Obviously, it's the act of having someone film you while naked that causes an increase in your risk for giving birth to an autistic child. My science proving this fact is as sound as that used by those who claim immunizations has anything to do with it.
I'm all for this as well. So long as it's not like Satellite internet where if you go over the cap your connection is reduced to an unusable state, having your bandwidth capped at a lower rate is much preferable to massive overage fees or service termination.
Ideally, it wouldn't be an issue and when an ISP (mobile or land based) offered a high speed connection they'd have the capacity available so every subscriber would be free to have that bandwidth pegged out 24/7. But since that's not a currently realistic business model, this is the method that is the least painful. The alternative is to do like most other mobile carriers and eliminate the Unlimited plans which most/.ers have long understood were never truly unlimited and never could be.
That's exactly the problem. Making smells has been easy enough for decades. The hard part has always been getting rid of them.
I've seen many attempts at using smell-o-vision systems. Most have been in theaters which used fans and such to try and pull the scent out but invariably, either half the audience doesn't ever get the scent or they all quickly start to overlap and become a complete mess of smells.
The only place I've ever seen it work is with things like the Disney attraction "Soarin' Over California". It uses fans set directly in front of the rider to individually blow scent into their faces so the scent reaches each rider and which helps clear the scent away for the next one once they stop delivering the scent. It also has a massive amount of exhaust pulling air out of the room so the scents don't linger and overlap. It works because the nature of the ride allows for a constant breeze being in your face and because it is housed in an area with massive amounts of exhaust capability. That's just not something that is feasible in a typical home or existing theaters.
I buy whatever the cheapest remote/IR Receiver combo I can find at the time (can usually find one for under $15), toss the remote, keep the receiver for use with a Harmony.
To maximize what you can do with the Harmony, without digging into the keymap.xml file and keeping everything simple and easy, just set up both "MCE Remote" and "MCE Keyboard" as devices in the Harmony software. (Computer > Media Center PC > Microsoft > Then Enter "MCE Remote" or "MCE Keyboard" as the model in the Harmony Software).
Then when programming your activity to control XBMC, customize the buttons to use a mix of the two with the media center remote functions handling most of the basic things like play, pause and fast forward and the MCE Keyboard to send XBMC Keyboard Shortcuts for things like bringing up the OSD and context menus or to fix anything that the MCE Remote functions don't do right.
It won't let you do any of the more advanced things you could do by digging into the keymap file, but it works fine for all the basic functions you'd likely need on a day to day basis and is a snap to set up.
Stargate Atlantis and Farscape both lasted 5 seasons which is a pretty good run for a series on American TV. Syfy didn't ruin them. They just ran their course. And SyFy gave us 3 more years of MST3K after Comedy Central canned it. And it's not their fault it ended. It's the fans fault really. With the show growing to cult status many of the license holders for the films needed to make the show starting demanding more and more for those rights. Eventually it got to the point that the show just wasn't feasible anymore. Sucess killed the show, not Syfy.
Caprica however was just a terrible show. Maybe if they'd put it on the CW network it'd have done better. It would have fit in well with Vampire Diaries and 90210.
Stargate Universe deserved it's death as well. Someone decided to take the Battlestar setting, completely rip off the plot of ST: Voyager and stuff it into the Stargate Universe but with the humor and charm of the movie and the previous 2 Stargate series. A show about a bunch of people stuck in a ship that didn't go anywhere interesting, didn't see anything interesting, and was filled with people who didn't do anything interesting didn't have much hope. Half the episodes were pointless filler and the other half seemed as if they were trying to build to something interesting but the writers forgot what that was before they got to it.
And like many people have pointed out, a niche network whose niche is one of the most expensive genres to produce has to make some concessions. Reality shows like Ghost Hunters are a necessity as they're immensely profitable even with relatively small audiences as they cost peanuts to make. Ditto for shows like Wrestling which help attract key ad demographics. Splitting seasons so they can produce a finale type episode for 2 different sweeps periods and thus boost their ad rates is another tool needed by such networks.
Syfy may not be all about Sci-Fi, but they still air more classic Sci-Fi than any other station and they produce some decent original shows as well like Eureka, Warehouse 13, and Sanctuary.
Wise-beard Unix hacker types make something, people start saying "Wow! These wise-beard Unix hacker types made something awesome!", the wise-beard Unix hacker types say to themselves "Hey! We can get rich off this and get supermodels for wives!" and BOOM! they're suddenly corporate whores.
Anything that can't potentially make you a corporate whore, or at least get you laid, isn't worth doing.
At first, that's how it will be. Just like with WotLK. Heroics weren't an easy faceroll at the beginning of WotLK. But when people are easily able to obtain gear 2 or 3 tiers higher than the content was balanced for after a few content patches are released, they will eventually become as trivial as Heroics are in WotLK. And if Blizz does with Cata raids what they did with ICC by adding the creeping buff, it's likely by the end of each content patch people will also be raiding the top tier content in PuGs again.
Which is a good system. The more hardcore players will get to see the content and show off the gear early but eventually, more casual players will be able to do it too and there won't be any issues like with Naxx40 or TBT where only a tiny portion of subscribers get to experience the top level content..
Copyrights and patents are necessary. They make progress in the sciences and arts a worthwhile endeavor for the common man.
Who would write great songs if some record label could stick an A&R man in some club to record it and then have Miley Cyrus sing it on an album that would be pounded down peoples' throats so aggressively that within a week even the person who wrote it would believe it was originally her song? Without copyrights, that's exactly what would happen. Copyright is needed. Sure, it's abused by the media industries. But that's because people allow themselves to be abused by those industries. When people refuse to be abused anymore, things change. Piracy is the consumers' rebellion against that abuse.
The same would hold true for patents if only tangible things like songs could be patented. But allowing people to patent methods and ideas does just what you say it does. Ideas are much easier than implementation. But ideas produce no benefit to society unless they are implemented. Our current legal system actively discourages anyone from trying to implement someone else's ideas for the betterment of society because if they dare to do so, it will likely mean they'll be sued into abject poverty for their troubles. That system is broken and needs to be fixed to protect and encourage the implementation and improvement of ideas. Abolishing the system wouldn't do that.
A few years ago devices like the PSP and the DS were a much bigger deal than they are now. These days most family cars have DVD players or even full game consoles built into them to keep the little kids entertained and just about everyone over 10 has a smart phone or iPad they can play time waster games on. The only real market for such devices is very young kids who can't operate more complex devices. And eventually, someone is going to come out with a kid friendly smart phone that catches on with parents, and that market is going to dry up too.
Sony, has lots of other areas with much more potential for the future and do not need to keep focusing on the dying industry of hand held dedicated gaming devices. They're going to milk the PSP for every drop of cash they can before it runs dry and has to be put down but they'll likely to be looking to turn the mobile gaming focus over to Ericcson.
We did this same exercise in school in History class. We were studying some history thing where one side used terror tactics against the other and had to come up with a method that would work in the present day. The assignment was printed in the book so there had to be quite a few classes doing this same exercise all across the country. No one threw a fit. Of course, that was the early 90s and people weren't anywhere near as uptight.
I don't remember what the conflict we were studying was, but I remember the exercise because it was thought provoking. Although frankly, I'm glad real terrorists haven't decided to use some of the ideas we came up with.
They thought about patenting the idea before anyone else. As long as the system is broken and lets them get away with this kind of thing, they'd be stupid not try.
You won't learn anything during the first 2 years at any college. That's why so many college kids spend their first 2 years at college majoring in Keg Tapping and Bong Hitting. It's the only thing that keeps them sane.
And a college degree is slowly becoming less and less desirable to employers. At least in certain fields like programming, web design and graphics work. Quite a few of the places I've worked lately don't even ask for education info. They want a portfolio and couldn't care less if you learned your trade at MIT or in your basement on pirated copies of Visual Studio, Maya and Photoshop.
This happened at my last place of employment. They kept hiring app programmers straight out of college but it was killing them because they ended up outsourcing all the most pressing programming work because none of the in-house programmers were lasting more than a few weeks because they had a great diploma, but they couldn't actually write programs. For years our in house apps were all crappy visual basic apps and batch files. And most of it was thrown together from libraries and code snippets found online because the people couldn't write them themselves. Eventually one of the guys in Tech Support convinced them to hire his little brother who had taught himself how to code in high school so he could make game mods. So he quit his job at Dollar General and started working there and within weeks was pumping out professional looking, stable apps from a huge backlog of requests by various departments over the years. After that, they no longer hired people based on their degree and instead required a portfolio.
Unfortunately, most companies haven't learned such a lesson and still give more weight to a piece of paper than actual competency. And of course that obviously doesn't apply to all fields (insert joke about the self trained surgeon here).
The best advice is to find some technical school with a 6-12 month training program that has worked out a deal with some local companies to hire their graduates and go that route. The curriculum at such schools usually actually teach you something as they want to pass people who are at least competent enough to do the jobs wanted by their sponsoring companies. And most companies these days will bypass their degree requirements in lieu of actual work experience. So you could spend 4 years at a college accumulating debt to learn skills that will probably be obsolete by the time you find a job and lead you to spend 5-10 more years bouncing from job to job or, you can plow through some specialized training course, move right into a crappy job, and after trudging through that for a few years, hopefully be able to parley that work experience into a real job.
Seriously. Where can I get one of these jobs? I don't care how much it pays. I'm financially secure enough that I only need to work for a little extra spending money. Something like this sounds a lot better than being the buffer between a bunch of people who hate their jobs and upper management who hates their employees.
Two girls one cup just makes me hungry for Ice Cream and Goatse makes me want pizza. I'm so desensitized to the internet at this point that Miley Cyrus is far more disturbing to me than anything on 4chan, Ogrish or Rotten. I'd love to get paid to allow a few people to retain their innocence a little while longer.
It matters because Radiohead had hundreds of thousands of existing fans willing to buy their album no matter how it was released. Metallica, Aerosmith, Bon Jovi, AC/DC and other such bands could probably make tons of money self releasing albums too because they, like Radiohead, have a huge existing fanbase that was built through many years of promotion by record labels.
Look at Chris Daughtry. He independently released 3 albums with 2 different bands which sold less than 1000 copies each. He had to go on American Idol to get fame and has now sold millions of albums. Ditto for Carrie Underwood (she had 3 albums released before Idol), David Cook, Adam Lambert and several others. Another example is Michelle Branch who self released Broken Bracelet in 2000. It sold less than 1500 copies. She signed with a label and her next album sold 1.9 million copies.
And Radiohead signed a deal with Warner Chappell Music Publishing which is a division of Warner Bros. Records to sell physical copies of In Rainbows in stores. If self publishing a digital download makes more money than going through a label, why did Radiohead go and do that?
Radiohead was already "Radiohead" when they did that. A band that had been built up by record labels since 1991. And much of the success of 'In Rainbows' was based on the novelty of a well established band letting people decide what to pay for their album. An new artist who tried that would be lucky to get enough to buy a value meal at McDonald's if they tried it.
In a round about way though, the RIAA is protecting the artists by protecting themselves and the labels.
Artists make money from concert tours, T-Shirt sales, clothing lines, product endorsements, etc. But to do that, they need to be famous. An album is the price they pay to a major marketing firm, aka a record label, to make them famous. If the record labels can't make money from selling albums due to piracy, then their incentive to make people famous goes away and artists suffer.
And as people have said, you don't have to use a record label. You can always try to become famous on your own. A few people have become famous by putting their music on Youtube and Myspace and such. And there's always reality shows like American Idol. And for the better looking women, they can always try a sex tape. But if all that fails, giving an album of music over to a record label is still a viable choice.
Because a hit album usually leads to a hit tour in large venues and lots of sales of TV Shirts and other marketing materials. Artists usually get a good chunk of that money and for most, that's where the bulk of their income comes from.
For aesthetics and uniqueness, it's a great idea. But as an eco-friendly idea, it's terrible. Such things as tube cars, shipping containers, etc are far more ecologically valuable as recycled material for things that can not be built with sustainable materials such as machine parts, tools, soda cans, and a million other things. Plus, you'll need to add additional materials, many of which are unlikely to be eco-friendly, to make the tube car a comfortable and energy efficient residence. Overall such a project is likely to cost the environment far more than it saves. Recycling is only eco-friendly when it's used to make things that can only be made from finite materials.
A much more eco-friendly pursuit than using recycled materials for building is to use renewable building materials. A guy in Arkansas who is pushing to build support for a ballot initiative or Senate bill to legalize industrial Hemp (he apparently owns a ton of farmland and figures with all the states passing Medical Marijuana laws that it'd be a good idea for Arkansas to get it's foot in the door first where some real money could be made from pot, industrial use) built a 4000 Sq ft house, made entirely from the yield of 6 acres of Hemp which was grown in France in 5 months on an one of those ultra eco nut job farms where they capture cow farts for power and such. The only things (other than things like appliances) not made from a sustainable material is the wiring which is made from recycled copper and some lime and cement that is mixed with Hemp to make the concrete, spray-in insulation and drywall. Even the windows are made from some kind of Hemp based plastic and apparently make the house very energy efficient as they are far less thermally conductive than glass. Being able to grow an entire house in less than 6 months with almost no ecological impact is pretty damn impressive.
I lived in Central CA. For a long time we had swamp coolers. Eventually bought a house with Central Air and ended up having to put humidifiers all over the place. We learned a hard lesson that "dehumidifies the room" is a great feature in the midwest where, when it's 95F with 80% humidity it makes you feel like crap but that in Central CA where it's 110F with 25% humidity it's not a great feature as you step outside and your nose immediately starts bleeding.
If I listen into someone int he next booth at a restaurant give out their credit card number while on a phone call, I haven't committed a crime by listening even if the person didn't intend for me to hear them.If I use the info to charge my meal to them, then it becomes a crime and their intent doesn't matter. But Google didn't use the info to drain people's bank accounts and I doubt they had any similar intent to use the data in a nefarious way.
The legal concept at work in this case is more likely to be the expectation of privacy which, while originally applied to 4th amendment challenges against government agencies, has also been applied in other cases. Expectation of privacy is a 2 part test. The first part is that "the person from whom the information was obtained must demonstrate that they, in fact, had an actual, subjective expectation that the evidence obtained would not be available to the public" and the second is "would society at large deem a person's expectation of privacy to be reasonable? " The tough part is whether "society at large" is considered technologically savvy or not. Most technically savvy people would say that it isn't reasonable to expect privacy when broadcasting unencrypted data over a public network doing so would violate both parts of the test. But to someone who buys a computer at Sears, they're like a sheltered deaf person. They can see the data and will worry if someone looks over their shoulder at their screen. But they can't hear the data themselves so they assume no one else can either and thus, so long as they protect their screen from being viewed by others thus passing the first test, would reasonably believe their conversations are private and thus pass the second as well.
And did I mention how much I love my parents for ensuring I don't ever have to deal with that crap again? Typing all that out makes me remember just how miserable that whole scene was. I've been doing short term temp work to keep myself occupied (Fast fact: Spend more than a month at home at a time with nothing to do, and you will start hating your wife and kids). A few weeks ago I spent 3 days sanding off the little plastic pieces left on plastic forks when they leave the extruder. Grunt work is so much less stressful than corporate bullshit. And it's possible to make decent money doing mindless labor. Awhile back I had a temp job at a food manufacturing plant for a month spraying down their machines to eliminate allergens and was getting paid $14/hr. Full employees were making $18/hr. with a full benefits package.
So there's another good tip for possibly increasing your job satisfaction. Move somewhere with a low cost of living (here in NE Oklahoma you can get a new, mid range 1800sq ft, 4BR 2Bath house for $175k) Get a job doing grunt work and get the hell out of the office.
Actually, most of them got canned. Even management isn't safe when half the customers disappear in less than 2 years. And they did get bit by it being at at-will work state. No contracts.:) So at most they only got the standard 6 weeks severance for management (if they weren't fired with cause) and an opportunity to verify their mailing address so their stuff could be shipped to them as security walked them to their cars. The walk of shame is happily something only managers were subjected to. Regular employees have their stuff packed up by management and it's waiting for them in the front office. The only difference is the manager is waiting to hand it to you when you to come through the door if you're fired. If I hadn't told people I was fired, no one would have ever known.
And this isn't New York or L.A. It's a midwest company that was bought by a company based in some podunk town in Virginia that itself was bought out by a company 2 or 3 times removed from the parent company which is based in the Netherlands. There was one company car for the entire company. A 2002 Blazer. They weren't big on stuff like bonuses or perks.
And here, even the biggest cities are just overgrown small towns. We're smack in the middle of nowhere. The next large city is a 50 mile drive through overly congested, 2 lane 55MPH highways that are heavily patrolled by State Troopers with two first names like Joebob Wilson. People here *do not* like commuting. So, they might be able to find a job somewhere where they won't be known as one of the people who ran a good company into the ground, but it's not going to be very convenient.
Werd. There's a guy at my local Office Max who was a Mortgage Broker for 15 years but can't find any other jobs in the area. Best Buy and Staples are filled with people who worked in IT. Most of the places that had IT departments or needed developers in the area have shut down, outsourced, or are just putting extra work on existing employees who are too scared of getting fired to refuse.
If you want a job in manufacturing or retail, stuff like that's picked back up around here a bit. But if you're in finance, tech, or most other professional fields the only jobs to be had are to replace the underpaid people who snapped under an overbearing workload.
However, there's cities 6 hours away with listings for professional jobs a mile long. But oh wait, the housing market is in the crapper so if someone here is 7 or 8 years into a 30 year mortgage and wanted to move there, he'd probably end up owing the bank his first 2 years' salary if he could sell at all.
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Obviously, it's the act of having someone film you while naked that causes an increase in your risk for giving birth to an autistic child.
My science proving this fact is as sound as that used by those who claim immunizations has anything to do with it.
WOW! They perfected married couple AI!
I'm all for this as well. So long as it's not like Satellite internet where if you go over the cap your connection is reduced to an unusable state, having your bandwidth capped at a lower rate is much preferable to massive overage fees or service termination.
/.ers have long understood were never truly unlimited and never could be.
Ideally, it wouldn't be an issue and when an ISP (mobile or land based) offered a high speed connection they'd have the capacity available so every subscriber would be free to have that bandwidth pegged out 24/7. But since that's not a currently realistic business model, this is the method that is the least painful. The alternative is to do like most other mobile carriers and eliminate the Unlimited plans which most
That's exactly the problem. Making smells has been easy enough for decades. The hard part has always been getting rid of them.
I've seen many attempts at using smell-o-vision systems. Most have been in theaters which used fans and such to try and pull the scent out but invariably, either half the audience doesn't ever get the scent or they all quickly start to overlap and become a complete mess of smells.
The only place I've ever seen it work is with things like the Disney attraction "Soarin' Over California". It uses fans set directly in front of the rider to individually blow scent into their faces so the scent reaches each rider and which helps clear the scent away for the next one once they stop delivering the scent. It also has a massive amount of exhaust pulling air out of the room so the scents don't linger and overlap. It works because the nature of the ride allows for a constant breeze being in your face and because it is housed in an area with massive amounts of exhaust capability. That's just not something that is feasible in a typical home or existing theaters.
I buy whatever the cheapest remote/IR Receiver combo I can find at the time (can usually find one for under $15), toss the remote, keep the receiver for use with a Harmony.
To maximize what you can do with the Harmony, without digging into the keymap.xml file and keeping everything simple and easy, just set up both "MCE Remote" and "MCE Keyboard" as devices in the Harmony software.
(Computer > Media Center PC > Microsoft > Then Enter "MCE Remote" or "MCE Keyboard" as the model in the Harmony Software).
Then when programming your activity to control XBMC, customize the buttons to use a mix of the two with the media center remote functions handling most of the basic things like play, pause and fast forward and the MCE Keyboard to send XBMC Keyboard Shortcuts for things like bringing up the OSD and context menus or to fix anything that the MCE Remote functions don't do right.
It won't let you do any of the more advanced things you could do by digging into the keymap file, but it works fine for all the basic functions you'd likely need on a day to day basis and is a snap to set up.
You can be sure there will be plenty of sticky, white goo flying around.
Stargate Atlantis and Farscape both lasted 5 seasons which is a pretty good run for a series on American TV. Syfy didn't ruin them. They just ran their course.
And SyFy gave us 3 more years of MST3K after Comedy Central canned it. And it's not their fault it ended. It's the fans fault really. With the show growing to cult status many of the license holders for the films needed to make the show starting demanding more and more for those rights. Eventually it got to the point that the show just wasn't feasible anymore. Sucess killed the show, not Syfy.
Caprica however was just a terrible show. Maybe if they'd put it on the CW network it'd have done better. It would have fit in well with Vampire Diaries and 90210.
Stargate Universe deserved it's death as well. Someone decided to take the Battlestar setting, completely rip off the plot of ST: Voyager and stuff it into the Stargate Universe but with the humor and charm of the movie and the previous 2 Stargate series.
A show about a bunch of people stuck in a ship that didn't go anywhere interesting, didn't see anything interesting, and was filled with people who didn't do anything interesting didn't have much hope. Half the episodes were pointless filler and the other half seemed as if they were trying to build to something interesting but the writers forgot what that was before they got to it.
And like many people have pointed out, a niche network whose niche is one of the most expensive genres to produce has to make some concessions. Reality shows like Ghost Hunters are a necessity as they're immensely profitable even with relatively small audiences as they cost peanuts to make. Ditto for shows like Wrestling which help attract key ad demographics. Splitting seasons so they can produce a finale type episode for 2 different sweeps periods and thus boost their ad rates is another tool needed by such networks.
Syfy may not be all about Sci-Fi, but they still air more classic Sci-Fi than any other station and they produce some decent original shows as well like Eureka, Warehouse 13, and Sanctuary.
Wise-beard Unix hacker types make something, people start saying "Wow! These wise-beard Unix hacker types made something awesome!", the wise-beard Unix hacker types say to themselves "Hey! We can get rich off this and get supermodels for wives!" and BOOM! they're suddenly corporate whores.
Anything that can't potentially make you a corporate whore, or at least get you laid, isn't worth doing.
At first, that's how it will be. Just like with WotLK. Heroics weren't an easy faceroll at the beginning of WotLK. But when people are easily able to obtain gear 2 or 3 tiers higher than the content was balanced for after a few content patches are released, they will eventually become as trivial as Heroics are in WotLK. And if Blizz does with Cata raids what they did with ICC by adding the creeping buff, it's likely by the end of each content patch people will also be raiding the top tier content in PuGs again.
Which is a good system. The more hardcore players will get to see the content and show off the gear early but eventually, more casual players will be able to do it too and there won't be any issues like with Naxx40 or TBT where only a tiny portion of subscribers get to experience the top level content..
Copyrights and patents are necessary. They make progress in the sciences and arts a worthwhile endeavor for the common man.
Who would write great songs if some record label could stick an A&R man in some club to record it and then have Miley Cyrus sing it on an album that would be pounded down peoples' throats so aggressively that within a week even the person who wrote it would believe it was originally her song? Without copyrights, that's exactly what would happen. Copyright is needed.
Sure, it's abused by the media industries. But that's because people allow themselves to be abused by those industries. When people refuse to be abused anymore, things change. Piracy is the consumers' rebellion against that abuse.
The same would hold true for patents if only tangible things like songs could be patented. But allowing people to patent methods and ideas does just what you say it does. Ideas are much easier than implementation. But ideas produce no benefit to society unless they are implemented.
Our current legal system actively discourages anyone from trying to implement someone else's ideas for the betterment of society because if they dare to do so, it will likely mean they'll be sued into abject poverty for their troubles. That system is broken and needs to be fixed to protect and encourage the implementation and improvement of ideas. Abolishing the system wouldn't do that.
A few years ago devices like the PSP and the DS were a much bigger deal than they are now. These days most family cars have DVD players or even full game consoles built into them to keep the little kids entertained and just about everyone over 10 has a smart phone or iPad they can play time waster games on.
The only real market for such devices is very young kids who can't operate more complex devices. And eventually, someone is going to come out with a kid friendly smart phone that catches on with parents, and that market is going to dry up too.
Sony, has lots of other areas with much more potential for the future and do not need to keep focusing on the dying industry of hand held dedicated gaming devices. They're going to milk the PSP for every drop of cash they can before it runs dry and has to be put down but they'll likely to be looking to turn the mobile gaming focus over to Ericcson.
We did this same exercise in school in History class. We were studying some history thing where one side used terror tactics against the other and had to come up with a method that would work in the present day. The assignment was printed in the book so there had to be quite a few classes doing this same exercise all across the country. No one threw a fit. Of course, that was the early 90s and people weren't anywhere near as uptight.
I don't remember what the conflict we were studying was, but I remember the exercise because it was thought provoking. Although frankly, I'm glad real terrorists haven't decided to use some of the ideas we came up with.
They thought about patenting the idea before anyone else. As long as the system is broken and lets them get away with this kind of thing, they'd be stupid not try.
You won't learn anything during the first 2 years at any college. That's why so many college kids spend their first 2 years at college majoring in Keg Tapping and Bong Hitting. It's the only thing that keeps them sane.
And a college degree is slowly becoming less and less desirable to employers. At least in certain fields like programming, web design and graphics work. Quite a few of the places I've worked lately don't even ask for education info. They want a portfolio and couldn't care less if you learned your trade at MIT or in your basement on pirated copies of Visual Studio, Maya and Photoshop.
This happened at my last place of employment. They kept hiring app programmers straight out of college but it was killing them because they ended up outsourcing all the most pressing programming work because none of the in-house programmers were lasting more than a few weeks because they had a great diploma, but they couldn't actually write programs. For years our in house apps were all crappy visual basic apps and batch files. And most of it was thrown together from libraries and code snippets found online because the people couldn't write them themselves.
Eventually one of the guys in Tech Support convinced them to hire his little brother who had taught himself how to code in high school so he could make game mods. So he quit his job at Dollar General and started working there and within weeks was pumping out professional looking, stable apps from a huge backlog of requests by various departments over the years. After that, they no longer hired people based on their degree and instead required a portfolio.
Unfortunately, most companies haven't learned such a lesson and still give more weight to a piece of paper than actual competency. And of course that obviously doesn't apply to all fields (insert joke about the self trained surgeon here).
The best advice is to find some technical school with a 6-12 month training program that has worked out a deal with some local companies to hire their graduates and go that route. The curriculum at such schools usually actually teach you something as they want to pass people who are at least competent enough to do the jobs wanted by their sponsoring companies. And most companies these days will bypass their degree requirements in lieu of actual work experience. So you could spend 4 years at a college accumulating debt to learn skills that will probably be obsolete by the time you find a job and lead you to spend 5-10 more years bouncing from job to job or, you can plow through some specialized training course, move right into a crappy job, and after trudging through that for a few years, hopefully be able to parley that work experience into a real job.
Seriously. Where can I get one of these jobs? I don't care how much it pays. I'm financially secure enough that I only need to work for a little extra spending money. Something like this sounds a lot better than being the buffer between a bunch of people who hate their jobs and upper management who hates their employees.
Two girls one cup just makes me hungry for Ice Cream and Goatse makes me want pizza. I'm so desensitized to the internet at this point that Miley Cyrus is far more disturbing to me than anything on 4chan, Ogrish or Rotten. I'd love to get paid to allow a few people to retain their innocence a little while longer.
It matters because Radiohead had hundreds of thousands of existing fans willing to buy their album no matter how it was released. Metallica, Aerosmith, Bon Jovi, AC/DC and other such bands could probably make tons of money self releasing albums too because they, like Radiohead, have a huge existing fanbase that was built through many years of promotion by record labels.
Look at Chris Daughtry. He independently released 3 albums with 2 different bands which sold less than 1000 copies each. He had to go on American Idol to get fame and has now sold millions of albums. Ditto for Carrie Underwood (she had 3 albums released before Idol), David Cook, Adam Lambert and several others.
Another example is Michelle Branch who self released Broken Bracelet in 2000. It sold less than 1500 copies. She signed with a label and her next album sold 1.9 million copies.
And Radiohead signed a deal with Warner Chappell Music Publishing which is a division of Warner Bros. Records to sell physical copies of In Rainbows in stores. If self publishing a digital download makes more money than going through a label, why did Radiohead go and do that?
Radiohead was already "Radiohead" when they did that. A band that had been built up by record labels since 1991. And much of the success of 'In Rainbows' was based on the novelty of a well established band letting people decide what to pay for their album. An new artist who tried that would be lucky to get enough to buy a value meal at McDonald's if they tried it.
In a round about way though, the RIAA is protecting the artists by protecting themselves and the labels.
Artists make money from concert tours, T-Shirt sales, clothing lines, product endorsements, etc. But to do that, they need to be famous. An album is the price they pay to a major marketing firm, aka a record label, to make them famous. If the record labels can't make money from selling albums due to piracy, then their incentive to make people famous goes away and artists suffer.
And as people have said, you don't have to use a record label. You can always try to become famous on your own. A few people have become famous by putting their music on Youtube and Myspace and such. And there's always reality shows like American Idol. And for the better looking women, they can always try a sex tape. But if all that fails, giving an album of music over to a record label is still a viable choice.
Because a hit album usually leads to a hit tour in large venues and lots of sales of TV Shirts and other marketing materials. Artists usually get a good chunk of that money and for most, that's where the bulk of their income comes from.
For aesthetics and uniqueness, it's a great idea. But as an eco-friendly idea, it's terrible. Such things as tube cars, shipping containers, etc are far more ecologically valuable as recycled material for things that can not be built with sustainable materials such as machine parts, tools, soda cans, and a million other things. Plus, you'll need to add additional materials, many of which are unlikely to be eco-friendly, to make the tube car a comfortable and energy efficient residence. Overall such a project is likely to cost the environment far more than it saves. Recycling is only eco-friendly when it's used to make things that can only be made from finite materials.
A much more eco-friendly pursuit than using recycled materials for building is to use renewable building materials.
A guy in Arkansas who is pushing to build support for a ballot initiative or Senate bill to legalize industrial Hemp (he apparently owns a ton of farmland and figures with all the states passing Medical Marijuana laws that it'd be a good idea for Arkansas to get it's foot in the door first where some real money could be made from pot, industrial use) built a 4000 Sq ft house, made entirely from the yield of 6 acres of Hemp which was grown in France in 5 months on an one of those ultra eco nut job farms where they capture cow farts for power and such. The only things (other than things like appliances) not made from a sustainable material is the wiring which is made from recycled copper and some lime and cement that is mixed with Hemp to make the concrete, spray-in insulation and drywall. Even the windows are made from some kind of Hemp based plastic and apparently make the house very energy efficient as they are far less thermally conductive than glass.
Being able to grow an entire house in less than 6 months with almost no ecological impact is pretty damn impressive.
I lived in Central CA. For a long time we had swamp coolers. Eventually bought a house with Central Air and ended up having to put humidifiers all over the place.
We learned a hard lesson that "dehumidifies the room" is a great feature in the midwest where, when it's 95F with 80% humidity it makes you feel like crap but that in Central CA where it's 110F with 25% humidity it's not a great feature as you step outside and your nose immediately starts bleeding.
If I listen into someone int he next booth at a restaurant give out their credit card number while on a phone call, I haven't committed a crime by listening even if the person didn't intend for me to hear them.If I use the info to charge my meal to them, then it becomes a crime and their intent doesn't matter. But Google didn't use the info to drain people's bank accounts and I doubt they had any similar intent to use the data in a nefarious way.
The legal concept at work in this case is more likely to be the expectation of privacy which, while originally applied to 4th amendment challenges against government agencies, has also been applied in other cases.
Expectation of privacy is a 2 part test. The first part is that "the person from whom the information was obtained must demonstrate that they, in fact, had an actual, subjective expectation that the evidence obtained would not be available to the public" and the second is "would society at large deem a person's expectation of privacy to be reasonable? "
The tough part is whether "society at large" is considered technologically savvy or not. Most technically savvy people would say that it isn't reasonable to expect privacy when broadcasting unencrypted data over a public network doing so would violate both parts of the test. But to someone who buys a computer at Sears, they're like a sheltered deaf person. They can see the data and will worry if someone looks over their shoulder at their screen. But they can't hear the data themselves so they assume no one else can either and thus, so long as they protect their screen from being viewed by others thus passing the first test, would reasonably believe their conversations are private and thus pass the second as well.
It's an interesting legal problem.
And did I mention how much I love my parents for ensuring I don't ever have to deal with that crap again? Typing all that out makes me remember just how miserable that whole scene was.
I've been doing short term temp work to keep myself occupied (Fast fact: Spend more than a month at home at a time with nothing to do, and you will start hating your wife and kids). A few weeks ago I spent 3 days sanding off the little plastic pieces left on plastic forks when they leave the extruder. Grunt work is so much less stressful than corporate bullshit. And it's possible to make decent money doing mindless labor. Awhile back I had a temp job at a food manufacturing plant for a month spraying down their machines to eliminate allergens and was getting paid $14/hr. Full employees were making $18/hr. with a full benefits package.
So there's another good tip for possibly increasing your job satisfaction. Move somewhere with a low cost of living (here in NE Oklahoma you can get a new, mid range 1800sq ft, 4BR 2Bath house for $175k) Get a job doing grunt work and get the hell out of the office.
Actually, most of them got canned. Even management isn't safe when half the customers disappear in less than 2 years. :) So at most they only got the standard 6 weeks severance for management (if they weren't fired with cause) and an opportunity to verify their mailing address so their stuff could be shipped to them as security walked them to their cars.
And they did get bit by it being at at-will work state. No contracts.
The walk of shame is happily something only managers were subjected to. Regular employees have their stuff packed up by management and it's waiting for them in the front office. The only difference is the manager is waiting to hand it to you when you to come through the door if you're fired. If I hadn't told people I was fired, no one would have ever known.
And this isn't New York or L.A. It's a midwest company that was bought by a company based in some podunk town in Virginia that itself was bought out by a company 2 or 3 times removed from the parent company which is based in the Netherlands. There was one company car for the entire company. A 2002 Blazer. They weren't big on stuff like bonuses or perks.
And here, even the biggest cities are just overgrown small towns. We're smack in the middle of nowhere. The next large city is a 50 mile drive through overly congested, 2 lane 55MPH highways that are heavily patrolled by State Troopers with two first names like Joebob Wilson. People here *do not* like commuting.
So, they might be able to find a job somewhere where they won't be known as one of the people who ran a good company into the ground, but it's not going to be very convenient.
Werd. There's a guy at my local Office Max who was a Mortgage Broker for 15 years but can't find any other jobs in the area.
Best Buy and Staples are filled with people who worked in IT.
Most of the places that had IT departments or needed developers in the area have shut down, outsourced, or are just putting extra work on existing employees who are too scared of getting fired to refuse.
If you want a job in manufacturing or retail, stuff like that's picked back up around here a bit. But if you're in finance, tech, or most other professional fields the only jobs to be had are to replace the underpaid people who snapped under an overbearing workload.
However, there's cities 6 hours away with listings for professional jobs a mile long. But oh wait, the housing market is in the crapper so if someone here is 7 or 8 years into a 30 year mortgage and wanted to move there, he'd probably end up owing the bank his first 2 years' salary if he could sell at all.