No kidding. Right now my wife and I share something like 1400 minutes a month for $89/month. And we could probably drop that down because we've never used all our minutes in a month. If I wanted to save a little money, I'd take a close look at how many minutes we're really using and adjust our plan accordingly. But, truth be told, $90/month for essentially unlimited domestic calling and 100% free calling between the two of us and others that use the same provider, I really like being able to pay $90/month and forget about it.
There are enough advertisements in my life. I don't need more on my cell phone.
I will agree with what someone else posted, though. I'd like GPS on my Treo and I'd like my Treo to report my GPS location to some service every couple of minutes. Then, at the touch of a couple keys, the service would immediately tell me the closest restauraunt, book store, auto shop, furniture store, etc. that I may happen to want. But I'd only want those advertisements on request, not pushed to me. And I definitely don't want to have my phone bothering me to look at advertisements throughout the day, or have to look at an ad at some point because I ran out of ad-financed "minutes."
Cell phone service is too cheap to make this worthwhile except for the bottom of the economic ladder that are really willing to dedicate that much of their own time to get a free phone... and I'm not sure how much advertisers are interested in the low-income, stingy demographic.
I'll settle for Democratic majorities in Congress and the Senate
Since the Democrats didn't run on any substantive issues other than "We're not Bush," I am completely unphased by the Democrats victory. I'm even more entertained by the liberals I hear and read thinking this is the end of the conservative movement and a huge event when, in historical terms, this sixth-year mid-term resulted in an almost precisely average number of losses for the president's party. Rather than a watershed event, this is a perfectly average sixth-year mid-term.
The great thing is that with the president being GOP and the Democrats holding only +1 in the Senate, the Democrats won't be able to actually do anything except make noise and launch investigations. So their liberal agenda is D.O.A. but they have the power to make Congress spend all its time on a bunch of wild goose chases.
2008 is going to be fun. Without the pent-up Bush hatred (which was released last week), and without the ability to pass any substantive legislation, and without being able to complain about supposedly-rigged elections, the Democrats aren't going to have any easy way to convince voters to vote for them in 2008.
I'm not defending Bush's spending. But if I can make a little progress in debunking the myth that Clinton ever had a surplus, I'll consider that a reasonable contribution for the day.
Really funny. Not! Bush has increased the size of government and took the US from the biggest budget surplus to the biggest budget deficit ever.
Despite popular urban legend, there was no budget surplus in the Clinton administration. You need look no further than the U.S. Bureau of the Public Debt to see that not once did the national debt go down from one year to the next not one. What Clinton did was borrowed $248 billion from other government agencies (Intergovernmental debt) to pay $231 billion of public debt--meaning the debt still increased by $17 billion.
There definitely wasn't a surplus under Clinton. Borrowing from your Visa to pay your Mastercard doesn't count as a surplus.
Like the other guy said, to avoid slander lawsuits. And maybe to keep their content somewhere above the level of the tabloid news which is where unsubstantiated and irrelevant "news" belongs.
I'd argue that Dean is right: without the presidency, what can the Democrats do about Iraq?
That's absolutely disgusting and a cop-out. It sounds like a pre-justification for failure in which the Demcrats are already excusing themselves. "Yes, we asked you to vote for us for a change, but you know what? We can't really do anything unless you give us the presidency, too." Neat that they didn't mention that until after the election. They've spent the last year convincing the electorate that by voting for them in 2006, they'd be voting for change. If they now think they can make excuses for 2 years and land the White House in 2008, they're sadly mistaken.
Democrats have been mounting a negative anti-Bush campaign for 4 years. They've finally had success. They now need to wake up and realize that they have exactly two years to come up with something they can show the voters in 2008. Otherwise, I have no doubt they will be shown the door.
So if the Democrats lose, Bush is to blame. If the Democrats win, it's Bush's fault that the Dems didn't win by more. Can you people even hear what you're saying? It's fun to watch.
The fact that you even ask that question suggests to me that answering it would be a waste of time.
I believe what the poster above would consider the "other" side has been adequately bombarding the media with "their" side.
If you think the "other side" to global warming (i.e., that it isn't happening or, at least, not caused significantly by humans) is covered in the media, again, you seem to be without a clue.
Of course, I get the sense that the poster above may not have actually seen the book... there's a lot of information provided in the book - and while there's the running narrative, even ignoring the potentially "biased" narrative, the remaining data points provide an unbiased and consequential amount of information to draw ones own conclusion.
Don't tell me you're saying that the "numbers can't lie?" No response to that belief is even necessary in educated circles. Heck, part of what TFA said was that the numbers being used as the foremost authority (IPCC) are being massaged to eliminate unhelpful data. I wonder how the data in the book was massaged? Did you check?
The data in the book were extensively fact-checked (many times over, if I recall) - so you can rest assured that the data is accurate.
No, I can't. And you shouldn't either. Did you fact-check the data in the book yourself? Did you Google any descenting opinion? If not, you did NOT do your homework and you're swallowing one-sided propaganda hook, line, and sinker.
Yeah, those silly Democrats. They're not happy if Republicans steal an election with paper ballots, they're not happy if Republicans steal them with electronic ballots. How do they want you to steal them, eh?
Let's not be a gullible partisan, ok? If you think Republicans steal elections, please be intellectually honest and admit that Democrats do so too. Neither party has clean hands historically. The Democrats just happen to be the first party that pretty much justifies their losses exclusively on perceived fraud rather than looking internally to finding out why they don't win elections.
This election is telling. I read in the last 24 hours that polls indicate that while most of the people that are voting Republican are voting for the Republican, most of those that are voting Democrat are voting against the Republican. That might be enough for the Democrats tomorrow, but it isn't indicative of a long-term groundswell of support for Democrats that would help them in 2008 or beyond.
Democrats lose because people think their policies suck; sure, there might be some fraud here and there. I'm sure the Democrats do it too. But the main reason they are where they are is because people don't like their policies.
When I have more time I plan to investigate that movie. I watched it for about an hour (most of the show, I guess) on HBO the other night. It sure seemed to me like there was a lot of selective editing which, as Moore taught us, can let you paint any picture you want.
Put it this way: I trust "Hacking Democracy" about as much as I trust Diebold. I really wish Moore hadn't brought us the trash-umentary genre. There's enough bullshit to filter out there without these people adding to it. Unfortunately, I suspect that many people--in their quest to bury Diebold--will overlook the obvious bullshit and let it by just because they happen to agree with the motives.
However the actual scientists carefully considered alternative explanations and only reached conclusions after many years of testing competing hypotheses. Don't use the politicization of the topic in the mainstream media to shmear the scientific discussion.
That you think the "scientific discussion" is somehow exempt from politics is worrisome. In a perfect world it would be. This isn't a perfect world.
How this bad science gets transformed into "inarguably, etc." I'll never understand. How this bad science gets turned into "but we have to account for the worst possible case" for political purposes--that I fully understand.
If you understand the latter, you will fully understand the former.
What sage advice. "Go read one side of the story and draw your own conclusion." I can't believe you're actually proud of the conclusion you've drawn, whatever that conclusion might be.
I just recently changed my major from computer science to accounting to keep school from being so boring.
Is that a joke? Accounting was the one class I literally could not stay awake for at the university. I really felt bad for the professor because I didn't want to insult her by falling asleep, but I couldn't avoid nodding off. There was nothing to keep me awake in accounting. It's a bunch of silly number-pushing that, these days, just exists to keep accountants employed. Most of them (accountants) could be replaced by computers that would probably do the job more honestly than many human accounts (see Enron, Worldcom, etc.).
I agree completely. I'm willing to jump through very few hoops to get employed. I was even interested in some Lockheed Martin positions but not enough to go through their employment website. Do little puzzles to apply? I honestly have better things to do with my time (and actually reading Slashdot isn't one of them, but I digress).
I agree with castodridae... the puzzles might eliminate the low-end of the spectrum but you're also going to eliminate a lot of the high-end talent to save HR some interviewing time. The job of HR should be to find the best talent for the company, not to look for ways to save their own time.
This is probably the wrong attitude for many people to take (maybe even myself), but my experience has been that if you have to seek a company out, you're probably wasting your time--like you said, it's a crap shoot.
When a company seeks you out, you're looking good. If you become good enough at what you do to stand out, companies will indeed look for you. And, as others said, if the pay and benefits are right, done deal. The "cool factor" is (or should be) important only to those just starting in their field. For those with enough experience to have companies actively seeking them out, the work experience is far more important than where that person may or may not have worked.
If you're not good enough that companies are actively seeking you out, get used to resume submissions being a roll of the dice and spend your time getting better (and more well-known) at what you do rather than spamming out resumes.
What exactly does "competitive" mean? I almost always interpret it as meaning "average"--or just slightly above. And that's not enough to peak my interest at this stage of my career.
His comments were not inaccurate. The fact that he has not flown does not make him unqualified to render an opinion on the matter; so he didn't discredit himself.
The belief that he is unqualified is why we have idiots that believe that just because some senator is rich that it is somehow impossible for him to act in a way that is in the intersts of poor people. You don't have to be a minority to know racism is bad, you don't have to be poor to know that being poor sucks, and you don't have to have flown since 9/11 to know that we wouldn't have put up with this level of security prior to 9/11.
When I saw this in the news the other day, I said, "Duh... I wondered about this lack of security a few years ago." As soon as you allow people to print their own boarding passes on their own printers, it's a piece of cake to print your own. Obviously you'd never get on a plane with it, but every time I presented my home-printed boarding pass to the TSA guys that check your documents before you get metal-detected, I always wondered, "Do these people really think they can recognize a valid boarding pass from a home-brewed one?" This isn't rocket scientist. I'd have to assume that anyone that deals with computers and has more than a few IQ points thought of it. This "security researcher" didn't do anything special whatsoever.
If he really wanted to bring attention to it, he could've just posted a website that says, "Printing your own false boarding pass is a piece of cake." End of story, the truth, and no laws broken. But actually putting up a website that serves absolutely no practical purpose except to violate the law was stupid and unnecessary.
I wouldn't be surprised if the ultimate response to this is that we will no longer be able to check-in from home and print our own boarding passes. I suspect, at best, we'll have to go through one of those kiosks in the airport and get an official ticket printed before we get in line for TSA.
Thanks, Christopher... Very few people actually believe the security is real anyway so you proved nothing that people didn't already know. You have, however, highlighted it so that the government will most likely have to enter CYA mode and further decrease the convenience of flying by banning home-printed boarding passes. For that, the flying public thanks you.
Most everyone at my kids highschool still uses CD's in their CD player.
But do they use the CD player to play CDs they've purchased, or compilations they've burned from music they've downloaded or copied from a friend? I lived in Mexico (not exactly a high-tech, high-income area) for awhile and my sister-in-law and the friends of hers that I know did, in fact, use CD players... but the CDs were home-burned and I'm not aware of any of them actually buying any music in any form.
And at $20 a CD (or whatever they cost these days), it doesn't take more than about 3 or 4 for a low-end MP3 player nor more than about 7 or 8 to pay for an iPod Nano. The idea that MP3 players are only for the rich is absurd. Anyone that has money to spend on a CD on anything approaching a regular basis would be much better off buying an MP3 player.
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I'm sorry, I don't trust anyone with a uid that high.
No kidding. Right now my wife and I share something like 1400 minutes a month for $89/month. And we could probably drop that down because we've never used all our minutes in a month. If I wanted to save a little money, I'd take a close look at how many minutes we're really using and adjust our plan accordingly. But, truth be told, $90/month for essentially unlimited domestic calling and 100% free calling between the two of us and others that use the same provider, I really like being able to pay $90/month and forget about it.
There are enough advertisements in my life. I don't need more on my cell phone.
I will agree with what someone else posted, though. I'd like GPS on my Treo and I'd like my Treo to report my GPS location to some service every couple of minutes. Then, at the touch of a couple keys, the service would immediately tell me the closest restauraunt, book store, auto shop, furniture store, etc. that I may happen to want. But I'd only want those advertisements on request, not pushed to me. And I definitely don't want to have my phone bothering me to look at advertisements throughout the day, or have to look at an ad at some point because I ran out of ad-financed "minutes."
Cell phone service is too cheap to make this worthwhile except for the bottom of the economic ladder that are really willing to dedicate that much of their own time to get a free phone... and I'm not sure how much advertisers are interested in the low-income, stingy demographic.
No thank you.
Since the Democrats didn't run on any substantive issues other than "We're not Bush," I am completely unphased by the Democrats victory. I'm even more entertained by the liberals I hear and read thinking this is the end of the conservative movement and a huge event when, in historical terms, this sixth-year mid-term resulted in an almost precisely average number of losses for the president's party. Rather than a watershed event, this is a perfectly average sixth-year mid-term.
The great thing is that with the president being GOP and the Democrats holding only +1 in the Senate, the Democrats won't be able to actually do anything except make noise and launch investigations. So their liberal agenda is D.O.A. but they have the power to make Congress spend all its time on a bunch of wild goose chases.
2008 is going to be fun. Without the pent-up Bush hatred (which was released last week), and without the ability to pass any substantive legislation, and without being able to complain about supposedly-rigged elections, the Democrats aren't going to have any easy way to convince voters to vote for them in 2008.
Despite popular urban legend, there was no budget surplus in the Clinton administration. You need look no further than the U.S. Bureau of the Public Debt to see that not once did the national debt go down from one year to the next not one. What Clinton did was borrowed $248 billion from other government agencies (Intergovernmental debt) to pay $231 billion of public debt--meaning the debt still increased by $17 billion. There definitely wasn't a surplus under Clinton. Borrowing from your Visa to pay your Mastercard doesn't count as a surplus.
Like the other guy said, to avoid slander lawsuits. And maybe to keep their content somewhere above the level of the tabloid news which is where unsubstantiated and irrelevant "news" belongs.
That's absolutely disgusting and a cop-out. It sounds like a pre-justification for failure in which the Demcrats are already excusing themselves. "Yes, we asked you to vote for us for a change, but you know what? We can't really do anything unless you give us the presidency, too." Neat that they didn't mention that until after the election. They've spent the last year convincing the electorate that by voting for them in 2006, they'd be voting for change. If they now think they can make excuses for 2 years and land the White House in 2008, they're sadly mistaken.
Democrats have been mounting a negative anti-Bush campaign for 4 years. They've finally had success. They now need to wake up and realize that they have exactly two years to come up with something they can show the voters in 2008. Otherwise, I have no doubt they will be shown the door.
Obviously this post was made before Bush completely debunked your conclusion.
Electoral college? Uhm... not this year.
The fact that you even ask that question suggests to me that answering it would be a waste of time.
I believe what the poster above would consider the "other" side has been adequately bombarding the media with "their" side.
If you think the "other side" to global warming (i.e., that it isn't happening or, at least, not caused significantly by humans) is covered in the media, again, you seem to be without a clue.
Of course, I get the sense that the poster above may not have actually seen the book ... there's a lot of information provided in the book - and while there's the running narrative, even ignoring the potentially "biased" narrative, the remaining data points provide an unbiased and consequential amount of information to draw ones own conclusion.
Don't tell me you're saying that the "numbers can't lie?" No response to that belief is even necessary in educated circles. Heck, part of what TFA said was that the numbers being used as the foremost authority (IPCC) are being massaged to eliminate unhelpful data. I wonder how the data in the book was massaged? Did you check?
The data in the book were extensively fact-checked (many times over, if I recall) - so you can rest assured that the data is accurate.
No, I can't. And you shouldn't either. Did you fact-check the data in the book yourself? Did you Google any descenting opinion? If not, you did NOT do your homework and you're swallowing one-sided propaganda hook, line, and sinker.
Let's not be a gullible partisan, ok? If you think Republicans steal elections, please be intellectually honest and admit that Democrats do so too. Neither party has clean hands historically. The Democrats just happen to be the first party that pretty much justifies their losses exclusively on perceived fraud rather than looking internally to finding out why they don't win elections.
This election is telling. I read in the last 24 hours that polls indicate that while most of the people that are voting Republican are voting for the Republican, most of those that are voting Democrat are voting against the Republican. That might be enough for the Democrats tomorrow, but it isn't indicative of a long-term groundswell of support for Democrats that would help them in 2008 or beyond.
Democrats lose because people think their policies suck; sure, there might be some fraud here and there. I'm sure the Democrats do it too. But the main reason they are where they are is because people don't like their policies.
Put it this way: I trust "Hacking Democracy" about as much as I trust Diebold. I really wish Moore hadn't brought us the trash-umentary genre. There's enough bullshit to filter out there without these people adding to it. Unfortunately, I suspect that many people--in their quest to bury Diebold--will overlook the obvious bullshit and let it by just because they happen to agree with the motives.
The ends do not justify the means.
That you think the "scientific discussion" is somehow exempt from politics is worrisome. In a perfect world it would be. This isn't a perfect world.
If you understand the latter, you will fully understand the former.
What sage advice. "Go read one side of the story and draw your own conclusion." I can't believe you're actually proud of the conclusion you've drawn, whatever that conclusion might be.
Is that a joke? Accounting was the one class I literally could not stay awake for at the university. I really felt bad for the professor because I didn't want to insult her by falling asleep, but I couldn't avoid nodding off. There was nothing to keep me awake in accounting. It's a bunch of silly number-pushing that, these days, just exists to keep accountants employed. Most of them (accountants) could be replaced by computers that would probably do the job more honestly than many human accounts (see Enron, Worldcom, etc.).
I agree with castodridae... the puzzles might eliminate the low-end of the spectrum but you're also going to eliminate a lot of the high-end talent to save HR some interviewing time. The job of HR should be to find the best talent for the company, not to look for ways to save their own time.
When a company seeks you out, you're looking good. If you become good enough at what you do to stand out, companies will indeed look for you. And, as others said, if the pay and benefits are right, done deal. The "cool factor" is (or should be) important only to those just starting in their field. For those with enough experience to have companies actively seeking them out, the work experience is far more important than where that person may or may not have worked.
If you're not good enough that companies are actively seeking you out, get used to resume submissions being a roll of the dice and spend your time getting better (and more well-known) at what you do rather than spamming out resumes.
What exactly does "competitive" mean? I almost always interpret it as meaning "average"--or just slightly above. And that's not enough to peak my interest at this stage of my career.
His comments were not inaccurate. The fact that he has not flown does not make him unqualified to render an opinion on the matter; so he didn't discredit himself.
The belief that he is unqualified is why we have idiots that believe that just because some senator is rich that it is somehow impossible for him to act in a way that is in the intersts of poor people. You don't have to be a minority to know racism is bad, you don't have to be poor to know that being poor sucks, and you don't have to have flown since 9/11 to know that we wouldn't have put up with this level of security prior to 9/11.
When I saw this in the news the other day, I said, "Duh... I wondered about this lack of security a few years ago." As soon as you allow people to print their own boarding passes on their own printers, it's a piece of cake to print your own. Obviously you'd never get on a plane with it, but every time I presented my home-printed boarding pass to the TSA guys that check your documents before you get metal-detected, I always wondered, "Do these people really think they can recognize a valid boarding pass from a home-brewed one?" This isn't rocket scientist. I'd have to assume that anyone that deals with computers and has more than a few IQ points thought of it. This "security researcher" didn't do anything special whatsoever.
If he really wanted to bring attention to it, he could've just posted a website that says, "Printing your own false boarding pass is a piece of cake." End of story, the truth, and no laws broken. But actually putting up a website that serves absolutely no practical purpose except to violate the law was stupid and unnecessary.
I wouldn't be surprised if the ultimate response to this is that we will no longer be able to check-in from home and print our own boarding passes. I suspect, at best, we'll have to go through one of those kiosks in the airport and get an official ticket printed before we get in line for TSA.
Thanks, Christopher... Very few people actually believe the security is real anyway so you proved nothing that people didn't already know. You have, however, highlighted it so that the government will most likely have to enter CYA mode and further decrease the convenience of flying by banning home-printed boarding passes. For that, the flying public thanks you.
But do they use the CD player to play CDs they've purchased, or compilations they've burned from music they've downloaded or copied from a friend? I lived in Mexico (not exactly a high-tech, high-income area) for awhile and my sister-in-law and the friends of hers that I know did, in fact, use CD players... but the CDs were home-burned and I'm not aware of any of them actually buying any music in any form.
And at $20 a CD (or whatever they cost these days), it doesn't take more than about 3 or 4 for a low-end MP3 player nor more than about 7 or 8 to pay for an iPod Nano. The idea that MP3 players are only for the rich is absurd. Anyone that has money to spend on a CD on anything approaching a regular basis would be much better off buying an MP3 player.