About a year ago, my daughter was studying the bohr model of the atom. I was helping her with her homework. The question was, name the subatomic particle that orbits the nucleus. I said, "Well, atoms have protons, neutrons, and what?" She thought for a minute, then replied, "Croutons?"
This is an interesting topic for me. There's a book (the author's name eludes me) titled Stabbed with a Wedge of Cheese that contains this sort of thing. We've all heard of the Chevy Nova. There are plenty of other silly mistakes also. It was a car named either the Fiero or Fuego that, in italian, means "an ugly old woman." My favorite one though was when Coca Cola was first introduced to China. Chinese characters are like heiroglyphics. They have sound and meaning, unlike the latin alphabet for example which is only sound. To make foreign words in chinese, you choose the symbols that make the right sounds to approximate the foreign word. These symbols have meanings though. The story goes that when they first assembled the sounds for coca cola, the meaning they got was "Bite the wax tadpole." Chinese marketing people later suggested a different set of symbols that produced the name coca cola, but meant something like "happiness in the mouth."
I have an Article C corporation. It's much more complicated than this. If your corp makes $100,000 and you pay yourself $50,000, the 50k you pay yourself was an expense and is not taxed on the corporate side. It is on the personal side though. So have your income gets the corporate rate, the other half gets the personal rate. This is not double taxation. Now if you don't make any money the next year and you use money you've already paid corporate taxes on to pay your salary, that money is taxed (again) as personal income. As long as you're making money, this isn't a problem, right?
I once delivered a replacement rental computer (an original IBM PC-XT) to a phosphorus mining operation in florida. The black bezels on the floppy drives had been bleached to a light grey. There was a shower in the parking lot where you could wash off your car before going home for the day.
A friend of mine used to work at the navistar engine casting plant in indianapolis. He used to work on computers withing a few feet of rivers of molten metal. The metal would pop and splatter on him occasionally burning holes in his clothes. He would come home with a black gritty sand-like substance in his teeth. Not fun.
I used to work for an electronics parts testing plant 3rd shift. We used to test, among other things, power diodes. The testing equipment had two buttons far enough apart so that it took two hands to perform the test, the idea being that your hands are away from the part when power is applied. To make the testers go faster, they would tape a wooden ruler to the test equpment spanning both buttons. You could now perform the test with one hand. After testing 1000s of power diodes at 3am, you would start to not get your other hand out of the way in time. I've gotten countless jolts. Sure wakes you up though. I also used to do high and low temperature military spec parts testing. For colding testing, they would wheel an open vat of liquid freon (that's what they called, maybe it was a different coolant) at -60 degrees. I'd put the transistor (the metal can type of course, not the plastic ones) in a wiring harness, hold the part and harness in the coolant, then perform the test. Then I'd have to pluck the transistor out of the harness while still cold. I had little frostbite spots on my fingers from dozens of freezing and thawing cycles in my finger tips. My fingers would feel strange after an evening of cold testing.
The strangest one of all though is when I worked for a bunch of scientologists who were writing software to run time share businesses. I'm not making this up. Every day was a new exercise in mind control avoidance and bizarre social/political problems. One scientologist IT worker was convinced he had a cold because people were thinking bad thoughts about him. The VP from the "org" used to cuss out the customers, which caused fights with the owner/president. He used to visit customers on sales calls and try to sleep with one of the women to seal the deal. I finally lost my job when they were seized by the IRS. Fun stuff.
It wont be the same. There will be a latency but it wont be anything close to that with satellite internet. Think about it.... Let's see, speed of light traversing 20+/- miles (up and back down each way) and this being factored into latency, vs speed of light traversing 56,000+/- miles (up and back each way). See a HUGE difference there? The latency would be/will be a nonissue.
I had satellite internet for a while and latency was a real issue. But let's do some math:
56000 miles x 5280 feet = 295680000 feet
1 meter = 3 feet 3 inches or 3.25 feet
295680000 / 3.25 = 90978461.5 meters
C = 299792458 m/s
90978461.5 / 299792458 = 0.3 seconds for a round trip.
I'm currently getting 30ms ping times to www.yahoo.com from here at work. 0.3 seconds is 300 milliseconds. A ping time of 330 milliseconds, while not great and maybe not enough to be a LPB, is respectable for a home internet account. When I went through a satellite, I was getting 1 second ping times, as in 1000 milliseconds. I think the bad ping time had more to do with the ISP than the distance to orbit.
My biggest complaint about the tivo is that I can't get shows out of it. After a year, even the 80gig model filled up and I started having to compromise about what to delete. Even if there is DRM, i don't really care. I would prefer not to have it, but i think in this case, I could live with it. I think the argument is similar to the itunes drm. It all depends on how oppressive it is and how much things cost. In the end, I'll probably build a mythtv box. But for now, these features would be well worth it. I suspect tivo would get a lot of heat for this if there were no drm.
There is basically no job (other than service, like working at a store) that can't be done cheaper by people outside this country.
This isn't entirely true. When the time is right (between 3 and 36 months from now), I plan to open either an auto shop or a body shop. It's hard to outsource your car repair to india.
French does have sort of a gutteral-sounding r though (as does Hebrew).
ah, you're right. I forgot about that one. I guess it could be sort of gutteral. I have brain damage now from studying french that makes me not think of it that way.:-)
The fourth day was about 'houiller birds. Houiller, pronounced sort of like "colly,"
While I'm not familiar with this french word, I do speak fairly good french.
In french, the letter H, especially at the beginning of the word, is silent. It only serves to disrupt liason which is the tentancy to blend the sounds of words together. For example, "the trees" would be "les abres" with the S in "les" pronouced like the letter Z and attached to the A in abres. It would sound more like one word pronounced lezabres. But with "les haricots verts" or green beans, the H in haricots would stop the blending with the previous word "les". The Z sound vanishes. The H is still silent.
Next, in french, the double L is usually pronounced as a Y. And the trailing R is not pronounced either but modifies the preceding E to sound like it has an accent. All this means that I would pronouce this word (remember that I don't know this specific word) as something like u-ee-ye. That would be U as in soup, EE as in bee, and YE as in yet.
Oddly, this looks like an ER verb though, not an adjective. Also, french doesn't have a gutteral sound.
Perhaps this word is really dutch? Or maybe it's a french word that's been adopted by old english and adjusted to match gutteral sounds that used to exist in english.
Actually, it's not sitting next to oranges. They're mikans, sort of like tangerines. These things are somewhere between the size of a golf ball and a tennis ball. Very tasty too.
And that price tag is not really abnormal in Japan. When I was there, 10,000 yen was about $40. They were selling cantaloupes for that price. They would cut the vine nicely and gift wrap them in little window boxes. Now, that's about $100. Oddly enough, honeydew melons were only about 500 yen at the time, maybe $2.
I sat and WATCHED online as my paycheck clearing time changed to AFTER the bills were paid so they could nail me with $75 in fees.
wow. I thought they just wrote their orderby clauses to make this happen. I'm starting to hate banks, and the credit card business' are the worst. US Bank routinely assesses arbitrary hold times on my deposits so that my overdraft "line of credit" gets hit. I went round and round with one of their people one day trying to figure out how and when the overdraft protection gets used. She was very evasive. I finally cornered her and got the truth though. I think the entire thing is a scam.
You can either work with us, and clearly communicate to OUR supervisors(not just us) what your needs are...or you can make us the enemy, always try to do things half-assed, and get nothing done.
As a developer and consultant, I've worked in a lot of environments for a lot of companies, all falling at different points on the admin nazi scale. I've worked in environments were I was expected to do microsoft development without having an admin account on my own machine. I have no problem when admins come to me and say, "You can use that machine you found in the closet for an extra test box, but we're not going to support it." It's when they try to protect me from myself to the point of ridiculousness that I take exception. In those cases, I simply document the obstruction and keep billing.
Really, compare these metrics to that of any other power distribution plant and you will see historically, even with the huge publicized disasters like Chernobyl and TMI, that no other large scale power producer even compares in safety to nuclear power.
Especially when you consider that you should probably include coal mining accidents/deaths in the numbers for coal fired plants.
There's a point of deminishing returns here. How much better can you get than a perfect digital copy? Their only alternative at this point is to make better music.
Slashdot Mirror
About a year ago, my daughter was studying the bohr model of the atom. I was helping her with her homework. The question was, name the subatomic particle that orbits the nucleus. I said, "Well, atoms have protons, neutrons, and what?" She thought for a minute, then replied, "Croutons?"
It was probably a different language.
This is an interesting topic for me. There's a book (the author's name eludes me) titled Stabbed with a Wedge of Cheese that contains this sort of thing. We've all heard of the Chevy Nova. There are plenty of other silly mistakes also. It was a car named either the Fiero or Fuego that, in italian, means "an ugly old woman." My favorite one though was when Coca Cola was first introduced to China. Chinese characters are like heiroglyphics. They have sound and meaning, unlike the latin alphabet for example which is only sound. To make foreign words in chinese, you choose the symbols that make the right sounds to approximate the foreign word. These symbols have meanings though. The story goes that when they first assembled the sounds for coca cola, the meaning they got was "Bite the wax tadpole." Chinese marketing people later suggested a different set of symbols that produced the name coca cola, but meant something like "happiness in the mouth."
I have an Article C corporation. It's much more complicated than this. If your corp makes $100,000 and you pay yourself $50,000, the 50k you pay yourself was an expense and is not taxed on the corporate side. It is on the personal side though. So have your income gets the corporate rate, the other half gets the personal rate. This is not double taxation. Now if you don't make any money the next year and you use money you've already paid corporate taxes on to pay your salary, that money is taxed (again) as personal income. As long as you're making money, this isn't a problem, right?
Dude, you're getting Dell-orian
I once delivered a replacement rental computer (an original IBM PC-XT) to a phosphorus mining operation in florida. The black bezels on the floppy drives had been bleached to a light grey. There was a shower in the parking lot where you could wash off your car before going home for the day.
A friend of mine used to work at the navistar engine casting plant in indianapolis. He used to work on computers withing a few feet of rivers of molten metal. The metal would pop and splatter on him occasionally burning holes in his clothes. He would come home with a black gritty sand-like substance in his teeth. Not fun.
I used to work for an electronics parts testing plant 3rd shift. We used to test, among other things, power diodes. The testing equipment had two buttons far enough apart so that it took two hands to perform the test, the idea being that your hands are away from the part when power is applied. To make the testers go faster, they would tape a wooden ruler to the test equpment spanning both buttons. You could now perform the test with one hand. After testing 1000s of power diodes at 3am, you would start to not get your other hand out of the way in time. I've gotten countless jolts. Sure wakes you up though. I also used to do high and low temperature military spec parts testing. For colding testing, they would wheel an open vat of liquid freon (that's what they called, maybe it was a different coolant) at -60 degrees. I'd put the transistor (the metal can type of course, not the plastic ones) in a wiring harness, hold the part and harness in the coolant, then perform the test. Then I'd have to pluck the transistor out of the harness while still cold. I had little frostbite spots on my fingers from dozens of freezing and thawing cycles in my finger tips. My fingers would feel strange after an evening of cold testing.
The strangest one of all though is when I worked for a bunch of scientologists who were writing software to run time share businesses. I'm not making this up. Every day was a new exercise in mind control avoidance and bizarre social/political problems. One scientologist IT worker was convinced he had a cold because people were thinking bad thoughts about him. The VP from the "org" used to cuss out the customers, which caused fights with the owner/president. He used to visit customers on sales calls and try to sleep with one of the women to seal the deal. I finally lost my job when they were seized by the IRS. Fun stuff.
It wont be the same. There will be a latency but it wont be anything close to that with satellite internet. Think about it. ... Let's see, speed of light traversing 20+/- miles (up and back down each way) and this being factored into latency, vs speed of light traversing 56,000+/- miles (up and back each way). See a HUGE difference there? The latency would be/will be a nonissue.
I had satellite internet for a while and latency was a real issue. But let's do some math:
56000 miles x 5280 feet = 295680000 feet
1 meter = 3 feet 3 inches or 3.25 feet
295680000 / 3.25 = 90978461.5 meters
C = 299792458 m/s
90978461.5 / 299792458 = 0.3 seconds for a round trip.
I'm currently getting 30ms ping times to www.yahoo.com from here at work. 0.3 seconds is 300 milliseconds. A ping time of 330 milliseconds, while not great and maybe not enough to be a LPB, is respectable for a home internet account. When I went through a satellite, I was getting 1 second ping times, as in 1000 milliseconds. I think the bad ping time had more to do with the ISP than the distance to orbit.
My biggest complaint about the tivo is that I can't get shows out of it. After a year, even the 80gig model filled up and I started having to compromise about what to delete. Even if there is DRM, i don't really care. I would prefer not to have it, but i think in this case, I could live with it. I think the argument is similar to the itunes drm. It all depends on how oppressive it is and how much things cost. In the end, I'll probably build a mythtv box. But for now, these features would be well worth it. I suspect tivo would get a lot of heat for this if there were no drm.
There is basically no job (other than service, like working at a store) that can't be done cheaper by people outside this country.
This isn't entirely true. When the time is right (between 3 and 36 months from now), I plan to open either an auto shop or a body shop. It's hard to outsource your car repair to india.
You've just defined communism.
Stop! Or I'll say stop again!
Wasn't Yahoo Serious working on this?
we can instantly flood Beijing with ads for penis enlargement!
What a cash cow! With their average length, that market must be screaming for this product.
(Sorry, couldn't resist)
French does have sort of a gutteral-sounding r though (as does Hebrew).
:-)
ah, you're right. I forgot about that one. I guess it could be sort of gutteral. I have brain damage now from studying french that makes me not think of it that way.
The fourth day was about 'houiller birds. Houiller, pronounced sort of like "colly,"
While I'm not familiar with this french word, I do speak fairly good french.
In french, the letter H, especially at the beginning of the word, is silent. It only serves to disrupt liason which is the tentancy to blend the sounds of words together. For example, "the trees" would be "les abres" with the S in "les" pronouced like the letter Z and attached to the A in abres. It would sound more like one word pronounced lezabres. But with "les haricots verts" or green beans, the H in haricots would stop the blending with the previous word "les". The Z sound vanishes. The H is still silent.
Next, in french, the double L is usually pronounced as a Y. And the trailing R is not pronounced either but modifies the preceding E to sound like it has an accent. All this means that I would pronouce this word (remember that I don't know this specific word) as something like u-ee-ye. That would be U as in soup, EE as in bee, and YE as in yet.
Oddly, this looks like an ER verb though, not an adjective. Also, french doesn't have a gutteral sound.
Perhaps this word is really dutch? Or maybe it's a french word that's been adopted by old english and adjusted to match gutteral sounds that used to exist in english.
Actually, it's not sitting next to oranges. They're mikans, sort of like tangerines. These things are somewhere between the size of a golf ball and a tennis ball. Very tasty too.
And that price tag is not really abnormal in Japan. When I was there, 10,000 yen was about $40. They were selling cantaloupes for that price. They would cut the vine nicely and gift wrap them in little window boxes. Now, that's about $100. Oddly enough, honeydew melons were only about 500 yen at the time, maybe $2.
I sat and WATCHED online as my paycheck clearing time changed to AFTER the bills were paid so they could nail me with $75 in fees.
wow. I thought they just wrote their orderby clauses to make this happen. I'm starting to hate banks, and the credit card business' are the worst. US Bank routinely assesses arbitrary hold times on my deposits so that my overdraft "line of credit" gets hit. I went round and round with one of their people one day trying to figure out how and when the overdraft protection gets used. She was very evasive. I finally cornered her and got the truth though. I think the entire thing is a scam.
You can either work with us, and clearly communicate to OUR supervisors(not just us) what your needs are...or you can make us the enemy, always try to do things half-assed, and get nothing done.
As a developer and consultant, I've worked in a lot of environments for a lot of companies, all falling at different points on the admin nazi scale. I've worked in environments were I was expected to do microsoft development without having an admin account on my own machine. I have no problem when admins come to me and say, "You can use that machine you found in the closet for an extra test box, but we're not going to support it." It's when they try to protect me from myself to the point of ridiculousness that I take exception. In those cases, I simply document the obstruction and keep billing.
Really, compare these metrics to that of any other power distribution plant and you will see historically, even with the huge publicized disasters like Chernobyl and TMI, that no other large scale power producer even compares in safety to nuclear power.
Especially when you consider that you should probably include coal mining accidents/deaths in the numbers for coal fired plants.
There's a point of deminishing returns here. How much better can you get than a perfect digital copy? Their only alternative at this point is to make better music.
you just eat a different song to overwrite it.
So this would be like write only memory. I mean, if you could read it back... eeeew.
I'm having trouble forming a mental image of this...
So am I. So is this bigger or smaller than a volkswagen?
Imagine A UN-Run Internet
A prophetic subject line? If they run it as well as other things, the internet may be un-run.
It's an Apple commercial hosted on Apple's site
He must be listening to Allanis Morrisette again.
Don't ya think?