is, if the "all stores have discount cards" thing actually happens, which it won't.
Well, opinions on that can differ. As a person who reads the fine print on all the "Terms and Conditions" junk sent to me by organizations with which I do business, I really can't agree. I think we are about 5 years from having every transaction tracked. And cash won't be an out (in the USofA), since the "USA Patriot Act" has greatly ratcheted down the threshhold for tracking and reporting cash transactions to the government.
And this is without the national ID card which I suspect is coming fairly soon.
That is the sticking point: what is the definition of "willingly"? Sure, you can refuse to sign up for a grocery store discount card. Until all grocery stores have discount cards, all grocery stores require them in order to use checks for payment, all grocery stores start imposing terms and conditions on people who don't use discount cards. Then you have the "choice" of getting a discount card and being tracked, or not eating.
Sound farfetched? In the last six months all credit card companies have sent out changes to their terms and conditions stating that you can no longer sue them - you must use binding arbitration. Don't like it? Just cancel all your credit cards. Which is a bit difficult for those who must travel, rent a car, get some cash far from home, etc. But you have a "choice".
A while back I was looking around for a kilo of Tungsten for a paperweight/curiosity
As long as you don't mind being on FBI/Interpol watch lists for the rest of your life, since metallic tungsten is used in the construction of 2-stage nuclear devices.
sPh
Re:Id like to see him try to stor the elements....
on
Periodic Table Table
·
· Score: 2
Honestly, uranium, like any other element with a half-life in the billions of years really isn't all that dangerous, except in large quantities.
Actually, natural and/or depleted uranium is only dangerous in very small quantities, which is to say: dust. In the solid form uranium is very hard and tough, and it makes a good alloy for situations where a dense, hard, tough material is needed.
In fact, uranium used to be used as an alloy in ceramic tooth fillings to add the slight yellow tinge of real enamel. Properly alloyed it is no danger to the owner of the tooth.
Uranium dust, however, besides being highly flammable, is toxic (like all heavy metals).
What I found lacking in the article (and all posts so far) is a biggie for me: most printer manufacturers will void your warranty if you use recycled cartridges, and with good reason.
So they say. However, in the US I believe the federal law passed in the 1940's (?) to prevent Henry Ford from pulling the exact same trick would apply, and (if you had the time and $ to pursue the issue in court) this disclaimer would be void.
I couldn't really speak to Lay, but what, exactly, are you accusing Cheney of doing?
Cheney played the revolving door between DoD and the defense industry for 15 years, set in motion various policies at DoD (many of which were necessary I will admit), jumped over to Halliburton and lobbied his own company into 20-30 billion worth of those contracts, then cashed out $300 million of options and revolved back through the door as Veep. I am sure that if someone picked through his record with the zeal that Mr. Ashcroft has displayed for invetigating people who worship at mosques quite a few "stretches" of the law could be found therein.
Halliburton is of course also heavily involved with that basion of free competition the Texas oil industry. Not to mention the Carlyle Group.
Funny thing is that Cheney fought very hard not to be forced to cash in his options when he was elected, but lost that battle. Haliburton is now in the toilet due to asbestos liability from one of Mr. Cheney's less-successful acquisitions. Had he kept those options they would be underwater at the moment.
Anyway, this topic is a bit too complex for this thread.
These two examples probably work against your argument. Kenneth Lay will probably be found guilty of insider trading and have to disgorge any profits he made. He may face heavy civil and criminal penalties, also. Bernard Ebbers is out at Worldcom and his $360 million loan to buy now nearly worthless Worldcom stock was not forgiven. Considering that much of Mr. Ebbers assets were tied up in now nearly worthless Worldcom stock, I'd say he's bankrupted as well.
I picked those examples as ones everyone was likely to be familar with. There are plenty of more obscure but better chosen examples out there. Try the Moneybox column in Slate for more in-depth discussion.
Note, however, that both Lay and Ebbers took hunderds of millions out before they tripped over their own, um, feet. If Ebbers hadn't gotten involved in a margin call, and thus athwart both the big brokerages and the SEC, I doubt he would have had any trouble slipping out of his current situation.
And while my heart and my gut would dearly love to see Lay, Fastow, etc. pay some sort of civil and/or criminal price, I doubt very much that will happen. Al Dunlop was far more clearly on the wrong side of the law, and he has slipped away with very little punishment.
If one wanted to be truely cynical, once could point out that if Lay were actually prosecuted, then Cheney and White might be next, and we can't have that can we?
This does lead to people being jobless. But, this also encourages everyone to keep their skills current and their pay expectations realistic.
Generally I agree with your description of an open job market. However, there is also an underlying assumption of the system not being rigged in favor of any specific group. What was believed to be true in a general sense prior to the recession of 2001 is now out in the open: the very top levels of various organizations have rigged the game so that (a) they skim off most of the profits (can you say Kenneth Lay? Bernard Ebbers?) (b) they do not pay the price of failure (I will leave it to you to dig out the details on the golden parachutes). So, what appears to be "clearing" is often just "covering up mistakes and preparing for my next jump to an even more lucrative CEO position even though I totally screwed up this company".
Programmers and IT geeks will be the factory workers of the future, Only that factory work requires a BS, a handfull of certs, and years of knowledge and experience.
Most factory jobs today require a 2 year college degree, certification, and on-going education. So your comparison may not be too far off the mark.
I've been doing a simple analysis about switching us from Oracle to PostgreSQL. I came to the conclusion that, except for some of our GIS apps and data, we could recoup the cost of our licenses within 2 years.
Does PostgreSQL support triggers and stored procedures? Those seem to be the killers when talking about replacing Oracle, DB2, etc.
I would humbly suggest that anyone who contracts with Verizon for any kind of service will be very sorry in the end. Their coverage, technical support, and customer service are the worst of any telecom company I have ever dealt with - and that is saying a lot. It took me 5 months and 6 letters cc'ed to the President and Corporate Counsel to break a contract when it was clear to everyone involved that Verizon just didn't have a signal anywhere near that area. Personally, I call selling a service you can't actually provide, billing for it, and sending threatening duns "mail fraud", but I guess that is how Verizon does business.
I have been following the trial in the general business press as well as the IT trade press and of course the Linux-centric sites. Although the IT trade press is reporting that Microsoft's witnesses are doing a mixed job and are taking some significant hits in cross-examination, the general business press is taking the line that Microsoft's legal team has everything under control this time and is crushing the States.
My guess is that the judge's viewpoint is going to be closer to the general business press than the IT world (much less Slashdot), so I am not holding out much hope for a meaningful order here.
Not to mention that Fontographer is evidently made by Macromedia which is probably a bigger company than Agfa Monotype (judging by the fact that I hadn't heard of the latter)
You might want to get out and about a bit more. Agfa is a very large industrial conglomerate with a huge presence in imaging of all types. Sort of like Kodak, except much larger and more profitable.
You know, thats an interesting point: Fontographer was written BEFORE the DMCA existed. Tom says he wrote the app (which, BTW, is about 30 lines of SIMPLE C) in 1997; IIRC, the DMCA was not law until 1998. Any lawyers know if ex post facto applies here?
Possession, use, and sale of cocaine was not outlawed in the United States until some time after the 1920's (not sure of the exact date). That doesn't mean you have the right to sell your Grandpa's stash of "revitalizing powder".
Really? Which country is this, where bankers and accountants are "required" to take their vacation? My wife is a senior CPA for a Fortune 200 firm in the US, and is not "required" to take time off.
Well, I think Enron has fallen down to the Fortune 20,000 now...
Required time off for key financial personnel is not a law (that I am aware of in the U.S. of A.) but rather a good and strongly recommended security practice. Some companies do it, some don't. The Fortune 50 company I used to work for had a strict policy that everyone in the Data Processing Dept. who worked with financial apps did have to take a 1-week "no contact" vacation every year. They actually flushed out a guy running a nationwide football pool on the mainframe that way!
Correct me if I am wrong, but Java does not specify native support for decimal arithmetic. Had this been included, Java would have been in a very good position to replace all that Cobol out there. As it is...
Great, here come the thought police. For fsck's sake, when will politicians get something even close to resembling a clue? How the hell do they think they'll be able to monitor petabytes of information, in thousands of different encryption formats, being chaoticilly strewn about the world's networks.
They don't need to monitor petabytes of information. They only need to make some shrewd guesses, monitor a few gigabytes of information flow, and put 200-300 middle-class burghers behind bars. The word gets around and everyone else falls in line. That's the way the tax enforcement system is set up and it works just fine.
The unstated basis of your question is that once a very large, monied interest manages to get a bill introduced to further its purposes that there subsequently must be legislation passed on that topic. Generally, this will be some sort of "compromise" (using the good bad bill/good bill tactic) that gives the monied interest 87% of what it asked for in the first place.
How about these alternatives: (a) no bill (b) a bill which is 180 degrees off from those currently pending: strong protection of fair use, prohibition of changing technology standards (HDTV) to benefit content providers at the cost of consumers, explicit acknowledgement that the Constitution does not guarantee any industry a certain rate of return no matter what their profit margin was in the past, etc.?
IMHO, in this case, "smart" equals "reacts against the hijacking of copyright law to prevent fair use". Alternatively, if you like RMS-speak, "smart" equals "understanding that information wants to be free".
Not to be rude (overly rude anyway!) but this equates to "he agrees with my view". I guarantee you that the RIAA, the movie studios, and especially the law firms that represent their interests have some very smart people working for them. Who just happen to disagree with your view. Agree/disagree is orthagonal to smart/silly/dumb.
He wanted to bring a document to the office so he could work on it, and we run MS Office 97. You'd expect similar applications to read each other's formats within the same vendor, so it seemed like a good idea. Except Word97 can't read MS Works files, even though MS Works can read MS Word files. Doesn't make any sense to me.
The MS-Works import/export converter is not installed by default with Office 97. You have to rerun setup, drill down on "Converters", and select the ones you want. Works is in there.
When you do so it will ask you for the original Office 97 CD (which must be exactly the same version). Since you have touched the original CD, don't forget to reinstall all Office and operating system service packs in the correct order when you are done.
Now the fun part is figuring out how to rerun Setup if you didn't install the Office tool bar, since the tool bar is the only organic location to start Setup, and you need to run Setup to install the tool bar:-).
As people go higher up the ladder and to better careers they'll get better breaks and holidays in general.
I have a friend who argues that life is backwards. We should start out at age 22 with a salary of $120,000/year and 6 weeks vacation. That should decrease as the years go by until at 65 we are at $18,000/year, 1 week vacation, and we work until we die.
The same guy also argues that only veterans should get Veterans Day as a holiday. I must say I agree, although I am not a veteran!
When I was a reporter working on a monthly magazine, I got paid vacation (I think 1 week for the first year, 2 weeks per year after that) but guess what, during the month when I took the vacation I pretty much had to write the same number of words.
Later, when I was an attorney, I got paid vacation time but again, my billable hour 'guidelines' for the year didn't really seem to reflect any weeks off. (Later, working for the same law firm, I switched to a straight model of getting paid per billable hour, instead of a salary, and ever since then I've had no paid vacations at all, nearly 10 years now).
Ultimately, paid vacation is just something you negotiate for, and it's part of the equation for how much your employer thinks it can pay.
Good points, but there are two underlying assumptions that Americans seldom discuss.
First, there is an assumption that if you work more hours, you will be more productive. Five 9-hour days will be more productive than five 8-hour days; six 9-hour days will be more productive than five 9-hour days; and eventually 52 workweeks of six 12-hour days and one 6-hour day will be the most productive of all.
But studies have shown that productivity in physical labor jobs decreases drastically after 8-9 hours and 5-5.5 days of labor per week. It is a lot harder to measure productivity in non-physical jobs, but my personal observation is that (for longer periods, say more than a month), five 9-hour days is about all a human can take. After that productivity goes down and sometimes becomes negative.
The second unquestioned assumption is that of the "vital man". If I don't call in 4 times a day while on vacation, if I don't check e-mail twice a day, if I don't keep my Blackberry running 24/7, I will be "out of the loop", "no longer needed", and of course will be deemed "non-essential" and finally be kicked out on my butt.
Well, maybe. But I would argue that if an organization is structured this way, it is doomed to failure in the long run anyway, so why worry? A full 2 weeks of vacation with minimal thought given to the workplace has a tendency to recharge people and make them more productive when they return. While all this hurrying and worrying, even when on vacation, tends to burn them out and make them less productive in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
And this is without the national ID card which I suspect is coming fairly soon.
sPh
Sound farfetched? In the last six months all credit card companies have sent out changes to their terms and conditions stating that you can no longer sue them - you must use binding arbitration. Don't like it? Just cancel all your credit cards. Which is a bit difficult for those who must travel, rent a car, get some cash far from home, etc. But you have a "choice".
sPh
sPh
In fact, uranium used to be used as an alloy in ceramic tooth fillings to add the slight yellow tinge of real enamel. Properly alloyed it is no danger to the owner of the tooth.
Uranium dust, however, besides being highly flammable, is toxic (like all heavy metals).
sPh
sPh
sPh
Halliburton is of course also heavily involved with that basion of free competition the Texas oil industry. Not to mention the Carlyle Group.
Funny thing is that Cheney fought very hard not to be forced to cash in his options when he was elected, but lost that battle. Haliburton is now in the toilet due to asbestos liability from one of Mr. Cheney's less-successful acquisitions. Had he kept those options they would be underwater at the moment.
Anyway, this topic is a bit too complex for this thread.
sPh
Note, however, that both Lay and Ebbers took hunderds of millions out before they tripped over their own, um, feet. If Ebbers hadn't gotten involved in a margin call, and thus athwart both the big brokerages and the SEC, I doubt he would have had any trouble slipping out of his current situation.
And while my heart and my gut would dearly love to see Lay, Fastow, etc. pay some sort of civil and/or criminal price, I doubt very much that will happen. Al Dunlop was far more clearly on the wrong side of the law, and he has slipped away with very little punishment.
If one wanted to be truely cynical, once could point out that if Lay were actually prosecuted, then Cheney and White might be next, and we can't have that can we?
sPh
sPh
Keep the synergy flowing! Anyone know any good replacements for HP laser printers?
sPh
sPh
sPh
sPh
My guess is that the judge's viewpoint is going to be closer to the general business press than the IT world (much less Slashdot), so I am not holding out much hope for a meaningful order here.
sPh
sPh
sPh
Required time off for key financial personnel is not a law (that I am aware of in the U.S. of A.) but rather a good and strongly recommended security practice. Some companies do it, some don't. The Fortune 50 company I used to work for had a strict policy that everyone in the Data Processing Dept. who worked with financial apps did have to take a 1-week "no contact" vacation every year. They actually flushed out a guy running a nationwide football pool on the mainframe that way!
sPh
Correct me if I am wrong, but Java does not specify native support for decimal arithmetic. Had this been included, Java would have been in a very good position to replace all that Cobol out there. As it is...
sPh
sPh
How about these alternatives: (a) no bill (b) a bill which is 180 degrees off from those currently pending: strong protection of fair use, prohibition of changing technology standards (HDTV) to benefit content providers at the cost of consumers, explicit acknowledgement that the Constitution does not guarantee any industry a certain rate of return no matter what their profit margin was in the past, etc.?
sPh
sPh
sPh
When you do so it will ask you for the original Office 97 CD (which must be exactly the same version). Since you have touched the original CD, don't forget to reinstall all Office and operating system service packs in the correct order when you are done.
Now the fun part is figuring out how to rerun Setup if you didn't install the Office tool bar, since the tool bar is the only organic location to start Setup, and you need to run Setup to install the tool bar :-).
sPh
The same guy also argues that only veterans should get Veterans Day as a holiday. I must say I agree, although I am not a veteran!
sPh
First, there is an assumption that if you work more hours, you will be more productive. Five 9-hour days will be more productive than five 8-hour days; six 9-hour days will be more productive than five 9-hour days; and eventually 52 workweeks of six 12-hour days and one 6-hour day will be the most productive of all.
But studies have shown that productivity in physical labor jobs decreases drastically after 8-9 hours and 5-5.5 days of labor per week. It is a lot harder to measure productivity in non-physical jobs, but my personal observation is that (for longer periods, say more than a month), five 9-hour days is about all a human can take. After that productivity goes down and sometimes becomes negative.
The second unquestioned assumption is that of the "vital man". If I don't call in 4 times a day while on vacation, if I don't check e-mail twice a day, if I don't keep my Blackberry running 24/7, I will be "out of the loop", "no longer needed", and of course will be deemed "non-essential" and finally be kicked out on my butt.
Well, maybe. But I would argue that if an organization is structured this way, it is doomed to failure in the long run anyway, so why worry? A full 2 weeks of vacation with minimal thought given to the workplace has a tendency to recharge people and make them more productive when they return. While all this hurrying and worrying, even when on vacation, tends to burn them out and make them less productive in the long run.
My 0.02.
sPh