I took my dad to the doctor yesterday... His office has computerized records that they share with the hospital system they're affiliated with. There is a computer in front of the secretary at the front desk, a computer in the doctor's personal office, two computers that the nurses use... OH, and a computer in every patient room. Computers the patients are left alone with. The computers sit there idling at a screensaver and the doctor or nurse taps the mouse, selects their username (which happens to be dr-lastname or n-lastname). I also watched my doctor type his password, word#word. There's nothing stopping me from logging in as him and accessing, at a minimum, all of his patients and maybe all of the patients that are affiliated with his hospital system, including patients not just of the hospital, but of other doctors as well.
Those are available at every doctor's office, every hospital, etc. If we're going to computerize all medical records, add in physical therapy offices, psychologists, psychiatrists, dentists, etc. The terminals might as well be just as ubiquitous as credit card terminals. My mom works in an administrative position at a different hospital and they've gone so insane territorially that people can't access the things they need to under their own accounts (like radiology techs not being able to log into the system they use to send the records back to doctors), so they leave terminals logged in with global permissions all the time. It completely destroys auditing and allows people that don't even work in the hospital to access anything they want if they get a couple seconds to themselves (and yes, they most certainly do). There's also a stack of blank DVDs and a burner there so the techs can send the images by carrier or give them to the patient to bring back to their doctors as well. Nothing like them supplying the media for you to copy someone else's records to too.
Digital health records are going to be even more open to abuse than credit records. I've seen the ease of access first hand. And, I know there are people here that will disagree with me, but to me, my health records are my most private records, even moreso than my banking records. I don't want just anyone snooping through them. I sure as hell don't want my government in them (and I love the hypocrisy from some factions that say it's a violation of your rights to listen to your international calls to a terrorists, but it's cool if they want to not just be able to look through your medical history, but control it)
I'm on the flip side... I grew up and live out in the sticks, just down the road from a dairy farm. I can hear the birds chirping right now. I find solace in the quiet and when I go hunting, I'm amazed as all my senses come alive, sitting there waiting for a deer to come along, listening to leaves fall (yeah, leaves actually make a lot of noise just falling off a tree), squirrels and chipmunks play, etc. The quiet makes me feel in tune with my surroundings.
When I go to the city, all I hear is noise. My senses dull and I feel overloaded. I have a hard time not being able to hear things I'm used to hearing while at the same time, hearing a thousand fold more of those things at the same time. For example, out here, you hear a horn beep... in a traffic jam, you hear 100 horns going and its hard to single out any particular one and where it's coming from. It stresses me out and compels me to return to my natural quiet. I can't bear more than a few hours in a city and when I've tried to spend a night in one, I can't sleep because of the constant noise.
I think it all comes down to a comfort zone with the surroundings we grew up in and the stark contrast to it when we find ourselves in different surroundings. Some people can adjust, others can't, but regardless, we all pine for mom's cooking as we get older.
and again, the "derivative work" threats from Ryan Dancey predated the creation of the OGL. All I could go buy was their previous history as T$R under Lorraine Williams and the implied threats of their product manager. Hindsight may be 20/20, but you have to make decisions with the information you have at the time.
As for shooting themselves in the foot, we'll never know how many 1E/2E players never bought any 3E+ material. It might have only been a dozen of us out of the hundreds or thousands that were reading rec.games.frp.dnd at the time, but that doesn't change the fact that their implied legal threats did scare off some (at least one) previous customers from buying their products, not to mention pulling campaign material off the net. I do remember other people doing the latter at the time, whether or not they ever put it back up, I don't know.
It does hurt the bottom line to scare off people that literally have bought thousands of dollars worth of your products by implying legal ramifications even though you never follow through on them. It was a completely pointless campaign by Dancey that could do nothing BUT hurt the company's image.
I'm sure plenty of people played 3E/3.5E/4E... Obviously, not everyone did what I did or else D&D wouldn't still be sitting on store shelves. But for me, their impled legal threats were enough for me to walk away.
As for buying new material, with about 60 1E/2E books (full books, not modules) sitting on my shelf, I've been able to continue gaming just fine without buying new material since 2000. That's kinda the point of why they pulled sales of the PDFs, because the real value is in the settings, monsters, etc and not the new numbers in the books for the slightly juggled rule systems.
I've never looked inside a 3E/4E book. I've never touched an OGL/SRD product. They successfully scared me off, shooting themselves in the foot much like the RIAA is doing today. I mean, I bought 60ish books at $20 or so a pop (compared to my players, whom generally had 3-4 books (PHB, PO:S&P, and some class/race books) and relied on my library for anything else). I was one of their best customers until they decided to start threatening us... but once threatened, I don't soon forget, promises of an Open Gaming License or not.
Again, this was BEFORE OGL, D20 and SRD... Dancey supposedly came up with them in response to the complaints we had in rec.games.frp.dnd.
But if you read through the entire threads on the issue at that time, Dancey was definitely strongly implying a whole lot of "if it uses AD&D rules, we own it." Dancey even tried to claim copyright on the game mechanics (which everyone knows aren't copyrightable... the expression of the rules, yes, but not the rules themselves).
Not being able to afford a lawyer should they try to assert ownership of my campaign setting (which I had available online at the time), I pulled it and none of it has ever been online again since. In fact, I haven't bought any D&D product since 2000, so Dancey sure did a great job at keeping us 1E/2E people excited about the game as they were getting ready to launch 3E. By the time the OGL came out, I had no faith left in TSR/WOTC/Hasbro and, as the post below illustrates, the possibility that they were still claiming ownership of my material if I used them anyway.
What this is really about is them trying to force people to go out and buy 4E material. Having low cost OOP material out there diminishes the value of their current product by saturating the market. D&D is about the story, not about the numbers... so if you have original setting material, it isn't hard to adapt it to current rules.
They lost me a long time ago when then current head of the AD&D product line tried to assert ownership over all third party content, including homemade settings that weren't tied to any particular rule system, claiming that anything that used the AD&D rules was a derivative work.
I've found quite a bit of useful info here and here
While not specific to AvPD, "Painfully Shy: How to Overcome Social Anxiety & Reclaim Your Life" by
Barbara G. Markway, who herself suffers from Social Anxiety, was helpful in trying to construct some self-therapy.
As for the therapist route, to be frank, I don't trust them enough. I haven't even gone to my PCP in 6 or 7 years because of an experience I had taking my disabled dad to one (who was also mine). Doctor turned me in to Adult Protective Services because I brought him in with an ulcer on his foot. Turns out he developed diabetes from being largely immobile from a stroke, yet, somehow, I was investigated for abusing him somehow even though you would think it would be up to his doctor to discover his diabetes (and no blame required at that point). I really enjoy hunting and wouldn't want to risk losing my right to bear arms by seeing a therapist and telling them about my feelings of exclusion from society and history of suicidal depression (though I never tried to kill myself). In fact, people in the field speculate that they don't really know a lot about people with AvPD or how to effectively treat them because they tend to avoid seeking help (avoidants avoiding, how existential).
Anyway, I wasn't trying to say that you necessarily have AvPD, just that people are quick to diagnose themselves while missing something that may fit their symptoms better, and that I was guilty of that myself.
I once thought I had a mild case of Aspergers myself... I'm quite intelligent, frequently intensely focus on a few interests to the exclusion of others, have firm routines and rituals that I don't like becoming upset, and mostly importantly, I feel completely socially inept and have a constant prevalence of "fight or flight" instinct.
The single biggest issue that affects me compared to "normal people" in my age range (I'm 32), is that I never grew out of the intense shyness, have a hard time relating to people socially, and still have a need need for acceptance/approval that most teenagers feel. I'm constantly overanalyzing social situations that I'm in, especially if it is with a woman I'm interested in. Frequently, I shut down and can't even talk to them (fight or flight kicks in). I don't let people get close to me without constantly testing their loyalty to and approval of me. I make excuses with my existing friends to not go out with them when they offer. I don't go to places where I've never been before unless I'm accompanied by a friend. I continually pre-reject myself on behalf of people I don't even know because I feel like such a failure. I'm constantly paranoid that other people are judging me and will avoid large crowds or even going to stores during normal hours to minimize my stress levels.
Previously, it was really just my social life and I was fine at work (I managed a restaurant). Since I quit my job two years ago (management taking advantage of me and I finally stood up for myself), it has begun to affect other portions of my life. After being turned down for jobs I am overqualified for, I don't bother to submit applications anymore... I can't handle being rejected from yet another source. My need to avoid people in my daily life has increased. I switched television providers and it took a couple months before I finally called to cancel my previous service because I didn't want to face their rejection over the phone.
After a lot of research, I came across a little known disorder related to social phobia called Avoidant Personality Disorder. It's classic trademark is that suffers will tend to avoid doing things which could threaten their fragile status quo generally out of a fear of being rejected, whether it is logically probable or not. They (I) tend to have low self esteem, feel inadequate and socially inept, have few friends, have severe issues with meeting potential mates, are constantly in that state of fight or flight looking for rejection, and will avoid doing things rather than face the "certainty" of rejection.
Something like AvPD tends to be less well known by more general therapists and people get lumped into one of the more common groups out of ignorance on the part of therapists and laziness. It's easier to just say someone has ASD, ADD/ADHD, social anxiety, etc than it is to find out what's really going on. Lump them in a group, throw them some pills and be done with it. Meanwhile, their real problem isn't being treated so they either keep coming back for more treatment or else they abandon hope and leave treatment altogether (possibly going down in the cured column since the therapist figures they stopped because they didn't need it anymore).
and I think it's even more prevalent in the self-diagnosis crowd... "oh, well, I have X Y and Z, so that means I have A and it justifies my behavior. People will just have to learn to accept my disorder." In reality, it's very likely they don't even have A, but it becomes justification for their behavior and an excuse for future behavior. "I have Aspergers, so if I'm an asshole, don't blame me, blame the disease." Problem is, there's no simple definitive test for this kind of stuff, so people can't be ruled absolutely in or absolutely out. It takes a sub-specialist in a certain field to determine whether or not someone really has what they think they do but most people get hung up on diagnosing themselves with the first thing that kinda meets their symptoms.
I just bought a new laptop that, unfortunately, came pre-installed with Vista. I spent the better part of the day creating settings by hand, tweaking this and that, to get things setup how I wanted them to be. I don't know of any handy way to copy my XP registry over from my old laptop to Vista on the new laptop(I could be wrong, I don't use windows for anything of importance so I haven't taken the time to learn all the power user tricks). That's to say nothing of all my application settings that were lost since they were written to the registry in my old laptop.
I installed Linux on it as well. You know what it took to copy over all of my settings and data?
cd/hpme
cp -a/mnt/nfs/home/user.
<sarcasm>That registry sure does make everything so much easier...</sarcasm> and that cp works even across different architectures, Linux distributions, etc.
Amazon does thousands (millions?) of transactions per day, so they have a lot more negotiating power than someone doing 20 transactions per day (which was about normal for the restaurant I worked at). Ditto for paypal, which someone else mentioned.
The bigger you are, the more the merchant bank wants your money, so the more likely they are to cut a deal favorable to you (because a smaller amount of a lot of transactions beats getting a larger amount of no transactions when you go to a competitor).
Bigger businesses work out better deals with the credit card processing companies (often working directly with the credit network instead of an intermediary) while smaller businesses can't do that, so you get stuck with a middle man making profit for not doing much other than passing your transactions to the merchants.
I wasn't involved in the actual negotiations with credit card processing companies, the owners of the restaurant did that themselves. All I know are the details of the deal they negotiated for us (and knowing how cheap the owners were, I'm sure they got the best deal they had available to them and they took 6 months from the time they decided to take cards until actually having a reader in the restaurant, so I don't think they went with the first processor).
To the AC below, we were charged just the transaction fee on debit cards, not the percentage, so it was a flat 75 cents for all debit transactions. That still puts us a quarter in the hole on a $1 candy bar.
Buying that candy bar with your credit card likely cost the merchant money. There's a base transaction fee (75 cents at the place I managed), a purchase percentage fee (Master/Visa was 2%, Discover 3% and AmEx 5%) that they keep, a card rejection fee (swipe an expired card and you just cost them another 25 cents to tell you it was expired), etc.
So, at best, your $1 candy bar cost the merchant 77-80 cents in just transaction fees, in addition to the 50 cents or so they paid to actually purchase the bar for you to buy... In other words, he just lose about 30 cents to sell it to you... In addition to that, there are fees just to check your balance for the day, fees to request a payment from your processor, etc. Debit cards are slightly cheaper to process, but overall, the break even point for the restaurant I used to manage was about $5 per transaction. Guess what we set the minimum transaction at?
We only started taking cards because so many people don't carry cash these days, so we were turning customers away. Most are quite understanding about the minimum transaction once we explain why we have it. We do make exceptions for regulars or if someone just bought $30 worth of food and forgot to order some fries or something. You might not like it, however, we can't stay in business long if we're losing money on every transaction, so where are you going to buy your candy bar from then, your high horse?
...And so the 33% suffer. Too bad, because if the providers could provide to 200% more users, they could lower the cost to all.
Only if deployment is free... let's say you have 10 people with access all clumped together and 10 more spread miles apart from each other. Adding those 10 new customers might mean that you're now operating at a loss and can't sustain your business because it cost too much to roll the cable out to then. The farther out from the clump, the more expensive it becomes to deliver that connection relative to the clump, so prices won't drop.
When I was a kid, we moved to a house one road outside of the main part of my town. Cable went down both roads that ran perpendicularly to mine, but we couldn't get the cable company to put it down the road. 16 houses over 2 miles just wouldn't be profitable unless every house signed up. They wanted a minimum of 30 houses on the road. About 10 years later, we finally got the required number and they strung cable down the road. Most people got it... and a couple years later when DirecTV/Dish Network rolled out, roughly half the houses on the road put up a dish and dropped cable. I'm sure the cable company recouped their investment sometime in the last 15 years, since they did have multiple customers... but can you imagine how long it would take to repay the installation of a 2 mile long cable to deliver service to a single person? Especially if said person promptly switches to a new service when it becomes available...
It might double revenue, but it doesn't double profits... in fact, it will lower their profit margins, possibly to the point of them becoming negative.
I have my home server on an UPS, but it didn't stop the power supply connector on my motherboard (Tyan S2460, it happened to other people on slashdot too) from shorting out, bringing down my system. A UPS is a tool to help prevent catastrophic failure, but it isn't guarantee.
a filesystem should help insulate the data during sudden power loss, not pretty much guarantee that it will thrash all of your data. Sometimes, shit just happens despite the best planning.
I converted a ~40GB partition and it took a while (I didn't time it... between 1 and 2 hours).
Per Ted Ts'o
The fix is checked into e2fsprogs 1.41.4 but release is waiting for a couple other high priority bugfixes to be released. If you want it now, you can pull it from his git repo
I migrated some of my non-critical partitions over to EXT4 and hit a race condition that corrupted my filesystem and resulted in data loss (the bug has since been fixed). I'm waiting a little longer before converting my important partitions over.
Switching from EXT3 to EXT4 is as simple as a flag change and a remount. HOWEVER, your existing data will still be laid out without extents and thus you'll miss you on a lot of the improvements in EXT4. Eventually, an online defragmenter will be written to defrag your drive while mounted and convert the old data to use extents, but Ted T'so says there are problems with the existing implementations and a working one isn't on the near horizon. Your best bet would be to move the data to another partition and back to convert it to using extents in the meantime.
Also note that if you're using extents, you can no longer mount the partition as EXT3.
I upgraded my 2AA Mini-Maglite to LED about a year ago since I couldn't find the standard bulbs locally. I'm going to guess I use it for about 10 minutes every day (in addition to longer durations like when the power goes out) and it's still on the cheap Rayovac batteries I put in it then. I'll estimate at least 4000 minutes on this set of batteries so far and the light still isn't noticeably dim. I can only imagine how long a 4D light would last.
I'm 31 and have been gaming since I was about 4 years old and got a knockoff Atari. I later transitioned to the NES and then SNES. I remember the Neo-Geo being all the rage because of the awesome 24 bit graphics (along with an insane price tag and games that cost as an entire SNES). I happily kept playing along on my consoles anyway, even still digging out the Atari for some good games despite the blocky graphics. Eventually, I switched from console gaming to PC gaming mostly due to the old AD&D CRPGs. By the time Doom 2 came out, I was gaming exclusively on the PC. I dual booted for a while until Loki came around and I got to play commercial games in Linux. To this day, I'm still content playing the games that run in Linux and I've watched a hundred games get hyped for months leading up to their release by Windows users and then forgotten a month later. It seems a lot of games are made to be consumed and most hardcore gamers need to get their fix by going from the current hyped game to the next hyped game as soon as the studios can rush them out.
I bought a Wii the week they came out and I've got 14 game sitting on my shelf. I play what I find fun, not what gets all the buzz. After all, I'm the only one that can truly determine my happiness because if I let others determine it for me, well, they're living my life, I'm not living my own. So yeah, I see the commercials for "HypedGame 7 only on PS360!" and yawn. Big deal. Remember how cool Assassin's Creed was going to be? Or the hype of Heavenly Sword and how that was going to launch the PS3 into the lead for this generation? When was the last time either of those games were even mentioned? I haven't played either and, you know what, I didn't miss them. They were hyped, summarily beaten in hours, and forgotten by the hardcores.
It kinda reminds me of my EverCrack days, where the hardcore guilds would do everything they could to conquer the content as fast as possible, meaning devs were always working on new content to keep the hardcores happy, bugs went unfixed and the less hardcore raiders (not to mention the purely casual gamers) were completely ignored. It got to the point where most of the people playing the game never got to see even half the content in the game all to keep the hardcore junkies hooked and needing a fix.
Taking that back to the broader video game subject, the hardcore gamers are just moving from one big budget game to the next with very few really good games out there... and I think that's exactly the opposite of where we need to be. Yes, contemporary graphics are a good thing, but should as much effort go into rendering a rippled water reflection in a fountain that you're going to spend a half second running by as developers put into making the game actually fun, memorable and replayable? If I want perfect reality, I'll look out my window. I play games to have fun. And that... is what Nintendo is trying to tap into, making gmaes that are fun for a lot of people rather than a 30 second "gee whiz, look at that!" for a few people. And you know what? That's fine by me... which is why I'll stick with my Wii instead of getting caught up in the hype of the next XBox3 game.
Congresscritters when they kneejerked after the 2000 elections and gave us HAVA in an effort to look like they were doing something. 357 Representatives and 92 Senators seemed to think it was a great idea, not to mention all the states that signed up going "ooh, free money!"
Once they understand it to be a revenue source they will, as restaurants already do about other kinds of waste oil, be more than willing to make the storage space to accommodate the extra income.
I'm not sure about where you live, but here in western NY, restaurants generally don't get paid for their used fryer oil. Rather, it costs $35 a month to rent an oil dumpster and to have it emptied (at least it did at the restaurant I managed up until 2 years ago). We had someone offer to take the oil for free from us to convert to bio-diesel, but it actually cost us more money to give it away to him since we had to waste time opening and closing buckets, being sure to carefully pour it, etc. At 10 extra minutes per night (2 employees at 5 minutes each), that's an extra 5 hours (300 minutes) a month at roughly $11 per hour (don't forget the business costs above paid wages to employ someone and NY's minimum wage is higher than the federal one). Further, we had to go through the hassle of keeping a second bucket to transfer waste oil around since we couldn't dump the stuff from the grease traps on the grills into his buckets because he didn't want to deal with separating the impurities.
What are restaurants going to do? They can't just dump the oil into the garbage (and you don't want to see what happens to your plumbing when you dispose of used oil in a sink) or else the garbage company and environmental agencies will be after you, so they have to pay the disposal fees. The marginal cost is passed on to the customers as part of the cost of doing business. Even if the restaurants got paid by someone picking up the oil, you don't think they're going to lower their prices by that marginal amount, do you? It'll just be a way to make more money (and then we can hear about big chains that have LOTS of oil making obscene profits at the expense of their poor customers).
Anyway, much like used vegetable oil, there will be increased costs associated with separating and storing a specific waste item. If just 10 minutes a day is wasted on it, then you're just breaking even with your $60 projected revenue stream. In fact, other work that could be getting done is getting delayed in that time (and anyone that has ever worked in, much less managed, a restaurant knows there's always something that can be done). It's just not worth the hassle.
My former high school is a little different. Same status as one of the better public schools in the state back when I was there. Since I've left, dropouts have increased from 5% to near 20% and on time graduation rates are down from 87% to 72%. Classes have increased from 100-120 when I was there to about 150 now, so it's not quite the growth your school saw, but in response, the school has spent a buttload of money building extra classrooms (because, you see, each teacher has the right to have their own classroom, which sits empty half the day, so we need to build a new one for every teacher hired). We've spent about $10 million a year in bonded capital improvements over the last decade or so while we've averaged around $150k a year on books. And that's before we even talk about lighted lavish sports fields and buildings (and I'm someone that played high school football under the lights on a field that had its own field house)
The mis-spent money is one thing... where the real difference comes in, and it was noticeable between my "generation" (class of 95) and my sister's (who is 7 years younger than me), was the teachers. As I came up through school, most of my teachers retired within a year or two of my having them. I had the old school teachers who taught the 3 Rs, taught you to memorize things and instilled some measure of critical thinking ability. Some where better than others, some were worse, but we had a clear foundation to build on. My sister got their fresh faced replacements, fresh out of college with new ideas on how to teach. They focused more on self-esteem and using technology than understanding how things actually worked. As such, my sister didn't get that same foundation to build on that I did.
I managed a restaurant for 10 years and dealt with kids about my own age and with this next generation... Even the dimmer bulbs of my generation had a little drive and a desire to learn how to do things. The newer generation of kids expect everything to be handed to them, can't properly fill out an application (and their spelling is atrocious!), can't do simple arithmetic without a calculator and whenever you tell them they're doing something wrong, no matter how gently you try, they completely break down. I couldn't tell you the number of people, especially girls, I've had cry on me in recent years because they made a very minor mistake and had to be corrected on it (such as not charging for a 25 cent side).
Yeah, for a lot of kids, it's the parents that need to take a majority of the blame for their kids being spoiled, can-do-no-wrong, praise seeking idiots, but the education system is very flawed as well (given that such a dichotomy can exist within the same family... my sister was pushed by our parents the same way I was). We need to look at education theory and throw in a little practice; We need to start doing the things we know work again and stop placing the majority of our focus on things that should work because someone in an ivory tower said so.
ebuilds are the packages in gentoo, overlays are unofficial repositories of ebuilds.
That said, the binary ebuild downloads from the gentoo mirrors rather than the official OpenOffice.org web/ftp servers, but the source built version downloads directly from go-oo.org
No identification is required in NY when you go to the polls... you just sign your name in the register of eligible voters and they conveniently give you a copy of your signature to look at while you do it.
Prior to the Seventeenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, we used to have such a body... The Senate used to be selected by the state legislatures they represent. These "statesmen" were usually considered some of the wisest and judicious people in their states. They were given 6 year terms so their position wouldn't be dependent upon the whims of the fickle populace.
These days, the Senate is just another popularity contest where statesmanship has gone out the window in favor of pandering...
Slashdot Mirror
I took my dad to the doctor yesterday... His office has computerized records that they share with the hospital system they're affiliated with. There is a computer in front of the secretary at the front desk, a computer in the doctor's personal office, two computers that the nurses use... OH, and a computer in every patient room. Computers the patients are left alone with. The computers sit there idling at a screensaver and the doctor or nurse taps the mouse, selects their username (which happens to be dr-lastname or n-lastname). I also watched my doctor type his password, word#word. There's nothing stopping me from logging in as him and accessing, at a minimum, all of his patients and maybe all of the patients that are affiliated with his hospital system, including patients not just of the hospital, but of other doctors as well.
Those are available at every doctor's office, every hospital, etc. If we're going to computerize all medical records, add in physical therapy offices, psychologists, psychiatrists, dentists, etc. The terminals might as well be just as ubiquitous as credit card terminals. My mom works in an administrative position at a different hospital and they've gone so insane territorially that people can't access the things they need to under their own accounts (like radiology techs not being able to log into the system they use to send the records back to doctors), so they leave terminals logged in with global permissions all the time. It completely destroys auditing and allows people that don't even work in the hospital to access anything they want if they get a couple seconds to themselves (and yes, they most certainly do). There's also a stack of blank DVDs and a burner there so the techs can send the images by carrier or give them to the patient to bring back to their doctors as well. Nothing like them supplying the media for you to copy someone else's records to too.
Digital health records are going to be even more open to abuse than credit records. I've seen the ease of access first hand. And, I know there are people here that will disagree with me, but to me, my health records are my most private records, even moreso than my banking records. I don't want just anyone snooping through them. I sure as hell don't want my government in them (and I love the hypocrisy from some factions that say it's a violation of your rights to listen to your international calls to a terrorists, but it's cool if they want to not just be able to look through your medical history, but control it)
I'm on the flip side... I grew up and live out in the sticks, just down the road from a dairy farm. I can hear the birds chirping right now. I find solace in the quiet and when I go hunting, I'm amazed as all my senses come alive, sitting there waiting for a deer to come along, listening to leaves fall (yeah, leaves actually make a lot of noise just falling off a tree), squirrels and chipmunks play, etc. The quiet makes me feel in tune with my surroundings.
When I go to the city, all I hear is noise. My senses dull and I feel overloaded. I have a hard time not being able to hear things I'm used to hearing while at the same time, hearing a thousand fold more of those things at the same time. For example, out here, you hear a horn beep... in a traffic jam, you hear 100 horns going and its hard to single out any particular one and where it's coming from. It stresses me out and compels me to return to my natural quiet. I can't bear more than a few hours in a city and when I've tried to spend a night in one, I can't sleep because of the constant noise.
I think it all comes down to a comfort zone with the surroundings we grew up in and the stark contrast to it when we find ourselves in different surroundings. Some people can adjust, others can't, but regardless, we all pine for mom's cooking as we get older.
and again, the "derivative work" threats from Ryan Dancey predated the creation of the OGL. All I could go buy was their previous history as T$R under Lorraine Williams and the implied threats of their product manager. Hindsight may be 20/20, but you have to make decisions with the information you have at the time.
As for shooting themselves in the foot, we'll never know how many 1E/2E players never bought any 3E+ material. It might have only been a dozen of us out of the hundreds or thousands that were reading rec.games.frp.dnd at the time, but that doesn't change the fact that their implied legal threats did scare off some (at least one) previous customers from buying their products, not to mention pulling campaign material off the net. I do remember other people doing the latter at the time, whether or not they ever put it back up, I don't know.
It does hurt the bottom line to scare off people that literally have bought thousands of dollars worth of your products by implying legal ramifications even though you never follow through on them. It was a completely pointless campaign by Dancey that could do nothing BUT hurt the company's image.
I'm sure plenty of people played 3E/3.5E/4E... Obviously, not everyone did what I did or else D&D wouldn't still be sitting on store shelves. But for me, their impled legal threats were enough for me to walk away.
As for buying new material, with about 60 1E/2E books (full books, not modules) sitting on my shelf, I've been able to continue gaming just fine without buying new material since 2000. That's kinda the point of why they pulled sales of the PDFs, because the real value is in the settings, monsters, etc and not the new numbers in the books for the slightly juggled rule systems.
I've never looked inside a 3E/4E book. I've never touched an OGL/SRD product. They successfully scared me off, shooting themselves in the foot much like the RIAA is doing today. I mean, I bought 60ish books at $20 or so a pop (compared to my players, whom generally had 3-4 books (PHB, PO:S&P, and some class/race books) and relied on my library for anything else). I was one of their best customers until they decided to start threatening us... but once threatened, I don't soon forget, promises of an Open Gaming License or not.
Again, this was BEFORE OGL, D20 and SRD... Dancey supposedly came up with them in response to the complaints we had in rec.games.frp.dnd.
But if you read through the entire threads on the issue at that time, Dancey was definitely strongly implying a whole lot of "if it uses AD&D rules, we own it." Dancey even tried to claim copyright on the game mechanics (which everyone knows aren't copyrightable... the expression of the rules, yes, but not the rules themselves).
Not being able to afford a lawyer should they try to assert ownership of my campaign setting (which I had available online at the time), I pulled it and none of it has ever been online again since. In fact, I haven't bought any D&D product since 2000, so Dancey sure did a great job at keeping us 1E/2E people excited about the game as they were getting ready to launch 3E. By the time the OGL came out, I had no faith left in TSR/WOTC/Hasbro and, as the post below illustrates, the possibility that they were still claiming ownership of my material if I used them anyway.
It was Ryan Dancy on rec.games.frp.dnd back in 2000, before the OGL and SRD.
Here are a couple links to threads from around that time.
What this is really about is them trying to force people to go out and buy 4E material. Having low cost OOP material out there diminishes the value of their current product by saturating the market. D&D is about the story, not about the numbers... so if you have original setting material, it isn't hard to adapt it to current rules.
They lost me a long time ago when then current head of the AD&D product line tried to assert ownership over all third party content, including homemade settings that weren't tied to any particular rule system, claiming that anything that used the AD&D rules was a derivative work.
I've found quite a bit of useful info here and here
While not specific to AvPD, "Painfully Shy: How to Overcome Social Anxiety & Reclaim Your Life" by Barbara G. Markway, who herself suffers from Social Anxiety, was helpful in trying to construct some self-therapy.
As for the therapist route, to be frank, I don't trust them enough. I haven't even gone to my PCP in 6 or 7 years because of an experience I had taking my disabled dad to one (who was also mine). Doctor turned me in to Adult Protective Services because I brought him in with an ulcer on his foot. Turns out he developed diabetes from being largely immobile from a stroke, yet, somehow, I was investigated for abusing him somehow even though you would think it would be up to his doctor to discover his diabetes (and no blame required at that point). I really enjoy hunting and wouldn't want to risk losing my right to bear arms by seeing a therapist and telling them about my feelings of exclusion from society and history of suicidal depression (though I never tried to kill myself). In fact, people in the field speculate that they don't really know a lot about people with AvPD or how to effectively treat them because they tend to avoid seeking help (avoidants avoiding, how existential).
Anyway, I wasn't trying to say that you necessarily have AvPD, just that people are quick to diagnose themselves while missing something that may fit their symptoms better, and that I was guilty of that myself.
I once thought I had a mild case of Aspergers myself... I'm quite intelligent, frequently intensely focus on a few interests to the exclusion of others, have firm routines and rituals that I don't like becoming upset, and mostly importantly, I feel completely socially inept and have a constant prevalence of "fight or flight" instinct.
The single biggest issue that affects me compared to "normal people" in my age range (I'm 32), is that I never grew out of the intense shyness, have a hard time relating to people socially, and still have a need need for acceptance/approval that most teenagers feel. I'm constantly overanalyzing social situations that I'm in, especially if it is with a woman I'm interested in. Frequently, I shut down and can't even talk to them (fight or flight kicks in). I don't let people get close to me without constantly testing their loyalty to and approval of me. I make excuses with my existing friends to not go out with them when they offer. I don't go to places where I've never been before unless I'm accompanied by a friend. I continually pre-reject myself on behalf of people I don't even know because I feel like such a failure. I'm constantly paranoid that other people are judging me and will avoid large crowds or even going to stores during normal hours to minimize my stress levels.
Previously, it was really just my social life and I was fine at work (I managed a restaurant). Since I quit my job two years ago (management taking advantage of me and I finally stood up for myself), it has begun to affect other portions of my life. After being turned down for jobs I am overqualified for, I don't bother to submit applications anymore... I can't handle being rejected from yet another source. My need to avoid people in my daily life has increased. I switched television providers and it took a couple months before I finally called to cancel my previous service because I didn't want to face their rejection over the phone.
After a lot of research, I came across a little known disorder related to social phobia called Avoidant Personality Disorder. It's classic trademark is that suffers will tend to avoid doing things which could threaten their fragile status quo generally out of a fear of being rejected, whether it is logically probable or not. They (I) tend to have low self esteem, feel inadequate and socially inept, have few friends, have severe issues with meeting potential mates, are constantly in that state of fight or flight looking for rejection, and will avoid doing things rather than face the "certainty" of rejection.
Something like AvPD tends to be less well known by more general therapists and people get lumped into one of the more common groups out of ignorance on the part of therapists and laziness. It's easier to just say someone has ASD, ADD/ADHD, social anxiety, etc than it is to find out what's really going on. Lump them in a group, throw them some pills and be done with it. Meanwhile, their real problem isn't being treated so they either keep coming back for more treatment or else they abandon hope and leave treatment altogether (possibly going down in the cured column since the therapist figures they stopped because they didn't need it anymore).
and I think it's even more prevalent in the self-diagnosis crowd... "oh, well, I have X Y and Z, so that means I have A and it justifies my behavior. People will just have to learn to accept my disorder." In reality, it's very likely they don't even have A, but it becomes justification for their behavior and an excuse for future behavior. "I have Aspergers, so if I'm an asshole, don't blame me, blame the disease." Problem is, there's no simple definitive test for this kind of stuff, so people can't be ruled absolutely in or absolutely out. It takes a sub-specialist in a certain field to determine whether or not someone really has what they think they do but most people get hung up on diagnosing themselves with the first thing that kinda meets their symptoms.
They say pre-med students make t
I just bought a new laptop that, unfortunately, came pre-installed with Vista. I spent the better part of the day creating settings by hand, tweaking this and that, to get things setup how I wanted them to be. I don't know of any handy way to copy my XP registry over from my old laptop to Vista on the new laptop(I could be wrong, I don't use windows for anything of importance so I haven't taken the time to learn all the power user tricks). That's to say nothing of all my application settings that were lost since they were written to the registry in my old laptop.
/hpme /mnt/nfs/home/user .
I installed Linux on it as well. You know what it took to copy over all of my settings and data?
cd
cp -a
<sarcasm>That registry sure does make everything so much easier...</sarcasm> and that cp works even across different architectures, Linux distributions, etc.
Amazon does thousands (millions?) of transactions per day, so they have a lot more negotiating power than someone doing 20 transactions per day (which was about normal for the restaurant I worked at). Ditto for paypal, which someone else mentioned.
The bigger you are, the more the merchant bank wants your money, so the more likely they are to cut a deal favorable to you (because a smaller amount of a lot of transactions beats getting a larger amount of no transactions when you go to a competitor).
Bigger businesses work out better deals with the credit card processing companies (often working directly with the credit network instead of an intermediary) while smaller businesses can't do that, so you get stuck with a middle man making profit for not doing much other than passing your transactions to the merchants.
I wasn't involved in the actual negotiations with credit card processing companies, the owners of the restaurant did that themselves. All I know are the details of the deal they negotiated for us (and knowing how cheap the owners were, I'm sure they got the best deal they had available to them and they took 6 months from the time they decided to take cards until actually having a reader in the restaurant, so I don't think they went with the first processor).
To the AC below, we were charged just the transaction fee on debit cards, not the percentage, so it was a flat 75 cents for all debit transactions. That still puts us a quarter in the hole on a $1 candy bar.
Buying that candy bar with your credit card likely cost the merchant money. There's a base transaction fee (75 cents at the place I managed), a purchase percentage fee (Master/Visa was 2%, Discover 3% and AmEx 5%) that they keep, a card rejection fee (swipe an expired card and you just cost them another 25 cents to tell you it was expired), etc.
So, at best, your $1 candy bar cost the merchant 77-80 cents in just transaction fees, in addition to the 50 cents or so they paid to actually purchase the bar for you to buy... In other words, he just lose about 30 cents to sell it to you... In addition to that, there are fees just to check your balance for the day, fees to request a payment from your processor, etc. Debit cards are slightly cheaper to process, but overall, the break even point for the restaurant I used to manage was about $5 per transaction. Guess what we set the minimum transaction at?
We only started taking cards because so many people don't carry cash these days, so we were turning customers away. Most are quite understanding about the minimum transaction once we explain why we have it. We do make exceptions for regulars or if someone just bought $30 worth of food and forgot to order some fries or something. You might not like it, however, we can't stay in business long if we're losing money on every transaction, so where are you going to buy your candy bar from then, your high horse?
...And so the 33% suffer. Too bad, because if the providers could provide to 200% more users, they could lower the cost to all.
Only if deployment is free... let's say you have 10 people with access all clumped together and 10 more spread miles apart from each other. Adding those 10 new customers might mean that you're now operating at a loss and can't sustain your business because it cost too much to roll the cable out to then. The farther out from the clump, the more expensive it becomes to deliver that connection relative to the clump, so prices won't drop.
When I was a kid, we moved to a house one road outside of the main part of my town. Cable went down both roads that ran perpendicularly to mine, but we couldn't get the cable company to put it down the road. 16 houses over 2 miles just wouldn't be profitable unless every house signed up. They wanted a minimum of 30 houses on the road. About 10 years later, we finally got the required number and they strung cable down the road. Most people got it... and a couple years later when DirecTV/Dish Network rolled out, roughly half the houses on the road put up a dish and dropped cable. I'm sure the cable company recouped their investment sometime in the last 15 years, since they did have multiple customers... but can you imagine how long it would take to repay the installation of a 2 mile long cable to deliver service to a single person? Especially if said person promptly switches to a new service when it becomes available...
It might double revenue, but it doesn't double profits... in fact, it will lower their profit margins, possibly to the point of them becoming negative.
I have my home server on an UPS, but it didn't stop the power supply connector on my motherboard (Tyan S2460, it happened to other people on slashdot too) from shorting out, bringing down my system. A UPS is a tool to help prevent catastrophic failure, but it isn't guarantee.
a filesystem should help insulate the data during sudden power loss, not pretty much guarantee that it will thrash all of your data. Sometimes, shit just happens despite the best planning.
I converted a ~40GB partition and it took a while (I didn't time it... between 1 and 2 hours).
Per Ted Ts'o The fix is checked into e2fsprogs 1.41.4 but release is waiting for a couple other high priority bugfixes to be released. If you want it now, you can pull it from his git repo
I migrated some of my non-critical partitions over to EXT4 and hit a race condition that corrupted my filesystem and resulted in data loss (the bug has since been fixed). I'm waiting a little longer before converting my important partitions over.
Switching from EXT3 to EXT4 is as simple as a flag change and a remount. HOWEVER, your existing data will still be laid out without extents and thus you'll miss you on a lot of the improvements in EXT4. Eventually, an online defragmenter will be written to defrag your drive while mounted and convert the old data to use extents, but Ted T'so says there are problems with the existing implementations and a working one isn't on the near horizon. Your best bet would be to move the data to another partition and back to convert it to using extents in the meantime.
Also note that if you're using extents, you can no longer mount the partition as EXT3.
I upgraded my 2AA Mini-Maglite to LED about a year ago since I couldn't find the standard bulbs locally. I'm going to guess I use it for about 10 minutes every day (in addition to longer durations like when the power goes out) and it's still on the cheap Rayovac batteries I put in it then. I'll estimate at least 4000 minutes on this set of batteries so far and the light still isn't noticeably dim. I can only imagine how long a 4D light would last.
I'm 31 and have been gaming since I was about 4 years old and got a knockoff Atari. I later transitioned to the NES and then SNES. I remember the Neo-Geo being all the rage because of the awesome 24 bit graphics (along with an insane price tag and games that cost as an entire SNES). I happily kept playing along on my consoles anyway, even still digging out the Atari for some good games despite the blocky graphics. Eventually, I switched from console gaming to PC gaming mostly due to the old AD&D CRPGs. By the time Doom 2 came out, I was gaming exclusively on the PC. I dual booted for a while until Loki came around and I got to play commercial games in Linux. To this day, I'm still content playing the games that run in Linux and I've watched a hundred games get hyped for months leading up to their release by Windows users and then forgotten a month later. It seems a lot of games are made to be consumed and most hardcore gamers need to get their fix by going from the current hyped game to the next hyped game as soon as the studios can rush them out.
I bought a Wii the week they came out and I've got 14 game sitting on my shelf. I play what I find fun, not what gets all the buzz. After all, I'm the only one that can truly determine my happiness because if I let others determine it for me, well, they're living my life, I'm not living my own. So yeah, I see the commercials for "HypedGame 7 only on PS360!" and yawn. Big deal. Remember how cool Assassin's Creed was going to be? Or the hype of Heavenly Sword and how that was going to launch the PS3 into the lead for this generation? When was the last time either of those games were even mentioned? I haven't played either and, you know what, I didn't miss them. They were hyped, summarily beaten in hours, and forgotten by the hardcores.
It kinda reminds me of my EverCrack days, where the hardcore guilds would do everything they could to conquer the content as fast as possible, meaning devs were always working on new content to keep the hardcores happy, bugs went unfixed and the less hardcore raiders (not to mention the purely casual gamers) were completely ignored. It got to the point where most of the people playing the game never got to see even half the content in the game all to keep the hardcore junkies hooked and needing a fix.
Taking that back to the broader video game subject, the hardcore gamers are just moving from one big budget game to the next with very few really good games out there... and I think that's exactly the opposite of where we need to be. Yes, contemporary graphics are a good thing, but should as much effort go into rendering a rippled water reflection in a fountain that you're going to spend a half second running by as developers put into making the game actually fun, memorable and replayable? If I want perfect reality, I'll look out my window. I play games to have fun. And that... is what Nintendo is trying to tap into, making gmaes that are fun for a lot of people rather than a 30 second "gee whiz, look at that!" for a few people. And you know what? That's fine by me... which is why I'll stick with my Wii instead of getting caught up in the hype of the next XBox3 game.
Congresscritters when they kneejerked after the 2000 elections and gave us HAVA in an effort to look like they were doing something. 357 Representatives and 92 Senators seemed to think it was a great idea, not to mention all the states that signed up going "ooh, free money!"
Once they understand it to be a revenue source they will, as restaurants already do about other kinds of waste oil, be more than willing to make the storage space to accommodate the extra income.
I'm not sure about where you live, but here in western NY, restaurants generally don't get paid for their used fryer oil. Rather, it costs $35 a month to rent an oil dumpster and to have it emptied (at least it did at the restaurant I managed up until 2 years ago). We had someone offer to take the oil for free from us to convert to bio-diesel, but it actually cost us more money to give it away to him since we had to waste time opening and closing buckets, being sure to carefully pour it, etc. At 10 extra minutes per night (2 employees at 5 minutes each), that's an extra 5 hours (300 minutes) a month at roughly $11 per hour (don't forget the business costs above paid wages to employ someone and NY's minimum wage is higher than the federal one). Further, we had to go through the hassle of keeping a second bucket to transfer waste oil around since we couldn't dump the stuff from the grease traps on the grills into his buckets because he didn't want to deal with separating the impurities.
What are restaurants going to do? They can't just dump the oil into the garbage (and you don't want to see what happens to your plumbing when you dispose of used oil in a sink) or else the garbage company and environmental agencies will be after you, so they have to pay the disposal fees. The marginal cost is passed on to the customers as part of the cost of doing business. Even if the restaurants got paid by someone picking up the oil, you don't think they're going to lower their prices by that marginal amount, do you? It'll just be a way to make more money (and then we can hear about big chains that have LOTS of oil making obscene profits at the expense of their poor customers).
Anyway, much like used vegetable oil, there will be increased costs associated with separating and storing a specific waste item. If just 10 minutes a day is wasted on it, then you're just breaking even with your $60 projected revenue stream. In fact, other work that could be getting done is getting delayed in that time (and anyone that has ever worked in, much less managed, a restaurant knows there's always something that can be done). It's just not worth the hassle.
My former high school is a little different. Same status as one of the better public schools in the state back when I was there. Since I've left, dropouts have increased from 5% to near 20% and on time graduation rates are down from 87% to 72%. Classes have increased from 100-120 when I was there to about 150 now, so it's not quite the growth your school saw, but in response, the school has spent a buttload of money building extra classrooms (because, you see, each teacher has the right to have their own classroom, which sits empty half the day, so we need to build a new one for every teacher hired). We've spent about $10 million a year in bonded capital improvements over the last decade or so while we've averaged around $150k a year on books. And that's before we even talk about lighted lavish sports fields and buildings (and I'm someone that played high school football under the lights on a field that had its own field house)
The mis-spent money is one thing... where the real difference comes in, and it was noticeable between my "generation" (class of 95) and my sister's (who is 7 years younger than me), was the teachers. As I came up through school, most of my teachers retired within a year or two of my having them. I had the old school teachers who taught the 3 Rs, taught you to memorize things and instilled some measure of critical thinking ability. Some where better than others, some were worse, but we had a clear foundation to build on. My sister got their fresh faced replacements, fresh out of college with new ideas on how to teach. They focused more on self-esteem and using technology than understanding how things actually worked. As such, my sister didn't get that same foundation to build on that I did.
I managed a restaurant for 10 years and dealt with kids about my own age and with this next generation... Even the dimmer bulbs of my generation had a little drive and a desire to learn how to do things. The newer generation of kids expect everything to be handed to them, can't properly fill out an application (and their spelling is atrocious!), can't do simple arithmetic without a calculator and whenever you tell them they're doing something wrong, no matter how gently you try, they completely break down. I couldn't tell you the number of people, especially girls, I've had cry on me in recent years because they made a very minor mistake and had to be corrected on it (such as not charging for a 25 cent side).
Yeah, for a lot of kids, it's the parents that need to take a majority of the blame for their kids being spoiled, can-do-no-wrong, praise seeking idiots, but the education system is very flawed as well (given that such a dichotomy can exist within the same family... my sister was pushed by our parents the same way I was). We need to look at education theory and throw in a little practice; We need to start doing the things we know work again and stop placing the majority of our focus on things that should work because someone in an ivory tower said so.
ebuilds are the packages in gentoo, overlays are unofficial repositories of ebuilds.
That said, the binary ebuild downloads from the gentoo mirrors rather than the official OpenOffice.org web/ftp servers, but the source built version downloads directly from go-oo.org
No identification is required in NY when you go to the polls... you just sign your name in the register of eligible voters and they conveniently give you a copy of your signature to look at while you do it.
Prior to the Seventeenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, we used to have such a body... The Senate used to be selected by the state legislatures they represent. These "statesmen" were usually considered some of the wisest and judicious people in their states. They were given 6 year terms so their position wouldn't be dependent upon the whims of the fickle populace.
These days, the Senate is just another popularity contest where statesmanship has gone out the window in favor of pandering...