No, it's not that; it's the perception that lawyers are making a bit more than the $48/hr the average person makes. The lawyer worked 6 months, at 40hr/wk that's $340/hr? Of course lawyers work for free: every so often, a lawyer must do volunteer work as a "public defender."
$48/hr? Obviously you don't mean USD, so what currency are you using for that figure?
Going by the US 2005 Census, the mean salary in the US was $43,362 a year. Figuring a 40 hour week that comes out to about $20.85 an hour. Personally I think that number is a bit high.
I wish I had some references to back this up (I'm curious about the validity of it myself), but here is something I've heard of for years:
In San Antonio, a number of years ago, a factory opened up in the area. Because the city wouldn't give them any (or enough) tax breaks, they built just outside city limits, and made a big deal of it that they did it to avoid taxes.
Shortly after there was a fire there. SAFD showed up and checked the building for any people who might have been trapped inside then put water on the building next door (which was in city limits). They let the factory burn to the ground at that point.
Again, this is just a story I've heard of for a number of years, but don't know the truth behind it.
RIAA won't stop until they gain the right, by law, to send their personal SWAT team to your home and execute you on the spot for humming more than two notes from a 200-year-old song that they have somehow kept under copyright.
The only other way to stop the insanity is for the artists and publishers to stop participating in RIAA.
No matter how many safety systems they build in, they'll never really be able to eliminate the damage done by sudden deceleration. Your internal organs, including the brain, still move around within the body, compress and change shape, etc. When you go from 70 MPH to 0 MPH instantly your brain smacks into your skull like hitting a brick wall. Your spleen does the same to the abdominal walls, etc.
Have there ever been any shows other than Futurama, Firefly and maybe Family Guy that Slashdot has ever given a rat's ass about getting canceled? I don't remember timeslot arguments coming up in Firefly or Family Guy.
And don't waste breath promoting Legend of the Seeker around a lot of us here, we're still pissed at how badly they destroyed the Sword of Truth books in this show. They turned an epic story into a Hercules/Xena style corny weekly show. Hell, every plot point that gave the first book such a good ending was completely destroyed in the first episode.
I agree the second was better than the first, though I also thought the double take by the guys *after* Amy's reaction was even better ("Oh wait, will you guys be there too? Ummm maybe not!").
I love Futurama, but not just for the intellectual side. How many comedy cartoons have had really good tear-jerker moments? Fry's dog, the story of his five-leaf clover, Leela's parents, etc. That's a damned rare thing for me, and like most guys pretty hard to admit, but Futurama's been able to pull it off more than a couple times.
This is why us geeks on the 'working end' of the spectrum hate dealing with the sheltered back-end IT geeks.
Yes, we use tape. It's portable, easy to swap, easy to use, cheap to replace when it wears out, etc.
I do have cases where backups are made to disk or over network--then those backups go to tape so they can be rotated offsite.
The one case where I'm stuck dealing with backups to a portable HD between Windows, VMware and the backup software in question the whole setup is so badly broken that the entire thing has to be rebooted in order to swap the USB hard drive to rotate it offsite.
The people responsible for making comments like 'tape is dead' need to be dragged (probably kicking and screaming) into the real world for a while and learn what all their toys are really used for. A server handed to us with a fresh OS is just a doorstop until we actually get applications on it and it is actually capable of *doing something*.
Isn't it just as likely that "ugly people" are more likely to have self esteem issues, which would lead to a higher proclivity towards committing crimes (thus more convictions) and the odds of those crimes being more heinous (leading to longer sentences)?
It left a taste in my mouth similar to if I had gone out and licked a homeless person.
Part of the issue with so many people not liking real butter is that it is notorious for absorbing odor/taste from the air around it. An unclean refrigerator or just one with lots of food that isn't 100% sealed will result in the butter absorbing those flavors, making it rather nasty.
You just have to store butter properly and you can generally get rid of this. Of course this leads to my own personal issue--real plain butter (generic salted sweet cream butter) has little to no flavor to me compared to margarine.
This game failed in big part because of their extremely poor server performance. Who cares how they did it?
Well, both poor server performance (Fortress battles were completely unplayable when I quit) plus they opened WAY too many servers at the start. If they'd started with 1/3 as many servers the game would probably be in far better shape today. The server transfers that they opened up as a last-ditch effort prior to merging servers was the straw that broke the camel's back for me, destroying my server's population.
WTB a fantasy (okay, I'll say it...WoW-like) MMO modeled after EVE's economy, industry, PVP, territory control, etc.
Just to note, yes, I contradicted myself, and I know I did as I wrote it--sort of. My point would be more that I'm annoyed at people looking at *historical* events for associations. Current events are pretty relevant to the works. Some event from a hundred years ago (say, slavery) are more often not.
One of the issues I've always had with literature studies (or any study of forms of art) is the over-analysis done by some people. People study literature and other works of art looking for references to historical events. While everything in the creator's past can certainly influence their work, whether consciously or subconsciously, trying to analyze this as being a relevant relationship is pointless.
If I was going to do something like this, one thing I'd do would be to look at Sci-Fi works over the last hundred years and look not at their exact thoughts on future technology but on future circumstances and problems. Did the trend of a global world war in the future become more common after WWII? More so than after WWI or Vietnam? How have views on alien hostility versus alien benevolence change over time? Futures run by corporations versus futures run by dictatorships/monarchies versus futures run by democratic governments? Obviously the homeland of the author would impact these as well.
(Personally I'd just as soon NOT analyze things like this. I don't feel these things are a particularly relevant course of study, but if you're going to study it anyway, they are some ideas.)
I also half expected the silver briefcase hastily retrieved at the last moment of evacuation would be yet another nuke (naquadria-enriched, of course) to be used by the military commander to eliminate some potential threat.
Wow, I was wrong, they didn't re-hash that theme yet again in the SG series. Amazing. It actually gives me hope for SGU.
Good news. While I think cells are a bit overused by kids today, if I was a parent I'd want my kids to keep a cell on them for emergencies. Make it a disciplinary issue for kids using them when they shouldn't, but don't ban them outright like many schools do.
If you pass San Antonio, visit the Witte Museum. They tend to get the major touring exhibits (the plastinated Human Body exhibits, animatronic dinosaurs, Egyptian artifacts/mummies).
If you pass Denver, stop by their natural history museum (and their zoo too, if you have the time). I was only there for a week on business once, but made it a point to visit both. It was well worth it.
I also played ATITD for a while. It's a shame that the pace and timeline of the game was so closely driven by Teppy as opposed to by the players. The Second Telling was more or less killed off by a combination of Teppy releasing Tests at too slow a pace and, of course, the release of WoW.
Up until then though, the large community efforts were impressive. Hundreds of people involved in digs (with some people making shovels for everyone, people cooking stamina food). The nearly region-long Acro lines, etc.
After I left, I tried to keep up with news on ATITD. Apparently the Second Telling took so long to progress in the end that Teppy made a bunch of changes to speed up the conclusion--sounding more like cutting his losses and wanting to just get started over again with the Third Telling.
Unfortunately the last time I checked in on the Third Telling the population was so low that the game just isn't the same anymore. There aren't enough people to form any of the large community events anymore that made the game so much more enjoyable.
(Though I have to admit, when it comes to repetitive behavior...I wore out the left mouse button on two high-end mice in less than 6 months of play there.)
I haven't stepped foot in a university in a decade.
I've been out in the real world. I spent a while in IT and had my 'idealistic' streak like most of the people in this thread, including, likely, the submitter.
However, since then, I've spent most of my time outside IT (though still closely related, I work in a software company). I've come to see the other side in the business world. IT, in the terms of infrastructure per the questions posed, is a cost point, not a profit center. I used to be the rabid Linux zealot, now I've 'seen the light' and realize how futile those efforts are, and how badly they can hamper business.
Universities should run IT the same as any business.
You are a service. You are a red line on the budget. Your only reason for existence is to provide IT services to your customers (your faculty and students). You don't make policy, you don't have an agenda, you don't enforce a strategy--you follow and obey.
People who spend their lives in academia lose touch with reality, so help bring some semblance of it back into their lives (this as close as you will get to having an 'agenda').
Let the individual divisions of the school give you their needs, and you meet them. You can certainly try to provide some real-world advice to promote where the real world stands, but you can't dictate anything.
I just hope that their return isn't like Family Guy and Tripping the Rift, where they just start out by hacking up a movie into half a season worth of episodes (and call it a full season, too).
My problem is that I enjoy the large group activities in MMOs, but I want there to also be a purpose.
My first graphic MMO (as opposed to MUDs that I used to play obsessively) was A Tale in the Desert. It's an extremely niche game, and unfortunately just never quite got the population it needed to survive. If there was some way to inject 20k more regular players into the game, I'd be back there again. It had purpose, but quickly lost the numbers to form a real community.
Then I got into the WoW closed beta, and I knew I found my new MUD with pretty pictures attached. The first couple years were great, even with the bugs and server issues. I was in a 40-man raiding guild, which gave me the large group activities I enjoyed. We also had at least some purpose--server firsts. We weren't large enough to compete for game-wide firsts (though we were close a couple times), but we did have most firsts on our server.
Then the first expansion came out for WoW and Blizzard killed off 40-man raiding guilds. I got sick of dealing with the cliques and even more narrow-minded views of 'acceptable' classes and builds for the new smaller zones, so left.
Prior to leaving, I had already started playing EVE. I still play today, and was even in one of the largest capital ship battles in EVE history last weekend. The only thing I'm missing in EVE is that I really want all of EVE's features in a fantasy setting. Give me WoW with player-built and player-controlled territories, the industrial and financial side, the skill set side of EVE.
When Warhammer came out, I thought I may have found some glimmer of what I wanted in the PVP and zone progression systems. Unfortunately Mythic severely disappointed me in how the entire thing felt utterly without purpose. The promises to remove 'the grind' were also gone once we began to realize the grinding required to gain equipment sets and their progression. A slew of server transfers decimating my server's population balance was enough to slam the book shut on WAR.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's not that; it's the perception that lawyers are making a bit more than the $48/hr the average person makes. The lawyer worked 6 months, at 40hr/wk that's $340/hr? Of course lawyers work for free: every so often, a lawyer must do volunteer work as a "public defender."
$48/hr? Obviously you don't mean USD, so what currency are you using for that figure?
Going by the US 2005 Census, the mean salary in the US was $43,362 a year. Figuring a 40 hour week that comes out to about $20.85 an hour. Personally I think that number is a bit high.
I wish I had some references to back this up (I'm curious about the validity of it myself), but here is something I've heard of for years:
In San Antonio, a number of years ago, a factory opened up in the area. Because the city wouldn't give them any (or enough) tax breaks, they built just outside city limits, and made a big deal of it that they did it to avoid taxes.
Shortly after there was a fire there. SAFD showed up and checked the building for any people who might have been trapped inside then put water on the building next door (which was in city limits). They let the factory burn to the ground at that point.
Again, this is just a story I've heard of for a number of years, but don't know the truth behind it.
RIAA won't stop until they gain the right, by law, to send their personal SWAT team to your home and execute you on the spot for humming more than two notes from a 200-year-old song that they have somehow kept under copyright.
The only other way to stop the insanity is for the artists and publishers to stop participating in RIAA.
No matter how many safety systems they build in, they'll never really be able to eliminate the damage done by sudden deceleration. Your internal organs, including the brain, still move around within the body, compress and change shape, etc. When you go from 70 MPH to 0 MPH instantly your brain smacks into your skull like hitting a brick wall. Your spleen does the same to the abdominal walls, etc.
Have there ever been any shows other than Futurama, Firefly and maybe Family Guy that Slashdot has ever given a rat's ass about getting canceled? I don't remember timeslot arguments coming up in Firefly or Family Guy.
And don't waste breath promoting Legend of the Seeker around a lot of us here, we're still pissed at how badly they destroyed the Sword of Truth books in this show. They turned an epic story into a Hercules/Xena style corny weekly show. Hell, every plot point that gave the first book such a good ending was completely destroyed in the first episode.
I agree the second was better than the first, though I also thought the double take by the guys *after* Amy's reaction was even better ("Oh wait, will you guys be there too? Ummm maybe not!").
I love Futurama, but not just for the intellectual side. How many comedy cartoons have had really good tear-jerker moments? Fry's dog, the story of his five-leaf clover, Leela's parents, etc. That's a damned rare thing for me, and like most guys pretty hard to admit, but Futurama's been able to pull it off more than a couple times.
I got sick of all the fools around me playing crap like this, and my response to them was always to not bother me until they picked up a REAL guitar.
So I went out and picked up a real guitar and a decent keyboard myself. Granted, I suck, but at least I'm no poser!
This is why us geeks on the 'working end' of the spectrum hate dealing with the sheltered back-end IT geeks.
Yes, we use tape. It's portable, easy to swap, easy to use, cheap to replace when it wears out, etc.
I do have cases where backups are made to disk or over network--then those backups go to tape so they can be rotated offsite.
The one case where I'm stuck dealing with backups to a portable HD between Windows, VMware and the backup software in question the whole setup is so badly broken that the entire thing has to be rebooted in order to swap the USB hard drive to rotate it offsite.
The people responsible for making comments like 'tape is dead' need to be dragged (probably kicking and screaming) into the real world for a while and learn what all their toys are really used for. A server handed to us with a fresh OS is just a doorstop until we actually get applications on it and it is actually capable of *doing something*.
Okay, done ranting for the day...
Isn't it just as likely that "ugly people" are more likely to have self esteem issues, which would lead to a higher proclivity towards committing crimes (thus more convictions) and the odds of those crimes being more heinous (leading to longer sentences)?
It left a taste in my mouth similar to if I had gone out and licked a homeless person.
Part of the issue with so many people not liking real butter is that it is notorious for absorbing odor/taste from the air around it. An unclean refrigerator or just one with lots of food that isn't 100% sealed will result in the butter absorbing those flavors, making it rather nasty.
You just have to store butter properly and you can generally get rid of this. Of course this leads to my own personal issue--real plain butter (generic salted sweet cream butter) has little to no flavor to me compared to margarine.
This game failed in big part because of their extremely poor server performance. Who cares how they did it?
Well, both poor server performance (Fortress battles were completely unplayable when I quit) plus they opened WAY too many servers at the start. If they'd started with 1/3 as many servers the game would probably be in far better shape today. The server transfers that they opened up as a last-ditch effort prior to merging servers was the straw that broke the camel's back for me, destroying my server's population.
WTB a fantasy (okay, I'll say it...WoW-like) MMO modeled after EVE's economy, industry, PVP, territory control, etc.
Obviously they aren't doing it in 2009, since Friday is December 18th, so they're going to do this in 2014?
Just to note, yes, I contradicted myself, and I know I did as I wrote it--sort of. My point would be more that I'm annoyed at people looking at *historical* events for associations. Current events are pretty relevant to the works. Some event from a hundred years ago (say, slavery) are more often not.
One of the issues I've always had with literature studies (or any study of forms of art) is the over-analysis done by some people. People study literature and other works of art looking for references to historical events. While everything in the creator's past can certainly influence their work, whether consciously or subconsciously, trying to analyze this as being a relevant relationship is pointless.
If I was going to do something like this, one thing I'd do would be to look at Sci-Fi works over the last hundred years and look not at their exact thoughts on future technology but on future circumstances and problems. Did the trend of a global world war in the future become more common after WWII? More so than after WWI or Vietnam? How have views on alien hostility versus alien benevolence change over time? Futures run by corporations versus futures run by dictatorships/monarchies versus futures run by democratic governments? Obviously the homeland of the author would impact these as well.
(Personally I'd just as soon NOT analyze things like this. I don't feel these things are a particularly relevant course of study, but if you're going to study it anyway, they are some ideas.)
I also half expected the silver briefcase hastily retrieved at the last moment of evacuation would be yet another nuke (naquadria-enriched, of course) to be used by the military commander to eliminate some potential threat.
Wow, I was wrong, they didn't re-hash that theme yet again in the SG series. Amazing. It actually gives me hope for SGU.
I would think the "meat grinder"-like "containment corridor" from Event Horizon would be a great example for that article, but it's a no-show.
So, do they have a website? Myspace page? Twitter page? Facebook page? Youtube channel?
Good news. While I think cells are a bit overused by kids today, if I was a parent I'd want my kids to keep a cell on them for emergencies. Make it a disciplinary issue for kids using them when they shouldn't, but don't ban them outright like many schools do.
This is great news for all of those students going to schools that permit them to carry cell phones.
Wait, what?
If you pass San Antonio, visit the Witte Museum. They tend to get the major touring exhibits (the plastinated Human Body exhibits, animatronic dinosaurs, Egyptian artifacts/mummies).
If you pass Denver, stop by their natural history museum (and their zoo too, if you have the time). I was only there for a week on business once, but made it a point to visit both. It was well worth it.
I also played ATITD for a while. It's a shame that the pace and timeline of the game was so closely driven by Teppy as opposed to by the players. The Second Telling was more or less killed off by a combination of Teppy releasing Tests at too slow a pace and, of course, the release of WoW.
Up until then though, the large community efforts were impressive. Hundreds of people involved in digs (with some people making shovels for everyone, people cooking stamina food). The nearly region-long Acro lines, etc.
After I left, I tried to keep up with news on ATITD. Apparently the Second Telling took so long to progress in the end that Teppy made a bunch of changes to speed up the conclusion--sounding more like cutting his losses and wanting to just get started over again with the Third Telling.
Unfortunately the last time I checked in on the Third Telling the population was so low that the game just isn't the same anymore. There aren't enough people to form any of the large community events anymore that made the game so much more enjoyable.
(Though I have to admit, when it comes to repetitive behavior...I wore out the left mouse button on two high-end mice in less than 6 months of play there.)
I haven't stepped foot in a university in a decade.
I've been out in the real world. I spent a while in IT and had my 'idealistic' streak like most of the people in this thread, including, likely, the submitter.
However, since then, I've spent most of my time outside IT (though still closely related, I work in a software company). I've come to see the other side in the business world. IT, in the terms of infrastructure per the questions posed, is a cost point, not a profit center. I used to be the rabid Linux zealot, now I've 'seen the light' and realize how futile those efforts are, and how badly they can hamper business.
Universities should run IT the same as any business.
You are a service. You are a red line on the budget. Your only reason for existence is to provide IT services to your customers (your faculty and students). You don't make policy, you don't have an agenda, you don't enforce a strategy--you follow and obey.
People who spend their lives in academia lose touch with reality, so help bring some semblance of it back into their lives (this as close as you will get to having an 'agenda').
Let the individual divisions of the school give you their needs, and you meet them. You can certainly try to provide some real-world advice to promote where the real world stands, but you can't dictate anything.
I just hope that their return isn't like Family Guy and Tripping the Rift, where they just start out by hacking up a movie into half a season worth of episodes (and call it a full season, too).
My problem is that I enjoy the large group activities in MMOs, but I want there to also be a purpose.
My first graphic MMO (as opposed to MUDs that I used to play obsessively) was A Tale in the Desert. It's an extremely niche game, and unfortunately just never quite got the population it needed to survive. If there was some way to inject 20k more regular players into the game, I'd be back there again. It had purpose, but quickly lost the numbers to form a real community.
Then I got into the WoW closed beta, and I knew I found my new MUD with pretty pictures attached. The first couple years were great, even with the bugs and server issues. I was in a 40-man raiding guild, which gave me the large group activities I enjoyed. We also had at least some purpose--server firsts. We weren't large enough to compete for game-wide firsts (though we were close a couple times), but we did have most firsts on our server.
Then the first expansion came out for WoW and Blizzard killed off 40-man raiding guilds. I got sick of dealing with the cliques and even more narrow-minded views of 'acceptable' classes and builds for the new smaller zones, so left.
Prior to leaving, I had already started playing EVE. I still play today, and was even in one of the largest capital ship battles in EVE history last weekend. The only thing I'm missing in EVE is that I really want all of EVE's features in a fantasy setting. Give me WoW with player-built and player-controlled territories, the industrial and financial side, the skill set side of EVE.
When Warhammer came out, I thought I may have found some glimmer of what I wanted in the PVP and zone progression systems. Unfortunately Mythic severely disappointed me in how the entire thing felt utterly without purpose. The promises to remove 'the grind' were also gone once we began to realize the grinding required to gain equipment sets and their progression. A slew of server transfers decimating my server's population balance was enough to slam the book shut on WAR.
Give me a WoW modeled after EVE.