With only a few exceptions religions purport the idea of being kind to one another and living in peace and harmony, yet even to this day religion has been the largest source of death and despair this planet has ever seen. From crusades, to jihads...religion continues to be the single largest point of friction in this world, because it always promotes the idea that it's followers are different and more important and special than anyone else...
You identified the real problem, but failed in your identification of the solution by saying that we should abolish religion.
The real problem is that mankind is instinctually a pack animal. We look for similarities and shared values between people who are members of our community and differences between us and people who are not. Religious prohibitions on dress, food, etc. are an expression of this sentiment and not the cause of it.
Getting rid of religion won't eliminate the problem. People have given into base animal instincts to kill the "other" without religion as a divider. The February Revolution of 1917 that threw out the Tsar and eventually gave birth to the Soviet Union was the peasants as "Us" and the royalty as "Them." Religion was not a part of it. The Cultural Revolution that Mao used the reseize power was fed entirely by stirring up resentment against intellectuals and the party elite that was putting him to pasture. Religion wasn't even a consideration.
Relgion is used as a prop by hate-filled and ambitious men looking to seize power everywhere, but it's not the source of the problem, and history shows us that people can be stirred easily to madness without it. Getting rid of religion would eliminate it as a force of charity, justice, and compassion without getting rid of the essential desires that drive men to kill and die in the name of cause they feel is greater than themselves.
I understand what you are saying about IT workers getting too cocky, but I have to disagree with you on the premise that they are "just repairment," or at the very least that that's the expectation of them.
Many computer problems are, as you pointed out, because computers don't obviously work in ways that they should and that users aren't trained how to work them. However, few people will jam a tape in a VCR upside down and then call and verbally abuse the VCR manufacturer because "the piece of junk" they sold them doesn't work. IT people get that.
IT people get their jobs threatened because of stupid user error. Mechanics and other repairmen don't get that generally. IT people are expected to understand that the users they service aren't expected to know how to operate the equipment that they are in charge of. Repairmen generally don't have that, and if they do, users generally have the sense of shame to be abashed at what they did wrong when it's pointed out to them. IT people get no such consideration.
Yes, computers are in many cases too complex, and, yes, fixed purpose machines are generally more reliable, but we not work in an environment where many jobs require general purpose machines. Do we really want to go back to the days of using seperate devices for different forms of communication, for handling spreadsheets, for composing documents, for searching for information, etc.? People need better computer education. That's the solution and not dumbing down devices and limiting their applicability.
In the mean time, IT people will have to resign themselves to diagnosing complex, multi-purpose devices, dealing with uneducated users, being abused, etc., and will probably continue to laugh at the people who make their jobs troublesome as a means of coping with it all. That's just natural. You have to laugh, after all.
Some poor, confused, cleaning-obsessed lady was technically savvy enough to open up her computer case, unscrew and remove the hard drive from its bay, and somehow open up a HDD without excessive force, and then she cleaned it with Windex? Then, someone (her or the guy calling) reassembled everything and gave a call? No one's that tech-savvy and tech-ignorant at the same time.
Someone else already posted that story. What a coincidence! I've seen several people post it over the years.
Credibility stretching. "Massive RF coming out of the vents of the monitor?" I'm pretty sure that no monitor puts out enough magnetism to erase a tape in the time it takes to record one.
Okay. Plausible. A communications gaffe.
Possible with large, ancient hard drives, depending on how much claiming it moved around, but I'm sensing a strange drift in what kind of shop would handle all of these problems with both phone service, on site visits, and RMA'd parts requests.
Older urban legend than the internet. You must be really lucky to have had two widely circulated stories happen to you personally.
Bum-bum-bum-bum! Bum-bum-bum-bum! Bumbumbabumbabaaaa! *swish* Steeeeeerike threeee! Wow a third widely circulated story that happened to you as well. You must be karmically blessed or have shared beers with better storytellers than yourself.
The terrorists have won. They've got us surrendering our Bics and taking off our shoes, standing in free speech zones and bitching about illegal aliens. Okay, maybe that last one isn't on them.
As much as I used to love using that trope in the early days of post-9/11 rights loss, I've come to realize something very important -- the terrorists really don't give a #$@! about all that.
All the terrorists want is for the US to pull out of the Middle East, stop building bases and applying military pressure, stop exposing them to "decadent Western culture," and stop propping up corrupt regimes like in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt that aren't as friendly to theocratic elements within their own states as the terrorists would want. (Yes, even the Sauds.)
They don't care if we turn into a fascist war machine so long as we point our attention elsewhere. If anything, the possibility that it could make us more focused on the Middle East (like it gave us an excuse to go into Iraq) represents a huge loss to the terrorists.
Their motivations are entirely about turf and being "allowed" to live in communities driven entirely by their own moral codes without any outside influence from the moral values of others.
In other words, terrorists are just xenophobic, fire-and-brimstone religious, "git off my propertee" rednecks with bombs and a little more fire in their belly. They're Klansmen with a different hate who have to go international to strike at the people they blame all their community's problems on.
You know that's pretty much logically and morally equivalent to telling someone who objects to the NSA wire-tapping program, "If you hate your country so much, perhaps you should find another field to work in."
I believe them. Especially any story about a customer lying and being abusive to avoid admitting that they could have caused their own problem or that their problem can't be helped.
This isn't because I've worked in tech support. I have, but it was supporting mission-critical middleware applications, so I didn't run into the same sorts of people.
No, I believe these stories because I have friends that have worked extensively with the masses -- in the hotel industry, in arcades, and in a call-center for a car rental place. Most people are smart, sane, honorable, and are not missing some sort of obvious facts.
Most people.
However, enough exposure to people who aren't college or even high school educated will eventually put you in contact with somebody out there who's either stupid, crazy, deceitful, or just having a bad day where they are missing something obvious and are too embarrassed to admit it once you mention it to them. This can be anything from people who don't realize you can't put real money in an arcade machine (even though it's right next to the token machine and the slot says "2 tokens") to people who try to claim that their check card is a real credit card even after being told that they can't rent a car on it.
My favorite story from the guy who works at the rental call center is about a guy who wanted to rent a car to go to Massachusettes but wasn't allowed to because the local offices would not rent to anyone driving through New York due to New York's liability laws.
"But I'm not going to New York! I'm going to Boston!" "You have to go through New York to get to Boston!" "But I'm not going to New York! I'm going to Boston!"
(Incidentally, this got a lot of stares and laughs at the call center because it was the first time in 2-3 months since he started working there that he raised his voice. Most people don't last a week before someone frustrates them enough to snap.)
He finally got the guy to go away, even though he couldn't hang up, and the guy just didn't get it. The guy had also tried to haggle for a car rental. Six days later, my friend's working and he hears another representative raise her voice to say, "But you have to go through New York to get to Boston!"
Yep, same guy. No kidding.
So, yeah, when people give their stories about customer just not getting it, customers lying about what they did, and customers jamming things that don't belong into slots that plausibly look like they can take it, I believe them. I have too many friends who have been there.
If you don't believe them, you need to mingle with the general public more. They're 99% good and decent people, but it's that 1% and the just plain bad days of the sane 99% that generate these stories.
The maintenance people don't cop an attitude to the drivers, if they ever even see them, and they certainly don't question the boss for giving the driver the vehicle. They just fix the damn cars/trucks so the company can keep doing business.
Yeah, but drivers rarely fill up a diesel truck with gasoline, try to figure some way to wedge "replacement" spark plugs in a EFI engine, accuse mechanics of stealing their keys when they misplace them, or accuse mechanics for causing them to drive off the road when they weren't paying attention while driving.
Most computer problems do in fact lie between keyboard and chair, unlike most auto mechanical failures (when the vehicle is regularly maintained as in the kind of shop you describe). While being surly to users in inexcusable, so's the attitude that IT people should just "shut up, monkeys!" and be grateful for their low-level trade school job maintaining simple machines for people who get "real work" done.
What about how lookOut Express hides the extensions too and the user receives virus.txt.exe..... Hiding extensions is a dumb idea WHEN THE OS DECIDES WHAT TO DO BY THE EXTENSION.
The OS should've never shown the extension in the first place. The Classic Mac OS didn't use extensions at all. It used a file-type code. If you looked at a file in the Finder, there was a column that told you what the file was. If you emailed the file to somebody, the MIME encoding told what type of file it was. The only place things broke down is where you used a file-exchange medium that didn't preserve metadata, like FTP or Windows File Shares.
An extension is noting more than file metadata foolishly encoded into the filename. A properly designed email app (unlike Outlook) would rely on MIME encoding to tell you what a file was rather than the file name and only act based on that information.
Thus, if you sent an image, the program would tell you it was an image, and load it into the appropriate other program when you click on it. If it's an executable, it would be flagged as such. There would be no way to have something executable that was flagged as being something else.
Of course, that's all good for a hand-wavy world where nothing ever was designed poorly in the first place or where poorly designed systems could be replaced with good systems at the wave of a wand, but we're stuck in a world where CPM (and thus its clone, DOS) made the decision a long time ago to rely on filename extensions and to expose them to the user.
The main flaw of Outlook in hiding extensions is not telling you what the file will be treated as right beside the file name. You should see:
"Attachment: virus.txt (Executable File)" or "Attachment: annakournikova.jpg (Visual Basic script)"
Outlook fails for hiding metadata completely instead of just hiding one type -- the extension.
Why I'm not going to read the fine aritcle either.
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The Man Behind MySpace
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"...they instead set out to appeal to the people they knew and, beyond them, the youth tribes of middle America."
"Youth tribes of middle America?"
I mean, I've heard Kansas is pretty f'ed up in some places, but have they really descended into tribal barbarism there, and if so, why are they posting crappy webpages?
Haven't you ever heard of "advertisers?" Where do you think that these publications get preview copies from? While a company like Square-Enix has no ownership of the publications and no direct control over them, they are perfectly free to make continued ad-revenue and cooperation with the magazines contingent on them toeing the party line.
This is how businesses control the media. It's really that simple.
Woah, woah, woah! Any shop using an ad-hoc collection of Access DBs and Excel spreadsheets is probably a small business that can't afford Oracle. They're comfortable with their current inefficient system, and the guy proposing this is planning on doing it with no funding and probably little to no allocated work time. He needs a free solution because he has no budget.
Proposing a multi-thousand dollar system is going to go over like a lead balloon in a workplace like this.
I had them too, but the question is why they chose that horrible acronym. The original source material is a Japanese character named Kinnikuman (or "Muscle Man"), a goofy series about wrestling and giant monster (parodying Ultraman in the beginning). The little M.U.S.C.L.E. toys were little figures sold in plastic capsules from vending machines in Japan that they decided to bring over to the US without the original backstory.
The decision to the call them "Millions of Unusual Small Creatures Lurking Everywhere" is actually kind of funny considering that Kinnikuman actually was human sized or larger in the original material.
I remember what ended the "Avoid the Noid" campaign, or at least so I thought.
Back in 1989, a guy named Kenneth Noid held up a Domino's in Georgia and kept the employees hostage for 6 hours. The man was paranoid delusional and thought that the campaign was directed specifically at him. The stand-off ended with no one hurt, and I believe the guy got off with an insanity plea.
I remember this in the news when I was a kid, because I'm from Georgia. It was "the big story" that day.
Turns out though, according to the Wikipedia, the campaign was actually ended becase the artist who created the character wanted more money. That's kind of disturbing in a way.
If you are forced into a religious group by the state by birth, and taxed to enrich that religion by default, you have neither freedom of thought nor freedom of religion.
Actually, it's you parents that sign you up for it by registering your name through a church. Children of atheists aren't taxed that way. State churches are primary social insitutions that handle weddings, funerals, births, etc. Few Finnish people actually are religiously active or attend the church, nor is there any real onus to do so. You'd probably be surprised how little most of the people registered with the churches actually care about religion, instead just using the church for traditional rites.
You are enslaved. This is not a question of allowing "opt-out", this is fundamental question of liberty.
I don't think you quite grasp that concept of slavery and oppression. Anything that you can walk away from with no ill effect (and in fact with a financial boost) is hardly slavery. I think you're deliberately being obtuse and probably trolling a little here.
I mean seriously, I think all the folks who rant against the US being a theocracy and hot-bed of fundementalism, etc, etc. need to travel around a little bit more, I think they'd be in for some surprises... even in Europe!
I think anyone who thinks that Finland is a theocracy needs to travel around a bit more themselves. We Americans are far more religious than any Scandinavian nation, and ancient, tax code fossils are not representative of how the nation actually views religion today.
There's also been an "anticatholicism" idea in the government, because for more than 70 years (until 2000), it was the freemasons who were presidents and ruled the country.
That's bizarre. In the US, Freemasonry has traditionally been tied to tolerance of other religions. All but two of the authors of the Constitution were Masons, for example. I wasn't aware until you mentioned it that they had just as much of a problem with the Papacy as with monarchies, nor was I aware that there was a branch of Freemasonry that allowed athiests nor that that branch was prevalent in Latin America.
Did Mexico declare all religion illegal or just the Catholic Church?
The 14th Amendment is what extends the limitations of the federal government to the state and local governments and was passed in the wake of the Civil War to prevent Confederate states from discriminating against the newly freed slaves.
In 1833, it was still generally permissable for state governments to establish state religions, restrict free speech, restrict free press, forbid the bearing of arms, quarter solidiers in homes, etc., etc., though most state constitutions banned some or all of these acts. This just wasn't brought into question again until much later.
It's like having the option of opting out of a mafia protection racket when by default the whole neighborhood is in, doesn't make the crime any less.
Except, you know, the mafia doesn't let you out just like the state doesn't let you out of most other taxes. The church tax lets you peacefully out if all you do is ask.
Violence is pointless in this endeavor unless you're hoping to use it to force your decision on others. There is no justification for it.
No minimum wage job is for people in HIGH demand. There is indeed demand. Pay would not drop to zero or negative. It's better to have two people getting $3/hour than to have one person unemployed while the other person gets $5/hour.
Let me break some numbers down for you. The nation has about 8 million people working for less than $7.25/hour. The nation also has about 5 million people who are unemployed and listed as "wanting to work" by the U.S. Labor department. Assuming that we hired all 13 million to work at $3/hour, it would not be a net benefit to the economy.
If everyone's working only 60 hours per week, we have 13 million people earning roughly $9,000 per year. Do the math. Assuming that they're all married (which is grossly undeserved given that people earning less than $25,000 have half the chances of getting married of people earning more than $25,000), you have a household income of $18,000. If you have the statistical average 2 children, you're well under the poverty line.
Housing costs should not account for more than 30% of your income to be affordable (and allow you to cover food, utilities, clothing, transportation, etc.). I live in Georgia. Median rent here is about $600 state wide. Assume that a poor person finds housing for $400/month. This is $4,800 for a year or 40% of income at this level. That leaves only $36/day (before taxes) to cover a full family of 4 -- $9 per day per person for 2-3 meals, transportation (including to work), etc.
A phone bill means nothing for 1-2 days of the month. (No frills, no internet.) Gas and electric bills mean nothing for 3-4 more days in peak months (for my nicely weather-proofed, non-slum apartment). The water bill is another day. If you rent appliances (and who at this income level owns appliances?), that can be another 1-3 days depending on who and where you rent from and given your utterly attrocious credit rating at this level of income.
So, now you're down to about $6/day for each person. I hope you live close to where you work, because I fill up at $30 every week for my one car. Most of the fast food workers where I live and work can't afford to live anywhere near there, and my car gets much better mileage than most of the clunkers the poor have to drive. (Maybe in the spirit of Marie Antoinette, we should simply say, "Let them drive Priuses!") If they're lucky they can take public transit for $52/month in Atlanta -- another day and a half of income used up.
So now, we've got families formerly earning twice as much as they used to living in slums with only about $5 spending money per day per person for the entire household -- We're not even considering single mothers! -- and this is somehow better for everybody concerned? Well, it's definitely would be better for the homeless, if anyone would just hire them at any price.
Oh, and don't get sick. Not only can't you afford to visit the doctor or even buy most OTC medicines, but you're likely to get fired and replaced with another cog that's only valued at $3/hour if you're out for more than a couple of days. This has nothing to do with "liability costs" or "best available care." This has to do with a freaking bottle of Robitussin costing half of the family's money for the day it was purchased. Brush those teeth kids, because you don't want to even think about going to the dentist.
Have I painted a deep enough picture of the misery of the life you propose? Do we really need an entire segment of our population dependent on welfare for survival while working their butts off like a good number of Wal-mart workers already are under much higher wages?
Can you even imagine how much more miserable this would be for a single mother who much raise kids on even half that budget? Do you understand the human cost of not having either parent at home to raise their kids? Do you not see how this leads to crime when the only role models that kids see that are getting ahead are thugs and drug dealers or when some child
You don't have to refold the GPS if you drive off the page.
You've never missed four turns while in a twisty maze of one-way streets before because it takes your GPS too long to figure out a new path after you missed the last one until it's too late to make the turn.
Yeah, I've nearly folded my GPS before when I was finished with it. "Nearly folded" it right off the dashboard, the stupid piece of junk...
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With only a few exceptions religions purport the idea of being kind to one another and living in peace and harmony, yet even to this day religion has been the largest source of death and despair this planet has ever seen. From crusades, to jihads...religion continues to be the single largest point of friction in this world, because it always promotes the idea that it's followers are different and more important and special than anyone else...
You identified the real problem, but failed in your identification of the solution by saying that we should abolish religion.
The real problem is that mankind is instinctually a pack animal. We look for similarities and shared values between people who are members of our community and differences between us and people who are not. Religious prohibitions on dress, food, etc. are an expression of this sentiment and not the cause of it.
Getting rid of religion won't eliminate the problem. People have given into base animal instincts to kill the "other" without religion as a divider. The February Revolution of 1917 that threw out the Tsar and eventually gave birth to the Soviet Union was the peasants as "Us" and the royalty as "Them." Religion was not a part of it. The Cultural Revolution that Mao used the reseize power was fed entirely by stirring up resentment against intellectuals and the party elite that was putting him to pasture. Religion wasn't even a consideration.
Relgion is used as a prop by hate-filled and ambitious men looking to seize power everywhere, but it's not the source of the problem, and history shows us that people can be stirred easily to madness without it. Getting rid of religion would eliminate it as a force of charity, justice, and compassion without getting rid of the essential desires that drive men to kill and die in the name of cause they feel is greater than themselves.
I think the shipping costs to sell outside the US would more than make up the savings from switching from eBay.
Or was this meant more as a way of sniping at a US-centric discussion instead of an honest attempt to help?
I understand what you are saying about IT workers getting too cocky, but I have to disagree with you on the premise that they are "just repairment," or at the very least that that's the expectation of them.
Many computer problems are, as you pointed out, because computers don't obviously work in ways that they should and that users aren't trained how to work them. However, few people will jam a tape in a VCR upside down and then call and verbally abuse the VCR manufacturer because "the piece of junk" they sold them doesn't work. IT people get that.
IT people get their jobs threatened because of stupid user error. Mechanics and other repairmen don't get that generally. IT people are expected to understand that the users they service aren't expected to know how to operate the equipment that they are in charge of. Repairmen generally don't have that, and if they do, users generally have the sense of shame to be abashed at what they did wrong when it's pointed out to them. IT people get no such consideration.
Yes, computers are in many cases too complex, and, yes, fixed purpose machines are generally more reliable, but we not work in an environment where many jobs require general purpose machines. Do we really want to go back to the days of using seperate devices for different forms of communication, for handling spreadsheets, for composing documents, for searching for information, etc.? People need better computer education. That's the solution and not dumbing down devices and limiting their applicability.
In the mean time, IT people will have to resign themselves to diagnosing complex, multi-purpose devices, dealing with uneducated users, being abused, etc., and will probably continue to laugh at the people who make their jobs troublesome as a means of coping with it all. That's just natural. You have to laugh, after all.
Wow a third widely circulated story that happened to you as well. You must be karmically blessed or have shared beers with better storytellers than yourself.
The terrorists have won. They've got us surrendering our Bics and taking off our shoes, standing in free speech zones and bitching about illegal aliens. Okay, maybe that last one isn't on them.
As much as I used to love using that trope in the early days of post-9/11 rights loss, I've come to realize something very important -- the terrorists really don't give a #$@! about all that.
All the terrorists want is for the US to pull out of the Middle East, stop building bases and applying military pressure, stop exposing them to "decadent Western culture," and stop propping up corrupt regimes like in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt that aren't as friendly to theocratic elements within their own states as the terrorists would want. (Yes, even the Sauds.)
They don't care if we turn into a fascist war machine so long as we point our attention elsewhere. If anything, the possibility that it could make us more focused on the Middle East (like it gave us an excuse to go into Iraq) represents a huge loss to the terrorists.
Their motivations are entirely about turf and being "allowed" to live in communities driven entirely by their own moral codes without any outside influence from the moral values of others.
In other words, terrorists are just xenophobic, fire-and-brimstone religious, "git off my propertee" rednecks with bombs and a little more fire in their belly. They're Klansmen with a different hate who have to go international to strike at the people they blame all their community's problems on.
You know that's pretty much logically and morally equivalent to telling someone who objects to the NSA wire-tapping program, "If you hate your country so much, perhaps you should find another field to work in."
We can do better. That's all he's asking.
I believe them. Especially any story about a customer lying and being abusive to avoid admitting that they could have caused their own problem or that their problem can't be helped.
This isn't because I've worked in tech support. I have, but it was supporting mission-critical middleware applications, so I didn't run into the same sorts of people.
No, I believe these stories because I have friends that have worked extensively with the masses -- in the hotel industry, in arcades, and in a call-center for a car rental place. Most people are smart, sane, honorable, and are not missing some sort of obvious facts.
Most people.
However, enough exposure to people who aren't college or even high school educated will eventually put you in contact with somebody out there who's either stupid, crazy, deceitful, or just having a bad day where they are missing something obvious and are too embarrassed to admit it once you mention it to them. This can be anything from people who don't realize you can't put real money in an arcade machine (even though it's right next to the token machine and the slot says "2 tokens") to people who try to claim that their check card is a real credit card even after being told that they can't rent a car on it.
My favorite story from the guy who works at the rental call center is about a guy who wanted to rent a car to go to Massachusettes but wasn't allowed to because the local offices would not rent to anyone driving through New York due to New York's liability laws.
"But I'm not going to New York! I'm going to Boston!"
"You have to go through New York to get to Boston!"
"But I'm not going to New York! I'm going to Boston!"
(Incidentally, this got a lot of stares and laughs at the call center because it was the first time in 2-3 months since he started working there that he raised his voice. Most people don't last a week before someone frustrates them enough to snap.)
He finally got the guy to go away, even though he couldn't hang up, and the guy just didn't get it. The guy had also tried to haggle for a car rental. Six days later, my friend's working and he hears another representative raise her voice to say, "But you have to go through New York to get to Boston!"
Yep, same guy. No kidding.
So, yeah, when people give their stories about customer just not getting it, customers lying about what they did, and customers jamming things that don't belong into slots that plausibly look like they can take it, I believe them. I have too many friends who have been there.
If you don't believe them, you need to mingle with the general public more. They're 99% good and decent people, but it's that 1% and the just plain bad days of the sane 99% that generate these stories.
The maintenance people don't cop an attitude to the drivers, if they ever even see them, and they certainly don't question the boss for giving the driver the vehicle. They just fix the damn cars/trucks so the company can keep doing business.
Yeah, but drivers rarely fill up a diesel truck with gasoline, try to figure some way to wedge "replacement" spark plugs in a EFI engine, accuse mechanics of stealing their keys when they misplace them, or accuse mechanics for causing them to drive off the road when they weren't paying attention while driving.
Most computer problems do in fact lie between keyboard and chair, unlike most auto mechanical failures (when the vehicle is regularly maintained as in the kind of shop you describe). While being surly to users in inexcusable, so's the attitude that IT people should just "shut up, monkeys!" and be grateful for their low-level trade school job maintaining simple machines for people who get "real work" done.
What about how lookOut Express hides the extensions too and the user receives virus.txt.exe .....
Hiding extensions is a dumb idea WHEN THE OS DECIDES WHAT TO DO BY THE EXTENSION.
The OS should've never shown the extension in the first place. The Classic Mac OS didn't use extensions at all. It used a file-type code. If you looked at a file in the Finder, there was a column that told you what the file was. If you emailed the file to somebody, the MIME encoding told what type of file it was. The only place things broke down is where you used a file-exchange medium that didn't preserve metadata, like FTP or Windows File Shares.
An extension is noting more than file metadata foolishly encoded into the filename. A properly designed email app (unlike Outlook) would rely on MIME encoding to tell you what a file was rather than the file name and only act based on that information.
Thus, if you sent an image, the program would tell you it was an image, and load it into the appropriate other program when you click on it. If it's an executable, it would be flagged as such. There would be no way to have something executable that was flagged as being something else.
Of course, that's all good for a hand-wavy world where nothing ever was designed poorly in the first place or where poorly designed systems could be replaced with good systems at the wave of a wand, but we're stuck in a world where CPM (and thus its clone, DOS) made the decision a long time ago to rely on filename extensions and to expose them to the user.
The main flaw of Outlook in hiding extensions is not telling you what the file will be treated as right beside the file name. You should see:
"Attachment: virus.txt (Executable File)"
or
"Attachment: annakournikova.jpg (Visual Basic script)"
Outlook fails for hiding metadata completely instead of just hiding one type -- the extension.
It seems that you have never heard of XGL.
Not helping.
Remember: Bigots wear bowties. It sure makes for easy identification of the Nation of Islam.
Hey, man. I won't hear one bad word from you like that about Tucker Carlson.
Though, it does explain a lot about Pee Wee Herman.
For those few who haven't figured it out yet, most of the things ascribed to Quayle were made up by his liberal opponents.
Check out his own comments on the event in this article. While the media did blow it out of proportion, and it was used as an avenue to attack his intelligence, it did actually happen. As did several other gaffes. (Be sure to scroll down to read the things he actually DID say after the false attribution given by a Republican.)
"...they instead set out to appeal to the people they knew and, beyond them, the youth tribes of middle America."
"Youth tribes of middle America?"
I mean, I've heard Kansas is pretty f'ed up in some places, but have they really descended into tribal barbarism there, and if so, why are they posting crappy webpages?
Haven't you ever heard of "advertisers?" Where do you think that these publications get preview copies from? While a company like Square-Enix has no ownership of the publications and no direct control over them, they are perfectly free to make continued ad-revenue and cooperation with the magazines contingent on them toeing the party line.
This is how businesses control the media. It's really that simple.
Worst title? I would buy this game for the title ALONE.
Woah, woah, woah! Any shop using an ad-hoc collection of Access DBs and Excel spreadsheets is probably a small business that can't afford Oracle. They're comfortable with their current inefficient system, and the guy proposing this is planning on doing it with no funding and probably little to no allocated work time. He needs a free solution because he has no budget.
Proposing a multi-thousand dollar system is going to go over like a lead balloon in a workplace like this.
I had them too, but the question is why they chose that horrible acronym. The original source material is a Japanese character named Kinnikuman (or "Muscle Man"), a goofy series about wrestling and giant monster (parodying Ultraman in the beginning). The little M.U.S.C.L.E. toys were little figures sold in plastic capsules from vending machines in Japan that they decided to bring over to the US without the original backstory.
The decision to the call them "Millions of Unusual Small Creatures Lurking Everywhere" is actually kind of funny considering that Kinnikuman actually was human sized or larger in the original material.
I remember what ended the "Avoid the Noid" campaign, or at least so I thought.
Back in 1989, a guy named Kenneth Noid held up a Domino's in Georgia and kept the employees hostage for 6 hours. The man was paranoid delusional and thought that the campaign was directed specifically at him. The stand-off ended with no one hurt, and I believe the guy got off with an insanity plea.
I remember this in the news when I was a kid, because I'm from Georgia. It was "the big story" that day.
Turns out though, according to the Wikipedia, the campaign was actually ended becase the artist who created the character wanted more money. That's kind of disturbing in a way.
If you are forced into a religious group by the state by birth, and taxed to enrich that religion by default, you have neither freedom of thought nor freedom of religion.
Actually, it's you parents that sign you up for it by registering your name through a church. Children of atheists aren't taxed that way. State churches are primary social insitutions that handle weddings, funerals, births, etc. Few Finnish people actually are religiously active or attend the church, nor is there any real onus to do so. You'd probably be surprised how little most of the people registered with the churches actually care about religion, instead just using the church for traditional rites.
You are enslaved. This is not a question of allowing "opt-out", this is fundamental question of liberty.
I don't think you quite grasp that concept of slavery and oppression. Anything that you can walk away from with no ill effect (and in fact with a financial boost) is hardly slavery. I think you're deliberately being obtuse and probably trolling a little here.
I mean seriously, I think all the folks who rant against the US being a theocracy and hot-bed of fundementalism, etc, etc. need to travel around a little bit more, I think they'd be in for some surprises... even in Europe!
I think anyone who thinks that Finland is a theocracy needs to travel around a bit more themselves. We Americans are far more religious than any Scandinavian nation, and ancient, tax code fossils are not representative of how the nation actually views religion today.
There's also been an "anticatholicism" idea in the government, because for more than 70 years (until 2000), it was the freemasons who were presidents and ruled the country.
That's bizarre. In the US, Freemasonry has traditionally been tied to tolerance of other religions. All but two of the authors of the Constitution were Masons, for example. I wasn't aware until you mentioned it that they had just as much of a problem with the Papacy as with monarchies, nor was I aware that there was a branch of Freemasonry that allowed athiests nor that that branch was prevalent in Latin America.
Did Mexico declare all religion illegal or just the Catholic Church?
The 14th Amendment is what extends the limitations of the federal government to the state and local governments and was passed in the wake of the Civil War to prevent Confederate states from discriminating against the newly freed slaves.
In 1833, it was still generally permissable for state governments to establish state religions, restrict free speech, restrict free press, forbid the bearing of arms, quarter solidiers in homes, etc., etc., though most state constitutions banned some or all of these acts. This just wasn't brought into question again until much later.
It's like having the option of opting out of a mafia protection racket when by default the whole neighborhood is in, doesn't make the crime any less.
Except, you know, the mafia doesn't let you out just like the state doesn't let you out of most other taxes. The church tax lets you peacefully out if all you do is ask.
Violence is pointless in this endeavor unless you're hoping to use it to force your decision on others. There is no justification for it.
No minimum wage job is for people in HIGH demand. There is indeed demand. Pay would not drop to zero or negative. It's better to have two people getting $3/hour than to have one person unemployed while the other person gets $5/hour.
Let me break some numbers down for you. The nation has about 8 million people working for less than $7.25/hour. The nation also has about 5 million people who are unemployed and listed as "wanting to work" by the U.S. Labor department. Assuming that we hired all 13 million to work at $3/hour, it would not be a net benefit to the economy.
If everyone's working only 60 hours per week, we have 13 million people earning roughly $9,000 per year. Do the math. Assuming that they're all married (which is grossly undeserved given that people earning less than $25,000 have half the chances of getting married of people earning more than $25,000), you have a household income of $18,000. If you have the statistical average 2 children, you're well under the poverty line.
Housing costs should not account for more than 30% of your income to be affordable (and allow you to cover food, utilities, clothing, transportation, etc.). I live in Georgia. Median rent here is about $600 state wide. Assume that a poor person finds housing for $400/month. This is $4,800 for a year or 40% of income at this level. That leaves only $36/day (before taxes) to cover a full family of 4 -- $9 per day per person for 2-3 meals, transportation (including to work), etc.
A phone bill means nothing for 1-2 days of the month. (No frills, no internet.) Gas and electric bills mean nothing for 3-4 more days in peak months (for my nicely weather-proofed, non-slum apartment). The water bill is another day. If you rent appliances (and who at this income level owns appliances?), that can be another 1-3 days depending on who and where you rent from and given your utterly attrocious credit rating at this level of income.
So, now you're down to about $6/day for each person. I hope you live close to where you work, because I fill up at $30 every week for my one car. Most of the fast food workers where I live and work can't afford to live anywhere near there, and my car gets much better mileage than most of the clunkers the poor have to drive. (Maybe in the spirit of Marie Antoinette, we should simply say, "Let them drive Priuses!") If they're lucky they can take public transit for $52/month in Atlanta -- another day and a half of income used up.
So now, we've got families formerly earning twice as much as they used to living in slums with only about $5 spending money per day per person for the entire household -- We're not even considering single mothers! -- and this is somehow better for everybody concerned? Well, it's definitely would be better for the homeless, if anyone would just hire them at any price.
Oh, and don't get sick. Not only can't you afford to visit the doctor or even buy most OTC medicines, but you're likely to get fired and replaced with another cog that's only valued at $3/hour if you're out for more than a couple of days. This has nothing to do with "liability costs" or "best available care." This has to do with a freaking bottle of Robitussin costing half of the family's money for the day it was purchased. Brush those teeth kids, because you don't want to even think about going to the dentist.
Have I painted a deep enough picture of the misery of the life you propose? Do we really need an entire segment of our population dependent on welfare for survival while working their butts off like a good number of Wal-mart workers already are under much higher wages?
Can you even imagine how much more miserable this would be for a single mother who much raise kids on even half that budget? Do you understand the human cost of not having either parent at home to raise their kids? Do you not see how this leads to crime when the only role models that kids see that are getting ahead are thugs and drug dealers or when some child
You don't have to refold the GPS if you drive off the page.
You've never missed four turns while in a twisty maze of one-way streets before because it takes your GPS too long to figure out a new path after you missed the last one until it's too late to make the turn.
Yeah, I've nearly folded my GPS before when I was finished with it. "Nearly folded" it right off the dashboard, the stupid piece of junk...