Risk: 20 years in jail x odds of getting caught x 0.66 (out in 2/3rds with good behavior) x 0.25 (realistic likely percentage of full sentence given for a first time offence) x 0.5 (overcrowded jails, halving sentences for white collar crime).
Reward: 40 years of career earning 20% more assuming you get a better post university position and then grow proportionally.
In pure cost vs. reward terms, a maybe 10% chance of getting caught and then facing what's really 2-3 years after the 20 year scare number is thrown around, works out to a pretty minimal statistical cost vs. about a million dollars in increased earning over a typical IT career.
Would you consider three months (statistical average cost) against one million dollars (statistical average reward)?
Kind of makes me feel stupid for not having done it in my day... or did I? *grins*
Yes, 20 years sounds like a disproportionately high punishment to our initial gut response. But, when you consider how inept we are at catching people, how inept we are at sentencing them, how inept we are at giving even close to that full sentence and how inept we are are them making them serve even close to it... You suddenly realize that a 20 year, $250,000 fine, sentence isn't near enough to make a sensible statistician pick the other option.
You'll notice the Notre Dame model was of the endlessly photographed front aspect.
I wonder how much detail such a technique can pull on the rear of the building? Or the back of Rodin's Kiss? How about the top surfaces of the Statue of Liberty?
Of course that won't stop CSI, next season, from pulling a bunch of pictures from Flickr of the front exterior of a building, reconstructing a complete 3D model, open accurately hinging doors, travelling inside, going down in to the basement and looking at the reflection in someone's eye to identify the killer.
I know the parent's been moderated as a joke but it raises a valid question.
For me, the answer's as follows:
Price Match - They have a policy where they'll price match any local competitor's advertised price so long as it's in stock. Go with a print out of a Circuit City, CompUSA, Fry's ad and a list of the dozen stores within the range limit then ask them if they really want to call around. It's exceptionally rare they'll bother - meaning you can get everything at the same price you'd pay in the stores that are sold out because of that price.
It's Closer - Circuit City, CompUSA, etc. all seem to have similar price matching policies. Whichever one was closest, I'd pick that one.
Reward Card - This has got progressively worse since they introduced it, paying back under half of what it once did. But at least it's free. If I'm going to go to my closest store anyway and pay the lowest local price, why not collect $5 for every $250 spent?
Loss-leaders - Best Buy seems to go in for this more than most of their competitors - advertising a bunch of really cheap DVDs that they know they'll quickly sell out of in order to get people in with a movie buying mindset. Sure, they may sell one movie for $4.99 - but the other three at $19.99 make up for it. If you recognize that and simply wait for the movies you want to be on a $4.99 sale, you save a fortune.
I'm Lazy - Rather than running around a bunch of stores, I'd rather use BestBuy.com to make the purchase for in-store pickup, then have one of their employees run around and find it on the shelves for me. It only takes an hour until they're ready for pickup and I never have to leave until the email confirming they actually have it is sent. I then promptly return the far less helpful online pickup and repurchase it as a store order in order to take advantage of the in store benefits, price matching, etc.
The Employees Hate The Place Too - You think you get screwed? Imagine the poor employees who have to enforce inane policies that they don't agree with and then get badly paid for it too. The great thing about it is that a little kindness goes a hell of a long way. I've got to know several employees at my local store who, after just a few friendly conversations, tell me when the deliveries are coming in and pull the hard to find items off the truck that night rather than the next morning when they're due to go on the shelves.
Basic Awareness Of Cons - The restuffing and returning a box is a pretty common scam. A lot of customers get hit on DSLRs with it. Unfortunately, BestBuy has no idea if it was you or the person who returned it first (though their paying with cash should be a giant red flag and a product inspection should be an absolute must on any return not tied to an identity). Accepting that, if you're trying to save the 10% or so for an open box, open every set of packaging and check the contents before you're out of range of the store's security cameras.
I'm Petit - The BestBuy CEO came out and stated that there are angel and demon customers (his words). Demons do, well, everything I've described above. Angels are basically sheep who see the great loss-leading deal and then politely buy the expensive version, five other things they didn't need and all of the accessories and warranties the salesperson offers. His ultimate dream, apparently, is to ban demons from his stores. Given that he's apparently not found a way to consistently and legally make that work, I'm delighting in continuing to be one of his demon customers. I know I personally don't affect him but I do like the idea that people like me keep [a man who calls me a "demon" for exercising basic consumer rights] up at night.
I'm not saying it's a great place. It is however somewhere that's incredibly useful if you understand how it works, can take advantage of its systems and avoid the abusive parts.
Whilst I realize I'm going to get flamed for daring to say it:
The challenge isn't making $6m with a successful act.
The challenge is in identifying the one band in ten, if you're lucky, that'll be that successful act.
If a typical band blows a half million dollar advance on recording an album and it flops, the record company is out the advance.
To deal with this, they write contracts that mean they recoup the 9 flops from the 10th breakout.
Those contracts are perceived as screwing successful artists because they take so damn much money from them once they are successful. What the artists are conveniently ignoring is they quite happily spent the advance while they were convinced they'd be the greatest thing ever but the label knew that hadn't been proven yet.
Radiohead ditched their label and all of the costs associated. Getting a much higher chunk of revenues, $6m is likely a great profit for them and likely far better than they'd get under a traditional deal. The question is whether any of that profit will get re-invested in advances for other artists in the way it would with a label trying to grow a stable of artists rather than just one band?
The industry does a hell of a lot wrong. They're slow to react, arrogant and treat their customers like criminals. On the flip side, they do at least have a [debatably flawed] structure for developing talent... an area where Radiohead's taking all of the profits may well fall short.
How can they be attacking Open Source projects on one hand, and seeking not only to use open source methods, but even to use the OSI Approved Open Source trademark? How can Americans be refusing to sign up to Kyoto on one hand and winning Nobel prizes on the other? Probably because Bush isn't Gore and Gore isn't Bush. When it comes to human rights abuses, the administration can be winking when telling people not to do anything bad and yet you can still have a general who comes down like a ton of bricks on any soldier who even begins to act out of line because he feels another path makes more sense in the long run.
If many of the old guard senior execs feel one way - and a newer junior VP who has his senior VP's protection feels another - then it's entirely possible for two parts of a large organization to act in two apparently conflicting ways.
That's simply the nature of large organizations. Once you clear a certain size, you can't have every decision cross your CEO's desk or they'll get nothing done.
Employee: Sorry, AOL employees only accept termination notices between the hours of 1:13am and 1:16am, Ugandan time. Please call back at this deliberately inconvenient time. Until then, we will continue to bill you for our services.
Boss [several hours later]: OK, now you're fired!
Employee: Sorry, please hold.
Boss [several hours later]: Look, you're freaking fired!
Employee: OK, I'm going to sign you up for one more month of free employment.
Boss: I don't want a month's free employment, you're freaking fired, you stupid cretins!
Employee: I'm sorry, we accidentally disconnected that call. Please begin the process again.
Management may want to fire them. If the employees have learned anything from their time working there, it'll be next to impossible to make them actually leave. Karma's a bitch.
Aside from the cheap, plastic, bottom of the line, heavily cropped sensors, minimal functionality, non-environmentally sealed versions, PhotoShop is cheaper than just about any DSLR out there. One in four or five cameras in a line doesn't really count as "many".
However, even then, most photography magazines will also discuss techniques for PhotoShop Elements - which runs all of $99 ($79.99 upgrade) - or Lightroom which for $299.
You've also got the upgrade path: The next version of Photoshop will set you back $199. The next version of your DSLR camera will still cost you full retail.
Also, if you're not a professional and qualify for the educational discount, a full copy of PhotoShop CS3 Extended will only set you back $299. The educational version of your DSLR... doesn't exist.
However, it seems that "unrated version" DVD's have become a pretty widespread norm. The MPAA is losing its grip on the DVD market, and good riddance. I think you're possibly missing what the MPAA ratings mean.
The MPAA doesn't give a flying f*** about what movies people can or can't see, so long as its members make money.
If the MPAA hadn't stepped in and created their own voluntary code, the government would have. By making their own voluntary code, they ensured they remained in control of it and not the government. This is exactly why publishers are supporting the ESRB ratings right now - they may not like the limits they impose but they'd much rather their own voluntary limits than the government making compulsory ones (the only problem being that theaters did a passable job of applying the limits and so the government backed away while many game stores keep ignoring the ESRB and so leave politicians with ammo).
So, the MPAA's ratings are only there to make the government go away. Given that that worked, they're totally happy for their members to release "unrated" versions - so long as a) the government stays away and b) their members make money. As the big chains are more than happy to sell unrated movies as something titilating and decades passing means politicians get no mileage from it, the MPAA is more than happy to support it.
Were the ratings really a symbol of MPAA power, sure, they'd fight "unrated" releases. But, given the ratings are simply there so they control censorship rather than letting the government do it, so long as their members don't upset the cart, they're more than happy for those same members to make even more money by appearing to flout them. They're still members and this is just another way for them to keep making a profit - which is all the ratings really were in the first place.
Manhunt 2 was originally rated Adults Only -- equivalent to an X in films -- and now carries an M for mature audiences (17 and up) Ao is a rough equivalent to NC-17. NC-17 is considered a commercial deathknell for a movie as it ensures most theaters won't pick it up because of concerns that potential audiences are too small. In exactly the same way, an Ao is a deathknell as BestBuy, Walmart, etc. won't carry a game they think is going to scare adults away from buying it for their children.
M is a rough equivalent to R. R pretends to mean "No one under 17" just like NC-17 but everyone knows many parents, older brothers, etc. will ignore that warning and choose to take kids anywhere (I sat through Scream 3 while a woman took her roughtly 3, 5 and 10 year olds in with her). In the same way, Walmart and BestBuy will happily sell M rated games as they know they won't scare parents off from buying them for their kids in the same way Ao might do.
Hollywood has been sending movies back for re-review for years. There are even famous letters of producers debating how many "fuck"s a "Jesus Christ!" is worth. Generally, they pick a rating they want, aim for the edgy end of it, submit, then make whatever edits they're told they need to to squeeze it back in to that category. All that's changed is that game companies have learned from Hollywood - nothing more, nothing less.
The real shame isn't that "evil" games are getting reclassified after receiving edits. The greater shame is, much like movies, potentially great pieces of art that are totally appropriate for an adult audience are being squashed in the name of commercial viability.
Games such as Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines are examples of the truly amazing art form the genre can become. From betrayal to lust, infanticide to the damaged adult personalities of children who were abused, it was far and away the most epic piece of game storytelling I've ever experienced. Though also flawed by bugs at the time of launch, its biggest issue was no one talked about it, no one advertised it and it was hard to find. An amazing game studio crumbled because they released something phenomenal that couldn't be sold in puritan America. Since then, no one has even tried to launch a game with close to that depth of adult themes.
I'm a computer-using professional, (a web developer, actually) and I haven't bought a computer in years (who needs to? a five year old Pentium IV does everything anyone needs a computer to do!). So long as you can run a basic text editor, MS Paint and a web browser, you can call yourself a web developer. By that rationale, a 233MHz processor, 128mb of ram and a 1.5gb hard drive meets those requirements (XP min specs).
Of course, no one in their right mind would do.
I can work with a single monitor, rather than two. I can work with a 15 inch 800x600 screen rather than something much larger. I can work with 512mb of ram and simply deal with files thrashing out disk constantly. I can close one browser before opening the next to free up memory when testing. I can close down my text editor before opening my FTP client rather than using one integrated suite. Were I a designer as well as a developer, I could build all of my graphics in a couple of layers, always merging down, in an old version of Photoshop rather than using things like layer effects.
A more powerful machine, the latest software, etc. may not be essential to being able to brute force my way through jobs. That doesn't change the simple fact that it's nowhere near as efficient and that, dealing with those inefficiencies, I'll be tempted to cut corners on quality rather than endure whatever hardships.
Sure, there are people who disagree with that. They'll take the cheap and easy approach. Then again, there're a lot of people who call themselves web developers while hustling for $25/hr to write crappy code.
In my case, I'm a director, running a decent sized team of developers at one of the fastest growing west coast digital media agencies. My life is a constant balance of cost vs. reward. In that world, with developers whose skills merit charging a decent rate, the increase in efficiency from investing in hardware and software is absolutely merrited. The reward point isn't there for the very latest, most powerful possible hardware. It absolutely is there for running on a two to three year hardware cycle and within two cycles of various Adobe products. In a pinch, we'll pull out an old machine and a single monitor but the cost of doing so is usually so great (about a $20-50/hr billable productivity drop) that it merits a ~$2,500 hardware/software setup in one to three weeks.
So, while it's doable to use old hardware, there really is a large productivity gain to be had. If charging at true professional rates, proudly refusing to upgrade really isn't a justifiable cost saving.
Vivendi Calls iTunes Contract Terms "Indecent"? You should see what they ask of their users:
10. Export Control....You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes... including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture or production of missiles, or nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. iTunes Contract - PDF
Which completely screws with my plan to have bitching tunes blasting from my spinner-equipped nuclear missile.
If the root cause is that your Axons are not releasing enough neurotransmitters, then this technique is addressing the root cause. The problem is, you're working on the assumption that the only effect of your Axons not releasing enough neurotransmitters is the human coined concept of depression and that it somehow has a one-to-one mapping to how the brain works.
SSRIs make the wonderful promise of "Increase seratonin levels in the brain, see depression and anxiety fade away!"
However, again using human coined terms for complex and non directly mapping neural concepts: Seratonin also aids inhibitions. Living with low seratonin means that patients who think they have a baseline for things like their sexual drive or their ability to cry when appropriate take the drug and, with those inhibitions increased too, complain about losing their sex drive, being unable to cry when appropriate, etc.
So, I'd argue that, even if the issue is Axons are not releasing enough neurotransmitters, the real need is to identify which Axons need to release which neurotransmitters to boost the areas we want boosted AND identify what other things are also affected by trying to fix the nebulous concept of depression so we can tweak other things back to their original levels.
Look at a car tuner... Only an idiot would take a stock car and decide the understeer issue could be fixed by putting a massive wing on the front. Sure, that might help some at speeds where airflow over it created extra downforce... but it'd also sap your top speed, your acceleration, and do next to nothing at low speeds where no air moved over it. A smarter mechanic would look at the bigger picture, adjusting suspension, tires, moving weight around, adding computers to the drivechain, etc. in order to get the most consistent possible increase with the least possible cost to existing systems he was happy with.
On a medical level, we're still at the point of "Hmm, a wing seems to help. Let's bolt one on and if stuff goes wrong, let's try varying the size or using a different one." SSRIs to electrodes sounds an awful lot like saying, "Oh, wings don't work so well, let's try tires now." It might help, it might help differently, it's still moronic when you consider complex interacting systems.
As Apple gets more and more of its revenue from non-Mac devices, they are also getting more and more of their revenue from devices that simply exclude third parties. Consumers suffer from this. We suffer from increased prices and decreased competition... And this non-Mac situation differs from the Mac situation how?
How many OS-X machines have you built with cheap parts you can get at Frys? How many run on low price/bulk volume Dell or Gateway hardware?
If you want to use OS-X, general* consensus is that you pay several hundred bucks more for your locked in Apple hardware than you would for a comparable third party's hardware. (*note: Yes, there are arguments against this but it's still a very, very common belief)
Have you ever installed the superior iPod interface software on a cheaper MP3 player? OK, so that's trickier than an OS install... So how many non-Apple MP3 players have you bought that have licensed the iPod interface, plug in to iTunes and can read your iTunes store purchases?
Again, for access to Apple's prized world, they lock you to their hardware and then bill you $50-$100 more than the equivalent MP3 player from Creative, Sandisk or whoever.
In short, Apple has always increased revenue by refusing to even consider competitors, meaning there's decreased competition and increased prices.
The only difference this time is they've partnered with someone to do it because there's an area they have no existing business strength in. It's still the same basic premise... they just have funkier TV ads now that have made most of us think they're our cool friend and not the same business that's always wanted to maximise profits from us through a model of non-competition.
On the flipside, they do get to keep using the [somewhat arguable] phrase, "It Just Works" because, unlike Microsoft's open approach to other hardware vendors, they don't get a reputation for putting out buggy systems when product X completely fails to work with product Y and product Z was never tested properly in the first place.
By that rationale, they could equally argue, "Had we openned it up, we'd have to rely on carriers for testing as we couldn't test with every one of them. The moment Sprint or T-Mobile had a glitch where everyone's emails disappeared or a virus got in to the system that we couldn't lock out by forced updates, news stories would tar the iPhone's name as well as just the guilty vendor, people would see the iPhone as buggy and we'd lose our market share through something that wasn't our fault. We'd rather stay locked to something we can control, sell a few less but maintain our reputation."
Whether for profits or for quality, it hardly matters. One has always been the claim against Apple, the other has always been their defense. Nothing's changed in far longer than the iPhone's lifetime.
what is in question is the fact that six officers felt threatened enough to justify electrocuting him He was made verbally aware that his self-important diatribe wasn't going to be allowed to continue but he revelled in pushing the issue.
He can be seen physically struggling, flailing all over the place, long after they initially try to remove him.
He can be heard being repeatedly warned to stop resisting arrest or face being tasered.
He can be heard acknowledging the threat of the taser - it's not like he was surprised with it - and continues apparently getting his rocks off at being a poor, abused protester.
Every single step of the way, he did his utmost to try and act like a martyr, to try and force the situation to the next level of confrontation. He was consistently warned of what the consequences would be if he continued to escalate things to the next level and, every time, he chose to do so as part of his self important crusade.
Yes, there were six officers trying to restrain him - and they tried purely physical force for quite some time. The reality however is that you can't fit all that many people around one person, they get in each other's way, someone who's resisting will leverage any moment where a grip's temporarily eased to flail back out. There comes a point where, after giving multiple warnings, the next level of restraint becomes appropriate.
If you look at him jumping around and all the rest of it, what would have happened had he leapt in to the seating, fallen, and broken a bone, gouged his eye on the corner of a seat, broken the neck of a girl he landed on? At that point, everyone would have been bitching that not enough force was used in restraining him, allowing the situation to get even further out of hand.
All things considered, he was a little bitch who was determined to make things as dramatic as possible. He was given repeated warnings about how each level would get worse for him and he chose to go there anyway. They did what they could to restrain him with the minumum of force (first verbal, then physical, finally electrical, never with a firearm) and only escalated as he refused to respond to both the current level and the threat of the next level.
I'm normally the first liberal to complain about brutality - but he deliberately chose that path. They acted with restraint, only elevating as he forced the situation.
You're making a fundamental mistake: Assuming anyone at PC World has the slightest clue what Slashdot is.
It's kind of like writing to McDonald's customer service department and telling them they are getting a bad reputation amongst the Michelin Guide people: they'll wonder what on earth tires have to do with anything.
I'm getting the feeling they backed themselves in to a corner:
Release the touch screen version with 160gb of space - the iPhone with 8gb becomes a joke.
Release a 160gb iPhone to keep it comparable, six months after the original launch - massively piss off your early adopters that Apple relies upon. For a lot of users, especially while most casual users have no idea how to get DVDs ripped, 8gb will let them keep about 100 albums - which is a decent sized casual music library.
For users like myself who obsessively collect many hundreds of CDs and would love to deal with DVDDecrypter, etc. to get movies on to that widescreen, storage is king and 8/16GB makes it nothing more than a cruel joke. But I'm realistic enough to accept that I'm not really their mass market and they're certainly not going to screw over their existing markets just to please the smaller subset I'm in.
Shame though. Give me the new features with a decent hard drive and I'd have been in heaven.
First and foremost, it appears to fall into the "illicit downloads = lost sales" fallacy, the view that each song obtained over a P2P network is a lost purchase.' Very true.
The problem is that music fans are largely disenchanted with the market. By and large, music fans think that music is too expensive, and that much of what is available isn't very good. This is pretty much the same kind of assumption but in reverse.
They assume: Most of what's pirated is clearly of good enough people would buy it anyway quality that it's a direct loss of sale.
The poster assumes: Much of what's pirated is of poor enough quality that no one would buy it but high enough quality that they'd go to the trouble of downloading it.
Both sides have pretty much retreated to their corners and are refusing to meet in a middle. Most likely, the situation is: Piracy, having a lower cost, allows people to consume more than they would otherwise do but that isn't a consumption that would go away if forced to pay the price requested, either. Instead, both retreat to their corners, pointing out how the other one's wrong whilst refusing to look at how their arguments are flawed too. It becomes a somewhat pointless discussion when neither side is capable of considering anything other than their own views.
At this rate, it's going to be twenty laptops per child! I always prefered Blendtec's twenty children per blender program, myself.
Chinese kids are even cheaper.
on
Kids Review the OLPC
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· Score: 5, Informative
The video of a 10-year-old and his younger sister replacing a mobo is pretty cool. Correction: The muted video of a 10-year-old and his younger sister being blatantly directed on exactly what to do by the pair of adult hands that keep entering the video to catch things they do wrong (including almost dropping it at one point) and apparently updating the instructions for them that they're evidently not doing on their own implies OLPC has learned what Nike figured out twenty years ago: kids make the best slave labor.
'less than 10 percent of the original music on the CDs.' 10% is a remarkably convenient figure, ignoring entirely how perception works.
By the same rule, CD's are already missing just a hair under 100% of of the original music - any given bitrate never being a perfect reproduction of a true waveform.
If you're going to argue "perception is what counts, not raw percentages" for your format of choice (CD), then you have to use the same rule for the one you dislike (MP3). By that standard, if you ask an average listener to compare live to CD, they'll likely say it's greater than 99% quality... and they'll say the same between CDs and higher bitrate MP3s.
She gave him her list of needs, he came up with a part list Her list ran:
Run Word or another word processor for college stuff Heavy Internet surfing (multiple windows) Store and play plenty of music Store and manage big digital art files, including many-layered Photoshop files Operate quietly Play the latest games without turning details way down Dropping $400 on a GPU when gaming is at the bottom of her list then skimping on $100 of memory when she's trying to run large PSDs on Vista screams of a gamer who once again ignored what he was being asked to get in favor of what he thought was cool.
2GB of ram will just about get Vista running with a little left over for smaller PSDs. The size PSDs she's talking about will be thrashing the hard drive to run. Doubling that ram up to 4GB, what's generally regarded as the sweet spot for Vista anyway, and dropping to a $300 graphics card would serve her far better for her main needs and let her still run pretty much any modern game with pretty decent quality settings.
But, hey, he gets to reassure himself it's a sweet gaming rig with that quad core processor and the 8800. Just a shame that was lowest on her list of requirements and likely added after a few rounds of, "Are you sure you wouldn't like to play games? I know they're not your main focus. But surely you'd like the option, right?"
Even ignoring that she plays Civ IV and Oblivion (both of which will run just fine on much cheaper hardware), he commits a cardinal sin amongst gamers too: He bought what he figured would be great for running a game in the future (Spore), not what was needed for her level of gaming now. Spore won't be out until sometime next year and probably late spring at the earliest from what they're saying. That $100 off the GPU now wouldn't cost her much right now, would get her the memory that would really aid her, and she'll likely want to upgrade to whatever the latest and greatest GPU is in a year's time for Spore anyway. At that point, it'll be pretty much guaranteed that $300 on nVidia's 9xxx series will beat $400 on the 8xxx series now and have whatever fun and exciting new features the 9xxx series has that nVidia worked with Maxis to get in to Spore.
It's cool to share building their PC with your girlfriend/wife/mother/friend/anyone who wouldn't normally build one, giving them a real sense of ownership and achievement with their new PC. But fooling yourself in to believing they need what you think is cool, rather than actually listening to their needs, is a great way to undo a lot of that when they realize they got you something cool rather than built what was right for them.
And, yes, this comes from a guy who sat there while his wife tapped on dozens of keyboards because she figured I'd make sure it simply worked and so the most important thing to her was the keyboard felt right. To me, that was crazy. To her, it was what mattered. So, crazy or not, I listened and made sure she got what felt perfect to her.
Girlfirend my ass... OK, I know these things are confusing, your parents were probably embarrassed talking about it and you're a nerd so you didn't figure you'd need to know anyway...
But, when the nice priest tries to "girlfriend" your ass, it's OK to call him a bad man.
In late June, the Indianapolis-based hospital system announced that starting in 2009, it will fine employees $10 per paycheck if their body mass index (BMI, a ratio of height to weight that measures body fat) is over 30.
BMI is a horribly flawed index.
Almost every major athlete (certain sports like ribbon twirling aside) has a BMI massively in excess of 30.
It's also based on your height SQUARED. Can any of the learned Slashdot crowd tell me how many physical dimensions the body exists in? For this reason, they've had to lower the recommended range to 18-22 for Asians because their lower average height means that the numbers are completely useless. By the same logic, anyone over the 5'6 or so it assumes for needs to raise their BMI but, of course, it fails to account for that.
For both of those reasons, just about no genuine exercise professionals use BMI. Body fat percentage is a vastly more accurate indicator except that only gets close to being accurate the more points you use, is only particularly accurate if you submerge someone in a water tank and is only completely accurate post-mortem.
To put the joke of BMI in context, we did a 7 point body fat reading and got my body fat percentage. Knock that percentage off from a starting weight of 100% and I end up about 15lbs over a BMI of 25 (the high end of normal). That's right... I need to drop past the 8% minimum body fat range, past the 6% point where brain function becomes affected, past the 0% point where I die, and then lose 15lbs of muscle/skeleton, all to get a BMI of 25 - the high end of what it claims is a healthy range for me.
In a world where any rational thinking has proved I am too tall and have too much basic muscle structure for BMI to have any validity, any company that tried to fine me for failing to live up to a demonstrably unhealthy scale would be facing an immediate lawsuit. The only thing that would be slowing me down would be figuring out if I was suing them for harrassment or for forcing a situation that would outright endanger my health to try and follow.
Before anyone makes the obvious joke, yeah, I'll accept I also go over the 18% recommended male body fat reading and could do with losing weight. It doesn't change the simple fact that BMI is massively flawed and using it to fine employees borders on the criminal.
Slashdot Mirror
Pulling numbers from my anatomical /dev/null
Risk: 20 years in jail x odds of getting caught x 0.66 (out in 2/3rds with good behavior) x 0.25 (realistic likely percentage of full sentence given for a first time offence) x 0.5 (overcrowded jails, halving sentences for white collar crime).
Reward: 40 years of career earning 20% more assuming you get a better post university position and then grow proportionally.
In pure cost vs. reward terms, a maybe 10% chance of getting caught and then facing what's really 2-3 years after the 20 year scare number is thrown around, works out to a pretty minimal statistical cost vs. about a million dollars in increased earning over a typical IT career.
Would you consider three months (statistical average cost) against one million dollars (statistical average reward)?
Kind of makes me feel stupid for not having done it in my day... or did I? *grins*
Yes, 20 years sounds like a disproportionately high punishment to our initial gut response. But, when you consider how inept we are at catching people, how inept we are at sentencing them, how inept we are at giving even close to that full sentence and how inept we are are them making them serve even close to it... You suddenly realize that a 20 year, $250,000 fine, sentence isn't near enough to make a sensible statistician pick the other option.
You'll notice the Notre Dame model was of the endlessly photographed front aspect.
I wonder how much detail such a technique can pull on the rear of the building? Or the back of Rodin's Kiss? How about the top surfaces of the Statue of Liberty?
Of course that won't stop CSI, next season, from pulling a bunch of pictures from Flickr of the front exterior of a building, reconstructing a complete 3D model, open accurately hinging doors, travelling inside, going down in to the basement and looking at the reflection in someone's eye to identify the killer.
I know the parent's been moderated as a joke but it raises a valid question.
For me, the answer's as follows:
Price Match - They have a policy where they'll price match any local competitor's advertised price so long as it's in stock. Go with a print out of a Circuit City, CompUSA, Fry's ad and a list of the dozen stores within the range limit then ask them if they really want to call around. It's exceptionally rare they'll bother - meaning you can get everything at the same price you'd pay in the stores that are sold out because of that price.
It's Closer - Circuit City, CompUSA, etc. all seem to have similar price matching policies. Whichever one was closest, I'd pick that one.
Reward Card - This has got progressively worse since they introduced it, paying back under half of what it once did. But at least it's free. If I'm going to go to my closest store anyway and pay the lowest local price, why not collect $5 for every $250 spent?
Loss-leaders - Best Buy seems to go in for this more than most of their competitors - advertising a bunch of really cheap DVDs that they know they'll quickly sell out of in order to get people in with a movie buying mindset. Sure, they may sell one movie for $4.99 - but the other three at $19.99 make up for it. If you recognize that and simply wait for the movies you want to be on a $4.99 sale, you save a fortune.
I'm Lazy - Rather than running around a bunch of stores, I'd rather use BestBuy.com to make the purchase for in-store pickup, then have one of their employees run around and find it on the shelves for me. It only takes an hour until they're ready for pickup and I never have to leave until the email confirming they actually have it is sent. I then promptly return the far less helpful online pickup and repurchase it as a store order in order to take advantage of the in store benefits, price matching, etc.
The Employees Hate The Place Too - You think you get screwed? Imagine the poor employees who have to enforce inane policies that they don't agree with and then get badly paid for it too. The great thing about it is that a little kindness goes a hell of a long way. I've got to know several employees at my local store who, after just a few friendly conversations, tell me when the deliveries are coming in and pull the hard to find items off the truck that night rather than the next morning when they're due to go on the shelves.
Basic Awareness Of Cons - The restuffing and returning a box is a pretty common scam. A lot of customers get hit on DSLRs with it. Unfortunately, BestBuy has no idea if it was you or the person who returned it first (though their paying with cash should be a giant red flag and a product inspection should be an absolute must on any return not tied to an identity). Accepting that, if you're trying to save the 10% or so for an open box, open every set of packaging and check the contents before you're out of range of the store's security cameras.
I'm Petit - The BestBuy CEO came out and stated that there are angel and demon customers (his words). Demons do, well, everything I've described above. Angels are basically sheep who see the great loss-leading deal and then politely buy the expensive version, five other things they didn't need and all of the accessories and warranties the salesperson offers. His ultimate dream, apparently, is to ban demons from his stores. Given that he's apparently not found a way to consistently and legally make that work, I'm delighting in continuing to be one of his demon customers. I know I personally don't affect him but I do like the idea that people like me keep [a man who calls me a "demon" for exercising basic consumer rights] up at night.
I'm not saying it's a great place. It is however somewhere that's incredibly useful if you understand how it works, can take advantage of its systems and avoid the abusive parts.
While they're nice to have, I'd rather have fun and be somewhat active than sit and look at pretty pictures.
Yeah, I say that too. Sadly not what my browser history confirms.
I swear I'm going to go on a real date one of these years!
Whilst I realize I'm going to get flamed for daring to say it:
The challenge isn't making $6m with a successful act.
The challenge is in identifying the one band in ten, if you're lucky, that'll be that successful act.
If a typical band blows a half million dollar advance on recording an album and it flops, the record company is out the advance.
To deal with this, they write contracts that mean they recoup the 9 flops from the 10th breakout.
Those contracts are perceived as screwing successful artists because they take so damn much money from them once they are successful. What the artists are conveniently ignoring is they quite happily spent the advance while they were convinced they'd be the greatest thing ever but the label knew that hadn't been proven yet.
Radiohead ditched their label and all of the costs associated. Getting a much higher chunk of revenues, $6m is likely a great profit for them and likely far better than they'd get under a traditional deal. The question is whether any of that profit will get re-invested in advances for other artists in the way it would with a label trying to grow a stable of artists rather than just one band?
The industry does a hell of a lot wrong. They're slow to react, arrogant and treat their customers like criminals. On the flip side, they do at least have a [debatably flawed] structure for developing talent... an area where Radiohead's taking all of the profits may well fall short.
If many of the old guard senior execs feel one way - and a newer junior VP who has his senior VP's protection feels another - then it's entirely possible for two parts of a large organization to act in two apparently conflicting ways.
That's simply the nature of large organizations. Once you clear a certain size, you can't have every decision cross your CEO's desk or they'll get nothing done.
AOL's trained its employees too well.
Boss: You're fired!
Employee: Sorry, AOL employees only accept termination notices between the hours of 1:13am and 1:16am, Ugandan time. Please call back at this deliberately inconvenient time. Until then, we will continue to bill you for our services.
Boss [several hours later]: OK, now you're fired!
Employee: Sorry, please hold.
Boss [several hours later]: Look, you're freaking fired!
Employee: OK, I'm going to sign you up for one more month of free employment.
Boss: I don't want a month's free employment, you're freaking fired, you stupid cretins!
Employee: I'm sorry, we accidentally disconnected that call. Please begin the process again.
Management may want to fire them. If the employees have learned anything from their time working there, it'll be next to impossible to make them actually leave. Karma's a bitch.
To take the two best known brands:
Canon Digital Rebel: $449.95
Nikon D40: $499.95
Nikon D80: $874.95
Canon 40D: $1,299.95
Nikon D300: $1,799.95
Canon 5D: $2,499.95
Canon 1D MkIII: $4,499.95
Nikon D3: $4,999.95
Canon 1Ds MkIII: $7,999.95
Aside from the cheap, plastic, bottom of the line, heavily cropped sensors, minimal functionality, non-environmentally sealed versions, PhotoShop is cheaper than just about any DSLR out there. One in four or five cameras in a line doesn't really count as "many".
However, even then, most photography magazines will also discuss techniques for PhotoShop Elements - which runs all of $99 ($79.99 upgrade) - or Lightroom which for $299.
You've also got the upgrade path: The next version of Photoshop will set you back $199. The next version of your DSLR camera will still cost you full retail.
Also, if you're not a professional and qualify for the educational discount, a full copy of PhotoShop CS3 Extended will only set you back $299. The educational version of your DSLR... doesn't exist.
The MPAA doesn't give a flying f*** about what movies people can or can't see, so long as its members make money.
If the MPAA hadn't stepped in and created their own voluntary code, the government would have. By making their own voluntary code, they ensured they remained in control of it and not the government. This is exactly why publishers are supporting the ESRB ratings right now - they may not like the limits they impose but they'd much rather their own voluntary limits than the government making compulsory ones (the only problem being that theaters did a passable job of applying the limits and so the government backed away while many game stores keep ignoring the ESRB and so leave politicians with ammo).
So, the MPAA's ratings are only there to make the government go away. Given that that worked, they're totally happy for their members to release "unrated" versions - so long as a) the government stays away and b) their members make money. As the big chains are more than happy to sell unrated movies as something titilating and decades passing means politicians get no mileage from it, the MPAA is more than happy to support it.
Were the ratings really a symbol of MPAA power, sure, they'd fight "unrated" releases. But, given the ratings are simply there so they control censorship rather than letting the government do it, so long as their members don't upset the cart, they're more than happy for those same members to make even more money by appearing to flout them. They're still members and this is just another way for them to keep making a profit - which is all the ratings really were in the first place.
M is a rough equivalent to R. R pretends to mean "No one under 17" just like NC-17 but everyone knows many parents, older brothers, etc. will ignore that warning and choose to take kids anywhere (I sat through Scream 3 while a woman took her roughtly 3, 5 and 10 year olds in with her). In the same way, Walmart and BestBuy will happily sell M rated games as they know they won't scare parents off from buying them for their kids in the same way Ao might do.
Hollywood has been sending movies back for re-review for years. There are even famous letters of producers debating how many "fuck"s a "Jesus Christ!" is worth. Generally, they pick a rating they want, aim for the edgy end of it, submit, then make whatever edits they're told they need to to squeeze it back in to that category. All that's changed is that game companies have learned from Hollywood - nothing more, nothing less.
The real shame isn't that "evil" games are getting reclassified after receiving edits. The greater shame is, much like movies, potentially great pieces of art that are totally appropriate for an adult audience are being squashed in the name of commercial viability.
Games such as Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines are examples of the truly amazing art form the genre can become. From betrayal to lust, infanticide to the damaged adult personalities of children who were abused, it was far and away the most epic piece of game storytelling I've ever experienced. Though also flawed by bugs at the time of launch, its biggest issue was no one talked about it, no one advertised it and it was hard to find. An amazing game studio crumbled because they released something phenomenal that couldn't be sold in puritan America. Since then, no one has even tried to launch a game with close to that depth of adult themes.
Of course, no one in their right mind would do.
I can work with a single monitor, rather than two. I can work with a 15 inch 800x600 screen rather than something much larger. I can work with 512mb of ram and simply deal with files thrashing out disk constantly. I can close one browser before opening the next to free up memory when testing. I can close down my text editor before opening my FTP client rather than using one integrated suite. Were I a designer as well as a developer, I could build all of my graphics in a couple of layers, always merging down, in an old version of Photoshop rather than using things like layer effects.
A more powerful machine, the latest software, etc. may not be essential to being able to brute force my way through jobs. That doesn't change the simple fact that it's nowhere near as efficient and that, dealing with those inefficiencies, I'll be tempted to cut corners on quality rather than endure whatever hardships.
Sure, there are people who disagree with that. They'll take the cheap and easy approach. Then again, there're a lot of people who call themselves web developers while hustling for $25/hr to write crappy code.
In my case, I'm a director, running a decent sized team of developers at one of the fastest growing west coast digital media agencies. My life is a constant balance of cost vs. reward. In that world, with developers whose skills merit charging a decent rate, the increase in efficiency from investing in hardware and software is absolutely merrited. The reward point isn't there for the very latest, most powerful possible hardware. It absolutely is there for running on a two to three year hardware cycle and within two cycles of various Adobe products. In a pinch, we'll pull out an old machine and a single monitor but the cost of doing so is usually so great (about a $20-50/hr billable productivity drop) that it merits a ~$2,500 hardware/software setup in one to three weeks.
So, while it's doable to use old hardware, there really is a large productivity gain to be had. If charging at true professional rates, proudly refusing to upgrade really isn't a justifiable cost saving.
Which completely screws with my plan to have bitching tunes blasting from my spinner-equipped nuclear missile.
SSRIs make the wonderful promise of "Increase seratonin levels in the brain, see depression and anxiety fade away!"
However, again using human coined terms for complex and non directly mapping neural concepts: Seratonin also aids inhibitions. Living with low seratonin means that patients who think they have a baseline for things like their sexual drive or their ability to cry when appropriate take the drug and, with those inhibitions increased too, complain about losing their sex drive, being unable to cry when appropriate, etc.
So, I'd argue that, even if the issue is Axons are not releasing enough neurotransmitters, the real need is to identify which Axons need to release which neurotransmitters to boost the areas we want boosted AND identify what other things are also affected by trying to fix the nebulous concept of depression so we can tweak other things back to their original levels.
Look at a car tuner... Only an idiot would take a stock car and decide the understeer issue could be fixed by putting a massive wing on the front. Sure, that might help some at speeds where airflow over it created extra downforce... but it'd also sap your top speed, your acceleration, and do next to nothing at low speeds where no air moved over it. A smarter mechanic would look at the bigger picture, adjusting suspension, tires, moving weight around, adding computers to the drivechain, etc. in order to get the most consistent possible increase with the least possible cost to existing systems he was happy with.
On a medical level, we're still at the point of "Hmm, a wing seems to help. Let's bolt one on and if stuff goes wrong, let's try varying the size or using a different one." SSRIs to electrodes sounds an awful lot like saying, "Oh, wings don't work so well, let's try tires now." It might help, it might help differently, it's still moronic when you consider complex interacting systems.
How many OS-X machines have you built with cheap parts you can get at Frys? How many run on low price/bulk volume Dell or Gateway hardware?
If you want to use OS-X, general* consensus is that you pay several hundred bucks more for your locked in Apple hardware than you would for a comparable third party's hardware. (*note: Yes, there are arguments against this but it's still a very, very common belief)
Have you ever installed the superior iPod interface software on a cheaper MP3 player? OK, so that's trickier than an OS install... So how many non-Apple MP3 players have you bought that have licensed the iPod interface, plug in to iTunes and can read your iTunes store purchases?
Again, for access to Apple's prized world, they lock you to their hardware and then bill you $50-$100 more than the equivalent MP3 player from Creative, Sandisk or whoever.
In short, Apple has always increased revenue by refusing to even consider competitors, meaning there's decreased competition and increased prices.
The only difference this time is they've partnered with someone to do it because there's an area they have no existing business strength in. It's still the same basic premise... they just have funkier TV ads now that have made most of us think they're our cool friend and not the same business that's always wanted to maximise profits from us through a model of non-competition.
On the flipside, they do get to keep using the [somewhat arguable] phrase, "It Just Works" because, unlike Microsoft's open approach to other hardware vendors, they don't get a reputation for putting out buggy systems when product X completely fails to work with product Y and product Z was never tested properly in the first place.
By that rationale, they could equally argue, "Had we openned it up, we'd have to rely on carriers for testing as we couldn't test with every one of them. The moment Sprint or T-Mobile had a glitch where everyone's emails disappeared or a virus got in to the system that we couldn't lock out by forced updates, news stories would tar the iPhone's name as well as just the guilty vendor, people would see the iPhone as buggy and we'd lose our market share through something that wasn't our fault. We'd rather stay locked to something we can control, sell a few less but maintain our reputation."
Whether for profits or for quality, it hardly matters. One has always been the claim against Apple, the other has always been their defense. Nothing's changed in far longer than the iPhone's lifetime.
He can be seen physically struggling, flailing all over the place, long after they initially try to remove him.
He can be heard being repeatedly warned to stop resisting arrest or face being tasered.
He can be heard acknowledging the threat of the taser - it's not like he was surprised with it - and continues apparently getting his rocks off at being a poor, abused protester.
Every single step of the way, he did his utmost to try and act like a martyr, to try and force the situation to the next level of confrontation. He was consistently warned of what the consequences would be if he continued to escalate things to the next level and, every time, he chose to do so as part of his self important crusade.
Yes, there were six officers trying to restrain him - and they tried purely physical force for quite some time. The reality however is that you can't fit all that many people around one person, they get in each other's way, someone who's resisting will leverage any moment where a grip's temporarily eased to flail back out. There comes a point where, after giving multiple warnings, the next level of restraint becomes appropriate.
If you look at him jumping around and all the rest of it, what would have happened had he leapt in to the seating, fallen, and broken a bone, gouged his eye on the corner of a seat, broken the neck of a girl he landed on? At that point, everyone would have been bitching that not enough force was used in restraining him, allowing the situation to get even further out of hand.
All things considered, he was a little bitch who was determined to make things as dramatic as possible. He was given repeated warnings about how each level would get worse for him and he chose to go there anyway. They did what they could to restrain him with the minumum of force (first verbal, then physical, finally electrical, never with a firearm) and only escalated as he refused to respond to both the current level and the threat of the next level.
I'm normally the first liberal to complain about brutality - but he deliberately chose that path. They acted with restraint, only elevating as he forced the situation.
You're making a fundamental mistake: Assuming anyone at PC World has the slightest clue what Slashdot is.
It's kind of like writing to McDonald's customer service department and telling them they are getting a bad reputation amongst the Michelin Guide people: they'll wonder what on earth tires have to do with anything.
Release a 160gb iPhone to keep it comparable, six months after the original launch - massively piss off your early adopters that Apple relies upon. For a lot of users, especially while most casual users have no idea how to get DVDs ripped, 8gb will let them keep about 100 albums - which is a decent sized casual music library.
For users like myself who obsessively collect many hundreds of CDs and would love to deal with DVDDecrypter, etc. to get movies on to that widescreen, storage is king and 8/16GB makes it nothing more than a cruel joke. But I'm realistic enough to accept that I'm not really their mass market and they're certainly not going to screw over their existing markets just to please the smaller subset I'm in.
Shame though. Give me the new features with a decent hard drive and I'd have been in heaven.
It sucks when buffer overflows can go critical.
Think you hated blue screens of death? Wait until you have to deal with a blue mushroom cloud of actual death.
They assume: Most of what's pirated is clearly of good enough people would buy it anyway quality that it's a direct loss of sale.
The poster assumes: Much of what's pirated is of poor enough quality that no one would buy it but high enough quality that they'd go to the trouble of downloading it.
Both sides have pretty much retreated to their corners and are refusing to meet in a middle. Most likely, the situation is: Piracy, having a lower cost, allows people to consume more than they would otherwise do but that isn't a consumption that would go away if forced to pay the price requested, either. Instead, both retreat to their corners, pointing out how the other one's wrong whilst refusing to look at how their arguments are flawed too. It becomes a somewhat pointless discussion when neither side is capable of considering anything other than their own views.
By the same rule, CD's are already missing just a hair under 100% of of the original music - any given bitrate never being a perfect reproduction of a true waveform.
If you're going to argue "perception is what counts, not raw percentages" for your format of choice (CD), then you have to use the same rule for the one you dislike (MP3). By that standard, if you ask an average listener to compare live to CD, they'll likely say it's greater than 99% quality... and they'll say the same between CDs and higher bitrate MP3s.
Heavy Internet surfing (multiple windows)
Store and play plenty of music
Store and manage big digital art files, including many-layered Photoshop files
Operate quietly
Play the latest games without turning details way down Dropping $400 on a GPU when gaming is at the bottom of her list then skimping on $100 of memory when she's trying to run large PSDs on Vista screams of a gamer who once again ignored what he was being asked to get in favor of what he thought was cool.
2GB of ram will just about get Vista running with a little left over for smaller PSDs. The size PSDs she's talking about will be thrashing the hard drive to run. Doubling that ram up to 4GB, what's generally regarded as the sweet spot for Vista anyway, and dropping to a $300 graphics card would serve her far better for her main needs and let her still run pretty much any modern game with pretty decent quality settings.
But, hey, he gets to reassure himself it's a sweet gaming rig with that quad core processor and the 8800. Just a shame that was lowest on her list of requirements and likely added after a few rounds of, "Are you sure you wouldn't like to play games? I know they're not your main focus. But surely you'd like the option, right?"
Even ignoring that she plays Civ IV and Oblivion (both of which will run just fine on much cheaper hardware), he commits a cardinal sin amongst gamers too: He bought what he figured would be great for running a game in the future (Spore), not what was needed for her level of gaming now. Spore won't be out until sometime next year and probably late spring at the earliest from what they're saying. That $100 off the GPU now wouldn't cost her much right now, would get her the memory that would really aid her, and she'll likely want to upgrade to whatever the latest and greatest GPU is in a year's time for Spore anyway. At that point, it'll be pretty much guaranteed that $300 on nVidia's 9xxx series will beat $400 on the 8xxx series now and have whatever fun and exciting new features the 9xxx series has that nVidia worked with Maxis to get in to Spore.
It's cool to share building their PC with your girlfriend/wife/mother/friend/anyone who wouldn't normally build one, giving them a real sense of ownership and achievement with their new PC. But fooling yourself in to believing they need what you think is cool, rather than actually listening to their needs, is a great way to undo a lot of that when they realize they got you something cool rather than built what was right for them.
And, yes, this comes from a guy who sat there while his wife tapped on dozens of keyboards because she figured I'd make sure it simply worked and so the most important thing to her was the keyboard felt right. To me, that was crazy. To her, it was what mattered. So, crazy or not, I listened and made sure she got what felt perfect to her.
But, when the nice priest tries to "girlfriend" your ass, it's OK to call him a bad man.
In late June, the Indianapolis-based hospital system announced that starting in 2009, it will fine employees $10 per paycheck if their body mass index (BMI, a ratio of height to weight that measures body fat) is over 30.
BMI is a horribly flawed index.
Almost every major athlete (certain sports like ribbon twirling aside) has a BMI massively in excess of 30.
It's also based on your height SQUARED. Can any of the learned Slashdot crowd tell me how many physical dimensions the body exists in? For this reason, they've had to lower the recommended range to 18-22 for Asians because their lower average height means that the numbers are completely useless. By the same logic, anyone over the 5'6 or so it assumes for needs to raise their BMI but, of course, it fails to account for that.
For both of those reasons, just about no genuine exercise professionals use BMI. Body fat percentage is a vastly more accurate indicator except that only gets close to being accurate the more points you use, is only particularly accurate if you submerge someone in a water tank and is only completely accurate post-mortem.
To put the joke of BMI in context, we did a 7 point body fat reading and got my body fat percentage. Knock that percentage off from a starting weight of 100% and I end up about 15lbs over a BMI of 25 (the high end of normal). That's right... I need to drop past the 8% minimum body fat range, past the 6% point where brain function becomes affected, past the 0% point where I die, and then lose 15lbs of muscle/skeleton, all to get a BMI of 25 - the high end of what it claims is a healthy range for me.
In a world where any rational thinking has proved I am too tall and have too much basic muscle structure for BMI to have any validity, any company that tried to fine me for failing to live up to a demonstrably unhealthy scale would be facing an immediate lawsuit. The only thing that would be slowing me down would be figuring out if I was suing them for harrassment or for forcing a situation that would outright endanger my health to try and follow.
Before anyone makes the obvious joke, yeah, I'll accept I also go over the 18% recommended male body fat reading and could do with losing weight. It doesn't change the simple fact that BMI is massively flawed and using it to fine employees borders on the criminal.
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