It's a burden for me to drag around the CD for every game I want to play, as I do full game installs (sure, it takes up HD space, but it drastically improves performance).
For that I use the free tool ISOBuster to create an ISO, and then use DAEMON Tools (also free) to mount it as a "virtual CD" (which looks just like a CD, but it's really the ISO on my hard drive).
Then I can do the minimal install, because the additional content it reads from the "CD", it's actually getting from the hard drive!;-)
So your laptop batteries will last much longer, since it doesn't have to spin both the hard drive and the CD-ROM; and your game will take up almost the same amount of space on your hard drive (possibly less, if the content on the CD is compressed).
Well, I delivered pizzas for a few months last year, but of course anecdotal evidence shouldn't sway one's argument.
And the wage was exactly minimum, plus tips. If they could have paid less, they would have, and I wouldn't have had a problem with that (apart from urging me to step up my job search, which I did, and am now back in the software sector).
As to employees being paid what the employer can get away with, that's absolutely correct. And employees embellish their resumes to get the wages that they can get away with. I see nothing wrong with that. Well, the lying is a bit over-the-top, but two parties should be able to negotiate a rate without the government stepping in and saying, "No, that's too low a rate, this person is barred from providing you with their services." That just forces low-skilled jobs overseas. It's no wonder the higher-skilled jobs are following; as far as I can tell, it's completely the government's fault that we are losing jobs these days. (It may also be completely the government's fault that we had so much prosperity throughout the 19xx's, also, but that doesn't make it right, just as I could rob a bank and provide a great education for my family but it wouldn't be right; the government had to block many import/export companies via tariffs and other taxes in order to prop up the minimum wage.)
My argument for a minimum wage is largely a moral one, because it rewards work and workers, thus making them less likely to require a handout from the state [...]
My argument is that a minimum wage is a handout from the state.
And for those people whose skills are valuable, but are currently worth less than the minimum wage, they cannot be employed and will end up on welfare or other government programs, which again is a handout from the state.
So we create two social programs: inflate wages and pay people not to work. I don't see that these are both necessary. If we paid people what they were worth, it would likely not affect IT industry salaries (or salaries/wages of most people), but it would open our economy up to millions of jobs which it is currently not economically viable to employ. I think that would be a good thing.
My view is that while government programs, minimum wage, etc are all good things [...]
Why do you think minimum wage is a good thing? (Seriously; I'm also a libertarian but not much of a Libertarian because they're all of bunch of draft-dodging tax cheats, as Dave Barry said, but actually in my experience working with the Advocates for Self Government in Florida, they're all a bunch of slackers who dream big but lack the marijuana sobriety to follow through.)
If the minimum wage is a good idea, why not set it at $50/hr?
Really: if my efforts can save/earn a company $1 an hour, why would they ever economically decide to pay me $5.75? It would lose them $4.75 an hour! It's obvious why jobs are going overseas; the minimum wage is (pretty much) solely responsible for our job losses.
I apologize if I sound aggressive, I just feel very strongly about this since my brother just lost his job to outsourcing.
Using pedals of some sort might be helpful for Gavin's friend as well. Perhaps a click-less mouse driven by a hand, and a pedal for each foot to click left and right?
In fact, I'd like that, just because I can't stand the wasted energy moving from keyboard to mouse and back. (Developers: please always have keyboard shortcuts. Thanks!)
Hmm. I'm not sure what your point is. Most free software is written to an existing closed source piece of software's specifications. (Not all; some is written to "scratch the itch" but generally that itch is financial in nature; even the birth of GPL was a quasi-financial transaction (RMS didn't want to sign the NDA which would open him up to lability if he were to share with others).)
Why isn't it fair to stand on the shoulders of giants? Because the giants just had their growth spurt? That's probably the best time, actually, since so few people are already there.
And as for "it's the commercial businesses that innovate", that may be true now but it certainly was not true when computers got started; back then (i.e., just before Bill Gates went into business), most software was freely distributed and shared. The hardware was what was sold. Software was just, like, "here's how to make your blinkenlights flash in cool patterns". Yeah, there may be a lot more patterns that are possible these days, but at the end of the day they're all still patterns.
It's probably religious: they think that if they do certain things here they'll get certain things in return later from their deity.
It may be couched in religious terms, but it is entirely secular: if they do certain things (i.e., kill other tribes, rape their women, steal their valuables), they'll get certain things now (i.e., expand their influence, increase their tribe, get more valuables for less effort).
They just couch it in religious terms so that their followers will agree to it as well.
I disagree with the AC's response: he (the manager) asked you what he should do about it. I don't think he expected you to ask him to stick feathers up his butt. Asking for store credit seems like one of the only options the manager can fulfill (the other being, fire the snot-nosed kid so another snottier-nosed kid can fill his place...)
However, I did find it very amusing to read a story about good/bad, and then read your signature:
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
The company you work for is conning its customers.
Huh? I didn't read the part where the grandparent stated the company he worked for is selling those hard drives to its customers. It sounded like his company has had to return hard drives that they purchased.
I completely agree about the absurdity of a one-year warranty on hard drives, though. I just lost a WD 250 GB drive about a month out of warranty.
Agreed; I even found the fact that they used "Homeland" which sounds so much like "Fatherland" to be mildly entertaining.
But they took it from a long US playbook, which includes the late Senator Thomas J. Dodd (D-CT) checking the 1938 Nazi gun control laws out of the Library of Congress immediately prior to writing the US's 1968 gun control laws--which look surprisinglylike the 1938 version! (In fact, barring translation issues, they're almost word-for-word according to the second link.)
I don't know which bothers me more:
1. That they do these things intentionally;
2. That we allow them to do it without raising holy hell;
3. That we keep voting them into office.
I have Pre-Paid Legal, and own a TiVo. If they reduce my functionality then I will sue them, and it won't cost me anything. (Well, the threat won't cost anything; to actually show up in court would cost me the hourly rate minus 25%, but I think I'll be happy with just threatening to start the class-action suit so I can see how they respond.)
What I don't understand is why TLDs are so important. I mean, it's just a mapping from a string of alphanumeric characters, to a series of 4 (or 6) bytes.
When I heard of.info and.biz, in fact way back when I first heard of.cc, I wondered why the extension was "fixed" and why they didn't just open it up to any random string being able to be mapped?
The answer, as far as I understand it, is the almighty dollar. They'll make a ton more money slowly releasing new TLDs than they would if they let anyone take whatever string they wanted as their domain name. Like, "mcdonalds" could be a domain, mapping to 164.109.145.147; or "me.and.my.shadow" could map to 99.99.99.99; etc.
I know I probably just violated some RFCs up above, but why such a big honking deal?
I'm a staunch Republican, and I never wanted to see Clinton dead. Impeached, yes. Dead? No.
Yeah, but: Clinton just got a blow job. Bush has indirectly slaughtered over 1,000 of your children.
If it was my children dying because Bush had Dick in his ear telling him to go to war to make more money, then I'd certainly want "an eye for an eye."
Back on topic, I read the cached version of her "prayer" and completely agree that it was satire, obviously so, and involved no real threat, from her or somebody else (other than God, who's going to kill all of us one day). Did the people who wrote the movie "Dead Presidents" get visits from the SS? (I love that abbreviation, makes them sound so Third Reichish.)
Heh, I was going to add text saying that the honor viruses that made the rounds were actually coded wrong, because they performed the steps backwards (as you did). But then I figured that was too much verbage for a +5 Funny.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
For that I use the free tool ISOBuster to create an ISO, and then use DAEMON Tools (also free) to mount it as a "virtual CD" (which looks just like a CD, but it's really the ISO on my hard drive).
Then I can do the minimal install, because the additional content it reads from the "CD", it's actually getting from the hard drive! ;-)
So your laptop batteries will last much longer, since it doesn't have to spin both the hard drive and the CD-ROM; and your game will take up almost the same amount of space on your hard drive (possibly less, if the content on the CD is compressed).
And the wage was exactly minimum, plus tips. If they could have paid less, they would have, and I wouldn't have had a problem with that (apart from urging me to step up my job search, which I did, and am now back in the software sector).
As to employees being paid what the employer can get away with, that's absolutely correct. And employees embellish their resumes to get the wages that they can get away with. I see nothing wrong with that. Well, the lying is a bit over-the-top, but two parties should be able to negotiate a rate without the government stepping in and saying, "No, that's too low a rate, this person is barred from providing you with their services." That just forces low-skilled jobs overseas. It's no wonder the higher-skilled jobs are following; as far as I can tell, it's completely the government's fault that we are losing jobs these days. (It may also be completely the government's fault that we had so much prosperity throughout the 19xx's, also, but that doesn't make it right, just as I could rob a bank and provide a great education for my family but it wouldn't be right; the government had to block many import/export companies via tariffs and other taxes in order to prop up the minimum wage.)
If fortune(1) has taught us anything, it's that:
Perhaps joining a union now won't help us, but why not align ourselves with the equation such that we ultimately benefit from it? ;-)
My argument is that a minimum wage is a handout from the state.
And for those people whose skills are valuable, but are currently worth less than the minimum wage, they cannot be employed and will end up on welfare or other government programs, which again is a handout from the state.
So we create two social programs: inflate wages and pay people not to work. I don't see that these are both necessary. If we paid people what they were worth, it would likely not affect IT industry salaries (or salaries/wages of most people), but it would open our economy up to millions of jobs which it is currently not economically viable to employ. I think that would be a good thing.
Why do you think minimum wage is a good thing? (Seriously; I'm also a libertarian but not much of a Libertarian because they're all of bunch of draft-dodging tax cheats, as Dave Barry said, but actually in my experience working with the Advocates for Self Government in Florida, they're all a bunch of slackers who dream big but lack the marijuana sobriety to follow through.)
If the minimum wage is a good idea, why not set it at $50/hr?
Really: if my efforts can save/earn a company $1 an hour, why would they ever economically decide to pay me $5.75? It would lose them $4.75 an hour! It's obvious why jobs are going overseas; the minimum wage is (pretty much) solely responsible for our job losses.
I apologize if I sound aggressive, I just feel very strongly about this since my brother just lost his job to outsourcing.
In fact, I'd like that, just because I can't stand the wasted energy moving from keyboard to mouse and back. (Developers: please always have keyboard shortcuts. Thanks!)
Why isn't it fair to stand on the shoulders of giants? Because the giants just had their growth spurt? That's probably the best time, actually, since so few people are already there.
And as for "it's the commercial businesses that innovate", that may be true now but it certainly was not true when computers got started; back then (i.e., just before Bill Gates went into business), most software was freely distributed and shared. The hardware was what was sold. Software was just, like, "here's how to make your blinkenlights flash in cool patterns". Yeah, there may be a lot more patterns that are possible these days, but at the end of the day they're all still patterns.
Makes for a neat image, which will shortly be fairly accurate, in legal terms. ;-)
I don't mind being labelled tacky if I'm wallowing in free shit. But then, I've been rich and poor and I highly disadvise the latter.
I just love the idea of a gun made out of lobsters driving in the first place, let alone mowing down half a klik of scientists...
It may be couched in religious terms, but it is entirely secular: if they do certain things (i.e., kill other tribes, rape their women, steal their valuables), they'll get certain things now (i.e., expand their influence, increase their tribe, get more valuables for less effort).
They just couch it in religious terms so that their followers will agree to it as well.
Because, if you were given the choice between talking for free as long as you wanted, and talking for a price, which would you choose?
And why, especially if the answer was the less efficient method?
However, I did find it very amusing to read a story about good/bad, and then read your signature:
Quite fitting, actually. ;-)
Huh? I didn't read the part where the grandparent stated the company he worked for is selling those hard drives to its customers. It sounded like his company has had to return hard drives that they purchased.
I completely agree about the absurdity of a one-year warranty on hard drives, though. I just lost a WD 250 GB drive about a month out of warranty.
Exactly, like declaring things vegetables when they really are fruits, just so they can collect more taxes.
Agreed; I even found the fact that they used "Homeland" which sounds so much like "Fatherland" to be mildly entertaining.
But they took it from a long US playbook, which includes the late Senator Thomas J. Dodd (D-CT) checking the 1938 Nazi gun control laws out of the Library of Congress immediately prior to writing the US's 1968 gun control laws--which look surprisingly like the 1938 version! (In fact, barring translation issues, they're almost word-for-word according to the second link.)
I don't know which bothers me more:
1. That they do these things intentionally;
2. That we allow them to do it without raising holy hell;
3. That we keep voting them into office.
I have Pre-Paid Legal, and own a TiVo. If they reduce my functionality then I will sue them, and it won't cost me anything. (Well, the threat won't cost anything; to actually show up in court would cost me the hourly rate minus 25%, but I think I'll be happy with just threatening to start the class-action suit so I can see how they respond.)
When I heard of .info and .biz, in fact way back when I first heard of .cc, I wondered why the extension was "fixed" and why they didn't just open it up to any random string being able to be mapped?
The answer, as far as I understand it, is the almighty dollar. They'll make a ton more money slowly releasing new TLDs than they would if they let anyone take whatever string they wanted as their domain name. Like, "mcdonalds" could be a domain, mapping to 164.109.145.147; or "me.and.my.shadow" could map to 99.99.99.99; etc.
I know I probably just violated some RFCs up above, but why such a big honking deal?
Yeah, but: Clinton just got a blow job. Bush has indirectly slaughtered over 1,000 of your children.
If it was my children dying because Bush had Dick in his ear telling him to go to war to make more money, then I'd certainly want "an eye for an eye."
Back on topic, I read the cached version of her "prayer" and completely agree that it was satire, obviously so, and involved no real threat, from her or somebody else (other than God, who's going to kill all of us one day). Did the people who wrote the movie "Dead Presidents" get visits from the SS? (I love that abbreviation, makes them sound so Third Reichish.)
Cut to buddy wearing high heels...
Btw, I like your sig. I've seen you around here, time to make you a friend.
Cheers!
PS Not really whoring since +1 Funny doesn't actually affect karma, according to the docs, but it's still fun to make others laugh.
It came with Nero.
So for (eventually...) $40 less than the price you quoted, I could get Nero and a 12x DVD writer!
Those guys from Trigger Happy TV, of course! (They just need hoverboards...)
Heh, I was going to add text saying that the honor viruses that made the rounds were actually coded wrong, because they performed the steps backwards (as you did). But then I figured that was too much verbage for a +5 Funny. ;-)
This is an honor virus. Please forward to all your friends, then format your hard drive(s). Thank you.