I would suspect the major factor back then on why the plague didn't spread so far, so quickly was that while they had long-distane trade links, the time period during which the plague would incubate and ultimately kill someone was far shorter than the time it took to travel great distances. I'm sure that if someone in a travel party began exhibiting symptoms of the plague, they were rather quickly left to die on their own in some remote location to avoid infecting the rest of the party.
b) It can be someone trying to liquidate a deceased family member's estate. (Do you believe someone should pay a tax on another's death?)
You haven't heard about the Estate Tax in the US when someone dies, have you? (Applies to the overall value of their estate at the time of their death for the amount greater than [I think] $1,000,000. The tax is about 50% of that overage).
The US was built by immigrants. They loved the open borders and free/cheap labor that came with it.
What open borders? When my mom and her family came to the US from Italy in the 1950's, they had to have proper papers from the Italian government just to enter the country when they got off the boat. And it took some years of taking US History classes and understanding basic english just to qualify for the exam to become a naturalized citizen. None of them complained... They were happy to do it and proudly call the US their home now.
It makes sense.
on
Cube House
·
· Score: 2, Informative
He works for a college in their CS department. Of course he won't get in trouble for it. Probably also hangs out "after hours" and tries to hang with all the residents and be cool.:)
How about this, every song that is purchased from iTunes has a "certificate of ownership" printed up w/ the name of the owner, address, etc. which are then stored by large clearinghouses (since its too impractical to be mailing the certificates themselves to the owner's) in big files.
But the owner can check their music inventory on a website so they know what they own. Then when they want to sell a song, they do it through the web interface which then gets a transfer agent involved at the clearinghouse who officializes the transfer and has new ownership certificates drawn up in the new owner's name and ships those certificates off the clearinghouse where the new owner has his "collection".
This could get the economy going too because a whole new industry would be started and employing people. Of course, the government would get nervous and regulate this new industry and probably create an oversight committee called the "MEC" (Music Exchange Commission).
But that's the difference between us and the rest of the world. We have a Hollywood.
The rest of the world also has a few Hollywoods. I know of Cine Citta' in Italy (city of cinema), and Bollywood in India (nickname coming from Bombay, where all their big movie studios are).
a number of votes cast for a candidate in a contest of more than two candidates that is greater than the number cast for any other candidate but not more than half the total votes cast
So its just whoever out of all the 200 candidates gets the most votes wins.
Sure, it's probably Blackboard which most colleges use, but if it's not Bb, it could also be Banner by SCT which plenty of schools also use.
Compromising Banner is far more dangerous than Blackboard (Bb).... Most schools that use Banner use it as their student management system, which records official transcript, program requirements met, class registration, etc. etc.
In my last undergrad semester, my team developed a website that interfaced directly w/ the Banner system and even found some loopholes in it which we exploited to allow our website to do a better job at calculating program requirements met and suggested offerings to complete it. (This was for an Advanced Software Project Mgmt class)
Needless to say, the Registrars office people were very intrigued by our exploration into the limits of the current system. I imagine a less cooperative school administration would be more punitive.. (But I went to a business school, so they know we just get motivated by $$;) )
Sometimes, it's not possible to just select a network provider based on who's got the best coverage...
I travel a couple times a year to Europe, and for me, having a phone that will work both here in the US and in Europe is a big deal. So, tri-band GSM is the only way for me to go, which means, here in the US I only have one choice.... T-Mobile. (When I'm abroad, I have a prepaid local SIM card, so I'm not paying crazy international roaming)
That being said, T-Mobile doesn't seem so bad to me... I used to have Verizon some years back w/ their dual digital/analog Qualcomm phone and that worked nicely. The fallback feature was nice.. But since I originally signed up with OmniPoint (then bought out by VoiceStream, then T-Mobile), the service in the Northeast (Boston) has gotten much better and the customer service folks are really helpful (Couple years back, when I called up to check on GSM coverage in the western US, the rep suggested I change my plan to a new plan for the same price but twice as many minutes!). I've never had a screwed up billing issue either.
But again, everyone has their own criteria by which they measure their provider. I don't think all the bells and whistles matter either... I never play the cheesy little games included in my Samsung S105, and its painful to use AIM on a phone or browse the net. Just basic phone service and text messaging is all I use..
Ummm......
on
Working Hard?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I take it you haven't been to mainland Europe much?
I spend a lot of time in Italy and they don't work that hard, probably less productive than us lazy Americans. Now the thing is, jobs are hard as hell to find over there, and those with them got them through connections most likely and not performance. So what motivation do they have to actually bust their butt? (And let's not even get started on the government jobs there. oh boy....)
Now Italians, however, put more focus in their life on enjoying and living life (work to live; NOT live to work). So that no matter how crappy a job they have, they make time for family/friends and are reasonably happy.
Plus, pretty much almost everyone goes away during the month of August for a couple weeks at least. August 15 is a national holiday for the workers where NOTHING is open (oh, and the highways aren't built to handle the traffic they get, so enjoy the sweltering heat in the bumper-to-bumper)
So yeah, socialism has overrun much of Europe, but on an average person basis, your average mainland Europeaner is happier than his/her American counterpart.
Can't say I blame them for enjoying life.. I know I really don't like the ratrace here, which is why I try to summer there whenever I can.
You know... Back in college I was always taught that gamma rays would quickly and easily kill any human because of their short wavelengths and high frequencies....
There is a reason they are one of the extreme categories on the 6 category scale of wavelengths I was taught about... (Radio waves, IR, Visible light, UV, X rays, Gamma rays)
But, thats completely ignoring what I was saying..
The Iraqi regime goes out of its way to put its own civilians in danger. This has been proven. They put arms and a tank in a hospital, they found a school that was stockpiling weapons, missile arrays are located in the middle of busy neighborhoods.
The big difference to me is the US government tries its best to keep its civilians out of harms way (as well as Iraqi civilians). If the military realizes a missile battery is located on the roof of an apartment complex, they are going to first try and see if they can eliminate it w/o damaging the rest of the building and killing innocent civilians. But if they deem it impossible to prevent civilian deaths because of the nature of the placement, then yes, they will take it out. But I find it horrible that Saddam and his cronies would even put his people in that type of situation.
I'm sure my analogy is flawed, but to me only looking at the total body counts and nothing else is like comparing sports team only by the final scores of their games and not looking at the individual players competence/ability or the level of gameplay the other team has.
2 top teams playing and ending at "2-1", and a top team playing a weak team and ending at "8-0" means nothing unless you look at how they arrived at that score and the level of play of each team.
Yes, bombs are going off all over Iraq now. BUT that is where the similarity to 9/11 ends.
On 9/11, there were no bombs, just commercial jets used as missiles. The invasion of Iraq and the attacks on 9/11 are not similar at all, even from the civilian perspective.
9/11 was a secret attack inflicted by a rogue group mainly to cause maximum deaths of civilians. (I'm not including the Pentagon attack because that was a valid military target)
Our invasion of Iraq is a pre-planned, well-announced attack on the regime running Iraq (and its figurehead, Saddam) by national military forces against military targets. The coalition forces are not purposely targetting civilians, however, as war is ugly, collateral deaths are inevitable. I truly believe the coalition forces are doing everything possible to avoid killing civilians. The Iraqi regime has gone out of their way to put its own citizens in harms way by embedding SAMs (surface-to-air missiles) in residential neighborhoods, even hiding a tank inside a hospital (which is against the internationally accepted rules of warfare; the Geneva Convention, which Iraq is a signatory to).
The Iraqi are also launching a moderately successful political game based on complete lies. Seems thats the regular mode of business for them. How about those chemical weapons they said they don't have but have warned us they will use if we try to take over Baghdad? Or the Iraqi POWs telling debriefers that their superiors told them to fight hard because the Americans would inject poison in their veins if they were caught.
So simply comparing numbers based on population size has no merit unless you also look at the overall situational factors, including history.
Actually, my school (Bentley College) has port-per-seat wiring in all the new classrooms and is even slowly retrofitting older classrooms as well.
The school also requires all students to either rent or purchase an IBM ThinkPad laptop for use in the dorms, and in class. These things tend to have about 2.5 - 3 hrs of battery life in them on a full charge.
Currently, they've wired up only public areas with WiFi (the library, open areas in buildings, cafeterias) access. But in class, in the rooms that have net jack and power outlets in each seat location, the Professor has a web control panel on the PC underneath their podium which lets them regulate the level of network availability the whole class has: All, Nothing, Intranet only, Web & Email only, Web Only and a few others...
Although, being a small private business school, they can afford to wire up more than other schools.
Every classroom also has a podium PC, w/ overhead projector, VCR, external video hookups, computer controlled lighting and even computer controlled window shades and screens in the newer buildings.
Bentley's undergrad CIS/MIS program was actually rated #10 in the US in the last US News ratings (second in the state, MA, to MIT)
Sure, kids are going to get distracted. But it's never been a major problem in my classes... Most professors will just say "don't bring your laptops" or "close your laptops for the next portion of the lecture" or they will just ask distracted students lots of questions and embarass them (this is very effective!).
Class attendance is also mandatory (a few professors don't care; but I have to ask and assume they keep track otherwise). School policy is to get an 'F' in any class where a student misses more than 5 hrs of classtime, unexcused.
[sarcasm] They could let everybody take knives and what not on planes, but then just strap everyone into their seats and sedate them for the duration of the flight.:) [/sarcasm]
Recently, I connected through Munich on a flight from Rome to the US and the German security was top-notch and much pickier than any US security I went through since 9/11..
They had the men and women go into separate security lines, made me take off my sandals for X-raying, and ran a wand metal-detector over every inch of my body, including my privates...
I remember them getting all snippy with the guy behind me who had a tweezer in his carry-on.
Slashdot Mirror
I would suspect the major factor back then on why the plague didn't spread so far, so quickly was that while they had long-distane trade links, the time period during which the plague would incubate and ultimately kill someone was far shorter than the time it took to travel great distances. I'm sure that if someone in a travel party began exhibiting symptoms of the plague, they were rather quickly left to die on their own in some remote location to avoid infecting the rest of the party.
You haven't heard about the Estate Tax in the US when someone dies, have you? (Applies to the overall value of their estate at the time of their death for the amount greater than [I think] $1,000,000. The tax is about 50% of that overage).
What open borders? When my mom and her family came to the US from Italy in the 1950's, they had to have proper papers from the Italian government just to enter the country when they got off the boat. And it took some years of taking US History classes and understanding basic english just to qualify for the exam to become a naturalized citizen. None of them complained... They were happy to do it and proudly call the US their home now.
He works for a college in their CS department. Of course he won't get in trouble for it. Probably also hangs out "after hours" and tries to hang with all the residents and be cool. :)
How about this, every song that is purchased from iTunes has a "certificate of ownership" printed up w/ the name of the owner, address, etc. which are then stored by large clearinghouses (since its too impractical to be mailing the certificates themselves to the owner's) in big files.
But the owner can check their music inventory on a website so they know what they own. Then when they want to sell a song, they do it through the web interface which then gets a transfer agent involved at the clearinghouse who officializes the transfer and has new ownership certificates drawn up in the new owner's name and ships those certificates off the clearinghouse where the new owner has his "collection".
This could get the economy going too because a whole new industry would be started and employing people. Of course, the government would get nervous and regulate this new industry and probably create an oversight committee called the "MEC" (Music Exchange Commission).
- mobster1975!
So what happens when one of his custom-plug peripherals breaks? More blood, sweat, and tears......
Doing a quick eBay search for "robosweep" returns a few listings saying: "ROOMBA ROBOSWEEP INTELLIGENT SWEEPER"
;)
Very very deceptive.....
And look at the crap description.... I almost fell off my chair laughing....
*Similar to Roomba but at a fraction of the price!
RoboSweep is a very affordably priced sweeper, especially compared to other robotic cleaners on the market..
RoboSweep uses built-in intellegence to stay in the room it's sweeping. Just turn it on and it sweeps! (Ya... sweeps your $40 away...)
Of course, at the end:
THIS IS NOT A ROOMBA! IT IS A ROBOSWEEP!
Just when I thought things were bad enough.... more searching finds some place is selling this thing for $46!!
Caveat emptor! A fool and his money are sooooo soon parted on the Internet
The rest of the world also has a few Hollywoods. I know of Cine Citta' in Italy (city of cinema), and Bollywood in India (nickname coming from Bombay, where all their big movie studios are).
a number of votes cast for a candidate in a contest of more than two candidates that is greater than the number cast for any other candidate but not more than half the total votes cast
So its just whoever out of all the 200 candidates gets the most votes wins.
Sure, it's probably Blackboard which most colleges use, but if it's not Bb, it could also be Banner by SCT which plenty of schools also use.
;) )
Compromising Banner is far more dangerous than Blackboard (Bb).... Most schools that use Banner use it as their student management system, which records official transcript, program requirements met, class registration, etc. etc.
In my last undergrad semester, my team developed a website that interfaced directly w/ the Banner system and even found some loopholes in it which we exploited to allow our website to do a better job at calculating program requirements met and suggested offerings to complete it. (This was for an Advanced Software Project Mgmt class)
Needless to say, the Registrars office people were very intrigued by our exploration into the limits of the current system. I imagine a less cooperative school administration would be more punitive.. (But I went to a business school, so they know we just get motivated by $$
Sometimes, it's not possible to just select a network provider based on who's got the best coverage...
I travel a couple times a year to Europe, and for me, having a phone that will work both here in the US and in Europe is a big deal. So, tri-band GSM is the only way for me to go, which means, here in the US I only have one choice.... T-Mobile. (When I'm abroad, I have a prepaid local SIM card, so I'm not paying crazy international roaming)
That being said, T-Mobile doesn't seem so bad to me... I used to have Verizon some years back w/ their dual digital/analog Qualcomm phone and that worked nicely. The fallback feature was nice.. But since I originally signed up with OmniPoint (then bought out by VoiceStream, then T-Mobile), the service in the Northeast (Boston) has gotten much better and the customer service folks are really helpful (Couple years back, when I called up to check on GSM coverage in the western US, the rep suggested I change my plan to a new plan for the same price but twice as many minutes!). I've never had a screwed up billing issue either.
But again, everyone has their own criteria by which they measure their provider. I don't think all the bells and whistles matter either... I never play the cheesy little games included in my Samsung S105, and its painful to use AIM on a phone or browse the net. Just basic phone service and text messaging is all I use..
I take it you haven't been to mainland Europe much?
I spend a lot of time in Italy and they don't work that hard, probably less productive than us lazy Americans. Now the thing is, jobs are hard as hell to find over there, and those with them got them through connections most likely and not performance. So what motivation do they have to actually bust their butt? (And let's not even get started on the government jobs there. oh boy....)
Now Italians, however, put more focus in their life on enjoying and living life (work to live; NOT live to work). So that no matter how crappy a job they have, they make time for family/friends and are reasonably happy.
Plus, pretty much almost everyone goes away during the month of August for a couple weeks at least. August 15 is a national holiday for the workers where NOTHING is open (oh, and the highways aren't built to handle the traffic they get, so enjoy the sweltering heat in the bumper-to-bumper)
So yeah, socialism has overrun much of Europe, but on an average person basis, your average mainland Europeaner is happier than his/her American counterpart.
Can't say I blame them for enjoying life.. I know I really don't like the ratrace here, which is why I try to summer there whenever I can.
My $0.02
You know... Back in college I was always taught that gamma rays would quickly and easily kill any human because of their short wavelengths and high frequencies....
There is a reason they are one of the extreme categories on the 6 category scale of wavelengths I was taught about... (Radio waves, IR, Visible light, UV, X rays, Gamma rays)
Back in 1997, within a year of each other, first we had our area code changed, then our zip code. There was hari-kari going on in the streets. Heh.
- mobster75!
mood indicator light did you say? let me guess, when its happy, it glows a nice amber?
Hmmm... Sounds like "Choose Your Own Adventure" to me. Heh.
Ok, how is a pop-up ad window considered a Traffic Management Utility?? I just don't get it....
- mobster75!
But, thats completely ignoring what I was saying..
The Iraqi regime goes out of its way to put its own civilians in danger. This has been proven. They put arms and a tank in a hospital, they found a school that was stockpiling weapons, missile arrays are located in the middle of busy neighborhoods.
The big difference to me is the US government tries its best to keep its civilians out of harms way (as well as Iraqi civilians). If the military realizes a missile battery is located on the roof of an apartment complex, they are going to first try and see if they can eliminate it w/o damaging the rest of the building and killing innocent civilians. But if they deem it impossible to prevent civilian deaths because of the nature of the placement, then yes, they will take it out. But I find it horrible that Saddam and his cronies would even put his people in that type of situation.
I'm sure my analogy is flawed, but to me only looking at the total body counts and nothing else is like comparing sports team only by the final scores of their games and not looking at the individual players competence/ability or the level of gameplay the other team has.
2 top teams playing and ending at "2-1", and a top team playing a weak team and ending at "8-0" means nothing unless you look at how they arrived at that score and the level of play of each team.
- mobster75!
Yes, bombs are going off all over Iraq now. BUT that is where the similarity to 9/11 ends.
On 9/11, there were no bombs, just commercial jets used as missiles. The invasion of Iraq and the attacks on 9/11 are not similar at all, even from the civilian perspective.
9/11 was a secret attack inflicted by a rogue group mainly to cause maximum deaths of civilians. (I'm not including the Pentagon attack because that was a valid military target)
Our invasion of Iraq is a pre-planned, well-announced attack on the regime running Iraq (and its figurehead, Saddam) by national military forces against military targets. The coalition forces are not purposely targetting civilians, however, as war is ugly, collateral deaths are inevitable. I truly believe the coalition forces are doing everything possible to avoid killing civilians. The Iraqi regime has gone out of their way to put its own citizens in harms way by embedding SAMs (surface-to-air missiles) in residential neighborhoods, even hiding a tank inside a hospital (which is against the internationally accepted rules of warfare; the Geneva Convention, which Iraq is a signatory to).
The Iraqi are also launching a moderately successful political game based on complete lies. Seems thats the regular mode of business for them. How about those chemical weapons they said they don't have but have warned us they will use if we try to take over Baghdad? Or the Iraqi POWs telling debriefers that their superiors told them to fight hard because the Americans would inject poison in their veins if they were caught.
So simply comparing numbers based on population size has no merit unless you also look at the overall situational factors, including history.
- mobster1975!
Damn... So, at the current rates that would be about $7.44 to park all day long in London.
That is CRAZY cheap compared to parking all day here in Boston (Somehere around $20-$25)...
- Mobster75
Actually, my school (Bentley College) has port-per-seat wiring in all the new classrooms and is even slowly retrofitting older classrooms as well.
:)
The school also requires all students to either rent or purchase an IBM ThinkPad laptop for use in the dorms, and in class. These things tend to have about 2.5 - 3 hrs of battery life in them on a full charge.
Currently, they've wired up only public areas with WiFi (the library, open areas in buildings, cafeterias) access. But in class, in the rooms that have net jack and power outlets in each seat location, the Professor has a web control panel on the PC underneath their podium which lets them regulate the level of network availability the whole class has: All, Nothing, Intranet only, Web & Email only, Web Only and a few others...
Although, being a small private business school, they can afford to wire up more than other schools.
Every classroom also has a podium PC, w/ overhead projector, VCR, external video hookups, computer controlled lighting and even computer controlled window shades and screens in the newer buildings.
Bentley's undergrad CIS/MIS program was actually rated #10 in the US in the last US News ratings (second in the state, MA, to MIT)
Sure, kids are going to get distracted. But it's never been a major problem in my classes... Most professors will just say "don't bring your laptops" or "close your laptops for the next portion of the lecture" or they will just ask distracted students lots of questions and embarass them (this is very effective!).
Class attendance is also mandatory (a few professors don't care; but I have to ask and assume they keep track otherwise). School policy is to get an 'F' in any class where a student misses more than 5 hrs of classtime, unexcused.
Just my $0.02
Does he go to Bentley College? Cuz someone was written up for that in the Campus Police logs last year for that very thing........
- Mobster75!
When I bought GTA3 last December, I bought it at Kay-Bee Toys. It's definitely an adult game, but why's it available in a kids' toy store?
;)
Although, it was only available behind the counter and they were checking ID's.
So they're not completely wholesome
- Mobster75!
...."Q" is dead.... Desmond Llewellyn (sp?) passed on....
[sarcasm] :)
They could let everybody take knives and what not on planes, but then just strap everyone into their seats and sedate them for the duration of the flight.
[/sarcasm]
Recently, I connected through Munich on a flight from Rome to the US and the German security was top-notch and much pickier than any US security I went through since 9/11..
:)
They had the men and women go into separate security lines, made me take off my sandals for X-raying, and ran a wand metal-detector over every inch of my body, including my privates...
I remember them getting all snippy with the guy behind me who had a tweezer in his carry-on.
How's that?