Because most companies wait until the very last possible moment to send their W-2's out.
And the "last possible moment" still gives 2 months or so of time. After working phone support for Intuit during tax season (NEVER. AGAIN.) a few years ago, I can't say I have any sympathy for the procrastinators.
Of course this is just capital one, I also get offers from nearly everyone else that offers cards, but not as often as the tards at Capital One.
I had the same problem a few years ago...Called 5 times and asked to be taken off their lists over a period of 3 months, but the crap kept coming.
It took me sending their customer service an email saying any further mail would be shredded, burned, and have the ashes tossed in a nearby lake before it stopped:P
I go home and copy my Nintendo cartridges to my Sony portable all the time.
Keeps getting mentioned again and again on the PSP stories....One of the best "advantages" of Sony's portable seems to be hacking it to play games from one of their biggest competitors. Someone at Nintendo must be getting a chuckle out of that.
I haven't actually looked myself, but I seem to remember seeing an ad for SG-1 & Atlantis episodes on iTunes. Probably whatever usual DRM Apple does on them, so that might work - or just spend about $20-40 each and start buying the DVD season boxsets off Amazon.
Sales have fallen dramatically after the holidays apparently.
Key word there being apparently. Though I almost wish the sales would slow down so I could actually find one in stock without it being a giant bundle or geting raped on ebay.
No, I understood that pretty well, and I actually tried installing that package too.
Doing a quick search on Google, it seems it might have worked eventually if I had screwed around with editing various config files by hand....But by default the resolution was still crippled, and it didn't give any immediate access to the nvidia-settings program that finally solved the issue after I installed the binary blob from Nvidia's site.
That is because Ubuntu gives you the open source 'nv' driver instead of the proprietary 'nvidia' driver.
Yes, that is what I said, pretty much.
Any bugs you found have nothing to do with the distro-provided packages of the proprietary drivers.
Okay, the distro-provided package cripples my display capabilities for (to the best of my knowledge) no immediately apparent reason. The proprietary driver doesn't.
Whether you want to call it a bug, a "feature", a bad design decision, etc., it still boils down to the same thing.
Funny, when I installed the latest version of Kubuntu a couple weeks ago, the default "official" driver provided for my GEForce inexplicably locked my desktop resolution from going any higher than 1024x768 and did not give access to any of the advanced settings for the card. Installed the latest package from Nvidia's website, and both problems were solved.
I think i'll stick with the "shit" packages, thanks:)
The suspension of disbelief comes from the fact that they're interacting with aliens who all speak English. Requiring anything beyond that is just insulting. A bunch of whales surrounding a city? Maybe that was Atlantis, but it's the same crap, different actors.
All I can really say is that some of us are more willing than you are, for the sake of some entertainment.
I don't know, of course, but everything that happens is implausible and/or impossible. And I don't mean the circumstances -- although they are implausible to be sure, but that's where suspension of disbelief comes in -- I mean what happens inside of those circumstances.
Again, they obviously had to decide whether to stick to real science (which, as your rant mentions, pretty much torpedos most of the show) or toss in some technobabble and real-world impossibilities.
Either the characters are all idiots who just assume they're home, or they realize the very real possibility that they're not home, but don't think it's worth mentioning at all.
Seems to be the second one, generally. I seem to remember the two-parter at the end of the 8th season dealing with restoring the timeline from an alternate ala Back to The Future. Everything's back to normal except for a minor change or two, the characters realize this, and take the attitude of "Eh. Close enough".
6 years in the military which, as any booter can tell you, is not even remotely similar to what is depicted in SG1.
A fiction show about a secret military program involving travel to other planets & galaxies doesn't match your personal experience as a "booter"? Shocking!
I would note also that the show has actually been honored by the US Air Force for its portrayal of the military, and two of their Chiefs of Staff have actually had cameo roles as well.
They almost killed off Sam's dad, but couldn't quite bring themselves to do it.
If you can get to the end of this transcript and prove the character is still alive, give yourself a cookie.
And as for the rest of the events you mention -- it's all abstract. There are "world wars, biological warfare, and lots of murder/torture/enslavement," but it all happens to other than major characters, or completely off-screen (such as the world wars), and in any case, it's generally over within an episode or two, with a nice, tidy, happy resolution.
Yeah, the various episodes where Teal'c gets tortured, Daniel gets his brain scrambled so many times by a ribbon device that he actually starts to get used to it, the 6th season episode where O'Neill basically spends the entire time getting tortured and killed over and over, etc....All figments of my imagination. I'm not going to waste any more time finding specific examples for you, look for it yourself.
And on that note, since you don't even seem to be able to keep SG-1 and Atlantis straight, much less have anything but scattered viewing of the show, debating you further is pointless. Have a nice life:)
Technology and science underwent idiotification (No problem.. I can troubleshoot a crystal with my handy multimeter)
It's science fiction, it requires a measure of disbelief. And besides, how do you know something couldn't be rigged up? Got some real alien technology laying around that you'd like to share with the rest of us?
alienating the supposed target audience, while everyone else was already alienated by the fact that it's a dorky show.
Yes, it sucked so bad that it ran for 200+ episodes, spawned a spinoff (with another being developed) and 2 movies in the works.
No problem went unsolved and nothing particularly bad or unhappy ever happened (that I saw).
So (for example) the deaths of several major characters, world war, biological warfare, and numerous instances of general murder/torture/enslavement of innocent people don't count as bad or unhappy in your book? I'd hate to see what you actually find unpleasant. It's pretty obvious that your experience with the series is very limited.
You must have watched a different version than I did.
And end up failing miserably like every other sci-fi tv to big screen endeavour outside of Trek TOS?
I doubt it, since it seems atm that they'll either be direct-to-DVD or TV-only. Slashdot and the linked site are woefully behind, these movies have been known about for at least a few weeks now.
Hey, I will agree that some of these larger companies have actively pushed some diplorable business ethics in the past. Does that mean that we should bombard them with frivilous law suites?
No, it doesn't.
My post was more to point out the immense humor I find in these patent trolls attacking 3 multi-billion dollar international companies, that no doubt all have armies of rabid lawyers waiting to be released.
Is it just me or does this speak so clearly to the culture we have developed in the US?
Considering who's being sued....The only thing coming to mind is that old "Bambi meets Godzilla" cartoon, except with the foot slamming down 3 times, each time harder than the last.
And meanwhile, for every "dedicated hardcore fan" that buys a PSP to hack to pieces, there's 1+x people from many other groups buying a DS. The homebrew may be infinitely cool, but I think you're being a little delusional if you think that's going to propel it past the DS (which, i've heard, has homebrew options of its own). Last time I saw some (Japanese) sale numbers, the DS was beating the PSP almost 4:1 in sales.
This happens to me with Cingular also - with anything less than a perfect connection, the phone will often just start randomly losing audio completely, eventually just sitting there with a connection but no way to actually communicate.
What would use 1TB of data storage in normal everyday kind of use?
Easy full backups, Entire (non-HD, anyway) series on one disc instead 4 episodes at once, simple storage and portability of gigantic video/picture files, etc.
Are Iranians even a significant enough portion of the world's internet users to affect something like that? Feel free to try and prove me wrong, but somehow I doubt it.
Quite often when I'm "socializing" I have to escape ASAP because all people seem to want to talk about is bloody "Survivor", "CSI" or worse, professional sports.
Okay, this is kinda divergent from what I mentioned in the first place. But anyway...
Not really something I would enjoy either. Perhaps you should find new people to hang around with, though, if you don't share any of their interests.
These are intelligent professional people, and it scares the hell out of me that this stuff is foremeost on their minds. Does anyone care that our nation is 8 trillion dollars in debt, involved in 2 wars, or that our personal freedoms are evaporating right in front of us?
They may care, but not enough to let it take over their leisure time. Unless you're a hardcore political activist or something, it's all about balance.
I sometimes interject a thought like this, and 2 minutes later we're back to NFL Sunday.
Again, find other people to hang around with. Go meet people on DailyKos or something. Not everyone in the world is like whatever small, shallow group of people you associate with.
What would you consider to be a worse use of time than TV? Apart from actively damaging your body, staring at the blank wall would be better than TV!
It's not that the other things are worse than TV, but at the same time I question whether they're really more worthwhile as well.
It induces people to stay at home, effectively just killing time, instead of doing something real - even just socialising is a far more helathy way of spending your time.
In my experience, a lot of those (not necessarily you) that proclaim people who watch TV/play games/etc. should go do something "real" really mean that they think everyone should spend all their free time out drinking, at parties, going shopping, etc. I'll never try to argue that most TV is incredibly thought-provoking or otherwise useful (and one certainly shouldn't make TV their only leisure activity), but to say that's it's worse than some of the other wastes of time people practice is really stretching it.
Normally 1 hour or so per weekday, somewhere between a few hours and none on weekends if there happens to be a good movie/baseball game/other special event on.
If you count DVD watching on the computer, then sometimes a few hours a night while my wife and I catch up with Stargate SG-1 before the other half of the last season starts.
So, hotmail is terrible at blocking spam, while Yahoo, at least puts it in a separate box for you, so it doesn't clutter up your inbox.
Well, that was part of my point...Considering I get maybe 1 spam per week at the most in my GMail box, having 400+ spams end up in the Yahoo account is still horrible, even considering I haven't completely cleared the inbox for a year or two now.
Just checked my old Yahoo account that I haven't used anywhere for anything for more than 5 years - 3037 messages in the spam box (30 days worth), and 474 messages in the inbox, 99.9999% of which is spam as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Because most companies wait until the very last possible moment to send their W-2's out.
And the "last possible moment" still gives 2 months or so of time. After working phone support for Intuit during tax season (NEVER. AGAIN.) a few years ago, I can't say I have any sympathy for the procrastinators.
Of course this is just capital one, I also get offers from nearly everyone else that offers cards, but not as often as the tards at Capital One.
:P
I had the same problem a few years ago...Called 5 times and asked to be taken off their lists over a period of 3 months, but the crap kept coming.
It took me sending their customer service an email saying any further mail would be shredded, burned, and have the ashes tossed in a nearby lake before it stopped
Oh, I got his point fine. I just found it amusing as an aside that he mentioned that.
I go home and copy my Nintendo cartridges to my Sony portable all the time.
Keeps getting mentioned again and again on the PSP stories....One of the best "advantages" of Sony's portable seems to be hacking it to play games from one of their biggest competitors. Someone at Nintendo must be getting a chuckle out of that.
I haven't actually looked myself, but I seem to remember seeing an ad for SG-1 & Atlantis episodes on iTunes. Probably whatever usual DRM Apple does on them, so that might work - or just spend about $20-40 each and start buying the DVD season boxsets off Amazon.
Sales have fallen dramatically after the holidays apparently.
Key word there being apparently. Though I almost wish the sales would slow down so I could actually find one in stock without it being a giant bundle or geting raped on ebay.
No, I understood that pretty well, and I actually tried installing that package too.
Doing a quick search on Google, it seems it might have worked eventually if I had screwed around with editing various config files by hand....But by default the resolution was still crippled, and it didn't give any immediate access to the nvidia-settings program that finally solved the issue after I installed the binary blob from Nvidia's site.
That is because Ubuntu gives you the open source 'nv' driver instead of the proprietary 'nvidia' driver.
Yes, that is what I said, pretty much.
Any bugs you found have nothing to do with the distro-provided packages of the proprietary drivers.
Okay, the distro-provided package cripples my display capabilities for (to the best of my knowledge) no immediately apparent reason. The proprietary driver doesn't.
Whether you want to call it a bug, a "feature", a bad design decision, etc., it still boils down to the same thing.
Funny, when I installed the latest version of Kubuntu a couple weeks ago, the default "official" driver provided for my GEForce inexplicably locked my desktop resolution from going any higher than 1024x768 and did not give access to any of the advanced settings for the card. Installed the latest package from Nvidia's website, and both problems were solved.
:)
I think i'll stick with the "shit" packages, thanks
The suspension of disbelief comes from the fact that they're interacting with aliens who all speak English. Requiring anything beyond that is just insulting. A bunch of whales surrounding a city? Maybe that was Atlantis, but it's the same crap, different actors.
:)
All I can really say is that some of us are more willing than you are, for the sake of some entertainment.
I don't know, of course, but everything that happens is implausible and/or impossible. And I don't mean the circumstances -- although they are implausible to be sure, but that's where suspension of disbelief comes in -- I mean what happens inside of those circumstances.
Again, they obviously had to decide whether to stick to real science (which, as your rant mentions, pretty much torpedos most of the show) or toss in some technobabble and real-world impossibilities.
Either the characters are all idiots who just assume they're home, or they realize the very real possibility that they're not home, but don't think it's worth mentioning at all.
Seems to be the second one, generally. I seem to remember the two-parter at the end of the 8th season dealing with restoring the timeline from an alternate ala Back to The Future. Everything's back to normal except for a minor change or two, the characters realize this, and take the attitude of "Eh. Close enough".
6 years in the military which, as any booter can tell you, is not even remotely similar to what is depicted in SG1.
A fiction show about a secret military program involving travel to other planets & galaxies doesn't match your personal experience as a "booter"? Shocking!
I would note also that the show has actually been honored by the US Air Force for its portrayal of the military, and two of their Chiefs of Staff have actually had cameo roles as well.
They almost killed off Sam's dad, but couldn't quite bring themselves to do it.
If you can get to the end of this transcript and prove the character is still alive, give yourself a cookie.
And as for the rest of the events you mention -- it's all abstract. There are "world wars, biological warfare, and lots of murder/torture/enslavement," but it all happens to other than major characters, or completely off-screen (such as the world wars), and in any case, it's generally over within an episode or two, with a nice, tidy, happy resolution.
Yeah, the various episodes where Teal'c gets tortured, Daniel gets his brain scrambled so many times by a ribbon device that he actually starts to get used to it, the 6th season episode where O'Neill basically spends the entire time getting tortured and killed over and over, etc....All figments of my imagination. I'm not going to waste any more time finding specific examples for you, look for it yourself.
And on that note, since you don't even seem to be able to keep SG-1 and Atlantis straight, much less have anything but scattered viewing of the show, debating you further is pointless. Have a nice life
Technology and science underwent idiotification (No problem.. I can troubleshoot a crystal with my handy multimeter)
It's science fiction, it requires a measure of disbelief. And besides, how do you know something couldn't be rigged up? Got some real alien technology laying around that you'd like to share with the rest of us?
alienating the supposed target audience, while everyone else was already alienated by the fact that it's a dorky show.
Yes, it sucked so bad that it ran for 200+ episodes, spawned a spinoff (with another being developed) and 2 movies in the works.
No problem went unsolved and nothing particularly bad or unhappy ever happened (that I saw).
So (for example) the deaths of several major characters, world war, biological warfare, and numerous instances of general murder/torture/enslavement of innocent people don't count as bad or unhappy in your book? I'd hate to see what you actually find unpleasant. It's pretty obvious that your experience with the series is very limited.
You must have watched a different version than I did.
Likewise.
And end up failing miserably like every other sci-fi tv to big screen endeavour outside of Trek TOS?
I doubt it, since it seems atm that they'll either be direct-to-DVD or TV-only. Slashdot and the linked site are woefully behind, these movies have been known about for at least a few weeks now.
Hey, I will agree that some of these larger companies have actively pushed some diplorable business ethics in the past. Does that mean that we should bombard them with frivilous law suites?
No, it doesn't.
My post was more to point out the immense humor I find in these patent trolls attacking 3 multi-billion dollar international companies, that no doubt all have armies of rabid lawyers waiting to be released.
Is it just me or does this speak so clearly to the culture we have developed in the US?
Considering who's being sued....The only thing coming to mind is that old "Bambi meets Godzilla" cartoon, except with the foot slamming down 3 times, each time harder than the last.
And meanwhile, for every "dedicated hardcore fan" that buys a PSP to hack to pieces, there's 1+x people from many other groups buying a DS. The homebrew may be infinitely cool, but I think you're being a little delusional if you think that's going to propel it past the DS (which, i've heard, has homebrew options of its own). Last time I saw some (Japanese) sale numbers, the DS was beating the PSP almost 4:1 in sales.
This happens to me with Cingular also - with anything less than a perfect connection, the phone will often just start randomly losing audio completely, eventually just sitting there with a connection but no way to actually communicate.
What would use 1TB of data storage in normal everyday kind of use?
Easy full backups, Entire (non-HD, anyway) series on one disc instead 4 episodes at once, simple storage and portability of gigantic video/picture files, etc.
The Tetris game card in my DS is just an illusion, then? Please, share exactly how it is that you find it unlikely :)
Are Iranians even a significant enough portion of the world's internet users to affect something like that? Feel free to try and prove me wrong, but somehow I doubt it.
Quite often when I'm "socializing" I have to escape ASAP because all people seem to want to talk about is bloody "Survivor", "CSI" or worse, professional sports.
Okay, this is kinda divergent from what I mentioned in the first place. But anyway...
Not really something I would enjoy either. Perhaps you should find new people to hang around with, though, if you don't share any of their interests.
These are intelligent professional people, and it scares the hell out of me that this stuff is foremeost on their minds. Does anyone care that our nation is 8 trillion dollars in debt, involved in 2 wars, or that our personal freedoms are evaporating right in front of us?
They may care, but not enough to let it take over their leisure time. Unless you're a hardcore political activist or something, it's all about balance.
I sometimes interject a thought like this, and 2 minutes later we're back to NFL Sunday.
Again, find other people to hang around with. Go meet people on DailyKos or something. Not everyone in the world is like whatever small, shallow group of people you associate with.
What would you consider to be a worse use of time than TV? Apart from actively damaging your body, staring at the blank wall would be better than TV!
It's not that the other things are worse than TV, but at the same time I question whether they're really more worthwhile as well.
It induces people to stay at home, effectively just killing time, instead of doing something real - even just socialising is a far more helathy way of spending your time.
In my experience, a lot of those (not necessarily you) that proclaim people who watch TV/play games/etc. should go do something "real" really mean that they think everyone should spend all their free time out drinking, at parties, going shopping, etc. I'll never try to argue that most TV is incredibly thought-provoking or otherwise useful (and one certainly shouldn't make TV their only leisure activity), but to say that's it's worse than some of the other wastes of time people practice is really stretching it.
Normally 1 hour or so per weekday, somewhere between a few hours and none on weekends if there happens to be a good movie/baseball game/other special event on.
If you count DVD watching on the computer, then sometimes a few hours a night while my wife and I catch up with Stargate SG-1 before the other half of the last season starts.
Thought it would be funny, but it is not, but I am not going to waste all that typing calculation I did, so will hide behind anonymity ;-)
:) Being friends with a couple hard-core math geeks, i've gotten used to it :)
Oh, it is
So, hotmail is terrible at blocking spam, while Yahoo, at least puts it in a separate box for you, so it doesn't clutter up your inbox.
Well, that was part of my point...Considering I get maybe 1 spam per week at the most in my GMail box, having 400+ spams end up in the Yahoo account is still horrible, even considering I haven't completely cleared the inbox for a year or two now.
Yahoo still seems to be that way.
Just checked my old Yahoo account that I haven't used anywhere for anything for more than 5 years - 3037 messages in the spam box (30 days worth), and 474 messages in the inbox, 99.9999% of which is spam as well.