I'm pretty sure the USA Constitution remains in effect for American companies even if they post a sign. Flying isn't a right, but for Americans, all the rights and freedoms in your Constiution ARE rights and cannot be ignored by American companies.
And why would a SUICIDE terrorist care if his picture is taken? It is not like he is planning on flying again. Much of the "security" measures the USA is implementing are like this - completely ineffectual, but make a nervous public feel better.
As far as I know only Islam and Christianity have strong anti-suicide rules. Other religions have weak anti-suicide rules, no rules on the subject, or in some cases, promote suicide (for the good of society, protect honour, etc...)
Yes, one should work and pay their bills, but doesn't exclude having fun (at work if very lucky), and after work for all of us lucky to live in a rich part of the world.
You should compare your life an Israeli, Iraqi, or Burma before whining that "life is hard". Most of here at slashdot have it very good.
If you are rich enough to be posting on slashdot, you should have the resources to do all sorts of non-boring things. For example, here are things I have/do that Kings did not only a thousand years ago:
fresh fruit all year (all sorts, yum yum)
central heating / air conditioning
cold drinks (refrigeration)
effective medecine
expect my children to survive to adulthood
music all the time (kings did have live muscians)
Movies, videos
lots of books
cruise ships
jets planes
public transportation
cars
radio (TV sucks - cancel your cable and spend the time playing more real life)
Even with a crappy job you have it good. Is anyone actively trying to kill you? Are you in danger of starving to death? If not, stop whinning and get out and do something!
Life is as intersting as you care to make it. Get off your butt and do something.
A few things I do, to make life more interesting:
Draw and paint (acrylic, easy to clean up, dries fast)
Learing piano (I really suck so far)
Programming (did a commercial video game years ago, do it for work, and dabble with directX)
tutoring (math and programming). Teaching is very rewarding.
floor hockey
roller blading
swimming
hiking
parenting
picnics (I don't actually ever go camping)
Writing, short stories, letters to the editor, book reviews (I have collected a few rejection notices for my short fiction. You can too.)
Passive spectator (movies, concerts, etc...)
Most people have to work, but that still leaves lots of time to pursue many intersting real life intersts.
Drugs are cheaper in Canada because we have stronger laws against gouging on drugs. Many drugs are bought in bulk by the government and they have policies to buy generic drugs, or older, but equally effictive drugs, instead of the latest and greatest name-brand drugs.
As for waitng lists. Yes, there are waiting lists for many non-critical surgeries. Yes, the system isn't perfect, but we are actively trying to fix it. We spend quite a bit less to provide the same services in Canada than in the USA. Part of this due to efficiencies of scale, and part is due to our less litigous society which means expensive tests that are mainly done to stave off lawsuits are not routinely done.
I'm sorry, but it is simply un-Canadian to conquer other nations. Why don't you organise a referendum to join Canada!
But beware! While we do enjoy more freedoms than Americans, we do also have a government that would be considered extremely left wing by USA standards. You know, a government that doesn't always put big business first, that promotes education and universal healthcare. Oh, and while we do have somewhat stricter gun control, the big difference is that is considered anti-social to shoot people - even if they are walking on your property. That might take a bit to get used to. No shooting people. Taxes are higher, but you get very good schools, and universal healthcare.
If you want to be proud of having an awesome military Canada might not be for you. We have a military, but it hasn't awed anyone since WWII. Most Canadians consider this a "good thing". You'll also have to give up thinking that the whole world would be better off if they just would convert to your own form of government. While justifiably proud of our government we don't suffer from the delusion that the only reason the rest of the world has not switched over to our system is that they are somehow too stupid to know a good thing when its shown to them.
CGA! You spoiled brat! MDA was good enough for real programmers. Why anyone would want anything other than 80 columns of crisp text is beyond me. Everything just went downhill after MDA! 80 columns - if it was good enough for punch cards, it was good enough for everything.
One nice thing about the mda cards was that they used a different address for the video memory so they would co-exist with your cga/ega/mcga/vga. Two monitors for graphics dev! One for the graphics, and a mono-text mda monitor for debug output. I used that for game dev back when a 386 with FOUR megs of ram was state of the art. Of course this was DOS, real mode, so the extra ram was used for a fast virtual disk (more or less) via xms.
Even if you managed to "blow up the moon" you would have to blow it up well enough for all the pieces to escape the moons gravity or all the pieces will just reform into a big ball again. As has been pointed out, the moon is VERY big. We can't blow it up.
The Sun has another 4 billion or so years left. I'm more worried about a planet killing comet or asteroid. They seem to hit about every 100 million years. The Earth is a nice place, but the human race has all its eggs in one basket.
Sales people are angels compared to "glossy brochures".
Glossy brochures are devil spawn, put on this earth to corrupt the innocent, and ravage the weak. Beware the glossy brochure for it has no morals and will eat your soul. The glossy brochure knows nothing of truth, and speaks only in the language of the damned.
It is completely immaterial wether the musician is "good" or "bad". It depends on their contract with their label. I don't care how bad the music is, if a musician or band wants to only allow downloads of "complete works of art" that should be their right if they can convince their label.
Now, if they also want to consider actually making money, and allowing fans, expecially new ones, to sample their music legally I think a musician would be wise to allow single song downloads. Or maybe allow downloads of the same songs released as radio singles only. There is room for flexability.
I can't image any real fan of Radiohead only buying one song from any of their albums since "pablo honey".
If your condition is adversely affecting, school, work, or your social life, please consider medication. Do NOT self-diagnose. See more than one Doctor. Consult with parents, friends, teachers or other trusted people to see if they have noticed a problem.
There is more than one effective medication, and many Doctors will have you try one for 6 months, monitor it effectiveness then try another if it is not working. Many people try going off their medication once a year, especially if young, as many people gain enough self-control and good habits while medicated that they can concentrate enough to make do without the medication. A period of minimum stress should be chosen when going off the meds, in consulation with your Doctor. The most common medication are in fact stimulants, and common side affects are: loss of appetite, trouble sleeping, bad dreams, and in cases of too high dosages extreme emotional periods, and other nasty mental problems. If the stimulants don't work there also some anti-depressants that sometimes work.
There any many good web sites, books, videos (check your local libray) for information on ADHD. Beware of web sites that are dogmatically against drugs. While I believe it is very possible that some of these drugs are over prescribed, they certainly can help some people.
I have personal experience with ADHD. Ritalin was tried first, but it was not effective and the side affects were unbearable. Dexedrine was tried next and it works well in this case. It does a brutally good job of appetite suppressing, but it has made a huge difference in school work. What was a constant battle to pay attention (being too hyper wasn't really a problem, just could not pay attention to anything, unles VERY interested in it for more than a few minutes) is now just normal "paying attention". School is no longer a miserable, frustrating ordeal. Marks are way up, and the child is much happier. As there was no real problem at home(getting one on one attention from parent keeps things on track) the meds are only used during school. No meds are used on vacations, summer, evenings, or weekends. We do try not using the meds each November, but so far it hasn't quite worked out.
Some people claim changes in diet, extra atention, and some lessons on good habits can overcome ADHD without meds. There are many good habits, procedures, and tactics that can be taught to ADHD people to help them overcome their affliction, but the drugs do work very well for many people.
Don't be too quick to go to drugs. Many kids go through bad periods, so wait at least a year before seeing a Doctor.
Talk to management and gt something in return. Some banked time, or something. Otherwise work your usual 8 hours. If the contract is actually important then the company should be willing to pay you.
You're all gutless to let your self be exploited like that. I was working hourly at a firm and was then put on salary - it was supposed to be a "promotion". Well I stopped working overtime. Did no OT at all. Management wasn't too happy, but not pissed off. I left a year later due to other unrelated problems.
I NEVER work for free, and neither should you.
PS - I must admit that while working as a contractor I have worked huge amounts of overtime - but I was getting paid for it.
Evn if it doesn't make sense to you, the North American power grid is divided into a number of disconnected regions that are only connected via DC interconnects to keep the different regions isolated. All generation on single interconnected AC grid is in sync. If a big generation plant in California has a sudden failure it can affect every generator on its grid from California to northern British Columbia. The DC links isolate and protect the different grids from failures on the other grids.
As there is no good reason to keep the different grids in sync - they are not in sync. As the fully conncted regions get larger there are more and more problems keeping the whole system "clean" and reliable.
Over view of North America Power Grid
Just like there are good and bad programmers, there are good and bad managers. I've worked for lots of different managers, of varying technical skills, and you know what? Being great at programming does not mean you will make a good manager. Most managers I worked for were good at managing. They would review the technical peoples reports and then decided how much was going to be spent on what. Nine times out of ten that meant doing as the techies reccomended. And nine times out of ten the techie report was based on requirements that came from management. Of course we never got enough time to do all the testing we wanted (I never worked on a project were skipping tests could cause loss of life, in that case testing is not skimped on, eg production and control systems for a dam), and of course requirements always change as the project progresses. And I've worked for non-technical mamagers who are very bright. They would review my design specs and catch things I hadn't thought of, ask for inteligent changes, notice subtle logical errors in processes.
I don't like working for managers who won't make a decision. Its hard to buy a backup server if the manager won't sign the paper work. Its hard to implement a system enhancement when the manger won't ok OT to take the system down on the weekend.
I've never worked for a manager that was swayed by TV adds. What they do want is a great big company backing the product for SUPPORT. We once actually got a main-frame terminal emulator selected that was written by one guy, was small fast, and cheap. But after three years they guy moved on to other things and suddenly there was no support. Managers don't like to take that sort of risk. We had to update 3000 workstations with new software. Its this sort of thing that makes managers leary of "free software". Having IBM's backing is a huge plus in the eyes of It managers working for large firms.
This is pretty impressive. I made some short films when I was a kid on regular 8 film (film, not video). Many hours of work went into each minute of film: model making, stop motion animation, editing etc... My longest film was about 6 minutes.
I did editing on a small manual editor and a manual splicer. Each roll only held 10 minutes of film, and you had to mail it "back east" to get it developed. I did little SF films, special effects for lasers were directly scratched onto the film (after processing) and coloured with a felt pen. Used both homemade models (balsa wood, toilet paper rolls, stryofoam balls, glue, plaster and paint), and model kits. Did stop motion "claymation", space battles, and one live action kungfu and sorcery film. The film was silent. I tried syncing the film to a casette tape, but my projector does not have any pre-set speeds, just an analog rotary dial. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get the projector to play at the same speed twice in a row. A lot of work, but a lot of fun.
"There are all kinds of arguments I could make regarding the war", but you didn't. I'd love to hear a rational explanation for the USA invasion of Iraq. My main issue with the invasion was that it was a "premptive" invasion - there was no immediate danger.
No WMD's have been found (lies or intelligence blunder?), no strong links to al Qaeda were found. Why Iraq? Why not all the other nasty dictatorships? There are lots of African governments busily murdering their citizens the USA could invade. The USA didn't have any moral troubles SUPPORTING murderous dictators when it thought it was untouchable.
Can't say I'm impressed by some USA politicians reaction to the lack of support from some of its more moral allies. Their childish pique at not being blindly followed is symptomatic of the USA's attitiude to ethics, "profit before all else", and "Its Ok if we do it - we are the good guys!".
The patent office does not nee to hire "better" people. The government needs to change the patent laws. Software, discoveries in nature, algorithms, forms, and processes should NOT be granted patents. It is 100% the fault of the government (and in the USA to some extent, poor court decisions) that patents are being abused like this.
Copyright has the same problem, of course.
It is natural for corporations to try to influence the government in their favour. It is wrong for the government to actually be persuaded to pass so many "corporation friendly" laws that have distorted the so called "free market".
VOTE! If everyone in the USA eligable to vote, but did not, all voted for the same person - that person would have won.
Slashdot Mirror
And why would a SUICIDE terrorist care if his picture is taken? It is not like he is planning on flying again. Much of the "security" measures the USA is implementing are like this - completely ineffectual, but make a nervous public feel better.
As far as I know only Islam and Christianity have strong anti-suicide rules. Other religions have weak anti-suicide rules, no rules on the subject, or in some cases, promote suicide (for the good of society, protect honour, etc...)
You should compare your life an Israeli, Iraqi, or Burma before whining that "life is hard". Most of here at slashdot have it very good.
- fresh fruit all year (all sorts, yum yum)
- central heating / air conditioning
- cold drinks (refrigeration)
- effective medecine
- expect my children to survive to adulthood
- music all the time (kings did have live muscians)
- Movies, videos
- lots of books
- cruise ships
- jets planes
- public transportation
- cars
- radio (TV sucks - cancel your cable and spend the time playing more real life)
Even with a crappy job you have it good. Is anyone actively trying to kill you? Are you in danger of starving to death? If not, stop whinning and get out and do something!Life is as intersting as you care to make it. Get off your butt and do something.
A few things I do, to make life more interesting:
Most people have to work, but that still leaves lots of time to pursue many intersting real life intersts.
There was also Mickey Rat, an underground Comix from the early 70's.
As for waitng lists. Yes, there are waiting lists for many non-critical surgeries. Yes, the system isn't perfect, but we are actively trying to fix it. We spend quite a bit less to provide the same services in Canada than in the USA. Part of this due to efficiencies of scale, and part is due to our less litigous society which means expensive tests that are mainly done to stave off lawsuits are not routinely done.
But beware! While we do enjoy more freedoms than Americans, we do also have a government that would be considered extremely left wing by USA standards. You know, a government that doesn't always put big business first, that promotes education and universal healthcare. Oh, and while we do have somewhat stricter gun control, the big difference is that is considered anti-social to shoot people - even if they are walking on your property. That might take a bit to get used to. No shooting people. Taxes are higher, but you get very good schools, and universal healthcare.
If you want to be proud of having an awesome military Canada might not be for you. We have a military, but it hasn't awed anyone since WWII. Most Canadians consider this a "good thing". You'll also have to give up thinking that the whole world would be better off if they just would convert to your own form of government. While justifiably proud of our government we don't suffer from the delusion that the only reason the rest of the world has not switched over to our system is that they are somehow too stupid to know a good thing when its shown to them.
Tolerance and peace.
One nice thing about the mda cards was that they used a different address for the video memory so they would co-exist with your cga/ega/mcga/vga. Two monitors for graphics dev! One for the graphics, and a mono-text mda monitor for debug output. I used that for game dev back when a 386 with FOUR megs of ram was state of the art. Of course this was DOS, real mode, so the extra ram was used for a fast virtual disk (more or less) via xms.
Even if you managed to "blow up the moon" you would have to blow it up well enough for all the pieces to escape the moons gravity or all the pieces will just reform into a big ball again. As has been pointed out, the moon is VERY big. We can't blow it up.
The Sun has another 4 billion or so years left. I'm more worried about a planet killing comet or asteroid. They seem to hit about every 100 million years. The Earth is a nice place, but the human race has all its eggs in one basket.
Glossy brochures are devil spawn, put on this earth to corrupt the innocent, and ravage the weak. Beware the glossy brochure for it has no morals and will eat your soul. The glossy brochure knows nothing of truth, and speaks only in the language of the damned.
Now, if they also want to consider actually making money, and allowing fans, expecially new ones, to sample their music legally I think a musician would be wise to allow single song downloads. Or maybe allow downloads of the same songs released as radio singles only. There is room for flexability.
I can't image any real fan of Radiohead only buying one song from any of their albums since "pablo honey".
There is more than one effective medication, and many Doctors will have you try one for 6 months, monitor it effectiveness then try another if it is not working. Many people try going off their medication once a year, especially if young, as many people gain enough self-control and good habits while medicated that they can concentrate enough to make do without the medication. A period of minimum stress should be chosen when going off the meds, in consulation with your Doctor. The most common medication are in fact stimulants, and common side affects are: loss of appetite, trouble sleeping, bad dreams, and in cases of too high dosages extreme emotional periods, and other nasty mental problems. If the stimulants don't work there also some anti-depressants that sometimes work.
There any many good web sites, books, videos (check your local libray) for information on ADHD. Beware of web sites that are dogmatically against drugs. While I believe it is very possible that some of these drugs are over prescribed, they certainly can help some people.
I have personal experience with ADHD. Ritalin was tried first, but it was not effective and the side affects were unbearable. Dexedrine was tried next and it works well in this case. It does a brutally good job of appetite suppressing, but it has made a huge difference in school work. What was a constant battle to pay attention (being too hyper wasn't really a problem, just could not pay attention to anything, unles VERY interested in it for more than a few minutes) is now just normal "paying attention". School is no longer a miserable, frustrating ordeal. Marks are way up, and the child is much happier. As there was no real problem at home(getting one on one attention from parent keeps things on track) the meds are only used during school. No meds are used on vacations, summer, evenings, or weekends. We do try not using the meds each November, but so far it hasn't quite worked out.
Some people claim changes in diet, extra atention, and some lessons on good habits can overcome ADHD without meds. There are many good habits, procedures, and tactics that can be taught to ADHD people to help them overcome their affliction, but the drugs do work very well for many people.
Don't be too quick to go to drugs. Many kids go through bad periods, so wait at least a year before seeing a Doctor.
Parent never heard of google? Here is a link to a short history of patents:
Patent History, USA and Europe
Talk to management and gt something in return. Some banked time, or something. Otherwise work your usual 8 hours. If the contract is actually important then the company should be willing to pay you.
I NEVER work for free, and neither should you.
PS - I must admit that while working as a contractor I have worked huge amounts of overtime - but I was getting paid for it.
Birds and wind mills
As there is no good reason to keep the different grids in sync - they are not in sync. As the fully conncted regions get larger there are more and more problems keeping the whole system "clean" and reliable. Over view of North America Power Grid
Details on the TExas Grid - good info"
I don't like working for managers who won't make a decision. Its hard to buy a backup server if the manager won't sign the paper work. Its hard to implement a system enhancement when the manger won't ok OT to take the system down on the weekend.
I've never worked for a manager that was swayed by TV adds. What they do want is a great big company backing the product for SUPPORT. We once actually got a main-frame terminal emulator selected that was written by one guy, was small fast, and cheap. But after three years they guy moved on to other things and suddenly there was no support. Managers don't like to take that sort of risk. We had to update 3000 workstations with new software. Its this sort of thing that makes managers leary of "free software". Having IBM's backing is a huge plus in the eyes of It managers working for large firms.
I did editing on a small manual editor and a manual splicer. Each roll only held 10 minutes of film, and you had to mail it "back east" to get it developed. I did little SF films, special effects for lasers were directly scratched onto the film (after processing) and coloured with a felt pen. Used both homemade models (balsa wood, toilet paper rolls, stryofoam balls, glue, plaster and paint), and model kits. Did stop motion "claymation", space battles, and one live action kungfu and sorcery film. The film was silent. I tried syncing the film to a casette tape, but my projector does not have any pre-set speeds, just an analog rotary dial. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get the projector to play at the same speed twice in a row. A lot of work, but a lot of fun.
No WMD's have been found (lies or intelligence blunder?), no strong links to al Qaeda were found. Why Iraq? Why not all the other nasty dictatorships? There are lots of African governments busily murdering their citizens the USA could invade. The USA didn't have any moral troubles SUPPORTING murderous dictators when it thought it was untouchable.
Can't say I'm impressed by some USA politicians reaction to the lack of support from some of its more moral allies. Their childish pique at not being blindly followed is symptomatic of the USA's attitiude to ethics, "profit before all else", and "Its Ok if we do it - we are the good guys!".
Depends where you live. In many places, as long as only you looked at the pictures and you never distributed them it would be ok to keep them.
Unfortunately, the USPO has decided to make "inovative" mean "not patented already".
Copyright has the same problem, of course.
It is natural for corporations to try to influence the government in their favour. It is wrong for the government to actually be persuaded to pass so many "corporation friendly" laws that have distorted the so called "free market".
VOTE! If everyone in the USA eligable to vote, but did not, all voted for the same person - that person would have won.
Not true! Have you not heard the popular saying:
Get married and get it regular.