"I buy a lot of music -- this year, about $800 on CDs" heh heh, sucker.
Not really. The music I like I'm willing to pay for, so that the artists and the labels I like know I support them and then they make more good music that I like and will buy.
I realize most people would just as soon download for free from the internet. I place a lot of value on my music, and I think the people who make it deserve to get paid.
Of course, once I buy the CD, I'm going to rip it to MP3, play it on my iPod, make mixed CDs, and generally use the music the way I see fit.
The guitar which came with Rock Band for the Wii is a piece of crap, but it can't use my Guitar Hero guitars. For reasons completely unknown to me, the USB guitars from RB for the XBox don't even work with the USB hub that comes with RB on the Wii.
How is it even possible that a USB guitar isn't compatible across those two platforms unless RB only has support for the wireless guitar they issued for the Wii?
The idea of having to buy a whole separate set of instruments for GH4 drives me nutty.
It really would be good for someone to enforce some standardization so the consumer doesn't end up getting gouged.
In this model, consumers would pay royalties into a pot (by paying an extra monthly fee to their ISPs, for instance) and would then have access to all the music from all the labels that participate in the scheme.
I have said it before, and I will say it again.
I am not going to pay a monthly fee on my internet connection or anything else to "excuse" me for all of the copying I don't do.
I don't download music, I buy music. I buy a lot of music -- this year, about $800 on CDs so far, most of that from 3 record labels, and not mainstream ones. The artists I listen to aren't covered under your Brittany-where's-my-panties-Spears tax, and aren't on those labels who are trying to benefit from this.
The last thing I want to see if some *(&^%(*& monthly surcharge on having an Internet connection to help offset the losses to artists I don't listen to.
Everybody who proposes one of these surcharges really needs to be fed their own head in very small pieces, because it's a stupid idea, doesn't address the issue, and won't be paying the artists I listen to. It basically is an attempt to have their revenue stream guaranteed by law.
I think MS screwed up by launching vista so soon before the hardware was really ready for it. Many people may say it does nothing to improve computing, but I just think its a little before its time
But, it's added hardware requirements which don't actually benefit the user.
I mean, now you need more disk space and memory than ever before, to do no more than you could with XP. How does it benefit the consumer to have this operating system?
Microsoft implemented eye-candy, a bad security model, and DRM that just slows down your system and presumes you're doing something shady.
No thanks. MS can keep Vista. I'm not convinced it adds anything more than bloat. That fact that a huge amount of people buying new PCs are "downgrading" to XP tells me that people simply don't want it.
I'm legitimately asking (because nobody ever really quantified what "blow up the Earth several times over" means) whether or not we could. Having been around in the 70's and 80's as a kid, you'd think we'd have been able to pulverize the whole planet by now.
I have no idea of how to wrap my head around how much energy would be required to cause a change in orbit, let alone in relation to what we could actually produce.
Let's face it, a large number of megatons worth of denotation, many times over, eventually becomes a pure abstraction you can't compare to anything else.
Obviously, you're asserting we can't, you're just not very helpful either.:-P
Are you afraid this will affect the Earth's orbit around the Sun? The change will be negligible --- the energy we'd need to mess up the orbits dangerously is far beyond us.
I though it was well within our current power to fuck up the Earth's orbit. Given that the whole time I was growing up we were constantly told we could "blow up the Earth 20 gazillion times over" I was under the impression that we could fairly easily knock it off kilter.
I mean, several tens of dozens of multi-megaton explosions sure as hell sounds like a lot of energy to me. I didn't think it would take much of a 'bump' to basically bugger everything.
There definitely are plenty of mushrooms that have strong flavors of their own! But as far as I understand, in everyday usage "mushroom" means the white button mushrooms without much flavor of their own.
Not really. The white mushrooms are the ones you're going to see most often, and since they're cheap, it's what most people will buy.
But, to those of us who cook (and, especially those of us who love mushrooms =) your supermarket will usually have trumpet, crimini, portobello,and shitake in addition to the ubiquitous white ones. Then there's usually several dried varieties which usually travel from someplace else -- like a lobster mushroom, which isn't a specific kind of mushroom, but one which has a fungus growing on it which makes it red and gives it a different flavor.
Go to a Chinese grocer (or a good grocery store) and you'll find even more varieties of dried mushrooms, with much stronger flavors.
For many of us, mushroom just covers the whole spectrum of tasty things out there. Include the whole spectrum of fungus, and you'll get up into things like truffles, which can be some of the most flavorful (and expensive) foodstuffs.
Button mushrooms are just about tasteless. It's impossible for them to be yuck.
Only uncooked.
If you fry mushrooms in a little butter or oil, grill them slowly, or simmer them for a little while until they give up their liquids, their taste and texture changes quite a bit.
There's a lot of flavor in mushrooms and there's a lot of umami in them -- basically it enhances the flavors of other things. The texture changes from a slightly dry and chalky one to a 'meatier' denser bite. Grilled portabello mushroom goes well into a bun like a burger, and also makes a fantastic taco filling cut into strips.
Button mushrooms may not be the most flavorful of all of our mushrooms, but, properly prepared there's a lot of taste to be had in button mushrooms. In a curry for example, mushrooms bring a lot of their own flavor as well as soaking up a lot of the other flavors, you just have to know how to cook 'em right.
I usually cook between 2 and 4 lbs of mushrooms per week -- trust me, they're quite tasty. =)
I've been using verified by visa for some time now, but every time I make a "large" purchase online, EVEN AFTER verifying my visa password, visa still puts a hold on my card and calls a few DAYS later if I don't call them first, asking me to verify my purchases... Tell me how useful that is?
I had that happen to me a few months ago, but at the time I thought it was perfectly reasonable.
I bought a digital SLR on-line (about $1200CDN). They have no history of me shopping on line (I usually don't), and a big purchase stuck out.
The next night I was paying for dinner and the card was declined. Right away I knew I'd flagged their system and called them the next day.
Personally, I kind of liked the fact that they're monitoring my account for atypical transactions. The alternative is much worse.
I guess VISA and the merchants are in a tough place -- if they don't scrutinize stuff, they get defrauded. If they do, they might irritate customers as their security flags lock the account.
I wish I could dig up a reference for this, but I'm at work and the google search might raise some eyebrows.:-P
About a decade or more ago, I remember hearing that some artist canned his own poo, and then sold it to the snooty art people at $5K each.
At the time, I remember thinking: that's brilliant, he managed to get people to buy tins of poo for that much money. Of course, if you never open it, it could well be a can of tuna and you'll never know. If you *do* open it, you've destroyed your, er, valuable art piece consisting of canned human excrement and now have an open tin of crap.
Either way, the guy who sold it was a genius. The people who bought it were idiots.:-P
"Well then you'd better go catch it before it trips over your address space layout randomization and skins its knees on the data execution prevention!"
Maybe all that porn watching addled his tiny mind. Maybe he believes he is allowed to do anything he wants to any woman he wants. That's what porn teaches you, isn't it? Porn consumption is all about a power game.
Horseshit.
Many happy, well adjusted couples watch porn together, and it's not even remotely about a power game. Therapists recommend porn to people -- it's a perfectly normal part of sexuality.
There is lots of porn which is very much about a bad power dynamic or doing whatever you wish to a woman (convicted Max Hardcore for example), and I personally won't watch stuff which involves choking or other things which are getting into the abusive realm, because it's something I find offensive and it defeats the purpose of porn.
Not all porn depicts imbalanced power dynamics or treats women like things to be abused. Much of it shows people who are very enthusiastically engaging in something that most everyone does at some point.
In this case, the guy installing the software either had some really uncontrollable fetish which he indulged himself in (no excuse), or just did it because he could and thought he could get away with it.
I'm not defending all porn as good, but it's also invalid to say all porn is bad. Tarring all consumers of porn with the same brush is as bad as doing it to any other group.
How come the programmers already employed by the state haven't learned COBOL yet? What kind of programmer can't learn a language like COBOL and start figuring out how to fix the system?
Supporting a system that old can be dangerous -- sometimes they're fragile in ways that you can't predict. You could fix one thing and break another.
And, I know you couldn't really pay me enough to re-learn COBOL and dive into a 40 year old application.
Sounds like the state has serious IT management problems.
From TFA...
California has tried to modernize its payroll system throughout the past decade, dating back to former Controller Kathleen Connell. It has faced numerous delays as state legislators have avoided investing the $177 million it now will cost.
So, between allowing the old-timers to retire to save on their salaries, and the fact that the state hasn't coughed up the funds to replace this, then end up in the fiasco that they don't have the skillset in house to fix their payroll problem.
I don't find this nearly as surprising as some people here do, but I've seen organizations that can't afford to get a replacement, couldn't get one even if they could since the in-house application has been grafted onto for 20 years, and don't have the people to maintain it.
If your people have been saying for a very long time the system needs to be replaced, and you don't replace it, when it falls apart, that's hardly surprising.
Mostly I agree with you, surely they can find someone to do it. Maybe not in the timeframe the Governator has set, but, eventually. Unfortunately, that's what TFA says.
OK, no one likes programming in COBOL, but to argue that these systems can't be updated because the language is obsolete is just an all out lie. Plenty of major corporations still use COBOL/CICS because it just works.
Yeah, but do they still have the expertise in house to make any changes?
I've known organizations that had to pull people out of retirement (at 5x their old salary) to maintain old mainframe systems -- for the simple reason that there isn't anyone else left who knows how to modify the system, and if you don't throw cash at the old-timers, they'll laugh at you and go back to their golf game.
If it works, great. If it stops, some companies simply don't have anyone left who can fix it. And then you're SOL.
If (as someone above stated) a programmer is required to update what should undoubtedly be database fields containing salary information, then it sounds like a problem of implementation, and not one of technology/language of choice.
Well, if it's a Vietnam-era bit of software (as TFA indicates) then it's quite possibly an implementation problem. What we currently consider to be "best practices" are likely to all be younger than the code in question. In fact, most of them are probably gleaned from systems just like this.
I wouldn't really be surprised that a system for "which the state made a large investment decades ago and has been keeping it going the last few years with duct tape" isn't really easy to cajole along.
I've been involved in projects to replace legacy applications -- it's sometimes not possible to actually give them all of the functionality because nobody has a detailed list until someone comes along and says "oh, what about feature X, how do I do that?" Then you see a room full of people looking stunned and asking "why is this the first we're seeing of this??". Often, it's a feature which is so fundamentally incompatible with everything else you've been told -- "X can never happen. Oh, except there."
Never underestimate just how bad software of that vintage can be, and just how hard it is to fix or replace it.
Why not make it illegal to talk about the movie? There could probably be a copyright basis somehow, and apparently it does hurt the business.
Because, reviewing and referencing a movie for purposes of review is still a protected fair-use right.
Making it illegal to talk about a movie would hurt them because nobody could say anything good about it if it didn't suck.
Or, we could change the law to Ebert and Roper and all the other reviewers can only give all movies the highest rating. Which, would be kind of stupid and make reviews useless.
If we're assuming archetypal prison behavior, wouldn't it be his outbox that gets stuffed?
Ummm... to quote the Simpsons.... "It can be two things".
Either way, he's now escalated himself from a cushy minimum security status to way worse. Assuming he gets caught, he'll end up doing harder time, for a lot longer than if he'd stayed put.
You assume the Feds will catch him. Is he even a priority?
I'm pretty sure that escaping is a felony. He's now enough of a priority.
His wife will likely also be facing jail time for this since from the description, it sounds like she assisted him in his escape. That, too, is a crime. Possibly more than one.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. The music I like I'm willing to pay for, so that the artists and the labels I like know I support them and then they make more good music that I like and will buy.
I realize most people would just as soon download for free from the internet. I place a lot of value on my music, and I think the people who make it deserve to get paid.
Of course, once I buy the CD, I'm going to rip it to MP3, play it on my iPod, make mixed CDs, and generally use the music the way I see fit.
Cheers
Right now, it's a complete crap shoot.
The guitar which came with Rock Band for the Wii is a piece of crap, but it can't use my Guitar Hero guitars. For reasons completely unknown to me, the USB guitars from RB for the XBox don't even work with the USB hub that comes with RB on the Wii.
How is it even possible that a USB guitar isn't compatible across those two platforms unless RB only has support for the wireless guitar they issued for the Wii?
The idea of having to buy a whole separate set of instruments for GH4 drives me nutty.
It really would be good for someone to enforce some standardization so the consumer doesn't end up getting gouged.
Cheers
I have said it before, and I will say it again.
I am not going to pay a monthly fee on my internet connection or anything else to "excuse" me for all of the copying I don't do.
I don't download music, I buy music. I buy a lot of music -- this year, about $800 on CDs so far, most of that from 3 record labels, and not mainstream ones. The artists I listen to aren't covered under your Brittany-where's-my-panties-Spears tax, and aren't on those labels who are trying to benefit from this.
The last thing I want to see if some *(&^%(*& monthly surcharge on having an Internet connection to help offset the losses to artists I don't listen to.
Everybody who proposes one of these surcharges really needs to be fed their own head in very small pieces, because it's a stupid idea, doesn't address the issue, and won't be paying the artists I listen to. It basically is an attempt to have their revenue stream guaranteed by law.
Cheers
But, it's added hardware requirements which don't actually benefit the user.
I mean, now you need more disk space and memory than ever before, to do no more than you could with XP. How does it benefit the consumer to have this operating system?
Microsoft implemented eye-candy, a bad security model, and DRM that just slows down your system and presumes you're doing something shady.
No thanks. MS can keep Vista. I'm not convinced it adds anything more than bloat. That fact that a huge amount of people buying new PCs are "downgrading" to XP tells me that people simply don't want it.
Cheers
A lot actually. Thanks.
Cheers
I'm doing absolutely no maths whatsoever.
I'm legitimately asking (because nobody ever really quantified what "blow up the Earth several times over" means) whether or not we could. Having been around in the 70's and 80's as a kid, you'd think we'd have been able to pulverize the whole planet by now.
I have no idea of how to wrap my head around how much energy would be required to cause a change in orbit, let alone in relation to what we could actually produce.
Let's face it, a large number of megatons worth of denotation, many times over, eventually becomes a pure abstraction you can't compare to anything else.
Obviously, you're asserting we can't, you're just not very helpful either. :-P
Cheers
Shhhh ... he hasn't figured that out yet. :-P
Cheers
I though it was well within our current power to fuck up the Earth's orbit. Given that the whole time I was growing up we were constantly told we could "blow up the Earth 20 gazillion times over" I was under the impression that we could fairly easily knock it off kilter.
I mean, several tens of dozens of multi-megaton explosions sure as hell sounds like a lot of energy to me. I didn't think it would take much of a 'bump' to basically bugger everything.
Cheers
Could it be seppuku? Please?
Cheers
Give us the e-bay item!!
Seriously dude, it's a good thing this is Slashdot, because anywhere else and people might not have gotten the reference. ;-)
Cheers
Not really. The white mushrooms are the ones you're going to see most often, and since they're cheap, it's what most people will buy.
But, to those of us who cook (and, especially those of us who love mushrooms =) your supermarket will usually have trumpet, crimini, portobello,and shitake in addition to the ubiquitous white ones. Then there's usually several dried varieties which usually travel from someplace else -- like a lobster mushroom, which isn't a specific kind of mushroom, but one which has a fungus growing on it which makes it red and gives it a different flavor.
Go to a Chinese grocer (or a good grocery store) and you'll find even more varieties of dried mushrooms, with much stronger flavors.
For many of us, mushroom just covers the whole spectrum of tasty things out there. Include the whole spectrum of fungus, and you'll get up into things like truffles, which can be some of the most flavorful (and expensive) foodstuffs.
Cheers
Only uncooked.
If you fry mushrooms in a little butter or oil, grill them slowly, or simmer them for a little while until they give up their liquids, their taste and texture changes quite a bit.
There's a lot of flavor in mushrooms and there's a lot of umami in them -- basically it enhances the flavors of other things. The texture changes from a slightly dry and chalky one to a 'meatier' denser bite. Grilled portabello mushroom goes well into a bun like a burger, and also makes a fantastic taco filling cut into strips.
Button mushrooms may not be the most flavorful of all of our mushrooms, but, properly prepared there's a lot of taste to be had in button mushrooms. In a curry for example, mushrooms bring a lot of their own flavor as well as soaking up a lot of the other flavors, you just have to know how to cook 'em right.
I usually cook between 2 and 4 lbs of mushrooms per week -- trust me, they're quite tasty. =)
Cheers
I had that happen to me a few months ago, but at the time I thought it was perfectly reasonable.
I bought a digital SLR on-line (about $1200CDN). They have no history of me shopping on line (I usually don't), and a big purchase stuck out.
The next night I was paying for dinner and the card was declined. Right away I knew I'd flagged their system and called them the next day.
Personally, I kind of liked the fact that they're monitoring my account for atypical transactions. The alternative is much worse.
I guess VISA and the merchants are in a tough place -- if they don't scrutinize stuff, they get defrauded. If they do, they might irritate customers as their security flags lock the account.
Cheers
Driving your customers to the competitor: Priceless. :-P
Cheers
Well, I guess you can opt to use your card with their authentication to shop on-line, or you can opt for a different method of payment.
Sadly, that's probably how they see it.
Cheers
I wish I could dig up a reference for this, but I'm at work and the google search might raise some eyebrows. :-P
About a decade or more ago, I remember hearing that some artist canned his own poo, and then sold it to the snooty art people at $5K each.
At the time, I remember thinking: that's brilliant, he managed to get people to buy tins of poo for that much money. Of course, if you never open it, it could well be a can of tuna and you'll never know. If you *do* open it, you've destroyed your, er, valuable art piece consisting of canned human excrement and now have an open tin of crap.
Either way, the guy who sold it was a genius. The people who bought it were idiots. :-P
Cheers
Wow.
You, sir, are brilliant. :-P
Cheers
How could that possibly be number 37? :-P I should think after "my fetish is OK and should be accepted", would come that one.
Everything else is just a corollary to #'s 1 and 2.
Cheers
Horseshit.
Many happy, well adjusted couples watch porn together, and it's not even remotely about a power game. Therapists recommend porn to people -- it's a perfectly normal part of sexuality.
There is lots of porn which is very much about a bad power dynamic or doing whatever you wish to a woman (convicted Max Hardcore for example), and I personally won't watch stuff which involves choking or other things which are getting into the abusive realm, because it's something I find offensive and it defeats the purpose of porn.
Not all porn depicts imbalanced power dynamics or treats women like things to be abused. Much of it shows people who are very enthusiastically engaging in something that most everyone does at some point.
In this case, the guy installing the software either had some really uncontrollable fetish which he indulged himself in (no excuse), or just did it because he could and thought he could get away with it.
I'm not defending all porn as good, but it's also invalid to say all porn is bad. Tarring all consumers of porn with the same brush is as bad as doing it to any other group.
Cheers
Supporting a system that old can be dangerous -- sometimes they're fragile in ways that you can't predict. You could fix one thing and break another.
And, I know you couldn't really pay me enough to re-learn COBOL and dive into a 40 year old application.
From TFA ...
So, between allowing the old-timers to retire to save on their salaries, and the fact that the state hasn't coughed up the funds to replace this, then end up in the fiasco that they don't have the skillset in house to fix their payroll problem.
I don't find this nearly as surprising as some people here do, but I've seen organizations that can't afford to get a replacement, couldn't get one even if they could since the in-house application has been grafted onto for 20 years, and don't have the people to maintain it.
If your people have been saying for a very long time the system needs to be replaced, and you don't replace it, when it falls apart, that's hardly surprising.
Mostly I agree with you, surely they can find someone to do it. Maybe not in the timeframe the Governator has set, but, eventually. Unfortunately, that's what TFA says.
Cheers
Yeah, but do they still have the expertise in house to make any changes?
I've known organizations that had to pull people out of retirement (at 5x their old salary) to maintain old mainframe systems -- for the simple reason that there isn't anyone else left who knows how to modify the system, and if you don't throw cash at the old-timers, they'll laugh at you and go back to their golf game.
If it works, great. If it stops, some companies simply don't have anyone left who can fix it. And then you're SOL.
Well, if it's a Vietnam-era bit of software (as TFA indicates) then it's quite possibly an implementation problem. What we currently consider to be "best practices" are likely to all be younger than the code in question. In fact, most of them are probably gleaned from systems just like this.
I wouldn't really be surprised that a system for "which the state made a large investment decades ago and has been keeping it going the last few years with duct tape" isn't really easy to cajole along.
I've been involved in projects to replace legacy applications -- it's sometimes not possible to actually give them all of the functionality because nobody has a detailed list until someone comes along and says "oh, what about feature X, how do I do that?" Then you see a room full of people looking stunned and asking "why is this the first we're seeing of this??". Often, it's a feature which is so fundamentally incompatible with everything else you've been told -- "X can never happen. Oh, except there."
Never underestimate just how bad software of that vintage can be, and just how hard it is to fix or replace it.
Cheers
Well, long before we had MP3s, we had the rest of the alt.binaries.* tree.
And, that was all about porn. One of the first things I ever saw on the internet in '88 was how to get porn.
I'm sure that, secretly, when Tim Berners-Lee wrote the HTTP protocol, he wanted to access porn. ;-)
Cheers
Because, reviewing and referencing a movie for purposes of review is still a protected fair-use right.
Making it illegal to talk about a movie would hurt them because nobody could say anything good about it if it didn't suck.
Or, we could change the law to Ebert and Roper and all the other reviewers can only give all movies the highest rating. Which, would be kind of stupid and make reviews useless.
Cheers
Ummm ... to quote the Simpsons .... "It can be two things".
Either way, he's now escalated himself from a cushy minimum security status to way worse. Assuming he gets caught, he'll end up doing harder time, for a lot longer than if he'd stayed put.
Cheers
I'm pretty sure that escaping is a felony. He's now enough of a priority.
His wife will likely also be facing jail time for this since from the description, it sounds like she assisted him in his escape. That, too, is a crime. Possibly more than one.
Cheers