Wal-Mart is despised because, despite being the nation's largest employer, they treat/have treated their employees and neighbors terribly. Wal-Mart has been successfully sued for gross violations of labor laws--not paying employees for time worked, forcing child employees (under 18) to work far more than the law allows, and locking employees into a building overnight. They've also closed down entire stores, simply to punish their employees from forming a union.
It doesn't matter if these are the direct result of the CEO's instructions or a few managers who went too far. The abuses were widespread enough that it's Wal-mart's corporate culture that is to blame. Until they show that they have altered their structure, they deserve the black marks against them.
As for the simple consumer side -- Wal-Mart stocks a stupidly narrow selection, of almost entirely shoddily-made products. This wouldn't be a bad thing, except that they're so cutthroat as to drive places that do have a good selection out of business.
I'm sorry, but if your best argument is reference two rich white guys who make their living by lying to an audience, I think you lose.
These guys wish they were Harry Houdini, but they aren't. Some examples of where they're just bat-shit crazy:
It really is possible to love someone your entire life.
Global Warming really is the biggest problem facing the planet today.
Secondhand smoke actually causes cancer.
AA really does help a huge number of Alcoholics quit.
The Boy Scouts are not ran by the Mormon Church.
We really are getting fatter as a nation
the Americans with Disabilities Act is a good thing
I varry on my feelings towards Wal-Mart. Yes, they made the whole darn industry more efficient. But they also monotonize the selection we have of consumer goods. If I want something that isn't popular enough for wal-mart to carry it, I practically have to go to the internet. And when no one's home during the day, ordering on-line is, at best, inconvenient.
But I sure as heck aren't going to let two professional con-men -- and that's what they are, even if they're usually honest about it -- tell me what is and isn't so.
The poster used this as an example of "capitalism gone awry" which it is not. Yes, it is. Capitalism, like democracy, will destroy itself on a long enough time-scale if there are not anti-capitalist checks to ensure that capitalism survives.
This topic is 12 minutes old and three post have already suggested we bury the command line No one suggested that you make the command line inaccessible. What they suggested was that you stop making the Linux GUI as crippled as the Windows 2000 command line.
Sure, the CLI is great. (I love the command-line in MySQL). But that's no excuse for making a half-assed GUI. Either make the GUI at least as expansive and full-featured as Windows, or drop the entire "config GUI" and just load up the darn text file.
The truth ain't flamebait assholes. Sorry, that's not the truth.
The United States Federal Government lives and dies by smart people. It's the smart people in the government that keep the planes flying, the nuclear weapons from blowing up in our faces, the law making halfway descent sense, and who translate the will of the elected charismatics into something mostly practical.
What the government doesn't want is smart rebels. Something entirely different from the larger subset of "smart people."
Enjoy that free health care though, hope you don't die of old ages while waiting for a slot. So accurate... right up to that.
There are comparable delays for elective surgery (and emergency surgery) between a overtly socialist medical care system, like in Canada or Europe, and a exploitist system like we have in the United States.
(It's not "Capitalist" until you can be a fair consumer -- and you can't.)
Because of some nice sounding sentences? No, because it politely lists the answers to the questions. Christianity is a very mature religion -- there is at least one answer to any question you have to pose to it.
How do you know this? Because some self-referential book told you? I'm sorry, this has nothing to do with religion but rather all the unsubstantiated assumptions that must be made in order to make this statement true or insightful. I count at least 5. There's only one, my friend. "The Christian God is real." Either the priests are right -- and thus their theology is accurate enough to satisfy the aforementioned Deity -- or they are wrong, and the whole religion is just a wild guess.
No Christian I know claims truth due to mere biblical reference. They proclaim belief in the Christian God, either by inherited teaching ("Mommy told me so") or by special relevation ("I met an Angel!" "I had a vision!" "I felt His Presence!")
I think D&D is to role-playing what Dragonball Z is to anime. Everyone should try it, and it's simple enough to introduce newbies to the genre, but as tastes grow mature and refined one should move past it to more, shall we say, verdant fields.
Alcohol and automobiles provide better examples.
D&D is beer / "Consumer" cars. Everyone starts out with it, and a few folks leave it because they want something that caters to their tastes better. These other choices require more work (finding players / earning cash / finding the damn books), and have real differences... but they don't get you any drunker or get you to your destination any faster.
IME, most people who play "D&D" start with the base game, and then take it to something else. Heck, the same line applies to every RPG system... so if you're going to hack it anyway, why not start with what's most popular?
1: What the hell is an MSO? Common etiquette is to explain terms that your audience may not understand, and industry-specific jargon is pretty much the reason that rule exists.
2: The FCC says "It must do X." YOUR industry can't seem to figure out how to make it do X. The blame doesn't lie with the FCC, it lies with your industry.
1: Gross price does not equal profit. If AT&T has two plans, one $40/mo and one $100/mo, but their profits are $10/mo and $1/mo respectively, they'll push you to the first plan. Why? Because that's where their profit is.
2: AT&T is not a monopoly. Microsoft is restrained from doing certain bundling actions with Windows, because they DO have a monopoly on Windows. AT&T & Apple do not have a monopoly on cell phone service, so if they wanted to they could require the purchase of a ham sandwhich with each monthly fee.
Science has a funny way of taking what were ordinary words, and attaching new meanings to them. And then lettings those new meanings blur into existing ones.
It is a scientific fact that species evolve, in the present day. This can be replicated, tested, duplicated, and has been observed on numerous occasions.
There is scientific consensus that, given enough time, evolution of one species will lead to the creation of new species, which cannot interbreed with either the original species or other evolutions thereof.
There is a historical theory that speciziation has occurred in the past. We see what appears to be intermediate steps from one species to another to another in the fossil record, and a commonality between modern species supports a common ancestry.
There is interesting speculation if the first life on Earth began on Earth, or if it began elsewhere. Some even conject that our planet's life could have been created by some odd alien terraforming experiment.
Now, up to this point, you'll hardly have any argument. You might have some bickering over how certain we are about the three points above, and I'm sure at least one person reading this article will disagree with the words I chose. However...
A discussion as to the ultimate origin of life -- be it divine creation by the hand of a sentient being from beyond our existence of causality, or as spontaneous genesis caused by an unlikely event of random chemical reactions that, after a few billion tries, finally hit on life -- is fundamentally a religious one, and any scientific endeavor that purports to solve it one way or the other is labeled under false pretense. Science cannot disprove God, and God seems content to withhold scientific evidence of his existence.
Now, for what it's worth, the question that you really DO need to have the Republicans answer is "Regardless of your religious convictions as to the origin of life, Do you believe that life evolves, and that understanding of this process is scientifically important?"
Don't make it a coded "are you a Creationist" slur. Don't try and and make it red-vs-blue or religion-vs-science. For the love of sanity, DON'T try and make it "pick one: God or Science? The right answer is Science."
I'm literally in shock right now. I thought Wizards of the Coast understood its consumer base better and was comprised of people more concerned about the integrity of the game and more competent about long-term business strategies.
They are. Go over to enworld.org and read the information.
3e was a much-needed refresh. 3.5 was a patch. 3.5 + all the cruft is an unstable, annoying, POS that I haven't played in years. Not because the game has gotten worse, but because a better game is so easy to make.
4e is necessary, and if they do it right I might just come back into the fold.
Hillary and Obama will continue the same crap bush started.
It depends on what you mean by "continue."
The American Federal Government is by design and tradition conservative. Absent a reason and a will to do something different, it continues doing the same thing. That is an important part of our country.
If you're in Afghanistan or Iraq you may not see any real difference between Hillary and W, but here in the US we'll see a huge difference. Among other things, I suspect we'll have an actual budget process and respect for the rule of law again.
What can be described as a 'criminal tool'? Why, anything that can be used in the commission of a crime. Behold the "reasonable man standard."
A criminal tool is something that a DA can stand in front of twelve randomly chosen citizens with no particular knowledge, and convince them that, not only that it can be used as a criminal tool, but that the defendant should have known that and did it anyway.
Seriously, is it possible any more to even pretend that the UN is anything but a forum for tinpot dictators and other nameless losers to bitch, complain, and blame the west for all of Earth's problems? That's, ah, er, the point of the United Nations. Avoid World War III by making a place where every nation can come and bitch to the rest of the world.
So OOXML name is a clear admission of hypocrisy: not a surprise to me anyway.
Hypocrisy? Huh?
OOXML is exactly what we've wanted from Microsoft for years. A document spec that can be read without spending hours attempting to reverse-engineer how Word stores files internally. They even made it a ZIP file of XML... exactly like OpenOffice.Org's original file format.
If anything, naming.docx et al "OOXML" is a tribute to where the idea came from in the first place.
Its the lack of space to store waste, rather than lack of fuel that's the limiting factor with nuclear fission.
No, it isn't. Or at least, not as you describe it.
Any nuclear waste that is hot enough to be dangerous to hold in your hand can still be used as an energy source. It may be impractical, but, well, if there wasn't any energy, you wouldn't be in any danger.
And most of this "hot" nuclear waste has a far shorter half-life. Every time a subatomic particle of radiation is released from a fission-reactive object, at least two (often more) atoms have changed to a lower state. Some of those will continue to decay, others are stable.
BTW, it's entirely feasible to use most of our nuclear "waste" to create elecrical power. We don't, because one of the intermediary steps between "spent uranium" and "electrictiy" is the critical components of a nuclear bomb.
If the majority of people had wanted to keep blacks oppressed the Klu Klux Klan would have taken control of the state and it would have been so. 1: The majority of more than a few southern states did put the KKK in power.
2: There's a big difference between "the majority of the nation", "the majority of an individual part of the nation", and "the majority of elected officials."
The greatest benefit to a republican form of democracy is that, instead of the mob ruling, the mob picks the ruler. It's a subtle difference, but it lets an empassioned, intelligent minority correct for the excesses of the majority.
3: There's a difference between the majority of people thinking that their peers should be oppressed, and that some people aren't their peers. If you oversimplify only a little bit, you can blame every single oppression in history on the dehumanization of the oppressed.
bitkeeper is not FREE software. I cannot use it in good conscience, and neither should you. For all intents and purposes, their source code is locked away. No. The source code is sealed in an envelope of hemp. You, a good citizen of the world, would never dare dream of touching any part of an illegal weed, and thus you never see it. But all you have to do is accept the world as it is, rather than how you think it should be, and then you can have the source code. You don't need to say that hemp is good, you don't even have to keep the envelope. You can even wear gloves.
The only thing keeping you from what you desire is your slavish adherence to a self-righteous code takien to an absurd extreme. I have no sympathy.
So WTF are these people doing ignoring MP3 in favor of WAV? They're not.
An MP3 is a compressed WAV. You can't support the former without doing almost all of the work to support the latter.
And if you think that HTML needs "music", well, you don't know what you're talking about. A few small-size, simple WAVs will do more for a website than a running background song ever could.
It is simply impossible to have a system that will identify EVERYONE in the world... that will not also allow the spammers to grab fake addresses whenever they want to. You don't know what "impossible" means, do you? Impossible means "if you had unlimited funding, you still couldn't do it."
A total identification system is fairly easy. The hard part would be picking the right one, and handling bad authorizers. It may be "impractical", but it sure as heck isn't "impossible."
(Absolutely easy method: one e-mail address per real person, always based on their nation of residence. Anonymnity goes out the window, but you get real authorization.)
This is the wrong day for this newsstory. Why? Because one city was destroyed today? It was in the middle of a war, it was done to end the war, and, unless you consider "sue for peace and let Japan continue to rape China" a fair end to the war, it saved lives.
However, how about you boycott fire for two days in February. The exact same rationale applies. Hiroshima should not be special because it was just one plane that destroyed the city. Dresden, and Tokyo, both were essentially destroyed, both in the conduct of a war, and both by bombing from above in an especially horrific fashion.
Slashdot Mirror
Wal-Mart is despised because, despite being the nation's largest employer, they treat/have treated their employees and neighbors terribly. Wal-Mart has been successfully sued for gross violations of labor laws--not paying employees for time worked, forcing child employees (under 18) to work far more than the law allows, and locking employees into a building overnight. They've also closed down entire stores, simply to punish their employees from forming a union.
It doesn't matter if these are the direct result of the CEO's instructions or a few managers who went too far. The abuses were widespread enough that it's Wal-mart's corporate culture that is to blame. Until they show that they have altered their structure, they deserve the black marks against them.
As for the simple consumer side -- Wal-Mart stocks a stupidly narrow selection, of almost entirely shoddily-made products. This wouldn't be a bad thing, except that they're so cutthroat as to drive places that do have a good selection out of business.
I'm sorry, but if your best argument is reference two rich white guys who make their living by lying to an audience, I think you lose.
These guys wish they were Harry Houdini, but they aren't. Some examples of where they're just bat-shit crazy:
I varry on my feelings towards Wal-Mart. Yes, they made the whole darn industry more efficient. But they also monotonize the selection we have of consumer goods. If I want something that isn't popular enough for wal-mart to carry it, I practically have to go to the internet. And when no one's home during the day, ordering on-line is, at best, inconvenient.
But I sure as heck aren't going to let two professional con-men -- and that's what they are, even if they're usually honest about it -- tell me what is and isn't so.
Sure, the CLI is great. (I love the command-line in MySQL). But that's no excuse for making a half-assed GUI. Either make the GUI at least as expansive and full-featured as Windows, or drop the entire "config GUI" and just load up the darn text file.
The United States Federal Government lives and dies by smart people. It's the smart people in the government that keep the planes flying, the nuclear weapons from blowing up in our faces, the law making halfway descent sense, and who translate the will of the elected charismatics into something mostly practical.
What the government doesn't want is smart rebels. Something entirely different from the larger subset of "smart people."
There are comparable delays for elective surgery (and emergency surgery) between a overtly socialist medical care system, like in Canada or Europe, and a exploitist system like we have in the United States.
(It's not "Capitalist" until you can be a fair consumer -- and you can't.)
No Christian I know claims truth due to mere biblical reference. They proclaim belief in the Christian God, either by inherited teaching ("Mommy told me so") or by special relevation ("I met an Angel!" "I had a vision!" "I felt His Presence!")
I think D&D is to role-playing what Dragonball Z is to anime. Everyone should try it, and it's simple enough to introduce newbies to the genre, but as tastes grow mature and refined one should move past it to more, shall we say, verdant fields.
Alcohol and automobiles provide better examples.
D&D is beer / "Consumer" cars. Everyone starts out with it, and a few folks leave it because they want something that caters to their tastes better. These other choices require more work (finding players / earning cash / finding the damn books), and have real differences... but they don't get you any drunker or get you to your destination any faster.
IME, most people who play "D&D" start with the base game, and then take it to something else. Heck, the same line applies to every RPG system... so if you're going to hack it anyway, why not start with what's most popular?
1: What the hell is an MSO? Common etiquette is to explain terms that your audience may not understand, and industry-specific jargon is pretty much the reason that rule exists.
2: The FCC says "It must do X." YOUR industry can't seem to figure out how to make it do X. The blame doesn't lie with the FCC, it lies with your industry.
Wrong. Doubly wrong, in fact.
1: Gross price does not equal profit. If AT&T has two plans, one $40/mo and one $100/mo, but their profits are $10/mo and $1/mo respectively, they'll push you to the first plan. Why? Because that's where their profit is.
2: AT&T is not a monopoly. Microsoft is restrained from doing certain bundling actions with Windows, because they DO have a monopoly on Windows. AT&T & Apple do not have a monopoly on cell phone service, so if they wanted to they could require the purchase of a ham sandwhich with each monthly fee.
Science has a funny way of taking what were ordinary words, and attaching new meanings to them. And then lettings those new meanings blur into existing ones.
It is a scientific fact that species evolve, in the present day. This can be replicated, tested, duplicated, and has been observed on numerous occasions.
There is scientific consensus that, given enough time, evolution of one species will lead to the creation of new species, which cannot interbreed with either the original species or other evolutions thereof.
There is a historical theory that speciziation has occurred in the past. We see what appears to be intermediate steps from one species to another to another in the fossil record, and a commonality between modern species supports a common ancestry.
There is interesting speculation if the first life on Earth began on Earth, or if it began elsewhere. Some even conject that our planet's life could have been created by some odd alien terraforming experiment.
Now, up to this point, you'll hardly have any argument. You might have some bickering over how certain we are about the three points above, and I'm sure at least one person reading this article will disagree with the words I chose. However...
A discussion as to the ultimate origin of life -- be it divine creation by the hand of a sentient being from beyond our existence of causality, or as spontaneous genesis caused by an unlikely event of random chemical reactions that, after a few billion tries, finally hit on life -- is fundamentally a religious one, and any scientific endeavor that purports to solve it one way or the other is labeled under false pretense. Science cannot disprove God, and God seems content to withhold scientific evidence of his existence.
Now, for what it's worth, the question that you really DO need to have the Republicans answer is "Regardless of your religious convictions as to the origin of life, Do you believe that life evolves, and that understanding of this process is scientifically important?"
Don't make it a coded "are you a Creationist" slur. Don't try and and make it red-vs-blue or religion-vs-science. For the love of sanity, DON'T try and make it "pick one: God or Science? The right answer is Science."
I'm literally in shock right now. I thought Wizards of the Coast understood its consumer base better and was comprised of people more concerned about the integrity of the game and more competent about long-term business strategies.
They are. Go over to enworld.org and read the information.
3e was a much-needed refresh. 3.5 was a patch. 3.5 + all the cruft is an unstable, annoying, POS that I haven't played in years. Not because the game has gotten worse, but because a better game is so easy to make.
4e is necessary, and if they do it right I might just come back into the fold.
Hillary and Obama will continue the same crap bush started.
It depends on what you mean by "continue."
The American Federal Government is by design and tradition conservative. Absent a reason and a will to do something different, it continues doing the same thing. That is an important part of our country.
If you're in Afghanistan or Iraq you may not see any real difference between Hillary and W, but here in the US we'll see a huge difference. Among other things, I suspect we'll have an actual budget process and respect for the rule of law again.
A criminal tool is something that a DA can stand in front of twelve randomly chosen citizens with no particular knowledge, and convince them that, not only that it can be used as a criminal tool, but that the defendant should have known that and did it anyway.
All the rest of it is just gravy.
maybe I could hide lots of charges
How? Do you think people won't ever look at the amount on their detatchable pay-slip? you think they won't notice when it's higher than they expected?
I hate to break it do you, but not all "journalists" do those, either.
Or do you really think that papers like The Sun or the New York Post are fact-checked?
So OOXML name is a clear admission of hypocrisy: not a surprise to me anyway.
.docx et al "OOXML" is a tribute to where the idea came from in the first place.
Hypocrisy? Huh?
OOXML is exactly what we've wanted from Microsoft for years. A document spec that can be read without spending hours attempting to reverse-engineer how Word stores files internally. They even made it a ZIP file of XML... exactly like OpenOffice.Org's original file format.
If anything, naming
Its the lack of space to store waste, rather than lack of fuel that's the limiting factor with nuclear fission.
No, it isn't. Or at least, not as you describe it.
Any nuclear waste that is hot enough to be dangerous to hold in your hand can still be used as an energy source. It may be impractical, but, well, if there wasn't any energy, you wouldn't be in any danger.
And most of this "hot" nuclear waste has a far shorter half-life. Every time a subatomic particle of radiation is released from a fission-reactive object, at least two (often more) atoms have changed to a lower state. Some of those will continue to decay, others are stable.
BTW, it's entirely feasible to use most of our nuclear "waste" to create elecrical power. We don't, because one of the intermediary steps between "spent uranium" and "electrictiy" is the critical components of a nuclear bomb.
2: There's a big difference between "the majority of the nation", "the majority of an individual part of the nation", and "the majority of elected officials."
The greatest benefit to a republican form of democracy is that, instead of the mob ruling, the mob picks the ruler. It's a subtle difference, but it lets an empassioned, intelligent minority correct for the excesses of the majority.
3: There's a difference between the majority of people thinking that their peers should be oppressed, and that some people aren't their peers. If you oversimplify only a little bit, you can blame every single oppression in history on the dehumanization of the oppressed.
The only thing keeping you from what you desire is your slavish adherence to a self-righteous code takien to an absurd extreme. I have no sympathy.
An MP3 is a compressed WAV. You can't support the former without doing almost all of the work to support the latter.
And if you think that HTML needs "music", well, you don't know what you're talking about. A few small-size, simple WAVs will do more for a website than a running background song ever could.
A baby will earn money, and thus pay premiums, for 14-40 years longer than their parent. It's a good investment on the company's part.
A total identification system is fairly easy. The hard part would be picking the right one, and handling bad authorizers. It may be "impractical", but it sure as heck isn't "impossible."
(Absolutely easy method: one e-mail address per real person, always based on their nation of residence. Anonymnity goes out the window, but you get real authorization.)
However, how about you boycott fire for two days in February. The exact same rationale applies. Hiroshima should not be special because it was just one plane that destroyed the city. Dresden, and Tokyo, both were essentially destroyed, both in the conduct of a war, and both by bombing from above in an especially horrific fashion.