I was a waiter at one time too while in college. It's difficult work, and you deal with a lot of jerks.
The outrage some servers reserve for those who don't tip is pretty amazing. If they only spent half that energy on getting their employer to pay a fair wage they wouldn't have to worry about tips at all.
You're going on the assumption they are tracking the above information. Sure they're going to know the average price per unit, but they may not be tracking geography info.
In the neighborhood I live in there is this tiny store that specializes in gay music. I walk past this store often and wonder how the hell they'll manage to make a living as time goes on. I buy almost all of my music from iTunes now. There is the rare occasion though when I do buy something from that store because iTunes doesn't have it.
If these stores are going to survive they are going to have to identify what iTunes doesn't have and simultaneously there is a demand for, and start stocking the store with those items.
If you're alone in a restaurant and paying $50 for a meal the wait staff should be fairly high caliber. They should be very knowledgeable about the menu and wine pairings. They should be friendly, intelligent, patient, and not hurried in their serving style, or in trying to get you out of the restaurant. If they are all those things it is justifiable to tip 20% on $50.
I'm sure you've heard of the expert fallacy. In science it is a basic tenant. I doubt it is in police service though. If an expert said it, it must be true, right? Even when it's clearly not. I'm looking at this situation without the aid of a supposed expert making justifications for the police actions, and what I see is an unnecessary use of force.
BTW: I'm glad I'm not the only one who occasionally goes back and checks for replies in ancient threads.:-)
Well, right now they are competing for my internet provider dollars with Comcast. That's not to say they couldn't buy Comcast some day soon.
I hate AT&T and I swore about 6 years ago that they would never receive another dollar from me. Unfortunately they bought my cell service provider (Cingular) with whom I have a contract until August 2008. So they're getting more of my money until I'm able to leave them. When SBC bought AT&T they let the virus like management of AT&T into their fold and now SBC is going to be as infected as AT&T was with monopolistic thinking.
I have zero desire to have ANYTHING with AT&T's name on it. In fact, for me it is such a strong negative association that I'm halfway considering getting rid of my contract now and just paying the early termination fee.
I see, so no matter what, in your mind, officers are okay to use whatever ridiculous form of coercion they have in their arsenal? That the only thing that matters is the officers safety. Whether it be a loud college student who has not in anyway struck an officer, or an old woman with brown grass, it's okay to handcuff them, to detain them, to arrest them, to put the cost of hiring a lawyer on them (I doubt either of these two qualify for public defenders.) There's more here than just the physical violence.
In the case of the student, grabbing him and pushing him out the door and blocking his reentry would have solved the problem. Hallway with stairs or not, once he was out that door, keeping him out solves the problem. No, instead they held him in the room creating a BIGGER disruption. Pushed him to the floor (making it impossible to remove him in an orderly manner mind you.) TASERED him causing a big disruption to turn into a GIGANTIC CLUSTER FUCK disruption. Now he has to go to jail, he has to hire a lawyer, he faces jail time, etc... THAT to me is far more violent than anything he did.
In the case of the old woman, she's old. She's undoubtedly not wealthy (although she well be after this trial, so good on her, I hope the cops are fired and can't water their lawn with their unemployment check, maybe they'll be arrested too!) So how do we resolve this problem? Do we put somebody who undoubtedly has arthritis in shackles and take them to jail? Apparently so in your mind. It's all justified after the fact. Really they should have just shot her execution style, it would've been justified in your mind too, after the fact. (Although I'm sure if you saw it happening as it happened you'd argue that it isn't, but after the fact you'd of course say it was, after all, she might have continued having a brown lawn, and wow, the collapse of society as a whole is sure to follow!)
This sounds like the first cannon fire in the legal war to no longer be required to practice net neutrality. They can use this as the justification to change what traffic goes across the internet they provide.
I don't know what they should have done, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't at all resemble what a bouncer has to do.
Perhaps it should, and that's the problem. In this case the police should have been acting as bouncers, not as violent thugs. The violence they committed was far more disruptive to the event than the guy himself was. Remember there is an intended outcome here of restoring order. Did the police accomplish that goal, or did they create an even bigger disruption? Looks to me as though it is the latter.
Just because an officer has a badge doesn't mean he's got a brain.
I wasn't there, judging by the video I think the audience wanted the guy thrown out. They were on the cops' side.
Like I said, the cops are lucky that kid wasn't very persuasive with the audience. You'll notice though that once the Taser action starts the crowd begins to switch sides.
And you know what, since when is resisting arrest authorization for torture and/or beating? There were six of them, one of him. You'll notice he never strikes them, he is attempting to resist by wrenching his arms free of their grasp, but he in no way on the film ever tried to assault the officers. So, where does their right to use outright violence (rather than just tactics to remove and/or detain) come into play? I saw NOTHING that indicated he was a physical threat to any of the officers. Since when is resistance an authorization for violence?
Where are his hands??? You can't see 'em!! So what if he is on the ground? He is still a threat if his hands are not cuffed! Were the officers able to pat him down for a weapon thoroughly? Did the officers believe -- because of his behavior-- that this person is and EDP (emotionally disturbed person) who needs psychiatric and possibly medical help?
And yet night club bouncers manage to remove people from nightclubs every single night without the use of a weapon or a taser. In fact, often times, it takes only one of them to remove somebody. Yet these cops instead decided that the goal of removing him from the building would be better accomplished by pushing him to the ground and immobilizing him.
Okay folks, I know you Slashdotters are smart, so it's physics test time! Which object is more like to move in the direction you want: a) The one laying on the ground with 500 lbs of human weight sitting on it, or b) the one without the 500lbs on it capable of movement or c) I'm going to argue for the cops on this one no matter what you say!
For those of you who guessed letter b, you are correct. The goal of removing somebody from a room is accomplished far easier when they are standing without weight on them, and with muscular control (from not having been tasered.)
I watched the video too. And what do you believe would be the correct method of detaining someone who is resisting arrest and creating a disturbance, because if you watched the video you can be very sure he was doing both of those.
I'm going to guess that most of this people reading slashdot don't spend a lot of time at night clubs. A single bouncer could have EASILY handled this man WITHOUT injuring him, or themselves. They would have just pushed him out the door. That's all that had to be done. The police just needed to MAKE A DECISION ABOUT WHERE THEY WERE GOING and push him out that door. SIMPLE. Instead they had 6 of them there trying to push him to the ground. The door was less than 10 feet away it looks like.
These cops are INCOMPETENT. If the purpose is to remove him from the premises... THEN REMOVE HIM. Pushing him to the ground ACCOMPLISHES NOTHING. He got louder when they did that, and more disruptive. TASERING HIM made it even worse! Now not only is HE screaming, but students elswhere sound like they are about ready to come to his aid.
They should all be fired. PERIOD. People this stupid and agressive shouldn't be allowed to carry weapons, lethal or not.
I'd say yes. They are lucky the guy the were subduing wasn't more persuasive with his fellow college students. I'm sure a riot would've taught the cops a thing or two about perspective.
Some people are claiming that he is crazy and that police did things by the book.
If that's by the book than it is time to change the book.
You know in the UK crowds commonly "unarrest" somebody that is being unfairly detained by the police. Considering that police are often power tripping a-holes with nothing more than a high school education it's no wonder why countries with educated populations don't allow them to carry guns.
If it works, they get money - if it doesn't, they don't lose that much, or even make just a little bi
This is false. They immediately lose 10% of their music revenues by not being playable on 90% of all MP3 players (the iPod.) But, that 10% number is more significant than you might think. Knock 10% off of the sales of most albums/singles and they fall right out of the billboard Top 10 list. When they fall out of the Top 10 list, their radio airplay drops. When their radio airplay drops, their music goes unheard, artists get forgotten. Meanwhile Universal has contracts with these artists that they owe money too, yet those artists aren't producing revenue in the form of sales because of Universal's stupid distribution decisions.
And so the downward spiral continues. If these CEO's had made the same decision about Wal-mart (15% of the music industry revenue, compared to iTunes 10%) those CEO's would be fired by their board.
This is what you get when you put lawyers before customers.
this is what happens when you listen to your lawyers before you listen to your customers. It's too bad the VP's of music for these companies don't have the brains god gave a doorknob. If they did they could've said to themselves "Hey, self, you know that iPod you have, and how none of our great music is going to play on it? Well Self, as a customer I won't be buying much of our music now well I? Yes Self, that would be a stupid thing to do."
Wow, that's the perfect analogy! What if Exxon oil stopped selling to gas stations because they didn't like the pricing scheme? And then they decided, "we'll make this oil into diesel instead! That'll teach em!"
The music industry really baffles me. First of all, what average consumer really knows which label their favorite bands are with? I'm sure most people are like me, and really don't care which band is with who. And when these labels start fragmenting how consumers are able to get music, it will just confuse the consumer, and just push them towards piracy.
I once dated a guy who worked for Universal in their licensing department. I guarantee you Universal doesn't understand that the average consumer has no idea what label an artist is on. When you work for a company like Universal you hear these entertainment names constantly, and it gets hard to separate that constant work related input from what you know about an entertainer from the non-work world.
In the end Universal is crippling itself. This isn't new for Universal. They were one of the last studios to begin moving their film archive onto DVD, they also just released DVD's with out even so much as a menu (ie, zero special features) you put the disk in, watched a couple previews you didn't want to watch, and then the movie started.
Universal is a company that has consistently put out the absolute minimum in frills, done the least possible it could in order to sell the item, all the while charging a premium for the DVD. This goes for Movies, and now more recently for Music. In the end they want to charge the CD price premium without providing the CD level quality. Apple won't let them screw their customers like that and so Universal is cutting off it's own nose to spite it's own face.
In the end we can live without the labels, and unfortunately Universal hasn't learned that fact yet. There'll always be great music out there, with or without them.
According to this article iTunes now is the third largest music retailer with 10% of the market (Wal-mart at #1 has 15% of the market.) Considering that Apple has nearly 90% of the digital music players market, Universal's attempt to move it's catalog onto Amazon (which is ranked #4 in the US for music retail) may have been an ill thought out strategic move when matched with the fact that the files only coming in (non-iPod supported) WMA format. In this case it appears that Universal has overestimated audience demand for their music library. Screwing yourself out of 10% total music sales in the US could easily result in Universal not seeing another artist enter the top 10 sales lists until the iTunes boycott ends. Most of todays generic corporate created artists lack any sort of long term market draw or memorability without the corporate backed marketing and chart positions generated by sales. That is the significance of Universal's ill thought out strategy to force Apple's hand.
I could also go off onto a tangent regarding Malcolm McDowell's Tipping Point and how the "cool kids" likely to cause a tipping point effect for an artist are probably the "cool kids" who of course own iPods. An artist without the "cool kids" support is going to find him/herself increasingly less relevant to mainstream consumers. This of course is a harder idea to support with actual numbers, for me it's just a gut feeling that this decision is going to have that sort of anti-cool impact that could result in the wrong kind of "tipping point" (ie, people abandoning an artist.)
The reason WOW succeeded where DAoC failed is because WoW has cartoon like graphics that make it widely accessible. You don't have to take -anything- seriously in WoW unless you want to. It has a good story, with good characters, and it's a cartoon.
WoW wins for the same reason that the Wii wins, it has mass appeal (ie, it's not for Ren Faire tards.)
Billions of stars and probably billions of planets... I wonder if any of them had intelligent life. I wonder what happened to that life 5 billion years ago when this event started. I wonder if the saw it coming, or if it was a surprise?
When I go to Burning Man every year I often wonder away from the man made lit up items and just go out and observe the sky. It's so amazingly beautiful. The milky way is clearly visible, and every year I'm momentarily overwhelmed by the absolute insignifance of humanity. We are so small in the grandness of our universe. I stand out on that perfectly flat place and realize that I'm a tiny speck on a tiny sphere in a tiny solar system in a smallish Galaxy. It's the loneliest feeling in the world, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
And to answer your question, one could easily write such an application using straight C and structures which contain the relevant data for each of the entities in the application, along with a library of functions to operate on these entities.
After I had typed out the response and thought about it some more I realized a struct would just as easily do some of the stuff I would use objects for. I primarily program in Java these days so I sometimes forget how the world works without objects.
Slashdot Mirror
When you frame your argument like this you run a higher risk of making alcohol illegal than getting pot legalized. Just so you know.
You'd be better off with a freedom argument.
I was a waiter at one time too while in college. It's difficult work, and you deal with a lot of jerks.
The outrage some servers reserve for those who don't tip is pretty amazing. If they only spent half that energy on getting their employer to pay a fair wage they wouldn't have to worry about tips at all.
You're going on the assumption they are tracking the above information. Sure they're going to know the average price per unit, but they may not be tracking geography info.
In the neighborhood I live in there is this tiny store that specializes in gay music. I walk past this store often and wonder how the hell they'll manage to make a living as time goes on. I buy almost all of my music from iTunes now. There is the rare occasion though when I do buy something from that store because iTunes doesn't have it.
If these stores are going to survive they are going to have to identify what iTunes doesn't have and simultaneously there is a demand for, and start stocking the store with those items.
If you're alone in a restaurant and paying $50 for a meal the wait staff should be fairly high caliber. They should be very knowledgeable about the menu and wine pairings. They should be friendly, intelligent, patient, and not hurried in their serving style, or in trying to get you out of the restaurant. If they are all those things it is justifiable to tip 20% on $50.
I'm sure you've heard of the expert fallacy. In science it is a basic tenant. I doubt it is in police service though. If an expert said it, it must be true, right? Even when it's clearly not. I'm looking at this situation without the aid of a supposed expert making justifications for the police actions, and what I see is an unnecessary use of force.
:-)
BTW: I'm glad I'm not the only one who occasionally goes back and checks for replies in ancient threads.
Well, right now they are competing for my internet provider dollars with Comcast. That's not to say they couldn't buy Comcast some day soon.
I hate AT&T and I swore about 6 years ago that they would never receive another dollar from me. Unfortunately they bought my cell service provider (Cingular) with whom I have a contract until August 2008. So they're getting more of my money until I'm able to leave them. When SBC bought AT&T they let the virus like management of AT&T into their fold and now SBC is going to be as infected as AT&T was with monopolistic thinking.
I have zero desire to have ANYTHING with AT&T's name on it. In fact, for me it is such a strong negative association that I'm halfway considering getting rid of my contract now and just paying the early termination fee.
I see, so no matter what, in your mind, officers are okay to use whatever ridiculous form of coercion they have in their arsenal? That the only thing that matters is the officers safety. Whether it be a loud college student who has not in anyway struck an officer, or an old woman with brown grass, it's okay to handcuff them, to detain them, to arrest them, to put the cost of hiring a lawyer on them (I doubt either of these two qualify for public defenders.) There's more here than just the physical violence.
In the case of the student, grabbing him and pushing him out the door and blocking his reentry would have solved the problem. Hallway with stairs or not, once he was out that door, keeping him out solves the problem. No, instead they held him in the room creating a BIGGER disruption. Pushed him to the floor (making it impossible to remove him in an orderly manner mind you.) TASERED him causing a big disruption to turn into a GIGANTIC CLUSTER FUCK disruption. Now he has to go to jail, he has to hire a lawyer, he faces jail time, etc... THAT to me is far more violent than anything he did.
In the case of the old woman, she's old. She's undoubtedly not wealthy (although she well be after this trial, so good on her, I hope the cops are fired and can't water their lawn with their unemployment check, maybe they'll be arrested too!) So how do we resolve this problem? Do we put somebody who undoubtedly has arthritis in shackles and take them to jail? Apparently so in your mind. It's all justified after the fact. Really they should have just shot her execution style, it would've been justified in your mind too, after the fact. (Although I'm sure if you saw it happening as it happened you'd argue that it isn't, but after the fact you'd of course say it was, after all, she might have continued having a brown lawn, and wow, the collapse of society as a whole is sure to follow!)
This sounds like the first cannon fire in the legal war to no longer be required to practice net neutrality. They can use this as the justification to change what traffic goes across the internet they provide.
You mean like this woman? Bloodied 70-Year-Old Woman Cuffed, Arrested for Brown Lawn.
The Police bloodied that terrible criminal up too.
I don't know what they should have done, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't at all resemble what a bouncer has to do.
Perhaps it should, and that's the problem. In this case the police should have been acting as bouncers, not as violent thugs. The violence they committed was far more disruptive to the event than the guy himself was. Remember there is an intended outcome here of restoring order. Did the police accomplish that goal, or did they create an even bigger disruption? Looks to me as though it is the latter.
Just because an officer has a badge doesn't mean he's got a brain.
I wasn't there, judging by the video I think the audience wanted the guy thrown out. They were on the cops' side.
Like I said, the cops are lucky that kid wasn't very persuasive with the audience. You'll notice though that once the Taser action starts the crowd begins to switch sides.
And you know what, since when is resisting arrest authorization for torture and/or beating? There were six of them, one of him. You'll notice he never strikes them, he is attempting to resist by wrenching his arms free of their grasp, but he in no way on the film ever tried to assault the officers. So, where does their right to use outright violence (rather than just tactics to remove and/or detain) come into play? I saw NOTHING that indicated he was a physical threat to any of the officers. Since when is resistance an authorization for violence?
Where are his hands??? You can't see 'em!! So what if he is on the ground? He is still a threat if his hands are not cuffed! Were the officers able to pat him down for a weapon thoroughly? Did the officers believe -- because of his behavior-- that this person is and EDP (emotionally disturbed person) who needs psychiatric and possibly medical help?
And yet night club bouncers manage to remove people from nightclubs every single night without the use of a weapon or a taser. In fact, often times, it takes only one of them to remove somebody. Yet these cops instead decided that the goal of removing him from the building would be better accomplished by pushing him to the ground and immobilizing him.
Okay folks, I know you Slashdotters are smart, so it's physics test time! Which object is more like to move in the direction you want: a) The one laying on the ground with 500 lbs of human weight sitting on it, or b) the one without the 500lbs on it capable of movement or c) I'm going to argue for the cops on this one no matter what you say!
For those of you who guessed letter b, you are correct. The goal of removing somebody from a room is accomplished far easier when they are standing without weight on them, and with muscular control (from not having been tasered.)
I watched the video too. And what do you believe would be the correct method of detaining someone who is resisting arrest and creating a disturbance, because if you watched the video you can be very sure he was doing both of those.
I'm going to guess that most of this people reading slashdot don't spend a lot of time at night clubs. A single bouncer could have EASILY handled this man WITHOUT injuring him, or themselves. They would have just pushed him out the door. That's all that had to be done. The police just needed to MAKE A DECISION ABOUT WHERE THEY WERE GOING and push him out that door. SIMPLE. Instead they had 6 of them there trying to push him to the ground. The door was less than 10 feet away it looks like.
These cops are INCOMPETENT. If the purpose is to remove him from the premises... THEN REMOVE HIM. Pushing him to the ground ACCOMPLISHES NOTHING. He got louder when they did that, and more disruptive. TASERING HIM made it even worse! Now not only is HE screaming, but students elswhere sound like they are about ready to come to his aid.
They should all be fired. PERIOD. People this stupid and agressive shouldn't be allowed to carry weapons, lethal or not.
The job should include being injured?
I'd say yes. They are lucky the guy the were subduing wasn't more persuasive with his fellow college students. I'm sure a riot would've taught the cops a thing or two about perspective.
Some people are claiming that he is crazy and that police did things by the book.
If that's by the book than it is time to change the book.
You know in the UK crowds commonly "unarrest" somebody that is being unfairly detained by the police. Considering that police are often power tripping a-holes with nothing more than a high school education it's no wonder why countries with educated populations don't allow them to carry guns.
If it works, they get money - if it doesn't, they don't lose that much, or even make just a little bi
This is false. They immediately lose 10% of their music revenues by not being playable on 90% of all MP3 players (the iPod.) But, that 10% number is more significant than you might think. Knock 10% off of the sales of most albums/singles and they fall right out of the billboard Top 10 list. When they fall out of the Top 10 list, their radio airplay drops. When their radio airplay drops, their music goes unheard, artists get forgotten. Meanwhile Universal has contracts with these artists that they owe money too, yet those artists aren't producing revenue in the form of sales because of Universal's stupid distribution decisions.
And so the downward spiral continues. If these CEO's had made the same decision about Wal-mart (15% of the music industry revenue, compared to iTunes 10%) those CEO's would be fired by their board.
This is what you get when you put lawyers before customers.
Thank you for the correction. I meant to go look up Gladwell's name before I posted but stupidly forgot to. Thanks again for catching my error.
this is what happens when you listen to your lawyers before you listen to your customers. It's too bad the VP's of music for these companies don't have the brains god gave a doorknob. If they did they could've said to themselves "Hey, self, you know that iPod you have, and how none of our great music is going to play on it? Well Self, as a customer I won't be buying much of our music now well I? Yes Self, that would be a stupid thing to do."
Wow, that's the perfect analogy! What if Exxon oil stopped selling to gas stations because they didn't like the pricing scheme? And then they decided, "we'll make this oil into diesel instead! That'll teach em!"
The music industry really baffles me. First of all, what average consumer really knows which label their favorite bands are with? I'm sure most people are like me, and really don't care which band is with who. And when these labels start fragmenting how consumers are able to get music, it will just confuse the consumer, and just push them towards piracy.
I once dated a guy who worked for Universal in their licensing department. I guarantee you Universal doesn't understand that the average consumer has no idea what label an artist is on. When you work for a company like Universal you hear these entertainment names constantly, and it gets hard to separate that constant work related input from what you know about an entertainer from the non-work world.
In the end Universal is crippling itself. This isn't new for Universal. They were one of the last studios to begin moving their film archive onto DVD, they also just released DVD's with out even so much as a menu (ie, zero special features) you put the disk in, watched a couple previews you didn't want to watch, and then the movie started.
Universal is a company that has consistently put out the absolute minimum in frills, done the least possible it could in order to sell the item, all the while charging a premium for the DVD. This goes for Movies, and now more recently for Music. In the end they want to charge the CD price premium without providing the CD level quality. Apple won't let them screw their customers like that and so Universal is cutting off it's own nose to spite it's own face.
In the end we can live without the labels, and unfortunately Universal hasn't learned that fact yet. There'll always be great music out there, with or without them.
According to this article iTunes now is the third largest music retailer with 10% of the market (Wal-mart at #1 has 15% of the market.) Considering that Apple has nearly 90% of the digital music players market, Universal's attempt to move it's catalog onto Amazon (which is ranked #4 in the US for music retail) may have been an ill thought out strategic move when matched with the fact that the files only coming in (non-iPod supported) WMA format. In this case it appears that Universal has overestimated audience demand for their music library. Screwing yourself out of 10% total music sales in the US could easily result in Universal not seeing another artist enter the top 10 sales lists until the iTunes boycott ends. Most of todays generic corporate created artists lack any sort of long term market draw or memorability without the corporate backed marketing and chart positions generated by sales. That is the significance of Universal's ill thought out strategy to force Apple's hand.
I could also go off onto a tangent regarding Malcolm McDowell's Tipping Point and how the "cool kids" likely to cause a tipping point effect for an artist are probably the "cool kids" who of course own iPods. An artist without the "cool kids" support is going to find him/herself increasingly less relevant to mainstream consumers. This of course is a harder idea to support with actual numbers, for me it's just a gut feeling that this decision is going to have that sort of anti-cool impact that could result in the wrong kind of "tipping point" (ie, people abandoning an artist.)
The reason WOW succeeded where DAoC failed is because WoW has cartoon like graphics that make it widely accessible. You don't have to take -anything- seriously in WoW unless you want to. It has a good story, with good characters, and it's a cartoon.
WoW wins for the same reason that the Wii wins, it has mass appeal (ie, it's not for Ren Faire tards.)
What an awesome way to make something of high value to collectors lose all value instantly.
Billions of stars and probably billions of planets... I wonder if any of them had intelligent life. I wonder what happened to that life 5 billion years ago when this event started. I wonder if the saw it coming, or if it was a surprise?
When I go to Burning Man every year I often wonder away from the man made lit up items and just go out and observe the sky. It's so amazingly beautiful. The milky way is clearly visible, and every year I'm momentarily overwhelmed by the absolute insignifance of humanity. We are so small in the grandness of our universe. I stand out on that perfectly flat place and realize that I'm a tiny speck on a tiny sphere in a tiny solar system in a smallish Galaxy. It's the loneliest feeling in the world, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
And to answer your question, one could easily write such an application using straight C and structures which contain the relevant data for each of the entities in the application, along with a library of functions to operate on these entities.
After I had typed out the response and thought about it some more I realized a struct would just as easily do some of the stuff I would use objects for. I primarily program in Java these days so I sometimes forget how the world works without objects.