list.
IIRC, the much maligned Walmart pays an effective tax rate of 27%. Guess they don't have the Obama connections that GE has.
Most? Well, a bit less than half. But I agree that nuclear is our best option for reducing CO2 emissions.
Trying to force Americans to give up cars is quite simply a non-starter.
The Constitution? Pfft.
We've moved past that a long time ago.
Asset forfeiture, warrantless search and seizure, restrictions on the freedom of the press on the internet...
Science deals with How stuff works, not Why stuff works. Ten million books on "Why does fire burn?" notwithstanding.
Why just takes you one level down, and will eventually reach a level called "I dunno, the universe just works that way."
>>As someone who lives in Japan, that doesn't surprise me one bit. MOST Japanese people are extremely honest, they may borrom your umbrella from the stand at the convenience store if it's pouring out but they'll return it on the next day.
A lot of the hotels in Japan have spare umbrellas in the stands by the front door for you to take, on an honor system of returning it later.
While "Matt's version control system" sounds ridiculously stupid, it's a pretty common thing for new coders to just throw away everything old they find, because they can't understand it.
But if the code they hand you isn't in working shape, then it's usually easier to just recode than try to wade through piles of code that don't make any sense.
>>There's one argument that "Arms" in the parlance of the time referred to man-portable weapon systems, and other ordnance (artillery and such) would not be included
Private citizens definitely could and did own artillery at the time, and nobody batted an eye at them, called them terrorists, or AFAIK, abused their artillery "rights" by shooting up a schoolyard.
They were called cannons, and were mounted on private ships.
Without them, private enterprise would have been vulnerable to pirates, and the French. Read the story of Pulo Aura at some point if you haven't (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Pulo_Aura) - a bunch of heavily armed East Indiamen chased off a French commerce-raiding fleet.
And now, here in California, we can't even bear arms.
>>Yes, I suppose you are right, the article also links to the fact that Brown took a sizable amount of donations from various police organizations for his reelection campaign.
Which also explains why California just banned open carry. (http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20118261-503544.html)
I love how they can take the second amendment, which guarantees the right to "bear" arms, and then pretend that word simply doesn't exist.
Arnie wasn't nearly as bad as Governor Moonbeam.
>>The word "average" is not in your sentence. Fuckwit.
I said, "When you have guys out of high school making more money than, let's say, pharmacists..." that implies average. Of course, the notion is so preposterous you obviously assumed I was talking about experienced longshoremen vs. new pharmacists, but hey, nice to know you agree with me.
>>And the CEO of publisher Gannett just retired with a $37 million retirement package,
Why do you keep talking about CEOs? I'm talking about normal-person wages.
>>whining that a fraction of a percentage of the American blue collar workforce can make more than someone who went to college.
High school grads that make nearly triple the median household average in America, putting them in the top 5% of all income earners for doing nothing more than driving forklifts around. Please, fuck-twat, please try to justify that to me.
If you add together all the longshoremen, the total drain on our economy is much greater than that of some shark CEO.
>>There are literally 10's of thousands of sales tax jurisdictions in the US, pretty much every county at a minimum, and often each city or town inside of the county.
Sure. A national sales tax would probably make more sense, especially if it would end local and state sales taxes, though that's a bit more of a pipe dream. Split the tax between the two local areas and their states, have the fed manage it, but not get a dirty penny out of it (or they'll expand it grossly, just like they did with the national income tax).
Unless we end up doing something a little more drastic and just moving to something like Herman Cain's flat tax proposal.
>>At this point, I've had enough of their confused thrashing, and will still be cancelling my subscription.
So they listened to their customers, abandoning the fucktarded Netflix/Qwkster split idea (though Qwkster would have made for a great Scrabble triple word score once it became genericized), and... you're cancelling over that?
I'm actually debating cancelling my cable TV. I never watch it, and only bought it to entertain my wife for when I'm playing video games. But now she spends all night watching Dr. Who and TNG episodes on Netflix, and hasn't turned on the cable box in over a month.
>>That's because you're a sophist pretending the exception is the rule, and comparing a guy fresh out of college to someone who has accumulated how many years of experience and seniority?
No. Idiot.
I was comparing average salaries, one from a manual labor job, the other from one requiring 9 years of college and passing boards.
Average wage for a pharmacist in Los Angeles is $110k. Average for a longshoreman in LA in 2002 was (only) $120k, so they went on strike to protest their low wages. Now they make $140k.
Ain't unions great?
>>Yes, I will. You're attitude makes perfect sense if you're in the top 1% of 1%. Otherwise, you're no more intelligent than a crab.
Michael Moore on the radio yesterday said that, quote, "Unions invented the middle class". (So there was no middle class before the 1800s, Moore? Lol.) I guess if you're one of those Moore-ons, then I can see why you'd have such a topsy-turvy way of thinking, where it's *right* for a manual laborer to make more money than someone with a lot of training. Since they're union, they deserve to make over twice the national median average?
Pull your head out of your Marxist ass.
>>This is why I have one folder called "work stuff" where everything I save goes.
Heh, I have one for "receipts" and then one for everything else called "old". It actually works reasonably well.
Besides my junk mail directory, I also filter out one of my relatives who always forwards chain letters to me into his own special directory, and some mailing lists get their own filters, but keeping all my email in one directory seems to work a lot better than sorting people into folders.
>>OTOH, conservative extraction costs for so-called shale oil, the better name is tar pits, is $75 dollars a barrel
Estimates range "from $12 to $95/barrel" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale_economics)
>>If the oil companies sell at a comparative markup, this means that the selling price would be $300 a barrel.
From the same link, says that it's competitive between $10-$30/barrel.
So you're only off by, you know, a factor of 10x.
>>Therefore shale oil is not an indication of a long term prosperous oil economy, but a clear signal that oil is becoming too costly to base an economy on.
Eh. There's a LOT of oil shale and even more coal reserves lying around the country.
>>Nethack or GTFO!
A game that will slaughter you mercilessly for not reading 200 pages worth of spoilers is... well, actually, it IS pretty fun.
But I've never beaten it, though I've come close a few times to ascending.
Prefer Slash'Em myself.
>>Thirty years ago, yes it was possible if not common to buy a house, a car, and support a stay-home mother based on a single union salary.
Because longshoremen deserve six digit salaries for all the time they put in in college, am I right? (http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06207/708719-96.stm)
When you have guys out of high school making more money than, let's say, pharmacists that put in 9 years of undergrad and pharmacy school, I consider that to be an inversion of how things should be.
>>Then the Reagan tax cuts, corporate trade, and morans
Morans, eh? You can say that again.
>>Loyalty to your employer? Are you kidding? They would fire your ass in a heartbeat as soon as the numbers exhibit a downturn.
Weird concept, I know, but not all companies are like that. While, yeah, sure, if a company is losing money eventually it has to either increase revenue or decrease costs, a number of corporations have made pledges of "no layoffs" during the current recession, and occasionally do other things that aren't quite evil.
Corporations are run by people, and not all people in corporations are the horrible soulless monsters that you think they are. To be fair, there's a lot of sociopaths in upper management (it selects for it), but it's not 100%.
If TFA talks about the guy being friends with the management, you shouldn't immediately leap to the conclusion that he's lying about this fact.
>>Also, the "I've got a better offer" is only a ploy you can use once.
Who says? Get the offer in writing, and show it to your boss if they don't believe you.
I had a former friend/boss/manager (who now works at Facebook of all places), who did this about once a year, and got a raise every time. I was an intern, and certainly couldn't do all the stuff he did. But he was a very smart guy, with a skillset that not many people had in the mid-1990s (OpenGL coding, and in particular, writing flight simulator software) which meant that competing companies were always trying to hire him, and at increasing offers every year.
After about five years, my company decided to not make their annual raise/counteroffer to him, and so he went to work for the competitor at a substantial salary increase.
>>Unless someone really screwed the pooch, the results are never getting back to the virus writers
The black hats can just order the drones to transmit the signal using Morse Code.
Waggling your wings is a dash.
Firing upon infidels is a dot.
>>Apple did recently remove the option to rent HD television episodes at $1.99, but you can buy full seasons ("season pass") which typically offer decent savings.
When Caprica was first coming out, the iTunes store had the Caprica pilot on sale. And then they had the Caprica pilot + "the complete first season" for $1 more. I was like, hell, ok. So I spent the extra dollar.
But when the first season actually rolled out much later, Apple conveniently forgot about that purchase entirely. Unfortunately, I deleted the receipt from my inbox so I had to leg to stand on when I called up Apple to complain, they said that they had no record of the transaction (at all). "Ok, why is the pilot sitting here in my downloaded files category, then?" "We have no idea, sir."
Sony likewise has fucked up DLC purchases - my wife loves Little Big Planet, and she's got a set of outfits that she (legally) downloaded that don't work any more. When she tries to put on the Chun Li outfit, for example, it says "You need to buy the Metal Gear Solid DLC". Sony said they'd only issue a refund if I could show the purchase, which, again, doesn't exist in their online records. "How the hell do I have the outfit downloaded if I didn't buy it?" "We have no idea, sir."
We've moved far beyond the elimination of the right of first sale. We're now in a time period where you can lose access to things you've legally bought because someone fucked up a database entry.
>>I lost all respect for Sony after Sony Entertainment Group pushed the hardware teams into implementing DRM. I don't buy Sony anymore, nor do I recommend it to friends and family.
What, it wasn't when they installed rootkits on your computers (that you wanted to listen to audio CDs on how dare you) or when they secretly added a "you can't sue us" clause to their PS3 EULA? Oh, and if you don't agree to the updated terms, you can't play any games online, use the internet browser, stream Netflix, or patch your single player games? Or when they decided to make every multiplayer game come with a code, meaning that used games will cost you an extra $10 to play online (paid to Sony) and that normal, non-used game buyers and sellers will be fucking annoyed by having to punch in a long code every time they buy a game?
The problem with boycotting Sony is that there's sooo many reasons to do so.
As a UCSD (University of California at San Diego) grad, I know there's no law school there. The professor who posted the analysis is from USD (University of San Diego), not UCSD.
>>And yes, magnetic fields should have zero effect on electronic equipment
You never used a TV before flatscreens, I take it?
The electrons being shot out by a CRT are pretty sensitive to magnetic fields, and a strong source nearby definitely can warp or distort the scene being displayed. Permanently, too, if you are dumb enough to directly stick a magnet to the box.
>>the US is historically paying very little in taxes.
Liberal talking point. Not true.
The percentage of GDP in receipts has stayed surprisingly constant since the 1940s, especially given the drastic changes in the tax code, medicare, and so forth since then.
(http://nationalpriorities.org/resources/federal-budget-101/charts/general/federal-outlays-and-revenues-1930-2015-perc-gdp/)
What HAS increased is outlays, and rather significantly. This is why most sane people believe in fixing the deficit mainly by cutting spending.