"To reach a good working balance, Millennials will have to change their ideas somewhat, but the work environment will also change to appeal to these very in-demand employees," [Harrington] says. If there's more supply of workers than demand for them, only those who're willing to lower their requirements get hired. It's not perfectly dynamic but, over time, salaries and conditions will drop until the supply is low enough (people leaving) and demand is high enough (businesses realizing there's profit to be made at the lower rates) that things balance out.
If there's more demand for workers than there is supply, those who're around can make more and more demands while companies wishing to hire them can either pay that or go out of business for lack of product. Again, over time, salaries and conditions will change, in this case improving, until equilibrium is reached due to increased supply (high salaries attract more people to the field) and reduced demand (companies can no longer make a profit at those costs and stop trying).
Either way, though not a static equilibrium, basic supply and demand implies that salaries will generally regulate relative to the value society places on them.
What doesn't make sense, is the argument, "Both sides need to meet in the middle!" If the young coders are asking too much, ignore them, they'll get hungry and come begging. If the young coders are actually asking a totally reasonable price, given how in demand their jobs are, what's the problem?
And that, to me, is really the crux of this: It sounds more like bitching that, "It wasn't like that in my day! We were lucky to get paid six pence a week to write COBOL!" So what if it was? So what if you don't like how in favor of the young coders the market is these days? If it's such an issue, don't hire them. If you want them badly enough that you are willing to pay what they demand, don't have your actions show that willingness then bitch about that reality.
The reverse is also true: If you're a coder and you think you're entitled to more than you're getting, you need to ask yourself why you're not getting it. Think you deserve an office, a car, expense accounts, 401ks and stock but you're not getting it? Well, if you merit it, why are you sitting here bitching about it rather than in the next job that'll apparently willingly reward you for it?
It's a free country. Employers can [pretty much] employ at will. Employees can [pretty much] be employed at will. That's a pretty good sign supply and demand is allowed to work and everyone's getting roughly what they should get. Look at how fast the dotcom boom came (maybe two years) and how fast it went (six months) - that's another great sign the market regulates pretty quickly. Don't like it? Wait six months. The whining about how things should be is just that - whining.
That's 98.5% more votes in one hand counted district than another for Clinton - and I only bothered to check as far as the C's.
With that kind of statistical variation, 5% variation overall means next to nothing. It just means a few more of the 44% districts were in one group and a few more of the 22% ones were in the other.
sandbox games and the impact of Assassin's Creed Three pieces of kitty litter in a large, empty box - with no toys to play with the sand - barely constitutes a sandbox game.
Any game where you can mock the zealots around the office who are boasting about their acheivements by saying, "Oooh! Did you press X?!" with mock excitement and have them look ashamed... That's just a great graphics rendering of what a sandbox might look like. It's not a sandbox.
On numerous occasions, hijackers have gone through the passengers, demanding to see passports.
Those that had U.S. passports (and, less frequently, British too) were singled out to be used as either human shields or the first to be executed to prove the terrorists meant their threats.
Leon Klinghoffer on the Achille Lauro is one classic example. A wheelchair bound, 69 year old, he was executed first because he was identified as a Jewish American.
Going through a plane full of 400 people or a cruise ship with a couple of thousand takes multiple people a significant amount of time as each scared person fumbles with their passport, pretends they can't find it, etc. Walking down the isles with an RFID reader that tells you whenever you pass one of your target group does make the job significantly easier.
An ignorance of history doesn't actually make a post flamebait.
The simple fact remains: Making it stupidly easy for hijackers and terrorists to identify people without even needing to see their passport, just walking within 20 feet, is an exceptionally bad idea.
"As people are approaching a port of inspection, they can show the card to the reader, and by the time they get to the inspector, all the information will have been verified and they can be waved on through."
"As people are cowering in their seats, their card is read by the terrorist's reader. By the time ther terrorist gets to the American Infidel, all the information will have been verified and they can be singled out for execution first."
Gee, thanks. Couldn't have [not lived] without it.
"The Bush Administration, finding innovative ways to make life easier for terrorists since 2001."
In America, this group of people called politicians make these things called laws.
Traditionally, they answered to the will of the people. If the people didn't like what they did, they got voted out. Therefore they tended to do whatever the people wanted.
However, people are lazy. People pay no attention to who does what, 99% of the time because it's a hassle.
Instead, people generally vote for whoever's already in power in the vast majority of cases. This tends to only change when on candidate spends a huge amount of money on advertising, telling the electorate that he did GoodThings(tm) and the other guy did BadThings(tm). This doesn't have to be true, as the electorate's far too lazy to fact check - they'll just believe what they're told.
So the only really motivating force in politics, so long as you otherwise generally keep your head down, is money.
And who gives politicians money? Big companies and lobbying organizations. Like the RIAA.
"We should do what we do to children who misbehave," he writes. "Take away their privileges." Two perspectives:
As the public sees it: The big mean RIAA is misbehaving. Let's take away their privileges.
As the RIAA sees it: The naughty public are misbehaving. Let's take away their privileges.
Who makes the decision over whose privileges get taken away? Oh, yeah, that'd be the politicians... who now only care about money thanks to years of voter apathy.
And who gives money to the politicians? That'd be the RIAA.
Who do you think is going to convince the politicians that they're right and the other side is wrong and deserves to have their rights taken away?
And there we have the DMCA, a progressively more conservative supreme court that will back businesses and a media surcharge tax in Canada.
As requested, the naughty ones are being punished... You just missed that your opinion over who the naughty ones are counts for absolutely nothing unless you can motivate the politicians to enforce it - and they listen to the other side because they give them money and we'll give them votes regardless.
'Three percent of the land area of Morocco could support all of the electricity for Western Europe.' 1. Find a resource that'll support western Europe that's outside of western Europe.
2. Do they have a flag? No? Then they can't have a country.
3. Profit.
The only difference is that this time, we British will fight to the death to defend anyone who can also help make our chips* a little saltier.
*Note: No, "Chips" are not "Fries" for Americans. What Americans call "Chips", the English call "Crisps", certainly. However, what the English call "Chips", Americans call "What the hell is that greasy thing? It's going to kill me! Can I have some avocado and a side salad instead?!" And the English call those people "Poofters". A subtle but very important point.
A colloquialism is an expression not used in formal speech, writing or paralinguistics. Colloquialims denote a manner of speaking or writing that is characteristic of familiar "common" conversation. Source
A colloquialism, whilst not correct in formal speech or writing, is absolutely correct to use when conveying local speech and writing styles.
Colloquial English from Nigeria, as evidenced my a ton of spam, tends to use the "$20 million dollars" format all the time. It's entirely likely that the litigant in question used that phrasing in his demands. Though not used in formal speech, it is nonetheless absolutely appropriate in reporting his cultural tendencies and demands accurately.
Much as we'd love to get the Grammar Nazi S.S. to kill every last one of them, they're busy planning the deaths of the American undermenschen that think "Y'all" is acceptable. Until that campaign is complete, they couldn't possibly attack Nigeria.
Guess what the Nigerian keyboard makers want from the One Laptop Per Child charitable organization trying to make the world a better place? $20 million dollars in 'damages,' and an injunction blocking OLPC from distribution in Nigeria. ...and someone to help them get the $20 million dollars out of the country. They are willing to give 25% to anyone who will.
Not to mention that any Apple Employees that value their position as 'employed' would never disclose anything regarding future Apple products. The new version of their keyboards were already all over Apple's website. The only "future" part of the product was Apple's laggy supply chain.
I know it is bullshit because nobody on God's Earth is such a black-hearted evil bastard of a fucking prick that they would pick on a helpless retail salesperson. If they're pretentious enough to call themselves a Genius Bar, they deserve flak for being complete morons.
These are the same Geniuses who'd immediately preceeding told me there was no way to fix a Mini fan that won't spin down, that it happens all the time when people try upgrading memory themselves to avoid paying Apple's 100% markup.
This is untrue as a 10 second google search proved. All that happens is the fan cable comes unhooked and you need to reset the SMC.
Still, it's nice to have the "geniuses" who are supposed to be the experts on the product at best be completely incompetent over a common and easy to fix problem and at worst outright lie to try scaring people in to paying their huge markups for vastly cheaper off the shelf upgrades.
So, yeah, when they're both pretentious and incompetent, Hitler and I will both treat them with contempt.
Wow... they were out of stock of something and waiting for new models to arrive. Bulldoze the damn place down! No...
They sent their existing stock away.
If they'd simply sold out of an existing product and weren't ordering more of something they knew was about to be hard to shift, that would be one thing.
But they didn't. They took the product they could still sell off the shelves and sent it back to end up either heavily discounted or in a landfill.
One is a reasonable occurence because of the unpredictability of demand. The other is moronic planning, creating waste, throwing away profits on something you'd already paid for and leaving customers unable to use other products you sell without buying things they don't want (I'd just bought a Mini that comes without a keyboard and mouse but supports bluetooth but was now told I'd need to waste ~$100 on a wired keyboard and mouse then buy the bluetooth versions I wanted later).
Don't have any? It's an Apple branded product. Are you out of stock.
Kind of. The new ones are coming out soon so we sent all of our old ones back.
You sent away all of your old model stock long before you got a shipment of your new models, leaving you unable to sell anything?
Uh, yeah.
How long have you been out of stock?
A week or two.
How long do you expect to remain out of stock.
We were supposed to have them by now. But probably another week or two.
And so you have nothing to sell people who really want to give you money for a wireless keyboard and mouse, any wireless keyboard and mouse, until then?
Given their claim that filling an iPod legally would cost about $40,000 That assumption requires:
We're talking about the largest available iPod, the 160GB version, ignoring the majority of users who're happy with the painfully limited flash memory based versions.
That the full 160GB is available, which it isn't.
That the 160GB iPod is filled exclusively with music - ignoring home movies, digital pictures and all kinds of other rights free things it does just fine.
That all of that music is bought through the RIAA - there's a lot of perfectly legal royalty free music out there
That all of that music is bought from iTunes at $1/track, ignoring perfectly legitimate discounted, sale, clearance and second hand CDs that are often only a fraction of that cost.
I've got an 80GB iPod. Of that, about 50GB is filled with music, the rest with pictures, video, etc. Of that 50GB of music, we're looking at about 600-700 albums. Just like I never buy $19.99 DVDs and would rather wait and pick them up at $4.99 in a BestBuy sale, the CDs are split roughly equally between second hand (many of which cost all of $0.01 plus S&H on Amazon) and ~$7.99-$9.99 in various "Artists You Ought To Know" promos, sales, etc. And that's before the $9.99 3CD sets. There are, total, about 20 tracks downloaded from iTunes where I knew, damn well, I'd never want anything by the artist again and thus $1/track was acceptable.
Insured value, that collection's worth about $10,000 - assuming I had to buy all of the CDs at full retail if I wanted to quickly replace them in one go. The actual price to put that whole library together? Probably around the $3,000 mark, spread over a decade of collecting and waiting for great deals.
So, I for one can say my iPod's entirely legally filled. Total cost: Around $3,000/10years, $300/year or $25/month - well within any music lover's reach and I'm not even collecting non-RIAA, royalty free music.
Granted: I've got an 80 not 160GB version and I've only two thirds filled with music because I do a lot of photography. Still, even quadrupling my numbers, $100/month is less than many people's phone bills. Not quite the large down payment on a house $40,000 they're talking about.
The big ones: Separate space for the racks (so you don't go deaf, don't freeze, don't get driven nuts by the blinking lights and don't suffocate when the fire suppression kicks in), room to grow, storage space have all been covered.
The simpler ones that can still make all the difference however:
As much monitor real estate as possible. IT guys are usually expected to multitask to an insane degree: fix someone's network access, get someone's email back on line, figure out why a server keeps crashing, etc. Trying to do that on one 1280x1024 monitor is masochistic. 1920x1200 24 inch monitors start below $400 now. A pair of 2560x1600 30 inch monitors sounds expensive at $2k until you figure what a miniscule part of a full IT closet that'll really be.
Whiteboards. Cover as much space as you can with them. Jokingly: When people ask you to explain why you spent so much money, you can do lots of impressive looking diagrams. Seriously: Because they're still a great way of communicating ideas.
An iPod touch. Add really simple web interfaces for many of your common tasks (albeit not the security critical ones) and you can now restart servers, reset passwords, all of the day to day drivel, from anywhere within range of the office WiFi. That reduces the number of times you have to ask to use someone's keyboard while you're helping them out (reducing the uncomfortable moments where they've got things they don't want you to see on the desktop or you have to touch their sticky keyboard). It also makes meetings more productive as, rude as it is, you can keep an eye on help requests and fix a lot of things without having to wait/step out. Why the touch rather than iPhone? Simple. It stops working once you're out of range of the network. Thus work stops following you lunch and home.
Backup. Yes, I know everyone'll laugh at me for daring to point this one out. The thing is, most small companies (and being a lone IT guy makes it sounds like that might well be your case) tend to have skimped in the past. One of the areas they'll have skimped on is likely backing things up. No, a RAID array in the newest server doesn't count. Having some means of being able to get back to somewhere close to where you were before the tornado/tsunami/earthquake/senior driver/fire knocked out the whole room is essential. That means having a means to write things to a media that can be stored off site.
A decent phone with a decent headset. If you're getting tech support calls all the time, you want to be able to use a computer to fix their issues while talking - trying to balance a phone on your shoulder isn't condusive to that.
Your own printer. Tech guys seem to generate more dead trees than almost anyone else. Having to walk halfway across the office, only to find someone from marketing is printing an entire book, is a great productivity killer. A cheap laser printer will barely make a dent in a budget and will save you a ton of time.
And finally, in complete contradiction to many of the other posters: A big glass window, a desk near the door, and lots of visibility. There's a reason IT guys are hated: we are antisocial bastards who act like every interaction with every other member of the organization is a trial that's beneath us. If you'd like respect, earn it. If you want people to think you live in your fortress of solitude and judge them, do that. If you'd like them to see you as a hardworker with nothing to hide, show them that instead.
From the original poster:
No need to opt-in, no way to opt-out. From the initial, very first comment in the thread they link to:
You can hide items from any friend you don't want to see, and you can also opt out of sharing by removing all your shared items. Sure, it's a pain: having to disable all of your shared items if you don't, you know, want to share. But it's not exactly "no way to opt-out" when the very first thing they do is tell you how to.
Now, had they been straight and called it for what it is, "You're auto opted in and the only way to opt out is a painful and destructive process that devalues other aspects." then that would be one thing. Blatantly misrepresenting to jump to the head of the wambulance queue - to the point where it's hard to believe it was anything other than deliberate - just devalues your point and loses you all credibility, even for your valid points.
IANAL. Slashdot could likely use IANASB too. I Am Not A Stock Broker. Nor are many of the others on Slashdot.
Fidelity, on the other hand, pays people huge amounts of money to be very, very good at that kind of thing.
One possibility is that rewarding execs to keep them from deserting a sinking ship, slowing the speed at which it sinks is a completely crazy idea and that only the geniuses on internet forums can spot this obvious issue whilst fund managers, whose lives and careers hang by the balance of their decisions, are completely blind to it.
Another possibility is that, whilst it's easy to get indignant about "the little people" and hate "the fat cats," the fact that the professionals, whose livelihoods depend on judging accurately, keep on supporting this system anyway implies that, just maybe, it kind of works.
Part of the reason capitalism tends to work is that, unlike say communism, it doesn't rely on how things "should be." Instead, those who react to how things are more accurately (whether intentionally or not) tend to rise to the surface as they make money, whilst those who don't tend to sink as they lose it. It's not perfect - it's a fairly dynamic equilibrium and luck will sometimes play a part along with lag - but it tends to even out over time.
Fidelity is all about money. If they believed an extra 10,000 floor workers and 1,000 less execs would make the company more profitable, you can believe they'd force that change in a heartbeat. That they've allowed the opposite implies that, as shareholders, they've established that that's what will make them more money.
Now, granted, it may make them more money by distorting numbers just long enough for them to cash out.
Still, overall, investment firms like to make money and they keep using the strategies that work for that. That they tend to want to avoid mass senior exoduses, even in failing companies, implies the raw numbers, emotion aside, support that approach.
I'm not saying it's ethically right or wrong. Capitalism has nothing to do with ethics unless they mean you can make more money. But, as a business approach, it's a safe bet that the professionals who do this for a living and learn to act without emotion are far better at accurately judging what makes the most money* than people on forums going off gut senses of righteousness.
* or loses the least - It may well be they've realized Circuit City is in a dying segment as Walmart forces its way in and are simply ensuring it sinks as painlessly as possible.
Much as I hate to say it, Microsoft is damn good at making business decisions overall. Most of our beloved causes tend to be pretty terrible at it. It doesn't make Microsoft good "ethically" but, as a financial entity, it makes them a far better bet. That we tend to hate them implies we go with our emotions and ethics, that they succeed anyway implies they make the right business decisions and shows a lot about our judgments. This, looking at Fidelity and others, is much the same thing.
and for an online game there is a surprisingly low asshat quotient.
Fuck Bioshock into a cocked hat. I think you may have just undermined your argument a little.;)
Underworld was a great game. It was also relatively PG rated.
Where Bioshock scored for me was that, for the first time since Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines, it dared to treat adults like, well, adults.
Other games have "moral ambiguity" but, let's be honest, most of them are simply, "There's no right option here." Do you help evil but rights of the individual side A or do you help evil but common good side B? Do you side with guy A's story or guy B's story. And you're left with no real doubt that that's as far as they've thought it through.
Bioshock's genius comes from:
Not just "Do you harvest little sisters for more Adam or be 'good' for less?" but really pushes you to think: What am I doing by "saving" them? Am I just taking out their symbiotic host so they die anyway? How do I feel about killing them if I know either option kills them?
[SPOILER ALERT] When saved, they talk about getting sleepy and appear to climb in the vents to die. When it's later revealed that they really are just going "home" - it adds an aching emotional response if you chose to kill them for your own goals. The "good" ending taking that even further.[/SPOILER ALERT]
Now add in insanity storylines, deliberate murders of families, stories of holocaust survival, Ayn Rand type debates. Even better, much of this happens off screen. Sure, the Manhunts or GTAs of this world will kill a family in front of you and have politicians up in arms for something with next to no emotional impact. Bioshock can imply it, off screen, leaving it to resonate in your mind on a vastly deeper level.
I love GTA but it's candy violence and candy swearing. None of it means anything. It's like watching a Die Hard movie. Sure, it's "adult" but kids want to go and see it, and understandably so, because it's nothing but a fun adrenalin ride.
Bioshock on the other hand is like the Godfather or, yes, Lolita. None of the violence, none of the swearing is there for a quick and cheap thrill. It's there because it's absolutely appropriate to a storyline that engages your brain on a much higher level. It shows you uncomfortable concepts, it doesn't tell you that it'll all get better if you just shoot everything, but still takes you on an intense journey that'll stay with you.
And so, in the same way, Bioshock matters like great films matter. There are tons of Disney games. There are huge numbers of action movie games. There're a few, like Ultima Underworld that manage to be great ET or Bridge To Terabithia type (PG but really makes you think) games. It's incredibly rare in gaming though for there to be a non-gratuitous, truly adult in the sense that adults are trusted to think for themselves about darker concepts, games.
Bioshock managed that.
Yes, System Shock came close - which is why Bioshock is openly talked about as its spiritual successor. Even then, the medium's evolved and it's like comparing The Godfather to a great silent movie. So much more, technologically, can be added now - from detailed objects to animation flourishes, objects in the distance to quantity and quality of audio.
Deus Ex was also a great game. Again, time moves on and a modern DVD, filled with the kind of quantity and quality of content a modern game budget allows, will always surpass it. Yes, pretty graphics for pretty graphics sake is meaningless. But, when used well, all of these advances really do enhance your immersion in a game just as VFX in a movie doesn't save a lousy movie but massively enhances a great one.
So, we've got a level of meaningful adult content that's rarely been in any prior game. We've got advances in the medium that allow those earlier ideas to be more richly realized.
Beyond that though, you're listing three games (if we ignore sequels) in 15 years. Even if we accept it does nothing new, one utterly engaging game in all of those ways, every four or five years, means it more than merits adoration - even if it isn't utterly unique.
I was going to jump in with much the same comments:
F-15: Mach 2.5+ (1,650mph)
However, it generates that from all 29,000 lbf of thrust it can manage with an afterburner lit. Dry thrust is 17,450lbf (both numbers are per engine so double that).
Also, those numbers are for high altitude only. At low altitude, even with afterburners lit, it tops out at Mach 1.2.
Given that an afterburner adds fuel downstream of the turbine that then burns, this is more like a hack to add a rocket than a genuine part of the jet engine aspect of jet engines. It also burns through fuel at a staggering rate and so is hardly maintainable.
So, to go back to the original quote with all of that considered: About the only jet that beats 1.6 on traditional jets alone is the F-22 which can supercruise (no afterburner) at Mach 1.72
At other places in the document, the author recommends selecting "older media compression standards, of which one can be reasonably sure that related patents are expired (or are close to expiration)." Which seems odd. Isn't the whole attraction of Ogg Theora that it isn't patented at all? Why recommend an older standard that IS patented over a newer one that isn't? The key here is related patents.
Two technologies, A and B. A was created 20 years ago and was patented but is largely open for use now. B was created 5 years ago and its makers benevolently made it without patents.
Along comes Evil Company. They declare that tech B uses their patented technology X. Sure, B itself doesn't have any patents. But they snuck a broadly worded patent claim in ten years ago and revised it endlessly to the point where an underlying part of B is affected.
Now, B, unpatented as it may be, has hardware manufacturers having to pay huge licensing fees to Evil Company to use the supposedly free technology B.
Technology A, on the other hand, is tweny years old. That puts it before most of the crazy modern patent issues. Plus, having been around for twenty years, it's a known quantity - more or less any patents that might come up already have come up. Finally, even if one does come up, it has to be older than the tech - giving it at the very most - 5 years before it expires.
Thus, to a hardware manufacturer like Nokia, something that's not totally free but is also pretty safe from suddenly becoming very expensive to support is far better than something that's totally free but has a much larger risk associated.
So, the problem isn't as simple as Ogg is free, MP3 isn't completely. It's MP3 is a known quantity, Ogg seems free right now but may saddle us with insane licensing fees because of the broken patent system.
This is exactly what happened to digital camera makers. They adopted JPEG, thinking there was little to no cost associated. As soon as it became the absolute standard, along comes a third party and claims they've got a patent on an underlying tech. Suddenly everyone's forking out millions for what was supposed to be a cheap solution. Strangely enough, they don't want to do that again. They'd rather a worse tech and a small fee over a better, free tech and the risk of having to pay massive fees once they can't back out.
Are you volunteering to been in that first million?
No, and every one of those two million should fight tooth and nail to avoid being in it too.
Every penny my parents spent on my education rather than buying new cars or going on vacations. Every night I stayed up studying in school when I'd have preferred to be in bed. Every morning I dragged my sorry ass out of bed to go to lectures. Every time I went in to the office when I'd have preffered to have been in bed. Every time I sucked up an insane manager rather than telling him how I felt and storming out. Those were my fights to ensure that neither I nor the next couple of generations of my family are likely to ever be in that situation.
It's not as severe a struggle, by any means. The worst I ever faced was a couple of weeks with nowhere to live and a similar duration with literally no money to buy food. But it did teach me one hell of a lesson... Fight with everything you've got to ensure you're not in that first million.
Buddhism has a really smart first pair of noble truths... No matter what, there is suffering in life and all you can do is address your response to it. You can sit there and bitch about how unfair it is or you can suck up that it is unfair and get on with making the most of living anyway.
It always sucks to be in that first million. One should do everything possible to make damn sure they're not in it. At the same time, that doesn't stop that first million, terrible and all, from being better than ten million later.
Slashdot Mirror
If there's more demand for workers than there is supply, those who're around can make more and more demands while companies wishing to hire them can either pay that or go out of business for lack of product. Again, over time, salaries and conditions will change, in this case improving, until equilibrium is reached due to increased supply (high salaries attract more people to the field) and reduced demand (companies can no longer make a profit at those costs and stop trying).
Either way, though not a static equilibrium, basic supply and demand implies that salaries will generally regulate relative to the value society places on them.
What doesn't make sense, is the argument, "Both sides need to meet in the middle!" If the young coders are asking too much, ignore them, they'll get hungry and come begging. If the young coders are actually asking a totally reasonable price, given how in demand their jobs are, what's the problem?
And that, to me, is really the crux of this: It sounds more like bitching that, "It wasn't like that in my day! We were lucky to get paid six pence a week to write COBOL!" So what if it was? So what if you don't like how in favor of the young coders the market is these days? If it's such an issue, don't hire them. If you want them badly enough that you are willing to pay what they demand, don't have your actions show that willingness then bitch about that reality.
The reverse is also true: If you're a coder and you think you're entitled to more than you're getting, you need to ask yourself why you're not getting it. Think you deserve an office, a car, expense accounts, 401ks and stock but you're not getting it? Well, if you merit it, why are you sitting here bitching about it rather than in the next job that'll apparently willingly reward you for it?
It's a free country. Employers can [pretty much] employ at will. Employees can [pretty much] be employed at will. That's a pretty good sign supply and demand is allowed to work and everyone's getting roughly what they should get. Look at how fast the dotcom boom came (maybe two years) and how fast it went (six months) - that's another great sign the market regulates pretty quickly. Don't like it? Wait six months. The whining about how things should be is just that - whining.
An even more painfully blunt observation:
Boscawen: 44.44%
Chatham: 22.39%
That's 98.5% more votes in one hand counted district than another for Clinton - and I only bothered to check as far as the C's.
With that kind of statistical variation, 5% variation overall means next to nothing. It just means a few more of the 44% districts were in one group and a few more of the 22% ones were in the other.
In a world where 1080p is fast becoming the norm, 800x600 gives you the experience of sitting 5-10 years back.
Any game where you can mock the zealots around the office who are boasting about their acheivements by saying, "Oooh! Did you press X?!" with mock excitement and have them look ashamed... That's just a great graphics rendering of what a sandbox might look like. It's not a sandbox.
On numerous occasions, hijackers have gone through the passengers, demanding to see passports.
Those that had U.S. passports (and, less frequently, British too) were singled out to be used as either human shields or the first to be executed to prove the terrorists meant their threats.
Leon Klinghoffer on the Achille Lauro is one classic example. A wheelchair bound, 69 year old, he was executed first because he was identified as a Jewish American.
Going through a plane full of 400 people or a cruise ship with a couple of thousand takes multiple people a significant amount of time as each scared person fumbles with their passport, pretends they can't find it, etc. Walking down the isles with an RFID reader that tells you whenever you pass one of your target group does make the job significantly easier.
An ignorance of history doesn't actually make a post flamebait.
The simple fact remains: Making it stupidly easy for hijackers and terrorists to identify people without even needing to see their passport, just walking within 20 feet, is an exceptionally bad idea.
"As people are approaching a port of inspection, they can show the card to the reader, and by the time they get to the inspector, all the information will have been verified and they can be waved on through."
"As people are cowering in their seats, their card is read by the terrorist's reader. By the time ther terrorist gets to the American Infidel, all the information will have been verified and they can be singled out for execution first."
Gee, thanks. Couldn't have [not lived] without it.
"The Bush Administration, finding innovative ways to make life easier for terrorists since 2001."
In America, this group of people called politicians make these things called laws.
Traditionally, they answered to the will of the people. If the people didn't like what they did, they got voted out. Therefore they tended to do whatever the people wanted.
However, people are lazy. People pay no attention to who does what, 99% of the time because it's a hassle.
Instead, people generally vote for whoever's already in power in the vast majority of cases. This tends to only change when on candidate spends a huge amount of money on advertising, telling the electorate that he did GoodThings(tm) and the other guy did BadThings(tm). This doesn't have to be true, as the electorate's far too lazy to fact check - they'll just believe what they're told.
So the only really motivating force in politics, so long as you otherwise generally keep your head down, is money.
And who gives politicians money? Big companies and lobbying organizations. Like the RIAA. "We should do what we do to children who misbehave," he writes. "Take away their privileges." Two perspectives:
As the public sees it: The big mean RIAA is misbehaving. Let's take away their privileges.
As the RIAA sees it: The naughty public are misbehaving. Let's take away their privileges.
Who makes the decision over whose privileges get taken away? Oh, yeah, that'd be the politicians... who now only care about money thanks to years of voter apathy.
And who gives money to the politicians? That'd be the RIAA.
Who do you think is going to convince the politicians that they're right and the other side is wrong and deserves to have their rights taken away?
And there we have the DMCA, a progressively more conservative supreme court that will back businesses and a media surcharge tax in Canada.
As requested, the naughty ones are being punished... You just missed that your opinion over who the naughty ones are counts for absolutely nothing unless you can motivate the politicians to enforce it - and they listen to the other side because they give them money and we'll give them votes regardless.
2. Do they have a flag? No? Then they can't have a country.
3. Profit.
The only difference is that this time, we British will fight to the death to defend anyone who can also help make our chips* a little saltier.
*Note: No, "Chips" are not "Fries" for Americans. What Americans call "Chips", the English call "Crisps", certainly. However, what the English call "Chips", Americans call "What the hell is that greasy thing? It's going to kill me! Can I have some avocado and a side salad instead?!" And the English call those people "Poofters". A subtle but very important point.
A colloquialism, whilst not correct in formal speech or writing, is absolutely correct to use when conveying local speech and writing styles.
Colloquial English from Nigeria, as evidenced my a ton of spam, tends to use the "$20 million dollars" format all the time. It's entirely likely that the litigant in question used that phrasing in his demands. Though not used in formal speech, it is nonetheless absolutely appropriate in reporting his cultural tendencies and demands accurately.
Much as we'd love to get the Grammar Nazi S.S. to kill every last one of them, they're busy planning the deaths of the American undermenschen that think "Y'all" is acceptable. Until that campaign is complete, they couldn't possibly attack Nigeria.
These are the same Geniuses who'd immediately preceeding told me there was no way to fix a Mini fan that won't spin down, that it happens all the time when people try upgrading memory themselves to avoid paying Apple's 100% markup.
This is untrue as a 10 second google search proved. All that happens is the fan cable comes unhooked and you need to reset the SMC.
Still, it's nice to have the "geniuses" who are supposed to be the experts on the product at best be completely incompetent over a common and easy to fix problem and at worst outright lie to try scaring people in to paying their huge markups for vastly cheaper off the shelf upgrades.
So, yeah, when they're both pretentious and incompetent, Hitler and I will both treat them with contempt.
They sent their existing stock away.
If they'd simply sold out of an existing product and weren't ordering more of something they knew was about to be hard to shift, that would be one thing.
But they didn't. They took the product they could still sell off the shelves and sent it back to end up either heavily discounted or in a landfill.
One is a reasonable occurence because of the unpredictability of demand. The other is moronic planning, creating waste, throwing away profits on something you'd already paid for and leaving customers unable to use other products you sell without buying things they don't want (I'd just bought a Mini that comes without a keyboard and mouse but supports bluetooth but was now told I'd need to waste ~$100 on a wired keyboard and mouse then buy the bluetooth versions I wanted later).
A real conversation I had:
I'd like to buy a wireless keyboard and mouse.
I'm sorry, we don't have any.
Don't have any? It's an Apple branded product. Are you out of stock.
Kind of. The new ones are coming out soon so we sent all of our old ones back.
You sent away all of your old model stock long before you got a shipment of your new models, leaving you unable to sell anything?
Uh, yeah.
How long have you been out of stock?
A week or two.
How long do you expect to remain out of stock.
We were supposed to have them by now. But probably another week or two.
And so you have nothing to sell people who really want to give you money for a wireless keyboard and mouse, any wireless keyboard and mouse, until then?
No. Sorry.
I can see why they call you geniuses.
- We're talking about the largest available iPod, the 160GB version, ignoring the majority of users who're happy with the painfully limited flash memory based versions.
- That the full 160GB is available, which it isn't.
- That the 160GB iPod is filled exclusively with music - ignoring home movies, digital pictures and all kinds of other rights free things it does just fine.
- That all of that music is bought through the RIAA - there's a lot of perfectly legal royalty free music out there
- That all of that music is bought from iTunes at $1/track, ignoring perfectly legitimate discounted, sale, clearance and second hand CDs that are often only a fraction of that cost.
I've got an 80GB iPod. Of that, about 50GB is filled with music, the rest with pictures, video, etc. Of that 50GB of music, we're looking at about 600-700 albums. Just like I never buy $19.99 DVDs and would rather wait and pick them up at $4.99 in a BestBuy sale, the CDs are split roughly equally between second hand (many of which cost all of $0.01 plus S&H on Amazon) and ~$7.99-$9.99 in various "Artists You Ought To Know" promos, sales, etc. And that's before the $9.99 3CD sets. There are, total, about 20 tracks downloaded from iTunes where I knew, damn well, I'd never want anything by the artist again and thus $1/track was acceptable.Insured value, that collection's worth about $10,000 - assuming I had to buy all of the CDs at full retail if I wanted to quickly replace them in one go. The actual price to put that whole library together? Probably around the $3,000 mark, spread over a decade of collecting and waiting for great deals.
So, I for one can say my iPod's entirely legally filled. Total cost: Around $3,000/10years, $300/year or $25/month - well within any music lover's reach and I'm not even collecting non-RIAA, royalty free music.
Granted: I've got an 80 not 160GB version and I've only two thirds filled with music because I do a lot of photography. Still, even quadrupling my numbers, $100/month is less than many people's phone bills. Not quite the large down payment on a house $40,000 they're talking about.
The big ones: Separate space for the racks (so you don't go deaf, don't freeze, don't get driven nuts by the blinking lights and don't suffocate when the fire suppression kicks in), room to grow, storage space have all been covered.
The simpler ones that can still make all the difference however:
As much monitor real estate as possible. IT guys are usually expected to multitask to an insane degree: fix someone's network access, get someone's email back on line, figure out why a server keeps crashing, etc. Trying to do that on one 1280x1024 monitor is masochistic. 1920x1200 24 inch monitors start below $400 now. A pair of 2560x1600 30 inch monitors sounds expensive at $2k until you figure what a miniscule part of a full IT closet that'll really be.
Whiteboards. Cover as much space as you can with them. Jokingly: When people ask you to explain why you spent so much money, you can do lots of impressive looking diagrams. Seriously: Because they're still a great way of communicating ideas.
An iPod touch. Add really simple web interfaces for many of your common tasks (albeit not the security critical ones) and you can now restart servers, reset passwords, all of the day to day drivel, from anywhere within range of the office WiFi. That reduces the number of times you have to ask to use someone's keyboard while you're helping them out (reducing the uncomfortable moments where they've got things they don't want you to see on the desktop or you have to touch their sticky keyboard). It also makes meetings more productive as, rude as it is, you can keep an eye on help requests and fix a lot of things without having to wait/step out. Why the touch rather than iPhone? Simple. It stops working once you're out of range of the network. Thus work stops following you lunch and home.
Backup. Yes, I know everyone'll laugh at me for daring to point this one out. The thing is, most small companies (and being a lone IT guy makes it sounds like that might well be your case) tend to have skimped in the past. One of the areas they'll have skimped on is likely backing things up. No, a RAID array in the newest server doesn't count. Having some means of being able to get back to somewhere close to where you were before the tornado/tsunami/earthquake/senior driver/fire knocked out the whole room is essential. That means having a means to write things to a media that can be stored off site.
A decent phone with a decent headset. If you're getting tech support calls all the time, you want to be able to use a computer to fix their issues while talking - trying to balance a phone on your shoulder isn't condusive to that.
Your own printer. Tech guys seem to generate more dead trees than almost anyone else. Having to walk halfway across the office, only to find someone from marketing is printing an entire book, is a great productivity killer. A cheap laser printer will barely make a dent in a budget and will save you a ton of time.
And finally, in complete contradiction to many of the other posters: A big glass window, a desk near the door, and lots of visibility. There's a reason IT guys are hated: we are antisocial bastards who act like every interaction with every other member of the organization is a trial that's beneath us. If you'd like respect, earn it. If you want people to think you live in your fortress of solitude and judge them, do that. If you'd like them to see you as a hardworker with nothing to hide, show them that instead.
Now, had they been straight and called it for what it is, "You're auto opted in and the only way to opt out is a painful and destructive process that devalues other aspects." then that would be one thing. Blatantly misrepresenting to jump to the head of the wambulance queue - to the point where it's hard to believe it was anything other than deliberate - just devalues your point and loses you all credibility, even for your valid points.
IANAL. Slashdot could likely use IANASB too. I Am Not A Stock Broker. Nor are many of the others on Slashdot.
Fidelity, on the other hand, pays people huge amounts of money to be very, very good at that kind of thing.
One possibility is that rewarding execs to keep them from deserting a sinking ship, slowing the speed at which it sinks is a completely crazy idea and that only the geniuses on internet forums can spot this obvious issue whilst fund managers, whose lives and careers hang by the balance of their decisions, are completely blind to it.
Another possibility is that, whilst it's easy to get indignant about "the little people" and hate "the fat cats," the fact that the professionals, whose livelihoods depend on judging accurately, keep on supporting this system anyway implies that, just maybe, it kind of works.
Part of the reason capitalism tends to work is that, unlike say communism, it doesn't rely on how things "should be." Instead, those who react to how things are more accurately (whether intentionally or not) tend to rise to the surface as they make money, whilst those who don't tend to sink as they lose it. It's not perfect - it's a fairly dynamic equilibrium and luck will sometimes play a part along with lag - but it tends to even out over time.
Fidelity is all about money. If they believed an extra 10,000 floor workers and 1,000 less execs would make the company more profitable, you can believe they'd force that change in a heartbeat. That they've allowed the opposite implies that, as shareholders, they've established that that's what will make them more money.
Now, granted, it may make them more money by distorting numbers just long enough for them to cash out.
Still, overall, investment firms like to make money and they keep using the strategies that work for that. That they tend to want to avoid mass senior exoduses, even in failing companies, implies the raw numbers, emotion aside, support that approach.
I'm not saying it's ethically right or wrong. Capitalism has nothing to do with ethics unless they mean you can make more money. But, as a business approach, it's a safe bet that the professionals who do this for a living and learn to act without emotion are far better at accurately judging what makes the most money* than people on forums going off gut senses of righteousness.
* or loses the least - It may well be they've realized Circuit City is in a dying segment as Walmart forces its way in and are simply ensuring it sinks as painlessly as possible.
Much as I hate to say it, Microsoft is damn good at making business decisions overall. Most of our beloved causes tend to be pretty terrible at it. It doesn't make Microsoft good "ethically" but, as a financial entity, it makes them a far better bet. That we tend to hate them implies we go with our emotions and ethics, that they succeed anyway implies they make the right business decisions and shows a lot about our judgments. This, looking at Fidelity and others, is much the same thing.
Underworld was a great game. It was also relatively PG rated.
Where Bioshock scored for me was that, for the first time since Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines, it dared to treat adults like, well, adults.
Other games have "moral ambiguity" but, let's be honest, most of them are simply, "There's no right option here." Do you help evil but rights of the individual side A or do you help evil but common good side B? Do you side with guy A's story or guy B's story. And you're left with no real doubt that that's as far as they've thought it through.
Bioshock's genius comes from:
Not just "Do you harvest little sisters for more Adam or be 'good' for less?" but really pushes you to think: What am I doing by "saving" them? Am I just taking out their symbiotic host so they die anyway? How do I feel about killing them if I know either option kills them?
[SPOILER ALERT] When saved, they talk about getting sleepy and appear to climb in the vents to die. When it's later revealed that they really are just going "home" - it adds an aching emotional response if you chose to kill them for your own goals. The "good" ending taking that even further.[/SPOILER ALERT]
Now add in insanity storylines, deliberate murders of families, stories of holocaust survival, Ayn Rand type debates. Even better, much of this happens off screen. Sure, the Manhunts or GTAs of this world will kill a family in front of you and have politicians up in arms for something with next to no emotional impact. Bioshock can imply it, off screen, leaving it to resonate in your mind on a vastly deeper level.
I love GTA but it's candy violence and candy swearing. None of it means anything. It's like watching a Die Hard movie. Sure, it's "adult" but kids want to go and see it, and understandably so, because it's nothing but a fun adrenalin ride.
Bioshock on the other hand is like the Godfather or, yes, Lolita. None of the violence, none of the swearing is there for a quick and cheap thrill. It's there because it's absolutely appropriate to a storyline that engages your brain on a much higher level. It shows you uncomfortable concepts, it doesn't tell you that it'll all get better if you just shoot everything, but still takes you on an intense journey that'll stay with you.
And so, in the same way, Bioshock matters like great films matter. There are tons of Disney games. There are huge numbers of action movie games. There're a few, like Ultima Underworld that manage to be great ET or Bridge To Terabithia type (PG but really makes you think) games. It's incredibly rare in gaming though for there to be a non-gratuitous, truly adult in the sense that adults are trusted to think for themselves about darker concepts, games.
Bioshock managed that.
Yes, System Shock came close - which is why Bioshock is openly talked about as its spiritual successor. Even then, the medium's evolved and it's like comparing The Godfather to a great silent movie. So much more, technologically, can be added now - from detailed objects to animation flourishes, objects in the distance to quantity and quality of audio.
Deus Ex was also a great game. Again, time moves on and a modern DVD, filled with the kind of quantity and quality of content a modern game budget allows, will always surpass it. Yes, pretty graphics for pretty graphics sake is meaningless. But, when used well, all of these advances really do enhance your immersion in a game just as VFX in a movie doesn't save a lousy movie but massively enhances a great one.
So, we've got a level of meaningful adult content that's rarely been in any prior game. We've got advances in the medium that allow those earlier ideas to be more richly realized.
Beyond that though, you're listing three games (if we ignore sequels) in 15 years. Even if we accept it does nothing new, one utterly engaging game in all of those ways, every four or five years, means it more than merits adoration - even if it isn't utterly unique.
I was going to jump in with much the same comments:
F-15: Mach 2.5+ (1,650mph)
However, it generates that from all 29,000 lbf of thrust it can manage with an afterburner lit. Dry thrust is 17,450lbf (both numbers are per engine so double that).
Also, those numbers are for high altitude only. At low altitude, even with afterburners lit, it tops out at Mach 1.2.
Given that an afterburner adds fuel downstream of the turbine that then burns, this is more like a hack to add a rocket than a genuine part of the jet engine aspect of jet engines. It also burns through fuel at a staggering rate and so is hardly maintainable.
So, to go back to the original quote with all of that considered: About the only jet that beats 1.6 on traditional jets alone is the F-22 which can supercruise (no afterburner) at Mach 1.72
I believe Michael Caine said it best, "Stop throwing those bloody 419 emails at me!"
Two technologies, A and B. A was created 20 years ago and was patented but is largely open for use now. B was created 5 years ago and its makers benevolently made it without patents.
Along comes Evil Company. They declare that tech B uses their patented technology X. Sure, B itself doesn't have any patents. But they snuck a broadly worded patent claim in ten years ago and revised it endlessly to the point where an underlying part of B is affected.
Now, B, unpatented as it may be, has hardware manufacturers having to pay huge licensing fees to Evil Company to use the supposedly free technology B.
Technology A, on the other hand, is tweny years old. That puts it before most of the crazy modern patent issues. Plus, having been around for twenty years, it's a known quantity - more or less any patents that might come up already have come up. Finally, even if one does come up, it has to be older than the tech - giving it at the very most - 5 years before it expires.
Thus, to a hardware manufacturer like Nokia, something that's not totally free but is also pretty safe from suddenly becoming very expensive to support is far better than something that's totally free but has a much larger risk associated.
So, the problem isn't as simple as Ogg is free, MP3 isn't completely. It's MP3 is a known quantity, Ogg seems free right now but may saddle us with insane licensing fees because of the broken patent system.
This is exactly what happened to digital camera makers. They adopted JPEG, thinking there was little to no cost associated. As soon as it became the absolute standard, along comes a third party and claims they've got a patent on an underlying tech. Suddenly everyone's forking out millions for what was supposed to be a cheap solution. Strangely enough, they don't want to do that again. They'd rather a worse tech and a small fee over a better, free tech and the risk of having to pay massive fees once they can't back out.
Are you volunteering to been in that first million?
No, and every one of those two million should fight tooth and nail to avoid being in it too.
Every penny my parents spent on my education rather than buying new cars or going on vacations. Every night I stayed up studying in school when I'd have preferred to be in bed. Every morning I dragged my sorry ass out of bed to go to lectures. Every time I went in to the office when I'd have preffered to have been in bed. Every time I sucked up an insane manager rather than telling him how I felt and storming out. Those were my fights to ensure that neither I nor the next couple of generations of my family are likely to ever be in that situation.
It's not as severe a struggle, by any means. The worst I ever faced was a couple of weeks with nowhere to live and a similar duration with literally no money to buy food. But it did teach me one hell of a lesson... Fight with everything you've got to ensure you're not in that first million.
Buddhism has a really smart first pair of noble truths... No matter what, there is suffering in life and all you can do is address your response to it. You can sit there and bitch about how unfair it is or you can suck up that it is unfair and get on with making the most of living anyway.
It always sucks to be in that first million. One should do everything possible to make damn sure they're not in it. At the same time, that doesn't stop that first million, terrible and all, from being better than ten million later.