Re:Interview with the author
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The Escapist
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· Score: 1
"This book, The Escapist was self-published"
That explains the excerpts I've seen elsewhere in the discussion. While an occasional gem gets rejected over and over only to come into its own via self-publishing, for the vast majority of it, there's a reason that the manuscript didn't get snatched up. Writing is one of those things where doing it is easy, but doing it well is not and doing it exceptionally is nigh unto impossible.
The excerpts (and that's all I'm ever going to read of this) are filled with labored descriptions, repetetive text, forced turns of phrase and an obsession with pounding one over the head with the technology he's invented for his future: all hallmarks of beginning sci-fi writing.
I'm personally going to participate in NaNoWriMo this year, but if I end up doing the self-publishing, it will be mostly to get printed copies for myself and a few interested friends and not any sort of self delusion that it's going to be the next great American novel, and I certainly won't be trying to push it on a site like Slashdot. Rather, I'm viewing it like an amateur runner views a marathon: a challenge to participate and a reward to finish and nothing more. It's something to have accomplished and finished, regardless of my final standing with regard to other participants. Should I deliver something of worth, that's a bonus.
I never claimed that there *was* a clear agreed-upon definition. However, if we're going to have laws about it, sue over it and threaten physical harm over it, just using whichever one we want is pretty much working out like rational predition would expect: it's not.
Personally, I don't care *which* definition we use. There are probably hundreds of semantically distinct definitions all with backers and detractors. That's not the point. The point is that, for legal and policy purposes, we need to agree on one. Sure, your Zen approach to spam definition is a wonderful ideal (and is the basis for Bayesian filtering, which I use heavily myself). However, when I have customers or subscribers threatening ever-increasingly-real legal consequences (fines, ISP shutdown, etc), I can't exactly respond to the lawsuit with, "You need to get in touch with your inner spam definition and reach my level of spam enlightenment."
When my ISP asks me if the claim of spamming has merit, I need to be able to *prove* it wasn't spam or face the consequences. That requires some sort of definition. Emails that will result in ISP shutdown are pretty different under the 2 definitions you listed. Under 1, with no further explanation of "excessive", who knows if I'd be shut down. Under the other, just pointing to the double-opt-in, the "unsolicited" question is answered and the messages are NOT spam, thus resulting in my keeping my ISP account.
The problem with that from the other side is that we've got a large percentage of the population that puts the definition closer to "Email I didn't expect today." Even if they requested it (with double-opt in subscriptions), if they didn't expect it when it arrives (through forgetfullness, etc), they still report it as spam and react as though you sent Viagra ads.
I've got people who specifically sign up and confirm the subscription to an email course and still threaten legal action over the "spam" when the 3rd installment of the course arrives.
Leaving the definition "in the eye of the beholder" is far more dangerous than a clear agreed-upon definition.
Most of the HBO and Showtime subscribers I know aren't doing it for the movies. They gave up on that a long time ago. The original series are what most of them are paying for now. I use Netflix for movies, but still subscribe to both for Sopranos, Carnivale, Dead Like Me, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, Penn and Teller's Bullshit, etc.
I haven't watched a movie on any of those channels in so long I can't remember.
I'm also actively involved in charity and community organizations and events, read 1-2 books per week, take my dogs for regular walks, run 2 businesses in addition to 40 hours a week as a contractor, play in 2 regular social poker games, maintain an aquarium, actively participate in local politics, and otherwise already HAVE a life. Additionally, I've been married 7 years and own my own home. I suspect that (and have confirmed over and over) I have much more of a "life" than an awful lot of people who have less TV's than I do.
Just because I have them doesn't mean I spend all of my time watching them. They're spread out throughout my 2000 sq ft house and allow me to start watching a movie, go upstairs to cook a meal and return all while watching the same movie.
Yep. 5 TV's from 13" to 52" in my house (2 adults, no kids). 3 have DirecTivo's, 1 has a regular DirecTV link and the remaining one is a dummy mirror of another via a 5.8Ghz link. So, we've got 2.5 Tv's per person.
Re:Then how is the production funded?
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P2P and TV
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· Score: 1
Personally, my top 5 favorite shows are ALL distributed commercial-free on my satellite dish: Carnivale(HBO), Penn and Teller's Bullshit(SHO), Dead Like Me(SHO), America's Test Kitchen(PBS) and Six Feet Under(HBO). I'm eagerly waiting for Rome and several new things coming up. I also rarely miss an HBO or Showtime miniseries or HBO-only type of movie. Also note that most of the support to be "drummed up" for shows on HBO and Showtime is only within the existing subscriber community. You don't often see ads for Carnivale on other channels.
PBS is donation supported and the others are $12/month PER CHANNEL and they have tons of subscribers. The budgets for the pay channel shows is plenty high and the production quality and story arcs are much closer to movies than the crappy sitcoms on advertiser-supported TV. On top of that, many of the subscribers ALSO pick up the $100/season DVD sets of these same shows that they already paid to watch.
A loyal following can easily directly pay for the production of a show.
Yeah. Whenever I hear someone going on and on about the "high quality sound" in theaters, I wonder if the sound is better in other cities or if these folks just haven't ever heard even a mediocre 5.1 setup in a home. Because I've been to a LOT of the theaters in my metro area and not a single one of them sounds as good as the setup in my basement, and I'd be embarassed to show my setup to most home theater nuts.
I'm not really being personally defensive. However, the grammar nazi's do bother me, particularly as the criticisms usually directly attack the writer's literacy and education and about 80% of the time violate 1 or more rules themselves. Yours was simply the first that came up as I was reading, so I responded. You consider my response unnecessary and overly critical, yet devoting nearly a third of your original post to the 3 black pixels between the "t" and the "s" of the "it's" is even more so, an irony that most grammar nazis ignore.
In response to your on-topic question, yes, much of this stuff has been revised and standardized into the volumes typically published. For instance Shakespeare is known to have used several different spellings of his own name, not being particularly consistent. That carried over into some of the manuscripts for the text itself. While that means it mostly affected the initial writing down, it was there. Chaucer (the first major writer of post English/French blending) had different spellings for quite a few different words.
It wasn't until the era where the first English dictionaries were compiled that the concept of a "right" way to spell something really came into popularity.
"Um BTW, as an English Major, and if you would like to pass, try leaving the apostrophe out of 'it's'."
And, as an English degree holder, I can tell you that all of the 8th grade grammar and spelling rules that Slashdotters assume is INTEGRAL to the study of the English language aren't even mentioned throughout the program. Stuff like punctuation, spelling, etc. falls at the same level as arithmetic does in a math program. It needs to be there, but is offloaded to the editing process like multiplication is to a calculator. In this and countless other public forum postings, I have NO editing process. I do the same for personal emails and casual business correspondance. However, when the level of discourse and importance of the missive rises, my editing process kicks in and multiple rounds of editing are involved. At its most stringent (i.e. the papers handed in during the course of my studies in the English program or for publication), my process usually involves 3-4 times as much time spent editing and rewriting as it does initial writing. It also often involves days or weeks away from the text to gain distance and objectivity. In other words, when the assumption for time spent on a Slashdot post rises above 2 minutes to 2 hours, I'll start worrying about people's personal punctuation and grammar demons (mine happens to be WAY too many parentheticals and the spelling of at least 10-20 words that I spell incorrectly EVERY time I type them).
Additionally, if you were to study English as a complete discipline and look into its history, you'd find that many of the things that are held so dearly as rules have really only been so for 150 years or so. Most of them were written down by the strict grammarians of the 19th century, during a rather short period where they were desperately trying to impose order on a decidedly disorderly language. Due to its mongrel heritage, English and its users have long resisted the rigid formality that many other languages impose (i.e. French). Its ability to integrate or invent entire vocabularies as necessary, a gigantic vocabulary and a grammatic structure that allows the speaker to often be understood despite large deviations from standards are simultaneously its greatest assets and liabilities.
Besides, if you're going to start criticizing punctuation, your criticism should probably contain fewer examples of violating those errors than the document you criticize.
As someone who got their degree in English and spent a lot of time hanging around Humanities professors, I always found their candid opinions of "classics" amusing. My favorite quote (which was probably quoted from someone else) was from a British literature professor I had: "The classics are the books we all pretend to have read."
This type of thing is common in all fields, where many of the people who've ACTUALLY done the studying in depth treat the "legends" and "classics" in the field with a little less reverence than those outside the field.
On Windows, I believe VLC uses whatever codecs are available as well as the built-in ones. I know for a fact that I've run WMV HD samples through VLC as a means of transcoding to high-quality DVD. The DRM-protected files don't work, but the "plain" ones do. All of the HD stuff is in the more recent WMV format.
Implicit in the listing of non-outsourced jobs is the underlying statement that those jobs hold some sort of promise for those worried about losing their job to outsourcing. Without that subtext, your list really doesn't say anything significant, except to say, "Here's a list of jobs where people perform onsite, physical services". So? What makes it a list worth making?
With regard to the dripping sarcasm bathing the rest of your post . ..Just because these jobs didn't *entirely* disappear during the Great Depression doesn't mean that the didn't *mostly* dry up, with regard to the number of people seeking to do them. Unemployment, even during the Great Depression still only ever got to around 25% at its worst. 75% of people still *had* jobs and it was the worst economic time in American history. Lots of professions stayed above their "static demand" levels that entire time. However, at the same time, flexible *supply* exploded. Suddenly, formerly high-paid people were lining up to be janitors. The WPA and other New Deal programs were a desperate attempt to *artifically* create or replace jobs that HAD disappeared via economic crisis. To use the WPA et al as the basis for an argument that offshoring has no potential for temporary economic detriment only works if you assume that the US government will create an equivalent organization to hire programmers, etc. and put them to work building some big project.
If not self employed in any of these professions . ..Construction ($11/hr), custodial($9/hr), teachers($13/hr), ministers($beg) (OK I guess the last two could be outsourced), landscapers ($8/hr), restaurant employees($5.15/hr+tips), plummers[sic]($13/hr).
Note that most fall below the current advocated "living wage" formulas and the few that go above it are only just over the line (current formulas give hourly living wages near $12.83/hr).
Additionally, if you check the phone book in most cities for the businesses in those categories, you'll find that even if you want to start your own, you'll have a LOT of competition.
The thing that offends opponents most in these types of discussions is exactly what kinds of jobs ARE left, hence all of the discussion of "good jobs" when politicians are talking about job creation. You don't sustain an economy of landscapers and construction workers at $12/hr if there's no one making $50/hr to pay them to build and landscape. Because, if you're making $12/hr, you can't *afford* landscaping. Similarly, if you cut my income down to any of these jobs, I won't ever build a new house, will completely stop eating out, will go to Home Depot and get my own drain cleaner, will vacuum my own floors, etc. The reason there's a job at Starbucks (making $6/hr) is that there's a whole lot of people able and willing to pay $4 for a cup of coffee with steamed milk in it.
Most of the jobs that "can't be outsourced" are both low paying and are only available because of disposable income from others. Cut off the disposable income and you won't have these jobs either.
They didn't actually GET $12,000 out of those accounts because, unlike Paypal, most banks and credit cards DO consider it their concern and did so in this case, stopping the transactions. I have nothing but praise for my banks and credit card companies. There was only about $200, directly in the bank account, but there was a secondary savings account that apparently was set up with some sort of rollover overdraft protection. You may be surprised how many banks, when you set up checking and savings accounts will "help" by rolling money over from one to another to prevent overdrafts. The credit cards had limits of something like $4000-10000 each. The $12,000 is what the total of transactions initiated was. The banks stopped pretty much all of them before there was any real damage. The fact it was a Friday night/Saturday morning helped out too as none of the transactions would have been real until Monday anyway, giving me time to sort it out with the real financial institutions. Paypal was another story.
Do I have that many accounts? Yes. I also am co-owner in 2 corporations and a partnership. My wife and I each maintain checking accounts, have 1 together, seperate savings and joint savings, several credit cards, lines of credit, mortgages, SEP IRA's, investment accounts (short, mid and long term), student loans, business accounts, business expense accounts, business credit cards, another one of each for each business, money market accounts, 401k's, a couple of IRA's that haven't been rolled over to somewhere else, a car loan, etc.. Each bank and account fits the need at hand and it's all managed by my accountant and financial advisor. I probably carry 10 credit cards from 5-6 companies in my wallet alone.
See, to me, the fact you see dealing with 10 financial institutions as "sketchy" leads me to just as quick a knee-jerk reaction indicating that you may not have dealings with anyone in business or are just starting out on your own. Statements like
MOST of the people I know have at least 6-7 accounts with various financial institutions and many have the same 10-20 that I do with quite a few having enough to dwarf what I've got for accounts. I know of at least 3 people that I see at least once a week who had tax bills (after payroll contributions) over $7500 this year. I know one person who wrote a check to the IRS for $75,000 this year.
The simple reality is that once someone gets past living from paycheck to paycheck, there frequently are a lot of financial institutions one ends up dealing with. Every few years, I tend to try to consolidate stuff together, but it isn't a huge priority. 10 is really easy to get to: 2 checking (joint and personal), 2 personal credit cards (one Citibank for the miles, one Chase for carrying a balance for 2-3 months when necessary), a mortgage (Wells Fargo), a student loan (Sallie Mae), a 0% car loan (GMAC), a store credit card (Best Buy/Circuit City), a 401K (Putnam) and a money market stock account (Scottrade). That's 10 and there's not even a single business in there yet. Just typical American middle class setup.
Also keep in mind that you don't have to just believe me. Check out the class action lawsuits that have not only been filed, but settled. Check out the fights they've had with the banking laws in this country. Check out just how hard they work to hide their phone numbers and keep customers at arm's length. They truly are a company trying to get something for nothing.
Allow me to introduce myself (then you'll know someone with a Paypal problem), I'm J. Since you're relying on your anecdotes as evidence of Paypal's innocence, the $12,000 that was stolen from my credit cards and linked checking account, coupled with the fact that, even after they'd been notified that the transactions were fraudulent (which I had to tell them, even though all of the real banks involved notified me immediately), they tried to push the transactions through 2 more times (as a "convenience"), puts them in a pretty crappy category in my book. I, too, started using them in 1998. I, too, had their Mastercard. However, I had what you apparently see as a mythical bad experience with Paypal.
So, after signing over the naming rights to my backyard, I finally got a phone number to deal with them (note that all of the 10 or so real banks I currently have accounts with ALL have phone numbers readily available). Of course, Paypal's "dispute" resolution process is to lock all sides until *they* are satisfied that it was fraud. It actually took me nearly 6 months to convince them that, despite the fact that the most I'd moved around prior to that point was $400 and all of it domestic, I suddenly decided to transfer $12,000 to the Czech Republic at 3:00am on a Saturday. Once I finally convinced them that I wasn't the one who sent it, it took another 6 months to get the $150 or so I still had in the account.
Paypal wants to be treated like a real financial institution, but doesn't act like one.
The same way anyone does in a checks-and-balances system. They take a shot at what they think they'll get away with and the courts smack them down when someone challenges it. When you're writing a law, if you KNOW that it's going to be challenged anyway (like widening handgun permits), you probably don't want to attach it to an "Arts Budget Bill" as that is clearly going to be struck down.
In your example, it may or may not. At least "wind farms" are energy related and would reduce the chances of it being in violation of this particular rule. The abuses in question are typically far more flagrant than this though. Think more along the lines of a bill to "prevent teachers from striking during the school year" suddenly having a clause authorizing the governor of MN to declare war on Wisconsin, or a clause to drop the state income tax for everyone making more than $250,000. In either case, it's apparent to anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together, that school teacher strikes have nothing to do with the other clauses and they're added only because the teacher bill has a chance of passing. Both state and federal laws are littered with that kind of thing.
In the federal example (broadcast flag), if the bill it's being attached to isn't FCC or broadcast related, it'd be pretty clear to anyone that they're unrelated.
Yes, the Minnesota constitution requires that any bill be about one thing. As such, the recent handgun permit law that was tacked onto something else was held unconstitutional soley on those grounds.
Basically, if they want to pass the handgun law, they need to have it voted on on its own merits.
"At least if one user's home directory is lost it does not wipe everything off the machine."
You just proved my point. On most home machines, even Linux ones, there really only *is* one important user. Any other users are usually pretty secondary. Shrugging it off as only "one user's home directory" is exactly why this is a problem. Destruction of my home directory (assuming I don't do backups, which I do*) would result in the destruction of probably close to 10,000 hours of work. Now, much of that work really wouldn't need to be redone, but compare that to the time to reinstall the relevant software and do a setup.
At work, the person seated at the machine 40 hours per week is the only user of consequence. Elminate their data and you're not talking about a 2-day rebuild, but possible 1-2 years to recreate anything not backed up.
I'm not saying you shouldn't backup. Obviously that's the "real" solution to stopping the destruction of data.
All I was commenting on the fact that a "secure" OS that still allows the destruction of the current user's data is only a small bit better than one that allows complete destruction due to the ratio of value between the OS and it's data and the user and their data.
*I keep my home directory under SVN control and back up the repository offsite.
Which is, incidentally, why Linux is just as vulnerable to virus destruction as any OS. It's "invulnerability" to viruses is almost always touted based on it's blocking of running arbitrary programs as root. However, when the primary value of the computer's setup is in the data, obliterating the current user's "home" directory is actually all the virus needs to do to be completely effective. Sure, the machine itself is still up and running, but the valuable stuff is gone.
95+% of American population farming by hand, raising large families to provide labor to eek out a subsistance living in the vast rural sections of the US.
The invention of the tractor, threshing machine and other technological advancements (the robots of the day), rendered the need for 25 people to hand thresh wheat or pick and process cotton unnecessary.
All of those unemployed people, PLUS one of the biggest immigration booms in US history brought millions of former farmers into "unemployment". Yet, manufacturing (a job that didn't exist before this shift) not only gave most of them jobs, it raised the overall standard of living in the country dramatically over the next century. Those jobs would never have been filled or created unless innovation had forced well over 90% of the existing population and most of the immigrating population into unemployment. That slack in available labor led to the Industrial Revolution (and many would argue, the American Civil War).
Now, the exact same thing is happening to manufacturing (and to some other types of repetitive tasks in technology).
Yeah. The whole mentality that a "successful" company can only happen if they are not only publicly traded, but number 1 in their industry and anything else is a "failure" bugs me to no end.
Given that 75% of jobs in the US are with small businesses (though the definition of small is still really subjective), that approach means you can retire with millions in the bank as a "failure". I'll take that any day.
Success in business should be determined only by the ability to make a profit over the long term. By that definition, you can create a successful business in almost any industry and don't even need to work at it full time or have even a single employee. A website that costs $200 a month in expenses and time and brings in $500 a month is a success. I'd rather own 100 of those than 1 business that loses $2 million a year on revenues of $500 million.
The entrepreneur in charge of a business might not be a success (as the definition needs to then be applied to the person just like it is to the business) if the individual business doesn't bring in enough money for their personal expenses and savings, but the business itself can still be a success.
It's actually about $48 for 8 at a time (that's the plan I'm currently on).
However, Netflix's pricing is entirely linear for the number of movies you can have out (above 3 at a time). It's just tiered, which gives some weird breaks.
Slashdot Mirror
That explains the excerpts I've seen elsewhere in the discussion. While an occasional gem gets rejected over and over only to come into its own via self-publishing, for the vast majority of it, there's a reason that the manuscript didn't get snatched up. Writing is one of those things where doing it is easy, but doing it well is not and doing it exceptionally is nigh unto impossible.
The excerpts (and that's all I'm ever going to read of this) are filled with labored descriptions, repetetive text, forced turns of phrase and an obsession with pounding one over the head with the technology he's invented for his future: all hallmarks of beginning sci-fi writing.
I'm personally going to participate in NaNoWriMo this year, but if I end up doing the self-publishing, it will be mostly to get printed copies for myself and a few interested friends and not any sort of self delusion that it's going to be the next great American novel, and I certainly won't be trying to push it on a site like Slashdot. Rather, I'm viewing it like an amateur runner views a marathon: a challenge to participate and a reward to finish and nothing more. It's something to have accomplished and finished, regardless of my final standing with regard to other participants. Should I deliver something of worth, that's a bonus.
I never claimed that there *was* a clear agreed-upon definition. However, if we're going to have laws about it, sue over it and threaten physical harm over it, just using whichever one we want is pretty much working out like rational predition would expect: it's not.
Personally, I don't care *which* definition we use. There are probably hundreds of semantically distinct definitions all with backers and detractors. That's not the point. The point is that, for legal and policy purposes, we need to agree on one. Sure, your Zen approach to spam definition is a wonderful ideal (and is the basis for Bayesian filtering, which I use heavily myself). However, when I have customers or subscribers threatening ever-increasingly-real legal consequences (fines, ISP shutdown, etc), I can't exactly respond to the lawsuit with, "You need to get in touch with your inner spam definition and reach my level of spam enlightenment."
When my ISP asks me if the claim of spamming has merit, I need to be able to *prove* it wasn't spam or face the consequences. That requires some sort of definition. Emails that will result in ISP shutdown are pretty different under the 2 definitions you listed. Under 1, with no further explanation of "excessive", who knows if I'd be shut down. Under the other, just pointing to the double-opt-in, the "unsolicited" question is answered and the messages are NOT spam, thus resulting in my keeping my ISP account.
"Spam is in the eye of the beholder."
The problem with that from the other side is that we've got a large percentage of the population that puts the definition closer to "Email I didn't expect today." Even if they requested it (with double-opt in subscriptions), if they didn't expect it when it arrives (through forgetfullness, etc), they still report it as spam and react as though you sent Viagra ads.
I've got people who specifically sign up and confirm the subscription to an email course and still threaten legal action over the "spam" when the 3rd installment of the course arrives.
Leaving the definition "in the eye of the beholder" is far more dangerous than a clear agreed-upon definition.
Most of the HBO and Showtime subscribers I know aren't doing it for the movies. They gave up on that a long time ago. The original series are what most of them are paying for now. I use Netflix for movies, but still subscribe to both for Sopranos, Carnivale, Dead Like Me, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, Penn and Teller's Bullshit, etc.
I haven't watched a movie on any of those channels in so long I can't remember.
I'm also actively involved in charity and community organizations and events, read 1-2 books per week, take my dogs for regular walks, run 2 businesses in addition to 40 hours a week as a contractor, play in 2 regular social poker games, maintain an aquarium, actively participate in local politics, and otherwise already HAVE a life. Additionally, I've been married 7 years and own my own home. I suspect that (and have confirmed over and over) I have much more of a "life" than an awful lot of people who have less TV's than I do.
Just because I have them doesn't mean I spend all of my time watching them. They're spread out throughout my 2000 sq ft house and allow me to start watching a movie, go upstairs to cook a meal and return all while watching the same movie.
Yep. 5 TV's from 13" to 52" in my house (2 adults, no kids). 3 have DirecTivo's, 1 has a regular DirecTV link and the remaining one is a dummy mirror of another via a 5.8Ghz link. So, we've got 2.5 Tv's per person.
Personally, my top 5 favorite shows are ALL distributed commercial-free on my satellite dish: Carnivale(HBO), Penn and Teller's Bullshit(SHO), Dead Like Me(SHO), America's Test Kitchen(PBS) and Six Feet Under(HBO). I'm eagerly waiting for Rome and several new things coming up. I also rarely miss an HBO or Showtime miniseries or HBO-only type of movie. Also note that most of the support to be "drummed up" for shows on HBO and Showtime is only within the existing subscriber community. You don't often see ads for Carnivale on other channels.
PBS is donation supported and the others are $12/month PER CHANNEL and they have tons of subscribers. The budgets for the pay channel shows is plenty high and the production quality and story arcs are much closer to movies than the crappy sitcoms on advertiser-supported TV. On top of that, many of the subscribers ALSO pick up the $100/season DVD sets of these same shows that they already paid to watch.
A loyal following can easily directly pay for the production of a show.
Yeah. Whenever I hear someone going on and on about the "high quality sound" in theaters, I wonder if the sound is better in other cities or if these folks just haven't ever heard even a mediocre 5.1 setup in a home. Because I've been to a LOT of the theaters in my metro area and not a single one of them sounds as good as the setup in my basement, and I'd be embarassed to show my setup to most home theater nuts.
I'm not really being personally defensive. However, the grammar nazi's do bother me, particularly as the criticisms usually directly attack the writer's literacy and education and about 80% of the time violate 1 or more rules themselves. Yours was simply the first that came up as I was reading, so I responded. You consider my response unnecessary and overly critical, yet devoting nearly a third of your original post to the 3 black pixels between the "t" and the "s" of the "it's" is even more so, an irony that most grammar nazis ignore.
In response to your on-topic question, yes, much of this stuff has been revised and standardized into the volumes typically published. For instance Shakespeare is known to have used several different spellings of his own name, not being particularly consistent. That carried over into some of the manuscripts for the text itself. While that means it mostly affected the initial writing down, it was there. Chaucer (the first major writer of post English/French blending) had different spellings for quite a few different words.
It wasn't until the era where the first English dictionaries were compiled that the concept of a "right" way to spell something really came into popularity.
"Um BTW, as an English Major, and if you would like to pass, try leaving the apostrophe out of 'it's'."
And, as an English degree holder, I can tell you that all of the 8th grade grammar and spelling rules that Slashdotters assume is INTEGRAL to the study of the English language aren't even mentioned throughout the program. Stuff like punctuation, spelling, etc. falls at the same level as arithmetic does in a math program. It needs to be there, but is offloaded to the editing process like multiplication is to a calculator. In this and countless other public forum postings, I have NO editing process. I do the same for personal emails and casual business correspondance. However, when the level of discourse and importance of the missive rises, my editing process kicks in and multiple rounds of editing are involved. At its most stringent (i.e. the papers handed in during the course of my studies in the English program or for publication), my process usually involves 3-4 times as much time spent editing and rewriting as it does initial writing. It also often involves days or weeks away from the text to gain distance and objectivity. In other words, when the assumption for time spent on a Slashdot post rises above 2 minutes to 2 hours, I'll start worrying about people's personal punctuation and grammar demons (mine happens to be WAY too many parentheticals and the spelling of at least 10-20 words that I spell incorrectly EVERY time I type them).
Additionally, if you were to study English as a complete discipline and look into its history, you'd find that many of the things that are held so dearly as rules have really only been so for 150 years or so. Most of them were written down by the strict grammarians of the 19th century, during a rather short period where they were desperately trying to impose order on a decidedly disorderly language. Due to its mongrel heritage, English and its users have long resisted the rigid formality that many other languages impose (i.e. French). Its ability to integrate or invent entire vocabularies as necessary, a gigantic vocabulary and a grammatic structure that allows the speaker to often be understood despite large deviations from standards are simultaneously its greatest assets and liabilities.
Besides, if you're going to start criticizing punctuation, your criticism should probably contain fewer examples of violating those errors than the document you criticize.
As someone who got their degree in English and spent a lot of time hanging around Humanities professors, I always found their candid opinions of "classics" amusing. My favorite quote (which was probably quoted from someone else) was from a British literature professor I had: "The classics are the books we all pretend to have read."
This type of thing is common in all fields, where many of the people who've ACTUALLY done the studying in depth treat the "legends" and "classics" in the field with a little less reverence than those outside the field.
On Windows, I believe VLC uses whatever codecs are available as well as the built-in ones. I know for a fact that I've run WMV HD samples through VLC as a means of transcoding to high-quality DVD. The DRM-protected files don't work, but the "plain" ones do. All of the HD stuff is in the more recent WMV format.
Implicit in the listing of non-outsourced jobs is the underlying statement that those jobs hold some sort of promise for those worried about losing their job to outsourcing. Without that subtext, your list really doesn't say anything significant, except to say, "Here's a list of jobs where people perform onsite, physical services". So? What makes it a list worth making?
.Just because these jobs didn't *entirely* disappear during the Great Depression doesn't mean that the didn't *mostly* dry up, with regard to the number of people seeking to do them. Unemployment, even during the Great Depression still only ever got to around 25% at its worst. 75% of people still *had* jobs and it was the worst economic time in American history. Lots of professions stayed above their "static demand" levels that entire time. However, at the same time, flexible *supply* exploded. Suddenly, formerly high-paid people were lining up to be janitors. The WPA and other New Deal programs were a desperate attempt to *artifically* create or replace jobs that HAD disappeared via economic crisis. To use the WPA et al as the basis for an argument that offshoring has no potential for temporary economic detriment only works if you assume that the US government will create an equivalent organization to hire programmers, etc. and put them to work building some big project.
With regard to the dripping sarcasm bathing the rest of your post . .
If not self employed in any of these professions . . .Construction ($11/hr), custodial($9/hr), teachers($13/hr), ministers($beg) (OK I guess the last two could be outsourced), landscapers ($8/hr), restaurant employees($5.15/hr+tips), plummers[sic]($13/hr).
Note that most fall below the current advocated "living wage" formulas and the few that go above it are only just over the line (current formulas give hourly living wages near $12.83/hr).
Additionally, if you check the phone book in most cities for the businesses in those categories, you'll find that even if you want to start your own, you'll have a LOT of competition.
The thing that offends opponents most in these types of discussions is exactly what kinds of jobs ARE left, hence all of the discussion of "good jobs" when politicians are talking about job creation. You don't sustain an economy of landscapers and construction workers at $12/hr if there's no one making $50/hr to pay them to build and landscape. Because, if you're making $12/hr, you can't *afford* landscaping. Similarly, if you cut my income down to any of these jobs, I won't ever build a new house, will completely stop eating out, will go to Home Depot and get my own drain cleaner, will vacuum my own floors, etc. The reason there's a job at Starbucks (making $6/hr) is that there's a whole lot of people able and willing to pay $4 for a cup of coffee with steamed milk in it.
Most of the jobs that "can't be outsourced" are both low paying and are only available because of disposable income from others. Cut off the disposable income and you won't have these jobs either.
They didn't actually GET $12,000 out of those accounts because, unlike Paypal, most banks and credit cards DO consider it their concern and did so in this case, stopping the transactions. I have nothing but praise for my banks and credit card companies. There was only about $200, directly in the bank account, but there was a secondary savings account that apparently was set up with some sort of rollover overdraft protection. You may be surprised how many banks, when you set up checking and savings accounts will "help" by rolling money over from one to another to prevent overdrafts. The credit cards had limits of something like $4000-10000 each. The $12,000 is what the total of transactions initiated was. The banks stopped pretty much all of them before there was any real damage. The fact it was a Friday night/Saturday morning helped out too as none of the transactions would have been real until Monday anyway, giving me time to sort it out with the real financial institutions. Paypal was another story.
Do I have that many accounts? Yes. I also am co-owner in 2 corporations and a partnership. My wife and I each maintain checking accounts, have 1 together, seperate savings and joint savings, several credit cards, lines of credit, mortgages, SEP IRA's, investment accounts (short, mid and long term), student loans, business accounts, business expense accounts, business credit cards, another one of each for each business, money market accounts, 401k's, a couple of IRA's that haven't been rolled over to somewhere else, a car loan, etc.. Each bank and account fits the need at hand and it's all managed by my accountant and financial advisor. I probably carry 10 credit cards from 5-6 companies in my wallet alone.
See, to me, the fact you see dealing with 10 financial institutions as "sketchy" leads me to just as quick a knee-jerk reaction indicating that you may not have dealings with anyone in business or are just starting out on your own. Statements like
MOST of the people I know have at least 6-7 accounts with various financial institutions and many have the same 10-20 that I do with quite a few having enough to dwarf what I've got for accounts. I know of at least 3 people that I see at least once a week who had tax bills (after payroll contributions) over $7500 this year. I know one person who wrote a check to the IRS for $75,000 this year.
The simple reality is that once someone gets past living from paycheck to paycheck, there frequently are a lot of financial institutions one ends up dealing with. Every few years, I tend to try to consolidate stuff together, but it isn't a huge priority. 10 is really easy to get to: 2 checking (joint and personal), 2 personal credit cards (one Citibank for the miles, one Chase for carrying a balance for 2-3 months when necessary), a mortgage (Wells Fargo), a student loan (Sallie Mae), a 0% car loan (GMAC), a store credit card (Best Buy/Circuit City), a 401K (Putnam) and a money market stock account (Scottrade). That's 10 and there's not even a single business in there yet. Just typical American middle class setup.
Also keep in mind that you don't have to just believe me. Check out the class action lawsuits that have not only been filed, but settled. Check out the fights they've had with the banking laws in this country. Check out just how hard they work to hide their phone numbers and keep customers at arm's length. They truly are a company trying to get something for nothing.
Allow me to introduce myself (then you'll know someone with a Paypal problem), I'm J. Since you're relying on your anecdotes as evidence of Paypal's innocence, the $12,000 that was stolen from my credit cards and linked checking account, coupled with the fact that, even after they'd been notified that the transactions were fraudulent (which I had to tell them, even though all of the real banks involved notified me immediately), they tried to push the transactions through 2 more times (as a "convenience"), puts them in a pretty crappy category in my book. I, too, started using them in 1998. I, too, had their Mastercard. However, I had what you apparently see as a mythical bad experience with Paypal.
So, after signing over the naming rights to my backyard, I finally got a phone number to deal with them (note that all of the 10 or so real banks I currently have accounts with ALL have phone numbers readily available). Of course, Paypal's "dispute" resolution process is to lock all sides until *they* are satisfied that it was fraud. It actually took me nearly 6 months to convince them that, despite the fact that the most I'd moved around prior to that point was $400 and all of it domestic, I suddenly decided to transfer $12,000 to the Czech Republic at 3:00am on a Saturday. Once I finally convinced them that I wasn't the one who sent it, it took another 6 months to get the $150 or so I still had in the account.
Paypal wants to be treated like a real financial institution, but doesn't act like one.
The same way anyone does in a checks-and-balances system. They take a shot at what they think they'll get away with and the courts smack them down when someone challenges it. When you're writing a law, if you KNOW that it's going to be challenged anyway (like widening handgun permits), you probably don't want to attach it to an "Arts Budget Bill" as that is clearly going to be struck down.
In your example, it may or may not. At least "wind farms" are energy related and would reduce the chances of it being in violation of this particular rule. The abuses in question are typically far more flagrant than this though. Think more along the lines of a bill to "prevent teachers from striking during the school year" suddenly having a clause authorizing the governor of MN to declare war on Wisconsin, or a clause to drop the state income tax for everyone making more than $250,000. In either case, it's apparent to anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together, that school teacher strikes have nothing to do with the other clauses and they're added only because the teacher bill has a chance of passing. Both state and federal laws are littered with that kind of thing.
In the federal example (broadcast flag), if the bill it's being attached to isn't FCC or broadcast related, it'd be pretty clear to anyone that they're unrelated.
Yes, the Minnesota constitution requires that any bill be about one thing. As such, the recent handgun permit law that was tacked onto something else was held unconstitutional soley on those grounds.
Basically, if they want to pass the handgun law, they need to have it voted on on its own merits.
Hence my "above 3 at a time" comment.
Didn't I also head all about the wiki editorial pages on NPR on Sunday? As in, another huge audience hearing about it within the last few days?
"At least if one user's home directory is lost it does not wipe everything off the machine."
You just proved my point. On most home machines, even Linux ones, there really only *is* one important user. Any other users are usually pretty secondary. Shrugging it off as only "one user's home directory" is exactly why this is a problem. Destruction of my home directory (assuming I don't do backups, which I do*) would result in the destruction of probably close to 10,000 hours of work. Now, much of that work really wouldn't need to be redone, but compare that to the time to reinstall the relevant software and do a setup.
At work, the person seated at the machine 40 hours per week is the only user of consequence. Elminate their data and you're not talking about a 2-day rebuild, but possible 1-2 years to recreate anything not backed up.
I'm not saying you shouldn't backup. Obviously that's the "real" solution to stopping the destruction of data.
All I was commenting on the fact that a "secure" OS that still allows the destruction of the current user's data is only a small bit better than one that allows complete destruction due to the ratio of value between the OS and it's data and the user and their data.
*I keep my home directory under SVN control and back up the repository offsite.
Which is, incidentally, why Linux is just as vulnerable to virus destruction as any OS. It's "invulnerability" to viruses is almost always touted based on it's blocking of running arbitrary programs as root. However, when the primary value of the computer's setup is in the data, obliterating the current user's "home" directory is actually all the virus needs to do to be completely effective. Sure, the machine itself is still up and running, but the valuable stuff is gone.
Scenario Actually Happened:
95+% of American population farming by hand, raising large families to provide labor to eek out a subsistance living in the vast rural sections of the US.
The invention of the tractor, threshing machine and other technological advancements (the robots of the day), rendered the need for 25 people to hand thresh wheat or pick and process cotton unnecessary.
All of those unemployed people, PLUS one of the biggest immigration booms in US history brought millions of former farmers into "unemployment". Yet, manufacturing (a job that didn't exist before this shift) not only gave most of them jobs, it raised the overall standard of living in the country dramatically over the next century. Those jobs would never have been filled or created unless innovation had forced well over 90% of the existing population and most of the immigrating population into unemployment. That slack in available labor led to the Industrial Revolution (and many would argue, the American Civil War).
Now, the exact same thing is happening to manufacturing (and to some other types of repetitive tasks in technology).
Yeah. The whole mentality that a "successful" company can only happen if they are not only publicly traded, but number 1 in their industry and anything else is a "failure" bugs me to no end.
Given that 75% of jobs in the US are with small businesses (though the definition of small is still really subjective), that approach means you can retire with millions in the bank as a "failure". I'll take that any day.
Success in business should be determined only by the ability to make a profit over the long term. By that definition, you can create a successful business in almost any industry and don't even need to work at it full time or have even a single employee. A website that costs $200 a month in expenses and time and brings in $500 a month is a success. I'd rather own 100 of those than 1 business that loses $2 million a year on revenues of $500 million.
The entrepreneur in charge of a business might not be a success (as the definition needs to then be applied to the person just like it is to the business) if the individual business doesn't bring in enough money for their personal expenses and savings, but the business itself can still be a success.
It's actually about $48 for 8 at a time (that's the plan I'm currently on).
However, Netflix's pricing is entirely linear for the number of movies you can have out (above 3 at a time). It's just tiered, which gives some weird breaks.