My Dentist (big hairy jewish guy) and his really hot hygenists (this is why I deliberately give myself cavities) sing showtunes to me while they do their thing. Its wonderful...
insert "could" where "should" was. It was only a suggestion. I am simply postulating a hypothetical response to the issue of broad software patents that is a hell of a lot less radical and much easier to implement than simply voiding software patents altogether.
Programming Language creators should include a provision in their license that forces programmers to use the copyright system and not the patent system with programs written in their language. In addition all software patent applications should require actual working code that is complex and novel enough to actually warrant a patent for the idea itself and not just a single expression of the idea as in copyright.
In the meantime congress should simply ban new software patents until the USPTO can be fixed.
His eccentricities aside I really don't see how playing a chess game can be a crime. Or for that matter how traveling to another country that wants you to visit can be a crime. Perhaps they will try to convince a jury that he was aiding Yugoslavian war strategists with his chess skills.
quiet, good lighting, air quality, and privacy
on
Building a Better Office
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· Score: 2, Interesting
When you do your buildout if you do one thicken the walls a bit or put something to help diminish the noise. Pay a few bucks more for better lighting. Not those plastic zombie lights that flicker. Good ventilation and and maybe a quiet air filter can really help out those us with allergies and anything that helps more oxygen and less dirt get through the lungs is a winner.
Privacy is a big one. I know I would be a lot more satisfied with my job if I was not in an office with no privacy. We don't even have dividers. I have to wait till everyone goes to lunch (I take a later lunch) just to have a moment of quiet. Obviously everyone can't have their own office but definitely don't overlook smaller sets of cubes. Why not put 4 cubes together in a diamond shape where everyone is at an angle from each other. This reduces the feeling of being in an egg carton.
I really hate my desk at work cause the monitor is recessed into the open corner of the office on the desk furniture. It makes me have to wear my glasses to see the screen and that increases my eye strain and general stess level.
Most valuable college class: English Composition 1 & 2, closely followed by Speech.
If you can write well, you can bullshit through almost anything. It really does help at work. Speech? Just make your first speech a practice run at asking for a raise and you see the point of not being nervous speaking in front of people. I am quite confident I will be getting a 50% raise tommorrow afternoon.
Least Valuable college class: Philosophy of Science closely followed by Survey of computers in business (ie microsoft propoganda, bad tech info, and half a MOUS course. )
Actually I tended to like my general education classes more than my major classes. At least in core classes I did not have to sit through things I already knew.
A person may need a college degree out in the job world, but chances are they don't need a college "education". Most college graduates don't work in their major field and many don't even work in jobs that have any use for a degreed person at all.
I attended a large private university and it probably does suck more than most schools as evidenced by its dismal 74% freshmen retention rate.
People who don't like it when others bash college always have the same refrain "you are a know-it-all kid...." I love it when this comes from people who never even went to college themselves or from people who majored in bullshit. Yeah my grades are only ok but I certainly was not flunking out. One of the few classes I failed was the result of being the only one in the class who did not blatantly cheat. The professor left the room during exams and it was lets compare answer time.
Why is it that everyone who feels they do not like college has to be wrong? Do you think colleges are run by ancient bearded men in robes who have already thought of everything? Colleges hire incompetent staff working for a slave wage except for the top administrators making hundreds of thousands dollars plus incredible personal benefits. Professors are almost all part-timers and TA's at most schools and the former get paid about the same rate as a highschool teacher in a poor district and the TA's barely get anything at all.
Which brings me to my other piece of advice, DON'T pay for Grad school. Work at the school, do grad school for free, only suckers pay for it. If you only saw the kinds of easy jobs that grad students got at my school for which they worked 30 hours a week and got 9 credits of free grad school a semester. You know what a help desk support specialist does? She sits there and revises her resume for 6 months straight for which she is paid 5 thousand dollars worth of classes. The undergraduate technicians get 7 bucks an hour to drive their own cars around campus at their own expense and fix whiny girl's computers.
I have always hated school too. It bears no resemblance to the real world. Don't put much stock in what they tell you. That includes the subjects, what they say about the world, and especially what they try to tell you about yourself. Like highschool its 90% bullshit. Its the same kinds of "education scientists" trying to convince you that everyone will be a more complete person after forcibly taking 30 credits of disconnected general education credits taught by TA's and part timers who probably won't even know your name by the end of the semester.
I am fairly close to concluding that college has been reduced to just a machine to put middle class kids into heavy debt that they will have to pay off their whole lives. Why else are dorms twice as expensive as off campus living and college catering services charging 8-15 dollars for a meal. Wouldn't that stuff be run at cost if college really was about learning and not about profit?
I have more or less relegated college to a chore at this point. I have a little less than 2 years left and I am taking some time off from it and working in my field. I am so much more successful in work environments that it is my sincere hope I won't ever have to go back. Basically college sucks IMHO. Aside from a handful of schools with extremely competitive admissions you are going to be surrounded by complete idiots. After a year you will stop wondering why everyone gets drunk, high, stoned, coked out of their mind every weekend because you will probably be doing it yourself.
Main Advice: Go give it a try and graduate as soon as possible. Try to do something real during the summers and winters or take more classes and graduate quicker. Its a waste of time but a degree is like a vat of butter that costs 50-200k and it greases you through the employers doors. On the other hand if you, like me, don't plan on working for someone else your whole life you may want to put that money into something useful like a business.
I worked as a tech for a large private university for about a year and I was amazed at the complete incompetence of most of the people working there. The low level guys who mainly managed student techs and small departments and single systems were the only competent people in the organization. The Dean of Technology was an education doctorate hack who had no familiarity with what it takes to manage a 10+ thousand node network with 4 thousand of those systems completely insecure (the dorm student pc's).
When the viruses hit hard late last summer her solution was to manually install copies of Mcafee virus scam and windows updates on 4000 student computers dorming in the fall at a cost of almost $650,000 dollars. Students were without internet or lan services for weeks (till their ports were turned on one by one) to the point of professors having to postpone tests and projects. The first month of the semester was a complete wash due to her incompetence. In addition the quality of the temp techs was so varied we had hundreds of students whose windows installations died on them as a result of installing mcaffee over norton.
They could have saved a lot of time and money installing anti-virus appliances at the building switch blocks and blocking common virus ports.
Keep in mind when I say administrators in the context of this article I don't mean the sysadmins. I mean the college administration faculty and tech deans with no real world experience that decide these things.
Yeah I took a required course that was about half web design last semester and she spent half the course teaching us frames and tables when she should have been teaching us css since half of us were already familiar with html and the other half knew nothing and could just as easily have learned css as html. And this was a part time professor who is supposedly a web project manager for a big comapany.
I am so glad I am taking time away from school at least this way I will not spend 3 years learning how things are really done after I graduate.
The DC public school system has had a similar project going on for most of the last decade that does not work yet. Also a large database, management, and payroll system. They are actually being advised to give up on it since they are now out of money and the citywide system will do a better job. But they don't even have the money to join the citywide system now. A lot of it stems from unnacountable and incompetent administration for large.edu and government projects that change specs often and insist on a lot of customization which then has to be redone every time they change the specs. They are also only interested in the latest buzzword instead of what works. The companies are all too happy to take advantage of the situation. In the DC case and in some other school districts they purchase systems well in excess of their current and future needs because they refuse to hire competent people for project planning and administration. In most cases the needs fulfilled by these systems could be done with very little customization and be planned and implemented in less than 2 years. Consultants can cost a lot but its a lot less than the cost of buying something that never works. One more reason why colleges are always so behind the times.
Charm City does rock. There are some very poor, very dangerous parts of town. It would be far more useful to put cameras in places like Cherry Hill than in the inner harbour where its all just tourists and sports fans. Cameras provide peace of mind but I would not want them everywhere recording everything all the time. Better lighting and more police would be a lot better. They could hire 250-350 more police for that same 25M. (assuming the salary + benefits of a police officer are between 60-100k) I am not sure, thats just a guess since that is what a lot of cops in MD make.
NYC is definitely a good example of how a more visible police presence can help street crime tremendously. Nobody is gonna rob someone in sight of a cop. In many major cities you can instantly tell when you entered a high crime area cause there is no cops around at all.
Clear Channel is owned by right-wingers who agree that the FCC should censor Radio. The top people in Clear Channel agree with the fines. It gives them an excuse to force out all the liberal leaning shock jocks that they syndicate on their stations and only let well dressed old white male conservatives on the radio.
You would think that Powell the General would be more likely to turn the country into a military police state but its really Powell jr. the Chairman of the Directorate for Truth and Decency in broadcasting that will bring about the neocon's hitlerian vision of a new America.
The Bush Administration are as much Radical Religious Fundamentalists as Al-Queda and Taliban. They agree on everything except who should rule the world and how low the hemlines should be. Regular people don't care about who rules the world as long as nobody bothers them.
A list of 120,000 names does not really narrow it down much. Perhaps there are a few hundred foriegn terrorists operating in the United States. 1% of 120,000 is 1200 and I would venture a guess that there are no more than 1200 foriegn terrorists in the US even by the widest stretch of the term terrorist. If my assumption is accurate then that mean MATRIX has a 99% false positive rate and sorting through 120,000 names to find 1200 or less is not a very useful tool. If there were really 120000 terrorists or even 12000 don't you think they would have gone to the store bought some guns and started shooting people by now. 12000 is a small army and could easily cause a lot of damage before our military could respond. Even 1200 could all get together and really do a lot of damage. That leads me to believe that they are a few hundred at most in a number of different groups espousing vastly different ideological and political goals. This system is just one more tool to turn America into a police state. Who are the real terrorists here?
As I said before. I am not a CS major. I am a business major. I can see some value in in a CS degree if you are a programmer but in my case I was paying almost 30k a year to learn business from a school that lost 26% of its freshmen each year and a good chunk of its softmores and juniors mainly because it exists for the benefit of its overpaid administrators and sweetheart deal food contractors far more than for its paying customers.
I think that people have to examine the total cost of a 4 year degree. Figure that a IT worker probably gets 25k a year at the minimum for a person with no degree, at an entry level job. Each year at a private University costs about 40,000 a year with food, housing, books, tuition, and misc bullshit. The average stay at college is now 5 years for a Bachelors especially for long programs like engineering, cs, and business mostly due to increasing credit counts and more required academic courses (as opposed to easier electives) which increase the likelihood of having to repeat classes. That is 200k for a private college degree. Add to that 5 years of missing out on a shitty 25k a year job and its $325k. The question is whether a person is really going to make 325 thousand dollars more over their working life with a degree than without. In most industries the answer is probably hovering around the just barely mark these days because so many college grad's still end up working shit jobs unrelated to their major for less than 50k and often less than 35k.
I am a person who does a lot better in working environments than formal education environments. I hate school. I cannot stand it. I am a habitual underachiever. At work on the contrary I quickly become well liked and virtually indispensible. My current supervisor pretty much flat out told the guy who hired me that I was not going to work out for her at all when I interviewed. Within 3 days she went back to him and told him she "loved me." Now a few months later she wants me to go with her to her new job when her contract is up saying that she does not know how she can work without me.
This makes not going back to school and doing another 2 years of college bullshit, a lot more appealing.
I am a tech generalist but I mostly focus on pc config/repair and networking. I am working on my CCNP through cisco academy which is actually a great place to network with other people cause a lot of the other students and the instructors work for big companies and government agencies. At this point if I had to choose between having my degree and having my CCNP with a security clearance I would definitely choose the latter.
I think that working for a couple years and then perhaps finishing my degree in business is much more useful since I will already be employed and experienced and I can parlay my degree directly into a management slot.
The broadcasters' group demanded that the Federal Communications Commission, which licenses satellite services, explicitly ban their rivals from using any technology to offer content in one area that is different from another location.
In other words, they want the Satelite stations to be just like the Clearchannel broadcast stations. The same crap all the time everywhere.
I will not miss Real too much and I know very few of us will. They make a buggy crappy player and it competed with another buggy crappy player for a different equally crappy format. The company with the bigger bank account won. No surprise there. I play my.rm files in WMP anyways thanks to the RealAlternative codec.
Apple has nothing to gain by helping Real and it is unlikely that Microsoft wants anything to do with Real except maybe to wait until they are about to collapse and buy them out to own the format.
No one uses Realplayer to play mp3's except for those systems that downloaded the RealOne operating system and can't use anything else to play media files anymore.
A friend of mine was working a part time crap job at a pool. She then landed a sweet job that paid like 6 times as much. She called in to say she was quiting and her former boss tried to convince her that she was legally required to give them two weeks notice. An employer gets notice in relation to the pay and treatment I recieve there. A minimum wage job does not get two weeks notice when you have already been hired for a 60k job.
The current issue of Reason magazine. www.reason.com has a cover article on this issue. I am sure it is far more free speech centered then the Baltimore Sun article. How did the Moonies get to own so many newpapers anyways?
If you are already laid off how can you be fired?
on
Train Your Own Replacement
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· Score: 3, Informative
Personally I would consider the moment I was notified that I was being laid off as the time I was laid off. If they want me to continue my normal job for x amount of time then that is fine. If they want me to train a replacement then they can pay me consultant rates. Once you are notified that you are being laid off for no cause, how can you be fired for cause. You are not required to finish up your week or month or whatever, the employer and employee simply agree that is the case but they can't make you do it. As far as unemployment eligibility goes they can't very well fire you once for no cause and then for cause when you refuse to train a replacement. If they want you to train a replacement, tell them you want consultant rates or extended severance and benefits.
Slashdot Mirror
My Dentist (big hairy jewish guy) and his really hot hygenists (this is why I deliberately give myself cavities) sing showtunes to me while they do their thing. Its wonderful...
insert "could" where "should" was. It was only a suggestion. I am simply postulating a hypothetical response to the issue of broad software patents that is a hell of a lot less radical and much easier to implement than simply voiding software patents altogether.
Programming Language creators should include a provision in their license that forces programmers to use the copyright system and not the patent system with programs written in their language. In addition all software patent applications should require actual working code that is complex and novel enough to actually warrant a patent for the idea itself and not just a single expression of the idea as in copyright.
In the meantime congress should simply ban new software patents until the USPTO can be fixed.
His eccentricities aside I really don't see how playing a chess game can be a crime. Or for that matter how traveling to another country that wants you to visit can be a crime. Perhaps they will try to convince a jury that he was aiding Yugoslavian war strategists with his chess skills.
When you do your buildout if you do one thicken the walls a bit or put something to help diminish the noise. Pay a few bucks more for better lighting. Not those plastic zombie lights that flicker. Good ventilation and and maybe a quiet air filter can really help out those us with allergies and anything that helps more oxygen and less dirt get through the lungs is a winner.
Privacy is a big one. I know I would be a lot more satisfied with my job if I was not in an office with no privacy. We don't even have dividers. I have to wait till everyone goes to lunch (I take a later lunch) just to have a moment of quiet. Obviously everyone can't have their own office but definitely don't overlook smaller sets of cubes. Why not put 4 cubes together in a diamond shape where everyone is at an angle from each other. This reduces the feeling of being in an egg carton.
I really hate my desk at work cause the monitor is recessed into the open corner of the office on the desk furniture. It makes me have to wear my glasses to see the screen and that increases my eye strain and general stess level.
Most valuable college class: English Composition 1 & 2, closely followed by Speech.
If you can write well, you can bullshit through almost anything. It really does help at work. Speech? Just make your first speech a practice run at asking for a raise and you see the point of not being nervous speaking in front of people. I am quite confident I will be getting a 50% raise tommorrow afternoon.
Least Valuable college class: Philosophy of Science closely followed by Survey of computers in business (ie microsoft propoganda, bad tech info, and half a MOUS course. )
Actually I tended to like my general education classes more than my major classes. At least in core classes I did not have to sit through things I already knew.
A person may need a college degree out in the job world, but chances are they don't need a college "education". Most college graduates don't work in their major field and many don't even work in jobs that have any use for a degreed person at all.
I attended a large private university and it probably does suck more than most schools as evidenced by its dismal 74% freshmen retention rate.
People who don't like it when others bash college always have the same refrain "you are a know-it-all kid...." I love it when this comes from people who never even went to college themselves or from people who majored in bullshit. Yeah my grades are only ok but I certainly was not flunking out. One of the few classes I failed was the result of being the only one in the class who did not blatantly cheat. The professor left the room during exams and it was lets compare answer time.
Why is it that everyone who feels they do not like college has to be wrong? Do you think colleges are run by ancient bearded men in robes who have already thought of everything? Colleges hire incompetent staff working for a slave wage except for the top administrators making hundreds of thousands dollars plus incredible personal benefits. Professors are almost all part-timers and TA's at most schools and the former get paid about the same rate as a highschool teacher in a poor district and the TA's barely get anything at all.
Which brings me to my other piece of advice, DON'T pay for Grad school. Work at the school, do grad school for free, only suckers pay for it. If you only saw the kinds of easy jobs that grad students got at my school for which they worked 30 hours a week and got 9 credits of free grad school a semester. You know what a help desk support specialist does? She sits there and revises her resume for 6 months straight for which she is paid 5 thousand dollars worth of classes. The undergraduate technicians get 7 bucks an hour to drive their own cars around campus at their own expense and fix whiny girl's computers.
I have always hated school too. It bears no resemblance to the real world. Don't put much stock in what they tell you. That includes the subjects, what they say about the world, and especially what they try to tell you about yourself. Like highschool its 90% bullshit. Its the same kinds of "education scientists" trying to convince you that everyone will be a more complete person after forcibly taking 30 credits of disconnected general education credits taught by TA's and part timers who probably won't even know your name by the end of the semester.
I am fairly close to concluding that college has been reduced to just a machine to put middle class kids into heavy debt that they will have to pay off their whole lives. Why else are dorms twice as expensive as off campus living and college catering services charging 8-15 dollars for a meal. Wouldn't that stuff be run at cost if college really was about learning and not about profit?
I have more or less relegated college to a chore at this point. I have a little less than 2 years left and I am taking some time off from it and working in my field. I am so much more successful in work environments that it is my sincere hope I won't ever have to go back. Basically college sucks IMHO. Aside from a handful of schools with extremely competitive admissions you are going to be surrounded by complete idiots. After a year you will stop wondering why everyone gets drunk, high, stoned, coked out of their mind every weekend because you will probably be doing it yourself.
Main Advice: Go give it a try and graduate as soon as possible. Try to do something real during the summers and winters or take more classes and graduate quicker. Its a waste of time but a degree is like a vat of butter that costs 50-200k and it greases you through the employers doors. On the other hand if you, like me, don't plan on working for someone else your whole life you may want to put that money into something useful like a business.
I worked as a tech for a large private university for about a year and I was amazed at the complete incompetence of most of the people working there. The low level guys who mainly managed student techs and small departments and single systems were the only competent people in the organization. The Dean of Technology was an education doctorate hack who had no familiarity with what it takes to manage a 10+ thousand node network with 4 thousand of those systems completely insecure (the dorm student pc's).
When the viruses hit hard late last summer her solution was to manually install copies of Mcafee virus scam and windows updates on 4000 student computers dorming in the fall at a cost of almost $650,000 dollars. Students were without internet or lan services for weeks (till their ports were turned on one by one) to the point of professors having to postpone tests and projects. The first month of the semester was a complete wash due to her incompetence. In addition the quality of the temp techs was so varied we had hundreds of students whose windows installations died on them as a result of installing mcaffee over norton.
They could have saved a lot of time and money installing anti-virus appliances at the building switch blocks and blocking common virus ports.
Keep in mind when I say administrators in the context of this article I don't mean the sysadmins. I mean the college administration faculty and tech deans with no real world experience that decide these things.
Yeah I took a required course that was about half web design last semester and she spent half the course teaching us frames and tables when she should have been teaching us css since half of us were already familiar with html and the other half knew nothing and could just as easily have learned css as html. And this was a part time professor who is supposedly a web project manager for a big comapany.
I am so glad I am taking time away from school at least this way I will not spend 3 years learning how things are really done after I graduate.
The DC public school system has had a similar project going on for most of the last decade that does not work yet. Also a large database, management, and payroll system. They are actually being advised to give up on it since they are now out of money and the citywide system will do a better job. But they don't even have the money to join the citywide system now. A lot of it stems from unnacountable and incompetent administration for large .edu and government projects that change specs often and insist on a lot of customization which then has to be redone every time they change the specs. They are also only interested in the latest buzzword instead of what works. The companies are all too happy to take advantage of the situation. In the DC case and in some other school districts they purchase systems well in excess of their current and future needs because they refuse to hire competent people for project planning and administration. In most cases the needs fulfilled by these systems could be done with very little customization and be planned and implemented in less than 2 years. Consultants can cost a lot but its a lot less than the cost of buying something that never works. One more reason why colleges are always so behind the times.
Charm City does rock. There are some very poor, very dangerous parts of town. It would be far more useful to put cameras in places like Cherry Hill than in the inner harbour where its all just tourists and sports fans. Cameras provide peace of mind but I would not want them everywhere recording everything all the time. Better lighting and more police would be a lot better. They could hire 250-350 more police for that same 25M. (assuming the salary + benefits of a police officer are between 60-100k) I am not sure, thats just a guess since that is what a lot of cops in MD make.
NYC is definitely a good example of how a more visible police presence can help street crime tremendously. Nobody is gonna rob someone in sight of a cop. In many major cities you can instantly tell when you entered a high crime area cause there is no cops around at all.
I did not say Bush is hitler. I said they want a police state in US.
Clear Channel is owned by right-wingers who agree that the FCC should censor Radio. The top people in Clear Channel agree with the fines. It gives them an excuse to force out all the liberal leaning shock jocks that they syndicate on their stations and only let well dressed old white male conservatives on the radio.
You would think that Powell the General would be more likely to turn the country into a military police state but its really Powell jr. the Chairman of the Directorate for Truth and Decency in broadcasting that will bring about the neocon's hitlerian vision of a new America.
The Bush Administration are as much Radical Religious Fundamentalists as Al-Queda and Taliban. They agree on everything except who should rule the world and how low the hemlines should be. Regular people don't care about who rules the world as long as nobody bothers them.
A list of 120,000 names does not really narrow it down much. Perhaps there are a few hundred foriegn terrorists operating in the United States. 1% of 120,000 is 1200 and I would venture a guess that there are no more than 1200 foriegn terrorists in the US even by the widest stretch of the term terrorist. If my assumption is accurate then that mean MATRIX has a 99% false positive rate and sorting through 120,000 names to find 1200 or less is not a very useful tool. If there were really 120000 terrorists or even 12000 don't you think they would have gone to the store bought some guns and started shooting people by now. 12000 is a small army and could easily cause a lot of damage before our military could respond. Even 1200 could all get together and really do a lot of damage. That leads me to believe that they are a few hundred at most in a number of different groups espousing vastly different ideological and political goals. This system is just one more tool to turn America into a police state. Who are the real terrorists here?
As I said before. I am not a CS major. I am a business major. I can see some value in in a CS degree if you are a programmer but in my case I was paying almost 30k a year to learn business from a school that lost 26% of its freshmen each year and a good chunk of its softmores and juniors mainly because it exists for the benefit of its overpaid administrators and sweetheart deal food contractors far more than for its paying customers.
I think that people have to examine the total cost of a 4 year degree. Figure that a IT worker probably gets 25k a year at the minimum for a person with no degree, at an entry level job. Each year at a private University costs about 40,000 a year with food, housing, books, tuition, and misc bullshit. The average stay at college is now 5 years for a Bachelors especially for long programs like engineering, cs, and business mostly due to increasing credit counts and more required academic courses (as opposed to easier electives) which increase the likelihood of having to repeat classes. That is 200k for a private college degree. Add to that 5 years of missing out on a shitty 25k a year job and its $325k. The question is whether a person is really going to make 325 thousand dollars more over their working life with a degree than without. In most industries the answer is probably hovering around the just barely mark these days because so many college grad's still end up working shit jobs unrelated to their major for less than 50k and often less than 35k.
I am a person who does a lot better in working environments than formal education environments. I hate school. I cannot stand it. I am a habitual underachiever. At work on the contrary I quickly become well liked and virtually indispensible. My current supervisor pretty much flat out told the guy who hired me that I was not going to work out for her at all when I interviewed. Within 3 days she went back to him and told him she "loved me." Now a few months later she wants me to go with her to her new job when her contract is up saying that she does not know how she can work without me.
This makes not going back to school and doing another 2 years of college bullshit, a lot more appealing.
I am a tech generalist but I mostly focus on pc config/repair and networking. I am working on my CCNP through cisco academy which is actually a great place to network with other people cause a lot of the other students and the instructors work for big companies and government agencies. At this point if I had to choose between having my degree and having my CCNP with a security clearance I would definitely choose the latter.
I think that working for a couple years and then perhaps finishing my degree in business is much more useful since I will already be employed and experienced and I can parlay my degree directly into a management slot.
In other words, they want the Satelite stations to be just like the Clearchannel broadcast stations. The same crap all the time everywhere.
I am well aware of the moral of that movie. Perhaps I should have used a B5 quote instead.
Kosh: "They are a dying people, we should let them pass."
"they are dying."
.rm files in WMP anyways thanks to the RealAlternative codec.
"Let them die."
I will not miss Real too much and I know very few of us will. They make a buggy crappy player and it competed with another buggy crappy player for a different equally crappy format. The company with the bigger bank account won. No surprise there. I play my
Apple has nothing to gain by helping Real and it is unlikely that Microsoft wants anything to do with Real except maybe to wait until they are about to collapse and buy them out to own the format.
No one uses Realplayer to play mp3's except for those systems that downloaded the RealOne operating system and can't use anything else to play media files anymore.
A friend of mine was working a part time crap job at a pool. She then landed a sweet job that paid like 6 times as much. She called in to say she was quiting and her former boss tried to convince her that she was legally required to give them two weeks notice. An employer gets notice in relation to the pay and treatment I recieve there. A minimum wage job does not get two weeks notice when you have already been hired for a 60k job.
Its not forced cheer, its a "FISHER PRICE" interface. "My First 'Puter"
The current issue of Reason magazine. www.reason.com has a cover article on this issue. I am sure it is far more free speech centered then the Baltimore Sun article. How did the Moonies get to own so many newpapers anyways?
Personally I would consider the moment I was notified that I was being laid off as the time I was laid off. If they want me to continue my normal job for x amount of time then that is fine. If they want me to train a replacement then they can pay me consultant rates. Once you are notified that you are being laid off for no cause, how can you be fired for cause. You are not required to finish up your week or month or whatever, the employer and employee simply agree that is the case but they can't make you do it. As far as unemployment eligibility goes they can't very well fire you once for no cause and then for cause when you refuse to train a replacement. If they want you to train a replacement, tell them you want consultant rates or extended severance and benefits.