Extremist Christian groups exist, and they send out death threats on a regular basis to a wide variety of people for all sorts of reasons. The difference between them and the Muslim extremists is the Muslim extremists are much better funded and better organized, so they're able to carry out their threats more often and in a much more spectacular fashion.
Sort of, but I think it mostly derives from certain Muslim traditions that either discourage or outright ban visual depictions of any living creature, particularly humans. This is part of the reason the Taliban in Afghanistan blew up those giant statues of Buddha, and also the reason we had all those stories early in the "war on terror" about how hard it was to find specific bad guys we were looking for (because few or no pictures of them existed, because having their picture taken was forbidden). Extremist Islamic groups have taken these traditions and radicalized them to the point where basically any depiction of Mohammad (or presumably anyone else, although they seem to get particularly offended if it's Mohammad) punishable by death by suicide bomber.
More mainstream Muslims don't care quite that much about it, and it's worth noting that there are plenty of paintings and other art works in Muslim areas featuring visual depictions of Muhammad dating back hundreds of years. This is just another symptom of what happens when people with extremist views have access to lots of explosives: their views get a whole lot more attention than they normally would.
Actually, I'm old enough to be a 15 year old's father, but I always appreciate it when people underestimate my age. Also, if you don't think Slashdot has anything in common with 3rd grade recess (especially the politics section), you're either new here or you were never in 3rd grade.
I don't think that's necessarily a conclusive argument. I can draw a beautiful picture on page 874 of my personal copy of the federal tax code, but that doesn't make the tax code art.
Without question there is art in video games, but the question is is the video game itself a piece of art? While the various character models, backgrounds, and even cinema clips are art, is the game as a whole? I'd argue that it is, because the design of the gameplay and the storyline, alterable by the user or not, is art in much the same way the architectural design of a building can be art. Additionally, there is such a thing as "interactive art" in which the observer is invited to interact with the art work in various ways. How is this different from a video game?
Of course, ultimately what is and isn't art is in the eye of the beholder. Ebert is entitled to his opinion as to what he considers art, as am I. It just so happens that he's wrong;).
Leaving aside the usual nonsense that kids today are worthless and can't do anything right, the problem is more complicated than that. Many universities have stepped away from the idea of going to college as a way to get a well-rounded education and have positioned themselves as places to get a piece of paper that will let you get a good job. Combine this with the increasing number of positions requiring a college degree, and you get a lot more people more interested in just getting through and getting that piece of paper as quickly as possible than they are with actually learning anything.
College is quickly becoming like high school: It's a base requirement that everyone has to go through if they don't want to spend the rest of their lives picking lettuce, so people are going to go and try and get through it as quickly and painlessly as possible. There have always been people who do this of course, and cheating is certainly not a new problem, but the above-mentioned issues may make it more prevalent than it once was.
Remember, though, that our generation cheated as well. Every college in the country has an honor code, and many of them have been in place for decades (or longer). These codes wouldn't exist if no one was cheating before.
That only works for Google because Google makes basket-loads of money on advertising. Google's "product" is its users' eyeballs, not the software itself. Oracle has an entirely different business model. If Oracle was a web property and sold advertising it could follow the Google model, but it isn't anything close to that.
Also, all companies (at least all public companies) care about maximizing their own profit, even Google. If they didn't, their shareholders would not be very happy with them.
It depends on how you define "mankind", I guess. Homo sapiens has been around for around 200-400 thousand years. Modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, have been around for something like 130,000 years. Granted, anything we could call civilization probably happened much more recently than that, but I'd wager private industry wasn't doing much in the way of safety standards prior to that point either.
The Federal Reserve is not the one who prints money. The US Mint is. The Federal Reserve is what keeps the money worth what it is (or at least tries to).
That's not quite right. The US Mint only makes coins, not paper money. The US Bureau of Engraving and Printing makes paper money. All currency, though, is distributed (or "issued") after it's been created by the Federal Reserve, so the OP is not really factually incorrect.
Mankind has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and yet these services only became available when the government stepped in and provided them. Read up on working conditions during the Gilded Age before all of the various safe employment laws and agencies were created for one example. You can also read up on the deplorable conditions in meat packing plants before the USDA stepped in.
So, when exactly were all of these other institutions going to get around to providing any of this stuff? People keep saying if we got rid of the government the private sector would provide, but the fact is the private sector worked without significant government intervention for quite a long time, and it sucked ass for anyone not belonging to the moneyed elite.
Taxes are calculated on an annual basis, and everyone's year starts at the same time for simplicity's sake and to avoid mass confusion. Once we start from this basis, having a single deadline is basically unavoidable, since if my deadline is earlier in the year than my neighbor's, the system is unfair to me because I have to file earlier and possibly pay money earlier than my neighbor does. So, the only real solution that's fair to everyone without causing mass confusion is a single deadline.
Of course, the major problem is that everyone just loves to wait until the deadline to do anything, so the IRS gets slammed. Most people filing taxes are owed a refund, so it's in their own best interest to file as early as possible. Further, if you're owed money the deadline really doesn't apply to you anyway. You can file weeks or even months after the deadline, and as long as you don't owe any money the IRS will happily accept your return and cut you a check. Still, though, most people will file at or very near the deadline because they're both paranoid and lazy: Too lazy to file early, and too paranoid to file after the deadline even if they're owed a refund.
Personally, I filed my taxes back in February and got my direct-deposited refund in less than a week. Taxes are far less painful if you avoid the rush at the deadline.
I'm reminded of the Futurama episode where they go to a museum of the 20th century and everything there is ridiculously inaccurate because of how information tends to get lost and garbled over time. I can just imagine what a museum of the 21st century will look like if their primary source is old tweets. They'll probably think our self-imposed 140 character limit was due to some bizarre superstition and we worshiped someone known only as "aplusk" as a God whose wisdom came down to us in the form of what will appear to them (and to many of us) as complete gibberish.
If he did all that he would be Buzz Aldrin, a man now almost as reviled for his relentless self-promotion as he is respected for his role in the space program. Neil and Buzz are both American heroes, but I'd say of the two Buzz's reputation has been the most tarnished, thanks in no small part to his constant spotlight-hunting.
Calling someone else a "total scumbag" in a sentence where you've already mentioned Tom DeLay is grammatically incorrect. It's like saying "Sure, Stalin was bad, but Dave in Accounting is evil".
To be fair, Dave in Accounting steals my lunch out of the office fridge every goddamn day, and Stalin never did that even once. So yeah, Dave is fucking evil.
As much as we all despise meetings, they are often needed. I've seen email exchanges go on for days arguing about something that could have been resolved in about 15 minutes with a simple conference call. There's also the issue that workers can tend to feel lost or abandoned if they don't have at least semi-regular communication with their bosses, even if it's just a weekly status meeting. For whatever reason, email communication just doesn't serve the same purpose as effectively.
30 hours per week of meetings is definitely excessive (and lots of people in my organization have that and even more scheduled every single week), but 2 hours is, in most cases (especially for management), too little. The key is balance and making sure the meetings you schedule are effective and serve a definite purpose. Further, invitee lists for individual meetings should only include essential personnel. I've seen plenty of times when someone isn't quite sure who to invite, so rather than taking the time to find out they'll just invite anyone they can think of who might possibly have some input, which makes meetings chaotic and overly long. Further, recurring meetings should be kept short and to the point. Scheduling an hour every week is usually not necessary for most things, and if you schedule it people tend to try to fill that time, even when they don't have anything of real substance to add.
Meetings are not the scourge of business, improperly managed meetings are.
Interestingly, one of their so-called "dirty jobs" is a guy who narced on his company to the BSA for using single-user software licenses on networked computers. Sure, misusing software licenses is wrong, but some guy sicking the much-maligned BSA on his company is hardly an example of the poor downtrodden IT guy.
The hardest part of Andrew Bonar's job is convincing the world he's not a spammer. It's not easy. Just having "email deliverability consultant" on his business cards is enough to start the Viagra jokes.
Somehow I don't think Andrew Bonar's job title is the reason for the Viagra jokes.
I think you're giving Hollywood way too much credit for caring about the artistic merits of their work. The simple fact is someone made money off a movie based on one of Dick's books, so now everyone that wants a movie made knows if they can say it's based on his work they're much more likely to get funded. The people who bankroll movies love to minimize risk, and at this point Philip K. Dick is a proven winner. What's likely to happen is a string of mediocre to awful films based on his work until the whole thing peters out and filmmakers find some other property they can make several movies from. It's not a coincidence that multiple movies based on a certain type or genre or author tend to come out within a couple of years of each other...it's just filmmakers knowing what's hot at the moment and getting on the gravy train while they can.
Good organization is hard to put in place and even harder to keep in place over the long term unless you exclusively employ anal-retentive OCD types. Luckily, lots of companies make programs whose purpose is to help you with organizing things and keeping them organized, which is basically what's being asked for here. For the type of people who love organizing stuff all day, this software is not needed. For the rest of us, any kind of document organization simply wouldn't get done without them.
Slashdot Mirror
Extremist Christian groups exist, and they send out death threats on a regular basis to a wide variety of people for all sorts of reasons. The difference between them and the Muslim extremists is the Muslim extremists are much better funded and better organized, so they're able to carry out their threats more often and in a much more spectacular fashion.
Sort of, but I think it mostly derives from certain Muslim traditions that either discourage or outright ban visual depictions of any living creature, particularly humans. This is part of the reason the Taliban in Afghanistan blew up those giant statues of Buddha, and also the reason we had all those stories early in the "war on terror" about how hard it was to find specific bad guys we were looking for (because few or no pictures of them existed, because having their picture taken was forbidden). Extremist Islamic groups have taken these traditions and radicalized them to the point where basically any depiction of Mohammad (or presumably anyone else, although they seem to get particularly offended if it's Mohammad) punishable by death by suicide bomber.
More mainstream Muslims don't care quite that much about it, and it's worth noting that there are plenty of paintings and other art works in Muslim areas featuring visual depictions of Muhammad dating back hundreds of years. This is just another symptom of what happens when people with extremist views have access to lots of explosives: their views get a whole lot more attention than they normally would.
I've seen that movie at least 10 times and never realized the chick in it was Angelina Jolie until 2 minutes ago. Wild.
I always take care to disguise my ass before photocopying it. You can never be too careful these days.
Actually, I'm old enough to be a 15 year old's father, but I always appreciate it when people underestimate my age. Also, if you don't think Slashdot has anything in common with 3rd grade recess (especially the politics section), you're either new here or you were never in 3rd grade.
Whatever it looks like, Opera users will whine that their browser looked like that first.
I don't think that's necessarily a conclusive argument. I can draw a beautiful picture on page 874 of my personal copy of the federal tax code, but that doesn't make the tax code art.
;).
Without question there is art in video games, but the question is is the video game itself a piece of art? While the various character models, backgrounds, and even cinema clips are art, is the game as a whole? I'd argue that it is, because the design of the gameplay and the storyline, alterable by the user or not, is art in much the same way the architectural design of a building can be art. Additionally, there is such a thing as "interactive art" in which the observer is invited to interact with the art work in various ways. How is this different from a video game?
Of course, ultimately what is and isn't art is in the eye of the beholder. Ebert is entitled to his opinion as to what he considers art, as am I. It just so happens that he's wrong
You may not be able to win at Nintendogs, but if you're playing it at all you've already lost.
Leaving aside the usual nonsense that kids today are worthless and can't do anything right, the problem is more complicated than that. Many universities have stepped away from the idea of going to college as a way to get a well-rounded education and have positioned themselves as places to get a piece of paper that will let you get a good job. Combine this with the increasing number of positions requiring a college degree, and you get a lot more people more interested in just getting through and getting that piece of paper as quickly as possible than they are with actually learning anything.
College is quickly becoming like high school: It's a base requirement that everyone has to go through if they don't want to spend the rest of their lives picking lettuce, so people are going to go and try and get through it as quickly and painlessly as possible. There have always been people who do this of course, and cheating is certainly not a new problem, but the above-mentioned issues may make it more prevalent than it once was.
Remember, though, that our generation cheated as well. Every college in the country has an honor code, and many of them have been in place for decades (or longer). These codes wouldn't exist if no one was cheating before.
That only works for Google because Google makes basket-loads of money on advertising. Google's "product" is its users' eyeballs, not the software itself. Oracle has an entirely different business model. If Oracle was a web property and sold advertising it could follow the Google model, but it isn't anything close to that.
Also, all companies (at least all public companies) care about maximizing their own profit, even Google. If they didn't, their shareholders would not be very happy with them.
It depends on how you define "mankind", I guess. Homo sapiens has been around for around 200-400 thousand years. Modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, have been around for something like 130,000 years. Granted, anything we could call civilization probably happened much more recently than that, but I'd wager private industry wasn't doing much in the way of safety standards prior to that point either.
The Federal Reserve is not the one who prints money. The US Mint is. The Federal Reserve is what keeps the money worth what it is (or at least tries to).
That's not quite right. The US Mint only makes coins, not paper money. The US Bureau of Engraving and Printing makes paper money. All currency, though, is distributed (or "issued") after it's been created by the Federal Reserve, so the OP is not really factually incorrect.
Mankind has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and yet these services only became available when the government stepped in and provided them. Read up on working conditions during the Gilded Age before all of the various safe employment laws and agencies were created for one example. You can also read up on the deplorable conditions in meat packing plants before the USDA stepped in.
So, when exactly were all of these other institutions going to get around to providing any of this stuff? People keep saying if we got rid of the government the private sector would provide, but the fact is the private sector worked without significant government intervention for quite a long time, and it sucked ass for anyone not belonging to the moneyed elite.
Taxes are calculated on an annual basis, and everyone's year starts at the same time for simplicity's sake and to avoid mass confusion. Once we start from this basis, having a single deadline is basically unavoidable, since if my deadline is earlier in the year than my neighbor's, the system is unfair to me because I have to file earlier and possibly pay money earlier than my neighbor does. So, the only real solution that's fair to everyone without causing mass confusion is a single deadline.
Of course, the major problem is that everyone just loves to wait until the deadline to do anything, so the IRS gets slammed. Most people filing taxes are owed a refund, so it's in their own best interest to file as early as possible. Further, if you're owed money the deadline really doesn't apply to you anyway. You can file weeks or even months after the deadline, and as long as you don't owe any money the IRS will happily accept your return and cut you a check. Still, though, most people will file at or very near the deadline because they're both paranoid and lazy: Too lazy to file early, and too paranoid to file after the deadline even if they're owed a refund.
Personally, I filed my taxes back in February and got my direct-deposited refund in less than a week. Taxes are far less painful if you avoid the rush at the deadline.
I'm reminded of the Futurama episode where they go to a museum of the 20th century and everything there is ridiculously inaccurate because of how information tends to get lost and garbled over time. I can just imagine what a museum of the 21st century will look like if their primary source is old tweets. They'll probably think our self-imposed 140 character limit was due to some bizarre superstition and we worshiped someone known only as "aplusk" as a God whose wisdom came down to us in the form of what will appear to them (and to many of us) as complete gibberish.
It was Aldrin who punched that guy. Got him pretty good too.
If he did all that he would be Buzz Aldrin, a man now almost as reviled for his relentless self-promotion as he is respected for his role in the space program. Neil and Buzz are both American heroes, but I'd say of the two Buzz's reputation has been the most tarnished, thanks in no small part to his constant spotlight-hunting.
Calling someone else a "total scumbag" in a sentence where you've already mentioned Tom DeLay is grammatically incorrect. It's like saying "Sure, Stalin was bad, but Dave in Accounting is evil".
To be fair, Dave in Accounting steals my lunch out of the office fridge every goddamn day, and Stalin never did that even once. So yeah, Dave is fucking evil.
As much as we all despise meetings, they are often needed. I've seen email exchanges go on for days arguing about something that could have been resolved in about 15 minutes with a simple conference call. There's also the issue that workers can tend to feel lost or abandoned if they don't have at least semi-regular communication with their bosses, even if it's just a weekly status meeting. For whatever reason, email communication just doesn't serve the same purpose as effectively.
30 hours per week of meetings is definitely excessive (and lots of people in my organization have that and even more scheduled every single week), but 2 hours is, in most cases (especially for management), too little. The key is balance and making sure the meetings you schedule are effective and serve a definite purpose. Further, invitee lists for individual meetings should only include essential personnel. I've seen plenty of times when someone isn't quite sure who to invite, so rather than taking the time to find out they'll just invite anyone they can think of who might possibly have some input, which makes meetings chaotic and overly long. Further, recurring meetings should be kept short and to the point. Scheduling an hour every week is usually not necessary for most things, and if you schedule it people tend to try to fill that time, even when they don't have anything of real substance to add.
Meetings are not the scourge of business, improperly managed meetings are.
Interestingly, one of their so-called "dirty jobs" is a guy who narced on his company to the BSA for using single-user software licenses on networked computers. Sure, misusing software licenses is wrong, but some guy sicking the much-maligned BSA on his company is hardly an example of the poor downtrodden IT guy.
The hardest part of Andrew Bonar's job is convincing the world he's not a spammer. It's not easy. Just having "email deliverability consultant" on his business cards is enough to start the Viagra jokes.
Somehow I don't think Andrew Bonar's job title is the reason for the Viagra jokes.
I think you're giving Hollywood way too much credit for caring about the artistic merits of their work. The simple fact is someone made money off a movie based on one of Dick's books, so now everyone that wants a movie made knows if they can say it's based on his work they're much more likely to get funded. The people who bankroll movies love to minimize risk, and at this point Philip K. Dick is a proven winner. What's likely to happen is a string of mediocre to awful films based on his work until the whole thing peters out and filmmakers find some other property they can make several movies from. It's not a coincidence that multiple movies based on a certain type or genre or author tend to come out within a couple of years of each other...it's just filmmakers knowing what's hot at the moment and getting on the gravy train while they can.
Good organization is hard to put in place and even harder to keep in place over the long term unless you exclusively employ anal-retentive OCD types. Luckily, lots of companies make programs whose purpose is to help you with organizing things and keeping them organized, which is basically what's being asked for here. For the type of people who love organizing stuff all day, this software is not needed. For the rest of us, any kind of document organization simply wouldn't get done without them.
Yes, but this experiment proves the shape can form even in the absence of Tide®-al forces.
If you've got people at your beach party asking where they can go to check their email, you're doing it wrong.