Guy at my comic shop yesterday was telling me about a comic that was basically a parody of Charles Atlas. Which pissed Charles Atlas off -- he sued for slander, and the result was that the comic can never be sold, never collected, and never awknowledged by the copyright holder. Copies on ebay are removed from auction as soon as they go up.
As such, the only way to get the book is to steal it. Which is of course illegal, but since it's also illegal for the copyright holder to persue damages, you're pretty much safe.
Word is the book is pretty good, created as it was by Quitely and Morrison, the team responsible for The Authority and the really bitchin' New X-men (whose legacy has since been crushed to feed the ego of Quesada and replaced by utterly inane work from Claremont and the hideous hack Chuck Austen, as well as a passable soap opera from Buffy author Joss Whedon. No problem here. Saves me about $8 bucks a month.)
but the industry gives them no other means to see a new movie without ripping it off!
Wow. Yeah, that's really the industry's fault. I wish everybody would realize that the secret to stopping theft is just to make things cheaper. I mean, shit, nobody would steal a big screen TV or a Porsche if it were only worth a few bucks! Then everybody could have one!
You know what? Screw the economy. There should be a rule that nothing can cost more than ten dollars. Then we should raise the minimum wage to ten dollars. One hour, one thing -- it doesn't get any easier than that!
Except that NVidia is keeping up with their competitors in most other areas. Whatever performance loss or gain margin they have with ATI, it isn't enough to say, hands down, X is better than Y.
If you remember the last days of 3dfx, what they were selling was more expensive, slower, had a lower resolution and a distinctly washed-out look compared to comparable Nvidia parts. In fact, I remember convincing several people at a LAN party to dump their Voodoo 2 cards for the TNT, because although the frame rate was much lower (sometimes by half), games were still playable and the performance hit for using higher resolutions was greatly reduced and achieving a res like 1024x768 or even 1280x1024 didn't require an additional card. Which meant that I could snipe from a further distance with more precision. Not to mention the clarity of those 32 bit textures; my god, I shudder at the thought of going back to banding 16 bit hell.
But hardly a useful statistic. I spend more than 1.4 hours per week getting coffee and going to the bathroom. Heck, if your computer takes 5 minutes to boot up every morning, that's more than two days of downtime every year. It's completely tolerable. Probably doesn't result in a dollar of lost revenue. But the statistic SURE looks scary, doesn't it?
What HR directors really want to know is does the satelite have a five year plan.
(I hope you think this is funny, because I pissed my pants when I thought it up. Maybe it's me. Maybe it's late and I'm drunk on songfight ideas (and that fifth of Beam))
I don't think I should have to go into depth of the nature of statistical mathematics in order to express my outrage. Yes, it says it's an average. This means that if many machines are down less than a day per incident, enough machines are down long enough or often enough to raise the average to 9. Which is far worse than having an average downtime of 9 days. If it is taking you more than 2 days to a) remove a virus or b) reinstall system software, you are doing something wrong. And if it's happening more than once or twice a year...you've got a REAL problem. What's the old adage? Fool me once, shame on you, but fool me twice, shame on me? Fix your firewall and get some goddamn virus software -- an average of NINE DAYS per PC per year is embarrassing.
You know the worst kind of charity call? Door to door collectors for the Police Benevolency Association.
I got one the other day -- cop in full blues and badge walks up to my door, rings the bell. Meanwhile, I'm upstairs clearing my browser cache, closing my FTP and KaZaa windows, dismounting my AES drives and trying like hell to get a Wipe Free Space pass started. I get down there and whip out my best "wossaproblemofficer," and he's like "Oh nothing, I was wondering if you wanted to give to the PBA. I got these sweet window stickers."
Needless to say, I was pissed. But he got my $20. I'm a sucker for a window sticker.
I would expect them to have IT staff who knew what the fuck they were doing. 9 days of sick time per PC? This is regoddamndiculous. If a PC in our office has even ONE DAY of downtime, it's a problem.
But we're a small business. We don't have a single machine to spare, and most of our staff is smart enough to reimage their own shit. Many corporate offices have a ton of extra machines thanks to downsizing. I suspect these numbers were skewed thusly: the IT staff had their PCs in a sort of queue, with newly imaged machines ready to go at all times. Somebody gets a virus, he gets a new computer immediately. Meanwhile, his virus ridden machine goes at the bottom of the "rebuild these when you have time" pile. If you were to combine all the time those PCs were sick, yeah, I could see that approaching 9 days.
Wait, no I can't. I can't get over this statistic. NINE DAYS to fix a dead machine? It only took 3 days round trip for Apple to replace my laptop's logic board and screen!
You are more than welcome to look down your nose at anybody for any reason. You're only asserting a biological tendency towards competetive and classification.
However, I think it's important that you realize others will do this to you as well. And since the majority of people speak incorrectly, they're liable to look at you as though you have a stick up your ass for trying to enunciate speech flawlessly, and some might wonder why you don't spend this extra editorial energy coming up with better points.
After all, the term "grammar" means "a set of rules that give structure to a language" only because those are the words written in the dictionary. It could just as easily mean "a set of inexplicable, irrational and unfair restrictions on the open use of language imposed by elitists for the sole purpose of judging others who fail to recognize them."
My impression of perl: it's an inscruitably complex scripting language playing at being a programming language to somehow legitimize the menial task of batch processing.
Er, no. The source would always be free. And nobody would buy a wash. Instead, they would spend several hours compiling their own from water, soap and wax.
You know. To save $5.
That's way too much for a car wash, especially since they don't even innovate that much at car washes anymore!
That's the only difference you can see between WalMart -- a gigantic, soulless corporation that manipulates and underpays its workers and offers inferior merchandise solely to funnel money to their shareholders from those consumers so infinitely stupid that they would prefer to saving eleven cents to getting something worthwhile -- and a Linux store run out of the back of a car wash?
It is. I can even pronounce it for you if you like. Using improper grammar or spelling to indicate accents or modes of speech is a common practice among writers, one that can often effectively convey meaning as well as pronunciation.
"If I write loike this, 'oo dyaspose I am emulightin'? Wot sort of spaitch dya 'ere when you ride it? Kinyou hair a nyoo accent I am cratin'?"
My linguistics and grammar prof hated this sort of thing, because it really is quite racist to think that other cultures use variant spellings of words due to the way they pronounce them. That hasn't stopped just about every writer in the twentieth century from doing so...heck, even Shakespearre used to play on mispronunciation and poor grammar.
Oh, you mean like how a person who misspells the word "fuck" as a form of droll computational humor might be unfunny about other things as well? After all, you can apparently judge an entire personality based on a single detail.
Lighten up. I've met hundreds of people who speak one way in business or on the phone, and quite another in private. I don't know what the "odds are" that they could pull this off effectively, but I do know this: if you were to eliminate everybody in this company who was lax in speech or dress, you'd have nobody left. And we've been successful for 16 years. It may not be accepted to occasionallt tell a customer "Listen, that whole part of the program is screwed up, it's not going to be fixed overnight," or to tell the boss "there's not way that shit can work," but it's apparently quite effective.
And how do you propose to assess the cost to make an album?
The cost to press a CD, and print the manual is marginal...you can usually have it done for about $1 or so.
But before you can press the CD or print anything, you need to have a master. It costs money to have a master CD made up, as well as to make a master file for the manual.
And before that, you need to have the songs to put on the master. Those need to be produced. The artwork needs to be created for the manual, the graphics laid out.
And before you can produce the songs, you need to record them! You need to play them while recording them, which takes instruments. You need somebody to play the instruments, which takes musicians. You need somebody to write the songs. Finding musicians and song writers takes talent reps, agents, A&R men. And you better copyright those songs, publish the music, pay for promotion, distribution, warehousing, second printings, etc.
They used the full market price -- the highest price anybody really paid for the record -- because that's the only fair way to do it. It's impossible to wade through what a CD actually costs to make. And furthermore, it's unfair to use what people paid, because it fluctuates so dramatically -- I bought Nirvana's "Nevermind" for $15 when it came out, $12 years later when the first copy was stolen, and $18 a few weeks ago when that one went tits-up. What's the CD worth? What's it cost? Do you average the three together, take the median, do you subtract the artists' advance or the cost of gold records?
If it makes you feel any better, I'm sure the judge who awarded the damages knew the CD price they'd use in liquidation would be "artificually" inflated, and inflated the award accordingly. It's all bullshit numbers. I only hope the bullshit was enough to curb future price fixing.
Or it could stop at the boundary of public speech. Do I have the right to stand on the street corner shouting obscenities at 3 am? No, this is a disturbance. Do I have the right to whisper them under my breath? Of course I do! It isn't the speech that's being censored, it's the method of delivery.
I read that China was really excited by the prospective of electric bicycles, which allow you to go farther with less work than a pedal bike but are affordable for the average Chinese, who does not have much by way of disposable income.
Slashdot Mirror
Guy at my comic shop yesterday was telling me about a comic that was basically a parody of Charles Atlas. Which pissed Charles Atlas off -- he sued for slander, and the result was that the comic can never be sold, never collected, and never awknowledged by the copyright holder. Copies on ebay are removed from auction as soon as they go up.
As such, the only way to get the book is to steal it. Which is of course illegal, but since it's also illegal for the copyright holder to persue damages, you're pretty much safe.
Word is the book is pretty good, created as it was by Quitely and Morrison, the team responsible for The Authority and the really bitchin' New X-men (whose legacy has since been crushed to feed the ego of Quesada and replaced by utterly inane work from Claremont and the hideous hack Chuck Austen, as well as a passable soap opera from Buffy author Joss Whedon. No problem here. Saves me about $8 bucks a month.)
but the industry gives them no other means to see a new movie without ripping it off!
Wow. Yeah, that's really the industry's fault. I wish everybody would realize that the secret to stopping theft is just to make things cheaper. I mean, shit, nobody would steal a big screen TV or a Porsche if it were only worth a few bucks! Then everybody could have one!
You know what? Screw the economy. There should be a rule that nothing can cost more than ten dollars. Then we should raise the minimum wage to ten dollars. One hour, one thing -- it doesn't get any easier than that!
Except that NVidia is keeping up with their competitors in most other areas. Whatever performance loss or gain margin they have with ATI, it isn't enough to say, hands down, X is better than Y.
If you remember the last days of 3dfx, what they were selling was more expensive, slower, had a lower resolution and a distinctly washed-out look compared to comparable Nvidia parts. In fact, I remember convincing several people at a LAN party to dump their Voodoo 2 cards for the TNT, because although the frame rate was much lower (sometimes by half), games were still playable and the performance hit for using higher resolutions was greatly reduced and achieving a res like 1024x768 or even 1280x1024 didn't require an additional card. Which meant that I could snipe from a further distance with more precision. Not to mention the clarity of those 32 bit textures; my god, I shudder at the thought of going back to banding 16 bit hell.
But hardly a useful statistic. I spend more than 1.4 hours per week getting coffee and going to the bathroom. Heck, if your computer takes 5 minutes to boot up every morning, that's more than two days of downtime every year. It's completely tolerable. Probably doesn't result in a dollar of lost revenue. But the statistic SURE looks scary, doesn't it?
What HR directors really want to know is does the satelite have a five year plan.
(I hope you think this is funny, because I pissed my pants when I thought it up. Maybe it's me. Maybe it's late and I'm drunk on songfight ideas (and that fifth of Beam))
I don't think I should have to go into depth of the nature of statistical mathematics in order to express my outrage. Yes, it says it's an average. This means that if many machines are down less than a day per incident, enough machines are down long enough or often enough to raise the average to 9. Which is far worse than having an average downtime of 9 days. If it is taking you more than 2 days to a) remove a virus or b) reinstall system software, you are doing something wrong. And if it's happening more than once or twice a year...you've got a REAL problem. What's the old adage? Fool me once, shame on you, but fool me twice, shame on me? Fix your firewall and get some goddamn virus software -- an average of NINE DAYS per PC per year is embarrassing.
Besides, maybe you could follow in the footsteps of Nobel, and start the R.J. Stanford Prize for Software.
Old ladies? They don't know how to use a DNC list. They make up some of the 200 million people not on the list
Luckily, there are unemployed Slashdrones who have nothing better to do but complain. I'm sure we make up at least half of that 426k.
You know the worst kind of charity call? Door to door collectors for the Police Benevolency Association.
I got one the other day -- cop in full blues and badge walks up to my door, rings the bell. Meanwhile, I'm upstairs clearing my browser cache, closing my FTP and KaZaa windows, dismounting my AES drives and trying like hell to get a Wipe Free Space pass started. I get down there and whip out my best "wossaproblemofficer," and he's like "Oh nothing, I was wondering if you wanted to give to the PBA. I got these sweet window stickers."
Needless to say, I was pissed. But he got my $20. I'm a sucker for a window sticker.
I would expect them to have IT staff who knew what the fuck they were doing. 9 days of sick time per PC? This is regoddamndiculous. If a PC in our office has even ONE DAY of downtime, it's a problem.
But we're a small business. We don't have a single machine to spare, and most of our staff is smart enough to reimage their own shit. Many corporate offices have a ton of extra machines thanks to downsizing. I suspect these numbers were skewed thusly: the IT staff had their PCs in a sort of queue, with newly imaged machines ready to go at all times. Somebody gets a virus, he gets a new computer immediately. Meanwhile, his virus ridden machine goes at the bottom of the "rebuild these when you have time" pile. If you were to combine all the time those PCs were sick, yeah, I could see that approaching 9 days.
Wait, no I can't. I can't get over this statistic. NINE DAYS to fix a dead machine? It only took 3 days round trip for Apple to replace my laptop's logic board and screen!
Yeah...someplace else. Their salads are TERRIBLE.
Shit. Now I want a salad.
You are more than welcome to look down your nose at anybody for any reason. You're only asserting a biological tendency towards competetive and classification.
However, I think it's important that you realize others will do this to you as well. And since the majority of people speak incorrectly, they're liable to look at you as though you have a stick up your ass for trying to enunciate speech flawlessly, and some might wonder why you don't spend this extra editorial energy coming up with better points.
After all, the term "grammar" means "a set of rules that give structure to a language" only because those are the words written in the dictionary. It could just as easily mean "a set of inexplicable, irrational and unfair restrictions on the open use of language imposed by elitists for the sole purpose of judging others who fail to recognize them."
"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."
Benjamin Franklin wrote that. I added it to our quote board at work yesterday, when the boss left early and somebody snuck in two cold sick packs.
My impression of perl: it's an inscruitably complex scripting language playing at being a programming language to somehow legitimize the menial task of batch processing.
Do I win?
I think it's amazing that on Slashdot, copyright violation is worth brownie points.
How many would I get for credit card fraud?
It's only because they aren't using PHP. Believe me, they'd be getting 500s left and right.
Er, no. The source would always be free. And nobody would buy a wash. Instead, they would spend several hours compiling their own from water, soap and wax.
You know. To save $5.
That's way too much for a car wash, especially since they don't even innovate that much at car washes anymore!
Around here we have Brown's Pianos, Organs and Waterbeds. Here's a whole list of other wierd stores, which hopefully will include this one shortly.
That's the only difference you can see between WalMart -- a gigantic, soulless corporation that manipulates and underpays its workers and offers inferior merchandise solely to funnel money to their shareholders from those consumers so infinitely stupid that they would prefer to saving eleven cents to getting something worthwhile -- and a Linux store run out of the back of a car wash?
Man, you need new glasses or something.
We have a car wash in my neighbourhood that has a salad bar attached to it.
I expect this store will have about the same impact on the community.
It is. I can even pronounce it for you if you like. Using improper grammar or spelling to indicate accents or modes of speech is a common practice among writers, one that can often effectively convey meaning as well as pronunciation.
"If I write loike this, 'oo dyaspose I am emulightin'? Wot sort of spaitch dya 'ere when you ride it? Kinyou hair a nyoo accent I am cratin'?"
My linguistics and grammar prof hated this sort of thing, because it really is quite racist to think that other cultures use variant spellings of words due to the way they pronounce them. That hasn't stopped just about every writer in the twentieth century from doing so...heck, even Shakespearre used to play on mispronunciation and poor grammar.
Oh, you mean like how a person who misspells the word "fuck" as a form of droll computational humor might be unfunny about other things as well? After all, you can apparently judge an entire personality based on a single detail.
Lighten up. I've met hundreds of people who speak one way in business or on the phone, and quite another in private. I don't know what the "odds are" that they could pull this off effectively, but I do know this: if you were to eliminate everybody in this company who was lax in speech or dress, you'd have nobody left. And we've been successful for 16 years. It may not be accepted to occasionallt tell a customer "Listen, that whole part of the program is screwed up, it's not going to be fixed overnight," or to tell the boss "there's not way that shit can work," but it's apparently quite effective.
And how do you propose to assess the cost to make an album?
The cost to press a CD, and print the manual is marginal...you can usually have it done for about $1 or so.
But before you can press the CD or print anything, you need to have a master. It costs money to have a master CD made up, as well as to make a master file for the manual.
And before that, you need to have the songs to put on the master. Those need to be produced. The artwork needs to be created for the manual, the graphics laid out.
And before you can produce the songs, you need to record them! You need to play them while recording them, which takes instruments. You need somebody to play the instruments, which takes musicians. You need somebody to write the songs. Finding musicians and song writers takes talent reps, agents, A&R men. And you better copyright those songs, publish the music, pay for promotion, distribution, warehousing, second printings, etc.
They used the full market price -- the highest price anybody really paid for the record -- because that's the only fair way to do it. It's impossible to wade through what a CD actually costs to make. And furthermore, it's unfair to use what people paid, because it fluctuates so dramatically -- I bought Nirvana's "Nevermind" for $15 when it came out, $12 years later when the first copy was stolen, and $18 a few weeks ago when that one went tits-up. What's the CD worth? What's it cost? Do you average the three together, take the median, do you subtract the artists' advance or the cost of gold records?
If it makes you feel any better, I'm sure the judge who awarded the damages knew the CD price they'd use in liquidation would be "artificually" inflated, and inflated the award accordingly. It's all bullshit numbers. I only hope the bullshit was enough to curb future price fixing.
Or it could stop at the boundary of public speech. Do I have the right to stand on the street corner shouting obscenities at 3 am? No, this is a disturbance. Do I have the right to whisper them under my breath? Of course I do! It isn't the speech that's being censored, it's the method of delivery.
I read that China was really excited by the prospective of electric bicycles, which allow you to go farther with less work than a pedal bike but are affordable for the average Chinese, who does not have much by way of disposable income.