Hope you're not using pure bleach. 1 quart water + 1 tablespoon bleach kills germs dead within a couple minutes, and won't wreck your shower curtain or make you wheeze. Tip from Alton Brown--I use this to disinfect cutting boards.
Bleach is a disinfectant, not an antibiotic, so germs don't really develop resistance to it. It would be like you or I developing resistance to being boiled in acid. Possible? I guess. But orders of magnitude more difficult than evolving resistance to an antibiotic.
I like this quote from a speech Ashcroft made in 2002:
Pornography "invades our homes persistently though the mail, phone, VCR, cable TV and the Internet."
OK, so I could do without the penis-enlargement spam. But how does porn "invade" your VCR?
Is it like this: "Aaaaaagh! How'd that porn get in my VCR? Go back to the shadow, foul tempter!"
Similarly, I've never received unsolicited porn in the mail or over the phone. My chief problem with cable TV is that the porn is so lame. Late-night movies on USA are the worst, because they edit out the good parts. Just when the chick is about to get naked, they cut to the next scene where the chick is lying in bed with the covers over her. Hey! WTF? Maybe someone will do something about this when we get a Democrat in the White House and appoint Howard Stern chairman of the FCC.
It was Apple's decision to not support WMA. What, you think Microsoft doesn't want WMA supported on the iPod? That's crazy talk. Apple won't support WMA because they want AAC to be the standard, so they can charge a royalty to everyone who encodes with it. See also the iPod's lack of support for OGG-Vorbis. Certainly no one outside of Apple is hindering their support for this feature--it's a completely open standard! But supporting open standards isn't compatible with their business objective.
Non-DRM'ed WMA is supported on many, many more platforms than AAC. Nearly all mp3 players support it. Not sure about DRM'ed WMA, because I've never owned any. Can't say as I've ever purchased music in this format.
The actors are simply using their market power to try to get a better deal. In theory, this is what we're all supposed to do in the capitalist system.
So how come so many die-hard capitalists become enamoured of the labor theory of value when it comes to, say, a major league baseball player negotiating a salary? Under capitalism, your salary isn't tied to how hard you work, or how much good you do for society. You get paid what the market will bear.
All you people who are shocked and appalled that the actors on the Simpsons get paid $125,000 for 7 hours work should ask how much Rupert Murdoch is paid for each hour he works. It's not as if Rupert Murdoch ever says to himself, "It's just wrong that I reap millions from Simpsons syndication deals when my labor input is about 15 seconds a week. I'm going to put the show in the public domain."
I wish I had their problems, only earning enough money to buy a small house every time I did a voice-over for a single episode.
Why don't you ask Rupert Murdoch how much he makes from the Simpsons for every hour of work he puts into it?
The show has earned over $1 billion for Fox. It will continue to run in syndication for god knows how long, earning billions more. The voice actors are simply exercising their market power, just as Fox does or WalMart does. I wish more workers were in as good a negotiating position.
Hardly anyone uses the true Bourne shell, except for scripts that have to be really, truly able to run on any Unix system built since the '70s./bin/sh on a linux system is actually bash running in a compatibility mode.
Bourne-compatible shells like bash and ksh have come a long way from the old Bourne shell. You can use bash to do just about anything you would do in perl. I find it's easier to use bash for some things. Like if you're interacting with the file system a lot, for instance. It's more straightforward do it in bash than to do a bunch of system calls in perl.
Anyway, the book is called Wicked Shell Scripts. If you wanted a book on perl, I suppose you could buy a book on perl.
When I bought my Rio 500 a few years ago, the packaging had an Audible.com logo on it, and the player came bundled with Audible.com software.
Did the player support Audible's file format? Um, no. But they said a firmware upgrade would add support.
It took more than 6 months for the upgrade to become available. I was not pleased.
Btw, this was immediately after I returned my Rio 300 because it short-circuited and caught on fire.
Another feature of the Rio 300 was that it could only take Duracell AA batteries. I don't believe that they had an arrangement with Duracell. It's just that their quality control was so terrible that the battery compartment was completely out of spec. They didn't offer a firmware upgrade to fix this.
The word "bias" is abused a lot because people don't understand what objective/subjective actually mean.
I'm opposed to Bush politically, but that doesn't mean I'm "biased." Biased implies that my opposition is subjective--that it comes from within me, and has no connection to the object (Bush's policies.) If I'm biased, he can change all his policies 180 degrees and become the Second Coming of Paul Wellstone, and I'll still oppose him because my opposition is subjective.
If I started with a conclusion (Bush Bad!) and only paid attention to facts which support that conclusion, that would be biased. Merely having a point of view on whether he should be reelected does not make me biased, as it is possible to reach that point of view objectively.
More to the point... American dollars go to India, and there are only two things that can happen:
1. They spend the money on American goods
2. They just keep the money
What about (3): They spend the money on non-American goods.
America is prosperous largely because it's a huge free-trade zone. Imagine if people in Massachusetts complained about imports of cars from Michigan, and passed a law that said you had to buy a car made in Massachusetts, so that jobs wouldn't be lost to low-cost labor in Michigan.
America is also united under a single federal government that redistributes wealth from rich states to poor states. Arkansas is poorer than New York, but at least they have water, electricity, highways, police and fire protection, courts, national defense, etc. They couldn't afford it without help from the federal government (ie, subsidies from rich states.) Workers are also allowed to move freely from state to state, and it is relatively easy to do so because Arkansas isn't halfway around the world from New York--geographically, culturally, or linguistically.
So although US states can't impose tariffs on goods from other states, there are quite a few restrictions built into the system to ensure an outcome that doesn't impoverish the masses. It's quite a remarkable system. The poor states can vote to have the rich states subsidize them, and the rich states have to comply! There is no analogous institution internationally. The UN can't force Europe and the US to spend $2 trillion bringing India's infrastructure up to Western standards. But that is, in effect, what the US Congress does when a majority votes to spend money on infrastructure in poor states. The poor states don't have to pay for it themselves. It comes out of the federal budget, and rich states don't have the option of declining to pay their share if the majority votes against them.
It's the same thing here. The US benefits from cheap labor, and India benefits by providing it. You learn this stuff on the first day of any economics 101 class.
Spoken like someone who has never taken econ 101...
Then start eleven businesses. That way, you have better than 50/50 odds of succeeding with one of them.
This is a fallacy. A business failure isn't a random event, like a roll of the dice. *Why* the business fails is important. If your business fails because you didn't start out with enough capital to get you through the initial lean years, then dividing your capital among 11 companies won't improve your probability of success.
Nine out of 10 new businesses fail. That number is likely to go up if more people who are tempermentally unsuited for entrepreneurship go into business for themselves. So even if every unemployed person "becomes his own boss," we'll still need a safety net for the 9-out-of-10 who fail. An even more generous safety net, even, since going into business for oneself is inherently risky, and those who fail are likely to dig a deeper hole than if they'd simply took a less risky/less rewarding job working for someone else.
So, that light at the end of the tunnel: 9 times out of 10, it's a train.
This is not the path to a stable livelihood for most people.
I think I'd prefer seeing tax and other incentives given to companies to KEEP jobs here. Credits for hiring US citizen IN the US.
There's no way government incentives can make up for what companies save by going overseas. $20K a year for an IT engineer? Vs $100K? So, the government's going to pay $80K for each worker, every year?
Such incentives would likely go to companies that weren't planning to move overseas anyway.
Better to insist on trade agreements that set minimum requirements for wages, time off, health & safety, retirement, environmental protection, etc. Workers in China and India will still be cheaper to hire, but at least we won't be competing based on who is willing to give up basic rights.
Now, imagine all the prices of all those goods increasing as every individual on the production and supply chain, all the way back to the origin, gets paid in US-standard wages that allows each and every worker to buy a US-sized house on a US-sized tract of land for a small nuclear family, with 2 recent-make cars for the family, health care, home entertainment systems, etc. Are you willing to pay $20 for a pair of socks to make that happen? $50,000 for an entry-level car?
You are assuming that all of the savings is passed on to consumers. It isn't. The price of an item isn't set by how much that item cost to produce--it is set by what the market will bear.
That is why you can pay $100 for a pair of designer jeans that cost $3 to make in a sweatshop in Pakistan. The savings from making the jeans in a sweatshop didn't go to you, the purchaser of the jeans. It went directly into the pockets of the huge, wealthy, multinational corporation who owns the sweatshop.
To say that we can't produce a $100 pair of jeans or even a $30 pair of jeans without resorting to sweatshop labor is absurd. The markup on these things is huge. All we have to do is force the corporations to carve out a piece of that markup and give it to their workers. Sounds easy, right? But the greed of some people is astounding.
Mock if you like, I think the Segway would be practicle transportation for me if it works as advertised. I live in San Francisco, which is very compact but which also has very steep hills and the worst traffic this side of Manhattan. The ability to travel up to 12mph, without regard for hills, would enable me to reach virtually anywhere in the city in a reasonable amount of time. Yeah, I could also ride a bike, but I'd get all sweaty going uphill, and who wants to get all sweaty in your nice clothes biking to work? Also, I'd be biking in traffic with cars whose drivers hate my guts for asserting my legal right to mess up the flow of traffic. Moreover, the bike may not be an option when I'm no longer young and fit.
Granted, most people in the US don't live in compact, densely populated, hilly cities. I just wanted to speak up for the people who do. The Segway might have a better chance in Europe and Japan.
I understand why people sometimes want to remain anonymous when posting to Slashdot, but come on.
Can you tell us what small Western nation you're from, or will that blow your cover? Must be a pretty small nation if you're the only programmer in it.
Fortunately, this website has a huge amount of geeky sorts who eat poorly, live in a dank, computer infested hovels and haven't gotten near pussy since they were expelled from one 20 years ago. Coupled with a decent facility for languages (just substitute Parsi or Arabic of PERL) and you can too can help the world's best country by being an incountry spy in a third world country like Pakistan, Egypt or France, please contact your local CIA recruiter.
We have a non-techie complaining about something that's so simple as changing the "Open With..." dialogue?
The "open with" dialogue disappears once an extension has been associated with an application. Some extensions--.htm,.mp3, cd audio (.cda?) are associated with Microsoft programs by default. You have to go to "Folder Options" to change the association, not the most intuitive place for that sort of thing.
For a long time, a war has been raging among the developers of multimedia applications. It has escalated to the point where you have to click a checkbox if you want the application to retain its file associations even when another application tries to override them without telling you. It's stupid that such a thing is necessary, but it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Who could forget... "200MB for an OS! That's ridiculous", etc
This is Slashdot. You're supposed to spell it "rediculous."
Hope you're not using pure bleach. 1 quart water + 1 tablespoon bleach kills germs dead within a couple minutes, and won't wreck your shower curtain or make you wheeze. Tip from Alton Brown--I use this to disinfect cutting boards.
Bleach is a disinfectant, not an antibiotic, so germs don't really develop resistance to it. It would be like you or I developing resistance to being boiled in acid. Possible? I guess. But orders of magnitude more difficult than evolving resistance to an antibiotic.
OK, so I could do without the penis-enlargement spam. But how does porn "invade" your VCR?
Is it like this: "Aaaaaagh! How'd that porn get in my VCR? Go back to the shadow, foul tempter!"
Similarly, I've never received unsolicited porn in the mail or over the phone. My chief problem with cable TV is that the porn is so lame. Late-night movies on USA are the worst, because they edit out the good parts. Just when the chick is about to get naked, they cut to the next scene where the chick is lying in bed with the covers over her. Hey! WTF? Maybe someone will do something about this when we get a Democrat in the White House and appoint Howard Stern chairman of the FCC.
It was Apple's decision to not support WMA. What, you think Microsoft doesn't want WMA supported on the iPod? That's crazy talk. Apple won't support WMA because they want AAC to be the standard, so they can charge a royalty to everyone who encodes with it. See also the iPod's lack of support for OGG-Vorbis. Certainly no one outside of Apple is hindering their support for this feature--it's a completely open standard! But supporting open standards isn't compatible with their business objective.
Non-DRM'ed WMA is supported on many, many more platforms than AAC. Nearly all mp3 players support it. Not sure about DRM'ed WMA, because I've never owned any. Can't say as I've ever purchased music in this format.
The actors are simply using their market power to try to get a better deal. In theory, this is what we're all supposed to do in the capitalist system.
So how come so many die-hard capitalists become enamoured of the labor theory of value when it comes to, say, a major league baseball player negotiating a salary? Under capitalism, your salary isn't tied to how hard you work, or how much good you do for society. You get paid what the market will bear.
All you people who are shocked and appalled that the actors on the Simpsons get paid $125,000 for 7 hours work should ask how much Rupert Murdoch is paid for each hour he works. It's not as if Rupert Murdoch ever says to himself, "It's just wrong that I reap millions from Simpsons syndication deals when my labor input is about 15 seconds a week. I'm going to put the show in the public domain."
I wish I had their problems, only earning enough money to buy a small house every time I did a voice-over for a single episode.
Why don't you ask Rupert Murdoch how much he makes from the Simpsons for every hour of work he puts into it?
The show has earned over $1 billion for Fox. It will continue to run in syndication for god knows how long, earning billions more. The voice actors are simply exercising their market power, just as Fox does or WalMart does. I wish more workers were in as good a negotiating position.
Hardly anyone uses the true Bourne shell, except for scripts that have to be really, truly able to run on any Unix system built since the '70s. /bin/sh on a linux system is actually bash running in a compatibility mode.
Bourne-compatible shells like bash and ksh have come a long way from the old Bourne shell. You can use bash to do just about anything you would do in perl. I find it's easier to use bash for some things. Like if you're interacting with the file system a lot, for instance. It's more straightforward do it in bash than to do a bunch of system calls in perl.
Anyway, the book is called Wicked Shell Scripts. If you wanted a book on perl, I suppose you could buy a book on perl.
When I bought my Rio 500 a few years ago, the packaging had an Audible.com logo on it, and the player came bundled with Audible.com software.
Did the player support Audible's file format? Um, no. But they said a firmware upgrade would add support.
It took more than 6 months for the upgrade to become available. I was not pleased.
Btw, this was immediately after I returned my Rio 300 because it short-circuited and caught on fire.
Another feature of the Rio 300 was that it could only take Duracell AA batteries. I don't believe that they had an arrangement with Duracell. It's just that their quality control was so terrible that the battery compartment was completely out of spec. They didn't offer a firmware upgrade to fix this.
The word "bias" is abused a lot because people don't understand what objective/subjective actually mean.
I'm opposed to Bush politically, but that doesn't mean I'm "biased." Biased implies that my opposition is subjective--that it comes from within me, and has no connection to the object (Bush's policies.) If I'm biased, he can change all his policies 180 degrees and become the Second Coming of Paul Wellstone, and I'll still oppose him because my opposition is subjective.
If I started with a conclusion (Bush Bad!) and only paid attention to facts which support that conclusion, that would be biased. Merely having a point of view on whether he should be reelected does not make me biased, as it is possible to reach that point of view objectively.
You might want to look up "bias" in a dictionary.
More to the point... American dollars go to India, and there are only two things that can happen:
1. They spend the money on American goods
2. They just keep the money
What about (3): They spend the money on non-American goods.
America is prosperous largely because it's a huge free-trade zone. Imagine if people in Massachusetts complained about imports of cars from Michigan, and passed a law that said you had to buy a car made in Massachusetts, so that jobs wouldn't be lost to low-cost labor in Michigan.
America is also united under a single federal government that redistributes wealth from rich states to poor states. Arkansas is poorer than New York, but at least they have water, electricity, highways, police and fire protection, courts, national defense, etc. They couldn't afford it without help from the federal government (ie, subsidies from rich states.) Workers are also allowed to move freely from state to state, and it is relatively easy to do so because Arkansas isn't halfway around the world from New York--geographically, culturally, or linguistically.
So although US states can't impose tariffs on goods from other states, there are quite a few restrictions built into the system to ensure an outcome that doesn't impoverish the masses. It's quite a remarkable system. The poor states can vote to have the rich states subsidize them, and the rich states have to comply! There is no analogous institution internationally. The UN can't force Europe and the US to spend $2 trillion bringing India's infrastructure up to Western standards. But that is, in effect, what the US Congress does when a majority votes to spend money on infrastructure in poor states. The poor states don't have to pay for it themselves. It comes out of the federal budget, and rich states don't have the option of declining to pay their share if the majority votes against them.
It's the same thing here. The US benefits from cheap labor, and India benefits by providing it. You learn this stuff on the first day of any economics 101 class.
Spoken like someone who has never taken econ 101...
Then start eleven businesses. That way, you have better than 50/50 odds of succeeding with one of them.
This is a fallacy. A business failure isn't a random event, like a roll of the dice. *Why* the business fails is important. If your business fails because you didn't start out with enough capital to get you through the initial lean years, then dividing your capital among 11 companies won't improve your probability of success.
Nine out of 10 new businesses fail. That number is likely to go up if more people who are tempermentally unsuited for entrepreneurship go into business for themselves. So even if every unemployed person "becomes his own boss," we'll still need a safety net for the 9-out-of-10 who fail. An even more generous safety net, even, since going into business for oneself is inherently risky, and those who fail are likely to dig a deeper hole than if they'd simply took a less risky/less rewarding job working for someone else.
So, that light at the end of the tunnel: 9 times out of 10, it's a train.
This is not the path to a stable livelihood for most people.
I think I'd prefer seeing tax and other incentives given to companies to KEEP jobs here. Credits for hiring US citizen IN the US.
There's no way government incentives can make up for what companies save by going overseas. $20K a year for an IT engineer? Vs $100K? So, the government's going to pay $80K for each worker, every year?
Such incentives would likely go to companies that weren't planning to move overseas anyway.
Better to insist on trade agreements that set minimum requirements for wages, time off, health & safety, retirement, environmental protection, etc. Workers in China and India will still be cheaper to hire, but at least we won't be competing based on who is willing to give up basic rights.
Now, imagine all the prices of all those goods increasing as every individual on the production and supply chain, all the way back to the origin, gets paid in US-standard wages that allows each and every worker to buy a US-sized house on a US-sized tract of land for a small nuclear family, with 2 recent-make cars for the family, health care, home entertainment systems, etc. Are you willing to pay $20 for a pair of socks to make that happen? $50,000 for an entry-level car?
You are assuming that all of the savings is passed on to consumers. It isn't. The price of an item isn't set by how much that item cost to produce--it is set by what the market will bear. That is why you can pay $100 for a pair of designer jeans that cost $3 to make in a sweatshop in Pakistan. The savings from making the jeans in a sweatshop didn't go to you, the purchaser of the jeans. It went directly into the pockets of the huge, wealthy, multinational corporation who owns the sweatshop. To say that we can't produce a $100 pair of jeans or even a $30 pair of jeans without resorting to sweatshop labor is absurd. The markup on these things is huge. All we have to do is force the corporations to carve out a piece of that markup and give it to their workers. Sounds easy, right? But the greed of some people is astounding.
Mock if you like, I think the Segway would be practicle transportation for me if it works as advertised. I live in San Francisco, which is very compact but which also has very steep hills and the worst traffic this side of Manhattan. The ability to travel up to 12mph, without regard for hills, would enable me to reach virtually anywhere in the city in a reasonable amount of time. Yeah, I could also ride a bike, but I'd get all sweaty going uphill, and who wants to get all sweaty in your nice clothes biking to work? Also, I'd be biking in traffic with cars whose drivers hate my guts for asserting my legal right to mess up the flow of traffic. Moreover, the bike may not be an option when I'm no longer young and fit.
Granted, most people in the US don't live in compact, densely populated, hilly cities. I just wanted to speak up for the people who do. The Segway might have a better chance in Europe and Japan.
I understand why people sometimes want to remain anonymous when posting to Slashdot, but come on. Can you tell us what small Western nation you're from, or will that blow your cover? Must be a pretty small nation if you're the only programmer in it.
Fortunately, this website has a huge amount of geeky sorts who eat poorly, live in a dank, computer infested hovels and haven't gotten near pussy since they were expelled from one 20 years ago. Coupled with a decent facility for languages (just substitute Parsi or Arabic of PERL) and you can too can help the world's best country by being an incountry spy in a third world country like Pakistan, Egypt or France, please contact your local CIA recruiter.
Do any of these caves have a T1 or digital cable?
I didn't think so...
We have a non-techie complaining about something that's so simple as changing the "Open With..." dialogue?
The "open with" dialogue disappears once an extension has been associated with an application. Some extensions--.htm, .mp3, cd audio (.cda?) are associated with Microsoft programs by default. You have to go to "Folder Options" to change the association, not the most intuitive place for that sort of thing.
For a long time, a war has been raging among the developers of multimedia applications. It has escalated to the point where you have to click a checkbox if you want the application to retain its file associations even when another application tries to override them without telling you. It's stupid that such a thing is necessary, but it is.