I'm not sure what you're saying. I do get up an hour earlier in the summer, I certainly could do so without changing my clocks (though that would seem like a silly and pointless exercise, since the everyone around me changes their clocks), and I'm not regulating anyone! Perhaps you mistook my practical suggestion for pro-DST advocacy?
The fact that there isn't really all that much they are suitable for, except for something like a data centre, which can then be *marketed* as being "nuclear-war-proof".
And it would be, unless someone directly targets the data center with a nuke. And if they do, they just wasted a nuke.
Unless the RIAA get access to nuclear weapons, of course....
Similarly, Top Gear should do an episode where they try to see how practical early-1900s cars are in today's world. Think of all the manual crank-starting, rear-only belt-braking, 1WD fun to be had at speeds of up to 30mph.
Maybe they've already done something like this and I just don't know about it.
They've already done something like this and you just don't know about it:P
I sit in a specially designed cradle, and biological actuators interface with an electromechanical control system, converting my neural signals into steering and acceleration commands. It was difficult to master at first; my thoughts about where the car should go didn't quite translate into reality, but after time and experience the interface becomes transparent. Nowadays on my regular commute I can even think about or sometimes do other (simple) things while driving (depending on road/traffic conditions). People often however disbelieve this...
I hereby declare that the feedback loop of publicity caused by outraged discussion of a tasteless or otherwise disreputable publicity stunt or advertisement be named "The Cole Effect".
Ironically this, if used, add to the publicity generated for this Mr. Cole by referring to him every time something similar happens in the future.
The Mods move in mysterious ways... (that or people desperately spend their mod points on the last day before they expire, tending to mod posts higher up the page, because they know/think that failing to spend today means failing to receive tomorrow)
I saw your post (and 1 or 2 others) after I posted mine; great minds and all that..:)
So, what probability of a gust of wind strong enough to topple a truck would you consider it acceptable for truckers to drive in? 10%? 0.01%? If there is a freak gust on a calm day, is that driver error too? Below what temperature would you consider that all drivers should drive as though the road is 100% icy? -1c? 2c?
Interesting; they DO count digital sales here (UK); making the singles chart somewhat relevant again. Plenty of people buy mp3 'singles' at £0.79 per pop.
Before they counted digital sales (a few years ago?) the singles chart was indeed a survey of people who think a CD with 3 versions of the same track for £4 is a good deal. Sounds like it still is where you are. (Not that the subjective quality of the chart has improved; I still despair whenever I look at it)
What sort of insanity is this? I stopped buying, pirating, or listening to Top 40 radio years ago; I get all my tunes from CC-licensed clearinghouses like jamendo.com or searching the Goog for CC licenses. This whole report just sounds like a discussion of 60's era soviet oppression- I know that's melodramatic, but it's got that same weird dissonance of separation of time and culture.
Protip: The "Top 40" is the list of the 40 most bought/played tracks. You know, the 40 most popular; by definition. The 40 most popular tracks of the week tend to be quite popular.
I've never lived in the eastern US, or eaten a burrito. That doesn't mean that nobody has.
Within the last 40 years, nearly all the gains in productivity have gone to the top 1%. The middle class has barely broken even. The poor have gotten poorer. I doubt the top 1% are actually responsible for those productivity gains, in fact I'm pretty sure the rest of us did the lion's share of the work. But we got shafted instead of getting rich, with a tiny minority harvesting all the fruits of our labors.
I'm sorry, but BULL-SHIT. The poor and middle classes are substantially, if not massively materially richer than 40 or even 20 years ago. Average incomes are much higher, people generally eat better food, have many more material posessions, live longer, etc etc; so much that one of the 'main health problems' today is that 'poor people are too fat'.
One day you'll learn the difference between something being done by the government of a country (or some other set of people within it) at some point in history; and that being the responsibility of the general population of that country, either then or now.
The linked leaked cable doesn't say that. What it does say is that Shell are/were concerned about Russia giving missiles and/or other weaponary to rebels intending to attack Shell helicopters and other installations etc, with a view to Gazprom taking over Shell's oil wells in Nigeria. Shell asked the US Gov. if it knew anything.
The headline should be "Cheaters Exposed By Analyzing Statistical Anomalies"? I thought the cheaters themselves were doing the analyzing, to get ahead of the cheat detection.
Now for the record I consider this to be a bad idea; but I can see why they think it's a good one. Parents are generally considered to be less technically literate than their kids (on average) so you end up with a common situation where any on-computer filtering is likely to be easily removed or bypassed by the children. Putting default porn blocking on internet connections (with an easy opt out) would prevent this problem (to an extent) without the 'concerned parents' having to do anything. This is already the situation with mobile internet in the UK (I don't know whether the cellcos did this themselves, or the government told them to). By default 'adult content' is blocked on cellphones, and a phone call to the provider removes the block.
Why this isn't a good idea is that there is so much porn (or other potentially objectionable material) out there that a 'blacklist' cannot possibly be comprehensive; and of course there are proxies, mirrors etc etc so that if little Johnny really wants to see boobs he can. Ideally, sufficiently concerned parents should directly supervise their kids' access, but a lot of kids these days use their own computers in their room, and Joe Sixpack has 'better things to do'.
What would be a better solution would be for internet connections to be 'open'/unfiltered by default, but the telcos provide the option of blocking on signup, and also information about 3rd party software (blacklist/whitelist) and also information about how any block isn't completely reliable, and if you are that concerned about what the little'uns are doing online then parhaps you should keep an eye on them. Default blocking is not the answer.
I often wonder why Currys/Comet still exist. Their prices are almost universally terrible and the service sucks - is the market for people who can't wait 24-48 hours for shipping really that large?
I think that for a lot of people (perhaps most) there is a lot of appeal in physically seeing what you're going to buy, and having an assistant available to answer questions (potentially bad advice is more appealing to many people than no advice). Also having things delivered can be damn inconvenient for many, especially for 9-5ers who can't recieve parcels at work. The choice between a physical shop and an online one can be between the shop selling something for £50, there and then to take away, and the online shop selling for £42, plus £5 shipping, and having to collect from the courier depot on some distant industrial estate on a saturday morning, a week after ordering.
Many people also are not fully aware of the alternatives, both on the net and in other shops. Personally I've found Comet to be alright for service and some of the prices are fairly good. Currys is worse on both counts. For TV's etc Richer Sounds can have some very good deals (if there is one near you). Any remotely computer related stuff comes off the net, usually ebuyer
I'm willing to bet that while one product is cheaper at one store, another may be more expensive. It could be a washout when it's all said and done shopping. If I was a sales manager, I would be offering some incentive to my customers to do all their shopping at my store at once. The more they spend, the greater their savings. I'm willing to bet it would keep people from playing the numbers game with you, and who want's to bounce around stores just to save a few bucks on a toy anyways?
That's basically what I did. Walked around the store, saw the appliances I wanted and noted down the model numbers. Sat in the car outside and searched for the cheapest price available for each appliance. Added the cheapest price for each thing together into a grand total, then walked back in to the store and told them that was how much I was going to pay.
After much negotiation, including the "we can't match internet prices" line (to which I said "I've already cost you your overheads by browsing the store, do you want some profit out of it or not?") I think they ended up about £30 more than the total I had written down (which was around £1100) but threw in free delivery and free extended warranties on everything, all on interest free credit.
I think that with the total discount compared to the sticker prices, I got the dishwasher free. It was cheaper even than ordering the items separately from the cheapest seller of each; there would have been £30 (ish) delivery per item.
Of course, the more you buy the bigger the discount available; any sensible retailer knows this, they just rarely advertise that fact in the hope that 'most people' will cough the full price(s), even when they're spending 1,000s.
I think the fact is that if you don't negotiate the price of something that costs over say £200, you're doing it wrong. The sticker price on a car is only a suggestion. With small owner-operated stores you can normally negotiate even on smaller items. I negotiated £5 off a £20 mouse once:)
I used my phone to find the best prices when I was buying various white goods (fridge/freezer, washing machine, dishwasher) upon moving house, from a certain UK big-box electrical retailer.
Of course, the salesperson said "Oh no, we can't match internet prices" but it turns out that given a choice between a discounted sale and no sale, they can
Protip: You haven't got the best price until the salesperson has sheepishly had to ask the manager for authority twice.
Slashdot Mirror
...Wait until you hear about the deadly radiation menace in smoke alarms, placed in every home by our evil corporate overlords!
I'm not sure what you're saying. I do get up an hour earlier in the summer, I certainly could do so without changing my clocks (though that would seem like a silly and pointless exercise, since the everyone around me changes their clocks), and I'm not regulating anyone! Perhaps you mistook my practical suggestion for pro-DST advocacy?
Yes, I did. Good day to you, sir. :)
Can't you simply get up a hour earlier in the summer, without changing the clocks to regulate everyone else into doing so?
The fact that there isn't really all that much they are suitable for, except for something like a data centre, which can then be *marketed* as being "nuclear-war-proof".
And it would be, unless someone directly targets the data center with a nuke. And if they do, they just wasted a nuke.
Unless the RIAA get access to nuclear weapons, of course....
Similarly, Top Gear should do an episode where they try to see how practical early-1900s cars are in today's world. Think of all the manual crank-starting, rear-only belt-braking, 1WD fun to be had at speeds of up to 30mph.
Maybe they've already done something like this and I just don't know about it.
They've already done something like this and you just don't know about it :P
They did a feature a while ago about "the first car to use 'modern' controls" involving lots of failing to brake and difficulty starting some very early cars. Clip here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/topgear/videos/index.shtml?cat=mucking_about&id=86
I sit in a specially designed cradle, and biological actuators interface with an electromechanical control system, converting my neural signals into steering and acceleration commands. It was difficult to master at first; my thoughts about where the car should go didn't quite translate into reality, but after time and experience the interface becomes transparent. Nowadays on my regular commute I can even think about or sometimes do other (simple) things while driving (depending on road/traffic conditions). People often however disbelieve this...
Oh yes, I forgot about that one.
I hereby declare that the feedback loop of publicity caused by outraged discussion of a tasteless or otherwise disreputable publicity stunt or advertisement be named "The Cole Effect".
Ironically this, if used, add to the publicity generated for this Mr. Cole by referring to him every time something similar happens in the future.
Congratulations. By retweeting and posting news stories about this, you've given this designer guy undreamed of publicity. I'm sure he's gutted.
C'mon, every fool knows that a Galaxy is a chocolate bar made of the same chocolate that Snickers/Mars are coated with...
Either that or a Ford MPV
The Mods move in mysterious ways... (that or people desperately spend their mod points on the last day before they expire, tending to mod posts higher up the page, because they know/think that failing to spend today means failing to receive tomorrow)
I saw your post (and 1 or 2 others) after I posted mine; great minds and all that.. :)
In Soviet Russia, spam deletes YOU?
So, what probability of a gust of wind strong enough to topple a truck would you consider it acceptable for truckers to drive in? 10%? 0.01%? If there is a freak gust on a calm day, is that driver error too? Below what temperature would you consider that all drivers should drive as though the road is 100% icy? -1c? 2c?
Perhaps one day we could have automated platoons of Slashdot submissions about the same damn thing, too?
Interesting; they DO count digital sales here (UK); making the singles chart somewhat relevant again. Plenty of people buy mp3 'singles' at £0.79 per pop.
Before they counted digital sales (a few years ago?) the singles chart was indeed a survey of people who think a CD with 3 versions of the same track for £4 is a good deal. Sounds like it still is where you are. (Not that the subjective quality of the chart has improved; I still despair whenever I look at it)
What sort of insanity is this? I stopped buying, pirating, or listening to Top 40 radio years ago; I get all my tunes from CC-licensed clearinghouses like jamendo.com or searching the Goog for CC licenses. This whole report just sounds like a discussion of 60's era soviet oppression- I know that's melodramatic, but it's got that same weird dissonance of separation of time and culture.
Protip: The "Top 40" is the list of the 40 most bought/played tracks. You know, the 40 most popular; by definition. The 40 most popular tracks of the week tend to be quite popular.
I've never lived in the eastern US, or eaten a burrito. That doesn't mean that nobody has.
so you like to hack into gay bar to watch penises, as they says : each to is own !
What a dick. If they find out, he's screwed.
Within the last 40 years, nearly all the gains in productivity have gone to the top 1%. The middle class has barely broken even. The poor have gotten poorer. I doubt the top 1% are actually responsible for those productivity gains, in fact I'm pretty sure the rest of us did the lion's share of the work. But we got shafted instead of getting rich, with a tiny minority harvesting all the fruits of our labors.
I'm sorry, but BULL-SHIT. The poor and middle classes are substantially, if not massively materially richer than 40 or even 20 years ago. Average incomes are much higher, people generally eat better food, have many more material posessions, live longer, etc etc; so much that one of the 'main health problems' today is that 'poor people are too fat'.
One day you'll learn the difference between something being done by the government of a country (or some other set of people within it) at some point in history; and that being the responsibility of the general population of that country, either then or now.
Russia and Nigeria have oil.
But Nigeria's oil industry is already owned by Shell. And they're working with US government to plant agents inside the Nigerian government so that the cheap oil keeps flowing.
The linked leaked cable doesn't say that. What it does say is that Shell are/were concerned about Russia giving missiles and/or other weaponary to rebels intending to attack Shell helicopters and other installations etc, with a view to Gazprom taking over Shell's oil wells in Nigeria. Shell asked the US Gov. if it knew anything.
The headline should be "Cheaters Exposed By Analyzing Statistical Anomalies"? I thought the cheaters themselves were doing the analyzing, to get ahead of the cheat detection.
Now for the record I consider this to be a bad idea; but I can see why they think it's a good one. Parents are generally considered to be less technically literate than their kids (on average) so you end up with a common situation where any on-computer filtering is likely to be easily removed or bypassed by the children. Putting default porn blocking on internet connections (with an easy opt out) would prevent this problem (to an extent) without the 'concerned parents' having to do anything. This is already the situation with mobile internet in the UK (I don't know whether the cellcos did this themselves, or the government told them to). By default 'adult content' is blocked on cellphones, and a phone call to the provider removes the block.
Why this isn't a good idea is that there is so much porn (or other potentially objectionable material) out there that a 'blacklist' cannot possibly be comprehensive; and of course there are proxies, mirrors etc etc so that if little Johnny really wants to see boobs he can. Ideally, sufficiently concerned parents should directly supervise their kids' access, but a lot of kids these days use their own computers in their room, and Joe Sixpack has 'better things to do'.
What would be a better solution would be for internet connections to be 'open'/unfiltered by default, but the telcos provide the option of blocking on signup, and also information about 3rd party software (blacklist/whitelist) and also information about how any block isn't completely reliable, and if you are that concerned about what the little'uns are doing online then parhaps you should keep an eye on them. Default blocking is not the answer.
I often wonder why Currys/Comet still exist. Their prices are almost universally terrible and the service sucks - is the market for people who can't wait 24-48 hours for shipping really that large?
I think that for a lot of people (perhaps most) there is a lot of appeal in physically seeing what you're going to buy, and having an assistant available to answer questions (potentially bad advice is more appealing to many people than no advice). Also having things delivered can be damn inconvenient for many, especially for 9-5ers who can't recieve parcels at work. The choice between a physical shop and an online one can be between the shop selling something for £50, there and then to take away, and the online shop selling for £42, plus £5 shipping, and having to collect from the courier depot on some distant industrial estate on a saturday morning, a week after ordering.
Many people also are not fully aware of the alternatives, both on the net and in other shops. Personally I've found Comet to be alright for service and some of the prices are fairly good. Currys is worse on both counts. For TV's etc Richer Sounds can have some very good deals (if there is one near you). Any remotely computer related stuff comes off the net, usually ebuyer
I'm willing to bet that while one product is cheaper at one store, another may be more expensive. It could be a washout when it's all said and done shopping. If I was a sales manager, I would be offering some incentive to my customers to do all their shopping at my store at once. The more they spend, the greater their savings. I'm willing to bet it would keep people from playing the numbers game with you, and who want's to bounce around stores just to save a few bucks on a toy anyways?
That's basically what I did. Walked around the store, saw the appliances I wanted and noted down the model numbers. Sat in the car outside and searched for the cheapest price available for each appliance. Added the cheapest price for each thing together into a grand total, then walked back in to the store and told them that was how much I was going to pay.
After much negotiation, including the "we can't match internet prices" line (to which I said "I've already cost you your overheads by browsing the store, do you want some profit out of it or not?") I think they ended up about £30 more than the total I had written down (which was around £1100) but threw in free delivery and free extended warranties on everything, all on interest free credit.
I think that with the total discount compared to the sticker prices, I got the dishwasher free. It was cheaper even than ordering the items separately from the cheapest seller of each; there would have been £30 (ish) delivery per item.
Of course, the more you buy the bigger the discount available; any sensible retailer knows this, they just rarely advertise that fact in the hope that 'most people' will cough the full price(s), even when they're spending 1,000s.
I think the fact is that if you don't negotiate the price of something that costs over say £200, you're doing it wrong. The sticker price on a car is only a suggestion. With small owner-operated stores you can normally negotiate even on smaller items. I negotiated £5 off a £20 mouse once :)
I used my phone to find the best prices when I was buying various white goods (fridge/freezer, washing machine, dishwasher) upon moving house, from a certain UK big-box electrical retailer.
Of course, the salesperson said "Oh no, we can't match internet prices" but it turns out that given a choice between a discounted sale and no sale, they can
Protip: You haven't got the best price until the salesperson has sheepishly had to ask the manager for authority twice.