Hiring people is a total crapshoot. Obviously you need to hire people with the competence you need. That usually is not the problem. The problem is discerning a prospective employee's attitude. Lots of people interview well and manage to hide their poor attitude. I don't want to be saddled with someone who creates workplace havoc once their probationary period ends when I cannot fire them without a very narrow cause. Since the government has taken away my freedom to do that with a myriad of labor laws designed to ensure my company represents a socialist welfare state, laws far beyond the valid 'non-discrimination' issues which I do find largely valid, I have to play defense when hiring. It costs a lot of money to hire someone and a lot of money to get rid of someone. If I don't do this right I am at a competitive disadvantage. It's a game of risk.
What is important to me varies depending on the task at hand. I might be very willing to overlook certain behaviors in a sysadmin job that would be troubling in a support engineer position that travels the country meeting prospective clients. If you are a boozer or a pot head, or profess attitudes that would reflect badly on my company as its representative, I simply do not want to hire you. You may think all this is your off-work time right to do what you want, but I don't think of it in that way. I'm not hiring you for eight hours a day only. When you're in the bar after-hours at a convention shooting the breeze, you still represent my company. If you act out, I lose business. I want to know your character, and I am going to get in your face(book) to find that out. I'm also going to find out your credit score and your arrest record and your civil record as well. I'm going to use my best efforts to find out what your attitude truly is, and if facebook or MySpace provides that information, tough. But thank you. If you've been bad-mouthing your former employer, I probably will not want to hire you. You may be right, but by being less than circumspect you tell me a lot about your maturity level. If you are smart enough to hide yourself on the Internet entirely, good for you. My job is harder, but I'll find a way. Besides, not putting crap on the Net is a point in your favor.
My suggestion for any job seekers is to pull together your own prfessional-looking web site with a resume on it. If you've got a scribd account or a librarything account, point to it. If you've got a blog, point to it. Turn this thing into an advantage. Then put the site on your paper copy or letter of application. My guess is a prospective employer would be quite pleased to see you made his job easier.
In a big network I could see this happening. I know--computer rooms are supposed to be pristine with every wire perfectly aligned and in place with everything perfectly labeled and mapped--NOT! Most computer rooms I've been in, including my own, are somewhat less than ideal. They kind of grew with no plan. Need more space? Run a jumper. One of the Field Engineers who worked on one of our minis just laughed and said we weren't really that bad--you should see banks--they're the worst. In other words, poor housekeeping is widespread and tolerated. A typical terminal server could be 1RU or even a blade, or a box sitting loose on top of the rack where you can't see it. If I were really devious I would put a small terminal server in a bigger box. If this were intentionally hidden it could be in the ceiling hooked to a 128 port hub in the rafters itself and you'd never even know it. It's a bird's nest of Cat5 around a hub, all looking the same. I'll just bet it's a Class B network, so you've got a tremendous number of possibilities. And if you used virtual networks on Cisco hubs or did some bizarre subnets that simply confounds matters. I feel very confident that I could hide a box in my building that even the pros would have a hard time finding. Of course you could start turning off power until the device disappeared to try to pin down its location, but my guess is no one wants to do that just because someone lost a box. Too funny.
Good Lord! Why is this turning into a "Whom do I blame?" issue? Why are you parsing every word of my sentences to assign your perceived hidden meaning to them? This isn't about ME; I just represent an example.
Here's the deal: My publisher told me they were withdrawing this book (already listed on Amazon) BECAUSE, at least in part, of this court ruling. That's what they said. Now, MAYBE they finally got around to reading it and realized they had to dump it because it is a crappy, poorly written, and full of errors. It may be that this court case is just a convenient excuse for them. I don't know.
All I can go by is what they said. I thought some people here might be interested in this because it affected a slashdot participant. My own attitude about it personally is, "This kinda sucks, but it isn't the end of the world." My own experience is just an example. The overriding issue here is a court decision that stifles free expression of value-added ideas, however ill-expressed they may be. This may not be the intent of the court, but it is the result.
No, I blame the publisher. But the publisher used this decision as a factor in making its own decision. They basically said that even if we were right and that my book was perfectly legal, their margins were so thin that they could not only not afford to lose a lawsuit, they could not afford to win one. Even though my contract stiplulates (I mean, stipulated; it's cancelled) that I was 'to blame' in case of any actions, they said a courtsuit would target them anyway as a 'deep pockets' participant, so they would lose. That's why I said specifically that this sort of decision has a 'chilling effect' despite the legal merits or even the dissimilarities of the two books. The publisher made what could be construed as an erroneous decision, using the results of this lawsuit as a 'tipping factor' in their decision. People and corporations make decisions all the time using court decisions, or their perception of what a future court decision COULD be, as part of their market risk assessment. You can argue with them, of course, but it's still their decision to make. They spent thousands of dollars prepping for publishing this book, but choose to eat it, which turned out to nullify (at least for now) two year's of work on my part and any income I would have derived. The point is that these decisions have far reaching implications that are not always apparent and that few people care about. It's just that this time one of those far reaching implications happened to affect me directly. Since we were discussing the court case, I thought you might like to know about it.
The thing is, this ruling, which may be entirely proper in this particular case, has a chilling effect on other similar types of endeavors. I wrote a book I called "The Falco Dictionary" covering the Falco mystery novels. It has a tremendous amount of value-added information not found in the books. I have Google Earth coordinates of every single location mentioned in the books. When Falco mentions Troy, for example, I give you the precise geographical coordinates of the model of the Trojan Horse standing outside the visitor center. You can actually see and recognize it in Google Earth. When Falco says he walks past the Forum in Rome, I show you the building, which is still standing.
I show where the author made a few mistakes, having Falco go through a gate in the Aurelian Wall, for example, that was built several hundred years after when he lived. I talk about historical events, dissect names, both real and imagined, point out allusions, and identify mythological characters. From what I have read of the Potter case my book comes nowhere near that state of infringement and amounts to a critical work. But the author objected on the grounds that she might want to do such a companion piece in the future and if her publisher refused her publication on the grounds there was already something out there, this would amount to loss of income, therefore she would sue.
So, given the Potter decision, my publisher freaked out and withdrew the book. Now it's my loss of income.
A lot of the comments here reflect the inwardly focused Geek world that thinks the ad is all about them or all for them. The ad was not intended to make people who visit Slashdot laugh, never intended to make people who visit here buy Vista or anything Microsoft. In fact, the ad bypasses Slashdot entirely. You might call it the Anti-Slashdot ad or the Slashdot-is-Irrelevant ad. In fact, the success of the ad is likely in inverse proportion to Slashdot's negative reactions. The more negative we are here, the more successful the ad.
The ad builds brand-awareness by using celebrity (just like OJ and Avis). It's targeted at consumers who buy PCs one at a time, not anybody in the industry. It shows Bill Gates making fun of himself--again. It's a 'show about nothing' with Seinfeld--again. It suggests the future will have even more friendly computers with whatever follows Vista. That's all it is supposed to do.
Think of it this way. Bill Gates is to Microsoft as the Clydsdales are to Budweiser. Instant brand recognition. When you see a Clydsdale ad, or even just a Clydsdale somewhere else, your brain thinks, "Budweiser." The more times your brain thinks 'Budweiser' the more likely it is that you'll pick up a six-pack of Budweiser next time you go shopping. With all the crazy beer names on the shelf in a bewildering array of attempted marketing fancy names, there's one I recognize: Budweiser. I'll take that.
So what if it's one of the worst beers out there on the market. It sells.
It was on a par with Star Tours in Disneyland--better because of the costumed actors as part of the show. I enjoyed it, took both sets of adult kids to it over the years. My wife would never open her eyes in teh shuttle. "My, God. Open your eyes and experience the thrill!" The costumed Ferengi in the restaurant was great and the props and timeline were top notch. Guess there's no reason to go out of your way over to the Hilton any more. Oh, well.
The popular conception of wind power is fast-paced windmills cutting birds in half as they twirl through the air whenever the wind happens to blow. I was just in Germany and saw many windmills turning so slowly through the air that if a bird hit one, it was either not paying attention or drunk. I've seen the same thing on the hills of Crete overlooking Heraklion. One point is that you needn't have hurricane force winds to make wind power effective. All you need is an area of 'prevailing winds' that are more or less predictable--just like the trade winds that predictably blew sailing ships across the oceans for centuries. There are many areas like this all across the USA. For example, the Dalles area on the Columbia River, well known for its prevailing winds. Here's a wind map for Oregon, for example: http://www.eere.energy.gov/windandhydro/windpoweringamerica/maps_template.asp?stateab=or
That Neanderthals were not stupid is not a new idea. Perhaps in popular culture they have been relegated to cave man status, but not in anthropological circles. As long as 40 years ago at least any standard textbook admitted, for example, that Neanderthal brains were bigger than those of modern man or Cro Magnon. This may be a statistical anomaly due to a smaller sample size, but it is still there. The stone tool kit has always had the best of praise. Although once in awhile someone would suggest Neanderthal's couldn't talk (an unlikely event) they have always been well-known for their burial practices which suggest high form thinking including religion. As one text book from 1965 said, "Put him in a Brooks Brothers suit and send him down to the supermrket for some groceries and he might pass completely unnoticed." It seems to me the entire premis of this article is flawed.
Sure it is. She wore 'provocative' clothes that enticed the rapist to commit a crime he otherwise would not have committed had she worn more conservative attire. If she were wearing conservative attire and was raped anyway, she should not have been out in the street alone, or after dark, or in that neighborhood. If this were 'date rape,' then she shouldn't have dated this schmuck in the first place. Didn't she do 'due diligence' and check him out? If not, why not? If she didn't know all these things, then she SHOULD have known them. It is not as if she were never told. The tools to make her more secure have always been available. Did she have a whistle? No. Did she have mace? No. Did she have a gun? No. Doesn't she know judo? No. She ignored all the well known tools that have been available for years to make her secure and went out without a single one of them. Whose fault is that? It is her responsibility. And she certainly should not have made the ridiculous mistake of being a woman in the first place.
Obviously she aided and abetted that crime and she should be charged for it to the fullest extent of the law. If there is no appropriate law on the books, we should make one. It's time to make these women accountable for the crimes they cause. These crimes WILL NOT go down until we stop looking at the symptoms and start addressing the root cause of rape in the first place: Women.
The New York Times is already online from 1851 onwards. the concept is cool, truly, but why not CAPTCHA something not already accomplished? Oh, I know. That was, like, a metaphor, right?
Actually, it IS a little more complex than that. Who created Iraq in the first place? Out of what famous European political party did the Ba'ath Party originate? May I suggest reading "Saddam; King of Terror" by Con Coughlin, Harper-Collins, 2002, 0-06-0500541-9, for a detaled accounting of Saddam's rise to power.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Most WiFi networks are of such low power to render them effectively useless beyond a few feet of the origin of the signal. In my neighborhood with houses on half-acre to acre lots I can detect half a dozen networks. A couple are 'insecure,' but the signal is one bar in strength. Besides, I'm detecting them with my own network, so why do I want to 'steal' their bandwidth? Mine is faster. There aren't many people who want to cruise the neighborhood looking for unsecured signals so they can use their laptop in the privacy of their own automobile to surf the net. How uncomfortable is that? I surf with my feet propped up, a beer on the table, and the dog curled up at my feet.
Then there are those networks that are intentionally unsecured. The local library has a router intentionally pointed at the parking lot (Gasp!) In the downtown area every hotel is within range of an unsecured network. They even have a placard that tells you how to connect--free!
Sure, there are probably guys into taking advantage of you if your network is unsecured. Perhaps the issue is more prevalent in an apartment house or a dorm than single family residences, but I think this is more of a theoretical issue than a practical one. You can hypothesize your way to wild conclusions, but in the end, is this REALLY a serious problem?
It was the "Centurion Guard," a piece of hardware. I forgot what it was called when I first posted. It's been a few years. I tried Deep Freeze on a couple, but the software stack was so large with all the other crap I had on there that it interfered. New ones are thin clients, so it's no longer quite the issue it was.
The Library Director may not know what he is talking about, but as an ex-MIS director of a fair-sized library system, I can tell you what I did in the same circumstances. All our public computers had devices in them that erased all activity on a reboot, and most of it on a sign-off (bookmarks, cookies, etc.) When the local police officers decided they wanted to snoop on a computer used by a pedophile, I explained to them that it was useless because the material, if any was automatically erased. They didn't believe me, rather snidely, I thought, so I let them run a DOS-based program that explored the hard drive for images. They were so proud of their little program. I even coached them how to get to a DOS prompt (which they couldn't quite do.) Sure enough--nothing. They wanted the name of the manufacturer of the device, which I gave them readily. They never got anything.
The point here is that if you set up the computers in such a way that they do not retain information, this whole issue is a moot point. Our Director did not understand any of this. I had Wi-Fi up in all our libraries for a year before she understood what it was. She then got a public service award award for being so far-sighted as to start it. I'm retired now. Ha ha.
OK, although y'all are certainly so very clever for not missing a Bush-bashing opportunity, the issue is not about BUSH at all, it's about the OFFICE of the Presidency as the head of government. This tells you one important thing; it's about PROTOCOL. Whatever it is is big enough to involve 'the President' or at least his Science Advisor.
Have you ever received a government grant? Do you think you get to announce the award? No, you don't. The Congressman responsible for herding the grant in conjunction with the Congressman in your district gets to announce it as a press release from their office (usually the same guy). You may think this is pork barrel politics in action. Of course, your attitude may be influenced by whether you are the grantee or the loser.
I guarantee you that whatever they have found will be controversial and there will be groups that jump up immediately to refute it. But it's something big or they'd never bother with the White House. It's got to be bigger than finding water. Martian microbes is my guess, but who knows?
Ha ha not funny. I had to laugh at this. A few years ago I was still mapping drives. I had the "H" (Home) actually-network drive for everyone mapped to one of my servers (huge drives, the server was named Moby Fred) which allowed me to backup everyone's stuff every day pretty nicely on autopilot at night. Also, if someone's box failed I could swap it out with a standard install and not worry about their saved stuff being lost 'cept for maybe bookmarks too bad eat shit. But my nightly backups started to fail. They needed another tape all of a sudden where I was in the 50% used category the week before--plenty of leeway, or so I thought.
Turns out one employee decided to 'archive' all his MP3s onto the H: drive and nearly filled the thing up. This was actually kind of work-related (He was the music librarian).
I had a VERY short, emotional, and poignant conversation with him (I was so very pissed!), whereupon the problem suddenly disappeared.
Thank you for the clarification. I see your point. People who actually care are going to see the point and make a better decision because they perceive a better value. I see engineers, in general, as folks who are very good at calculating trade-offs and getting the best bang for the buck (or lift on a wing).
I'm thinking more of the mass market. I had a board member years ago (an idiot, but a well placed one) who talked to me about this new box called a VCR, when Beta and VHS were still battling it out. He said, "When it gets down to $500, then I might get one." It did and he did and suddenly everyone had a VHS VCR despite the fact it wasn't REALLY the best format.
The masses today are certainly influenced by 'cool' and Apple is 'cool' as in iPod/iPhone, but by and large people just want to get on the Net, get their email, and browse around. A few want to write or spreadsheet or 'powerpoint' but beyond that it gets specialized fast. How many people want to individually create a database? Near zero. the corporate folks have their issue, but they'd just as soon do thin client to make it easier on themselves so they don't have to worry about updates on every damn PC in the place.
So you've got corporate pressure to cut costs as well as mass culture that just wants onto the Internet, cut the bells and whistles, get me on cheaply, and here's Apple with Macs that are entirely too expensive given the job most people want them to do.
Don't get me wrong. I spent $7,000 on my Apple ][ in 1979 (cp/m, blah blah blah), but I think Apple's future is the iPhone platform rather than the Mac, and it's just a matter of time before that whole issue is history. If Linux can provide an easy appliance interface so no one needs to do anything special or geeky, it will win hands down, but no one has been able to put the combination of Linux/box together yet to make that happen. I suspect the margins at this level are such that the Vista premium does not make a difference, but ultimately, the future is not with the PC-tyope platform anyway, though it was fun while it lasted.
This is just spin. If you are talking about individual companies and how many units they sell, okay. So they're third. Yay. But if you are talking about OSX versus Vista/XP, and Apple is at 7-8%, what is the big deal? Those of you with longer memories may recall that Apple once held over 10% of the PC market, but an insistence on high margins and a belief that they were competing directly against IBM itself led to a plummeting market share in the face of half-price PC clones from which Apple has not yet recovered--and it's been 20 years. I was one of the guys who was faced with a decision back then: Do I buy one Apple or two clones? Regardless of a 1% move in rank, Apple remains a niche market. PCs are now an appliance that gives you a portal onto the Internet. Why do you want to spend an extra thousand dollars to do that?
Same rule applies for Linux. If someone could just get out there and market a Linux box successfully, why do you need to pay for Windows? Unfortunately, the disparity is not as great when you can buy a Vista laptop for $500. The $500 number appears to be more of a magic number than 10% because at that price point, people stop analyzing and just buy.
I've been to Lituya Bay. I've walked its shores. I managed to lose a crab pot there. I've talked with one of the survivors. Lituya Bay is a protected harbor used by fishing boats to get out of the weather. I used the harbor to protect myself and a 38' fishing boat from 105 mph winds one summer (1967). There is a very narrow passage to get into the harbor. You have to line up to lights (night) or white sticks (day) and traverse between a large sandspit and the shore. In the middle of the bay is an island. It contains ruins of an old French fur trapping venture. At the back of the bay is a glacier. When the earthquake struck a piece of the glacier broke off and entered the bay, quickly, causing a huge wave. The wave rushed away from the back of the bay, washed over the island, and washed several fishing boats over the sandspit into the Gulf of Alaska, snapping their anchor chains easily.
You can see that this was no ordinary 'tsunami.' The wave did not come from the sea, but from the shore and moved outward. take a look on Google Earth and you will see what I mean. 58*37'52" North, 137*36'03" East.
Slashdot Mirror
Hiring people is a total crapshoot. Obviously you need to hire people with the competence you need. That usually is not the problem. The problem is discerning a prospective employee's attitude. Lots of people interview well and manage to hide their poor attitude. I don't want to be saddled with someone who creates workplace havoc once their probationary period ends when I cannot fire them without a very narrow cause. Since the government has taken away my freedom to do that with a myriad of labor laws designed to ensure my company represents a socialist welfare state, laws far beyond the valid 'non-discrimination' issues which I do find largely valid, I have to play defense when hiring. It costs a lot of money to hire someone and a lot of money to get rid of someone. If I don't do this right I am at a competitive disadvantage. It's a game of risk.
What is important to me varies depending on the task at hand. I might be very willing to overlook certain behaviors in a sysadmin job that would be troubling in a support engineer position that travels the country meeting prospective clients. If you are a boozer or a pot head, or profess attitudes that would reflect badly on my company as its representative, I simply do not want to hire you. You may think all this is your off-work time right to do what you want, but I don't think of it in that way. I'm not hiring you for eight hours a day only. When you're in the bar after-hours at a convention shooting the breeze, you still represent my company. If you act out, I lose business. I want to know your character, and I am going to get in your face(book) to find that out. I'm also going to find out your credit score and your arrest record and your civil record as well. I'm going to use my best efforts to find out what your attitude truly is, and if facebook or MySpace provides that information, tough. But thank you. If you've been bad-mouthing your former employer, I probably will not want to hire you. You may be right, but by being less than circumspect you tell me a lot about your maturity level. If you are smart enough to hide yourself on the Internet entirely, good for you. My job is harder, but I'll find a way. Besides, not putting crap on the Net is a point in your favor.
My suggestion for any job seekers is to pull together your own prfessional-looking web site with a resume on it. If you've got a scribd account or a librarything account, point to it. If you've got a blog, point to it. Turn this thing into an advantage. Then put the site on your paper copy or letter of application. My guess is a prospective employer would be quite pleased to see you made his job easier.
In a big network I could see this happening. I know--computer rooms are supposed to be pristine with every wire perfectly aligned and in place with everything perfectly labeled and mapped--NOT! Most computer rooms I've been in, including my own, are somewhat less than ideal. They kind of grew with no plan. Need more space? Run a jumper. One of the Field Engineers who worked on one of our minis just laughed and said we weren't really that bad--you should see banks--they're the worst. In other words, poor housekeeping is widespread and tolerated. A typical terminal server could be 1RU or even a blade, or a box sitting loose on top of the rack where you can't see it. If I were really devious I would put a small terminal server in a bigger box. If this were intentionally hidden it could be in the ceiling hooked to a 128 port hub in the rafters itself and you'd never even know it. It's a bird's nest of Cat5 around a hub, all looking the same. I'll just bet it's a Class B network, so you've got a tremendous number of possibilities. And if you used virtual networks on Cisco hubs or did some bizarre subnets that simply confounds matters. I feel very confident that I could hide a box in my building that even the pros would have a hard time finding. Of course you could start turning off power until the device disappeared to try to pin down its location, but my guess is no one wants to do that just because someone lost a box. Too funny.
Good Lord! Why is this turning into a "Whom do I blame?" issue? Why are you parsing every word of my sentences to assign your perceived hidden meaning to them? This isn't about ME; I just represent an example.
Here's the deal: My publisher told me they were withdrawing this book (already listed on Amazon) BECAUSE, at least in part, of this court ruling. That's what they said. Now, MAYBE they finally got around to reading it and realized they had to dump it because it is a crappy, poorly written, and full of errors. It may be that this court case is just a convenient excuse for them. I don't know.
All I can go by is what they said. I thought some people here might be interested in this because it affected a slashdot participant. My own attitude about it personally is, "This kinda sucks, but it isn't the end of the world." My own experience is just an example. The overriding issue here is a court decision that stifles free expression of value-added ideas, however ill-expressed they may be. This may not be the intent of the court, but it is the result.
No, I blame the publisher. But the publisher used this decision as a factor in making its own decision. They basically said that even if we were right and that my book was perfectly legal, their margins were so thin that they could not only not afford to lose a lawsuit, they could not afford to win one. Even though my contract stiplulates (I mean, stipulated; it's cancelled) that I was 'to blame' in case of any actions, they said a courtsuit would target them anyway as a 'deep pockets' participant, so they would lose. That's why I said specifically that this sort of decision has a 'chilling effect' despite the legal merits or even the dissimilarities of the two books. The publisher made what could be construed as an erroneous decision, using the results of this lawsuit as a 'tipping factor' in their decision. People and corporations make decisions all the time using court decisions, or their perception of what a future court decision COULD be, as part of their market risk assessment. You can argue with them, of course, but it's still their decision to make. They spent thousands of dollars prepping for publishing this book, but choose to eat it, which turned out to nullify (at least for now) two year's of work on my part and any income I would have derived. The point is that these decisions have far reaching implications that are not always apparent and that few people care about. It's just that this time one of those far reaching implications happened to affect me directly. Since we were discussing the court case, I thought you might like to know about it.
The thing is, this ruling, which may be entirely proper in this particular case, has a chilling effect on other similar types of endeavors. I wrote a book I called "The Falco Dictionary" covering the Falco mystery novels. It has a tremendous amount of value-added information not found in the books. I have Google Earth coordinates of every single location mentioned in the books. When Falco mentions Troy, for example, I give you the precise geographical coordinates of the model of the Trojan Horse standing outside the visitor center. You can actually see and recognize it in Google Earth. When Falco says he walks past the Forum in Rome, I show you the building, which is still standing.
I show where the author made a few mistakes, having Falco go through a gate in the Aurelian Wall, for example, that was built several hundred years after when he lived. I talk about historical events, dissect names, both real and imagined, point out allusions, and identify mythological characters. From what I have read of the Potter case my book comes nowhere near that state of infringement and amounts to a critical work. But the author objected on the grounds that she might want to do such a companion piece in the future and if her publisher refused her publication on the grounds there was already something out there, this would amount to loss of income, therefore she would sue.
So, given the Potter decision, my publisher freaked out and withdrew the book. Now it's my loss of income.
A lot of the comments here reflect the inwardly focused Geek world that thinks the ad is all about them or all for them. The ad was not intended to make people who visit Slashdot laugh, never intended to make people who visit here buy Vista or anything Microsoft. In fact, the ad bypasses Slashdot entirely. You might call it the Anti-Slashdot ad or the Slashdot-is-Irrelevant ad. In fact, the success of the ad is likely in inverse proportion to Slashdot's negative reactions. The more negative we are here, the more successful the ad.
The ad builds brand-awareness by using celebrity (just like OJ and Avis). It's targeted at consumers who buy PCs one at a time, not anybody in the industry. It shows Bill Gates making fun of himself--again. It's a 'show about nothing' with Seinfeld--again. It suggests the future will have even more friendly computers with whatever follows Vista. That's all it is supposed to do.
Think of it this way. Bill Gates is to Microsoft as the Clydsdales are to Budweiser. Instant brand recognition. When you see a Clydsdale ad, or even just a Clydsdale somewhere else, your brain thinks, "Budweiser." The more times your brain thinks 'Budweiser' the more likely it is that you'll pick up a six-pack of Budweiser next time you go shopping. With all the crazy beer names on the shelf in a bewildering array of attempted marketing fancy names, there's one I recognize: Budweiser. I'll take that.
So what if it's one of the worst beers out there on the market. It sells.
It was on a par with Star Tours in Disneyland--better because of the costumed actors as part of the show. I enjoyed it, took both sets of adult kids to it over the years. My wife would never open her eyes in teh shuttle. "My, God. Open your eyes and experience the thrill!" The costumed Ferengi in the restaurant was great and the props and timeline were top notch. Guess there's no reason to go out of your way over to the Hilton any more. Oh, well.
The popular conception of wind power is fast-paced windmills cutting birds in half as they twirl through the air whenever the wind happens to blow. I was just in Germany and saw many windmills turning so slowly through the air that if a bird hit one, it was either not paying attention or drunk. I've seen the same thing on the hills of Crete overlooking Heraklion. One point is that you needn't have hurricane force winds to make wind power effective. All you need is an area of 'prevailing winds' that are more or less predictable--just like the trade winds that predictably blew sailing ships across the oceans for centuries. There are many areas like this all across the USA. For example, the Dalles area on the Columbia River, well known for its prevailing winds. Here's a wind map for Oregon, for example: http://www.eere.energy.gov/windandhydro/windpoweringamerica/maps_template.asp?stateab=or
That Neanderthals were not stupid is not a new idea. Perhaps in popular culture they have been relegated to cave man status, but not in anthropological circles. As long as 40 years ago at least any standard textbook admitted, for example, that Neanderthal brains were bigger than those of modern man or Cro Magnon. This may be a statistical anomaly due to a smaller sample size, but it is still there. The stone tool kit has always had the best of praise. Although once in awhile someone would suggest Neanderthal's couldn't talk (an unlikely event) they have always been well-known for their burial practices which suggest high form thinking including religion. As one text book from 1965 said, "Put him in a Brooks Brothers suit and send him down to the supermrket for some groceries and he might pass completely unnoticed." It seems to me the entire premis of this article is flawed.
Sure it is. She wore 'provocative' clothes that enticed the rapist to commit a crime he otherwise would not have committed had she worn more conservative attire. If she were wearing conservative attire and was raped anyway, she should not have been out in the street alone, or after dark, or in that neighborhood. If this were 'date rape,' then she shouldn't have dated this schmuck in the first place. Didn't she do 'due diligence' and check him out? If not, why not? If she didn't know all these things, then she SHOULD have known them. It is not as if she were never told. The tools to make her more secure have always been available. Did she have a whistle? No. Did she have mace? No. Did she have a gun? No. Doesn't she know judo? No. She ignored all the well known tools that have been available for years to make her secure and went out without a single one of them. Whose fault is that? It is her responsibility. And she certainly should not have made the ridiculous mistake of being a woman in the first place.
Obviously she aided and abetted that crime and she should be charged for it to the fullest extent of the law. If there is no appropriate law on the books, we should make one. It's time to make these women accountable for the crimes they cause. These crimes WILL NOT go down until we stop looking at the symptoms and start addressing the root cause of rape in the first place: Women.
I can't mod the entire thing down. I can't believe I got suckered into another idle post. Note to self: Look for word "idle," skip.
Sure, but every KW generated by solar out west is one more KW you don't have to generate in the Appalachians.
The New York Times is already online from 1851 onwards. the concept is cool, truly, but why not CAPTCHA something not already accomplished? Oh, I know. That was, like, a metaphor, right?
Now I know why it says: "Idle.slashdot.org is a total waste of your time. Never go there." I didn't; it came to me. Oh, well...
Actually, it IS a little more complex than that. Who created Iraq in the first place? Out of what famous European political party did the Ba'ath Party originate? May I suggest reading "Saddam; King of Terror" by Con Coughlin, Harper-Collins, 2002, 0-06-0500541-9, for a detaled accounting of Saddam's rise to power.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Most WiFi networks are of such low power to render them effectively useless beyond a few feet of the origin of the signal. In my neighborhood with houses on half-acre to acre lots I can detect half a dozen networks. A couple are 'insecure,' but the signal is one bar in strength. Besides, I'm detecting them with my own network, so why do I want to 'steal' their bandwidth? Mine is faster. There aren't many people who want to cruise the neighborhood looking for unsecured signals so they can use their laptop in the privacy of their own automobile to surf the net. How uncomfortable is that? I surf with my feet propped up, a beer on the table, and the dog curled up at my feet.
Then there are those networks that are intentionally unsecured. The local library has a router intentionally pointed at the parking lot (Gasp!) In the downtown area every hotel is within range of an unsecured network. They even have a placard that tells you how to connect--free!
Sure, there are probably guys into taking advantage of you if your network is unsecured. Perhaps the issue is more prevalent in an apartment house or a dorm than single family residences, but I think this is more of a theoretical issue than a practical one. You can hypothesize your way to wild conclusions, but in the end, is this REALLY a serious problem?
It was the "Centurion Guard," a piece of hardware. I forgot what it was called when I first posted. It's been a few years. I tried Deep Freeze on a couple, but the software stack was so large with all the other crap I had on there that it interfered. New ones are thin clients, so it's no longer quite the issue it was.
The Library Director may not know what he is talking about, but as an ex-MIS director of a fair-sized library system, I can tell you what I did in the same circumstances. All our public computers had devices in them that erased all activity on a reboot, and most of it on a sign-off (bookmarks, cookies, etc.) When the local police officers decided they wanted to snoop on a computer used by a pedophile, I explained to them that it was useless because the material, if any was automatically erased. They didn't believe me, rather snidely, I thought, so I let them run a DOS-based program that explored the hard drive for images. They were so proud of their little program. I even coached them how to get to a DOS prompt (which they couldn't quite do.) Sure enough--nothing. They wanted the name of the manufacturer of the device, which I gave them readily. They never got anything.
The point here is that if you set up the computers in such a way that they do not retain information, this whole issue is a moot point. Our Director did not understand any of this. I had Wi-Fi up in all our libraries for a year before she understood what it was. She then got a public service award award for being so far-sighted as to start it. I'm retired now. Ha ha.
OK, although y'all are certainly so very clever for not missing a Bush-bashing opportunity, the issue is not about BUSH at all, it's about the OFFICE of the Presidency as the head of government. This tells you one important thing; it's about PROTOCOL. Whatever it is is big enough to involve 'the President' or at least his Science Advisor.
Have you ever received a government grant? Do you think you get to announce the award? No, you don't. The Congressman responsible for herding the grant in conjunction with the Congressman in your district gets to announce it as a press release from their office (usually the same guy). You may think this is pork barrel politics in action. Of course, your attitude may be influenced by whether you are the grantee or the loser.
I guarantee you that whatever they have found will be controversial and there will be groups that jump up immediately to refute it. But it's something big or they'd never bother with the White House. It's got to be bigger than finding water. Martian microbes is my guess, but who knows?
Ha ha not funny. I had to laugh at this. A few years ago I was still mapping drives. I had the "H" (Home) actually-network drive for everyone mapped to one of my servers (huge drives, the server was named Moby Fred) which allowed me to backup everyone's stuff every day pretty nicely on autopilot at night. Also, if someone's box failed I could swap it out with a standard install and not worry about their saved stuff being lost 'cept for maybe bookmarks too bad eat shit. But my nightly backups started to fail. They needed another tape all of a sudden where I was in the 50% used category the week before--plenty of leeway, or so I thought.
Turns out one employee decided to 'archive' all his MP3s onto the H: drive and nearly filled the thing up. This was actually kind of work-related (He was the music librarian).
I had a VERY short, emotional, and poignant conversation with him (I was so very pissed!), whereupon the problem suddenly disappeared.
Yes, you do have time. Set your phasers on stun. That was in 1967. Oh, wait! That was in 2400 something. Oh, wait! I'm so confused.
Thank you for the clarification. I see your point. People who actually care are going to see the point and make a better decision because they perceive a better value. I see engineers, in general, as folks who are very good at calculating trade-offs and getting the best bang for the buck (or lift on a wing).
I'm thinking more of the mass market. I had a board member years ago (an idiot, but a well placed one) who talked to me about this new box called a VCR, when Beta and VHS were still battling it out. He said, "When it gets down to $500, then I might get one." It did and he did and suddenly everyone had a VHS VCR despite the fact it wasn't REALLY the best format.
The masses today are certainly influenced by 'cool' and Apple is 'cool' as in iPod/iPhone, but by and large people just want to get on the Net, get their email, and browse around. A few want to write or spreadsheet or 'powerpoint' but beyond that it gets specialized fast. How many people want to individually create a database? Near zero. the corporate folks have their issue, but they'd just as soon do thin client to make it easier on themselves so they don't have to worry about updates on every damn PC in the place.
So you've got corporate pressure to cut costs as well as mass culture that just wants onto the Internet, cut the bells and whistles, get me on cheaply, and here's Apple with Macs that are entirely too expensive given the job most people want them to do.
Don't get me wrong. I spent $7,000 on my Apple ][ in 1979 (cp/m, blah blah blah), but I think Apple's future is the iPhone platform rather than the Mac, and it's just a matter of time before that whole issue is history. If Linux can provide an easy appliance interface so no one needs to do anything special or geeky, it will win hands down, but no one has been able to put the combination of Linux/box together yet to make that happen. I suspect the margins at this level are such that the Vista premium does not make a difference, but ultimately, the future is not with the PC-tyope platform anyway, though it was fun while it lasted.
This is just spin. If you are talking about individual companies and how many units they sell, okay. So they're third. Yay. But if you are talking about OSX versus Vista/XP, and Apple is at 7-8%, what is the big deal? Those of you with longer memories may recall that Apple once held over 10% of the PC market, but an insistence on high margins and a belief that they were competing directly against IBM itself led to a plummeting market share in the face of half-price PC clones from which Apple has not yet recovered--and it's been 20 years. I was one of the guys who was faced with a decision back then: Do I buy one Apple or two clones? Regardless of a 1% move in rank, Apple remains a niche market. PCs are now an appliance that gives you a portal onto the Internet. Why do you want to spend an extra thousand dollars to do that?
Same rule applies for Linux. If someone could just get out there and market a Linux box successfully, why do you need to pay for Windows? Unfortunately, the disparity is not as great when you can buy a Vista laptop for $500. The $500 number appears to be more of a magic number than 10% because at that price point, people stop analyzing and just buy.
Right. My mistake. Sorry! :-)
I've been to Lituya Bay. I've walked its shores. I managed to lose a crab pot there. I've talked with one of the survivors. Lituya Bay is a protected harbor used by fishing boats to get out of the weather. I used the harbor to protect myself and a 38' fishing boat from 105 mph winds one summer (1967). There is a very narrow passage to get into the harbor. You have to line up to lights (night) or white sticks (day) and traverse between a large sandspit and the shore. In the middle of the bay is an island. It contains ruins of an old French fur trapping venture. At the back of the bay is a glacier. When the earthquake struck a piece of the glacier broke off and entered the bay, quickly, causing a huge wave. The wave rushed away from the back of the bay, washed over the island, and washed several fishing boats over the sandspit into the Gulf of Alaska, snapping their anchor chains easily.
You can see that this was no ordinary 'tsunami.' The wave did not come from the sea, but from the shore and moved outward. take a look on Google Earth and you will see what I mean. 58*37'52" North, 137*36'03" East.