And the United States is the only country in the world realistically capable of turning the USSR....err "Russia" into radioactive ash. For crying out loud are we really going to do all of this again? Why?
Love that comic. Bloom County was amazing and I miss it daily. Seen that particular one many times and had no interest in copying it from that website (I already own at least one book that includes it) until I tried to run my cursor over it. I just wanted to read it and kind of use my mouse cursor sometimes like a person would their fingertip to follow the text. The moment I did that the big red COPYNO.com image replaced what I was trying to read and it became my mission in life to copy the damned picture. Out comes my screenshot utility and moments later I'm sending that out to several people just because I can.
I think that the real issue is that a car, much like a home is one of the relatively few things in this world that Americans (for the most part) will ever negotiate the price of. In the US most things traditionally "cost what they cost". You decide what you want to buy, you go to where they sell it, and you pay them the price that they have on the price tag if you want it bad enough and/or think it is worth the asking price. Relatively few people in the US negotiate daily and for most of them it's not a comfortable experience. Most people don't have a comfortable understanding of the process and are worried that they're being taken advantage of when they settle on a price. The process doesn't do much to help get past this fear. The last time I bought a car I did it online. I was looking for a 2006 Pontiac GTO and went to Pontiac's website where I searched for one in Texas and Louisiana. I found them all, assembled all their email addresses for their online sales department, and sent them the same email. Basically "I want a 2006 GTO, I'm going to pay 18% off sticker, I don't care what color it is or whether it is an automatic or manual transmission (there were very few options on that car). Please contact me if you want to move a car right now. I have my own financing lined up. Thank You".
I got a bunch of replies. Most said nobody would make that deal and three said they had a car they would sell me for that deal. I picked one (a silver one in Bastrop Texas) and drove there from Houston with my wife to pick it up. I was in the dealership for about 45 minutes.
Actually a lot of them don't do this anymore (pull them off the same line). That was a very common practice a few years ago where the company that produced the official product did so with the intention of running a "third shift" to make goods that would go unreported and sell them under the table. Now the guys making fakes (and nothing but fakes) are so good at what they do that something simple like an NFL logo is just too easy to copy perfectly. I buy them all the time and rarely ever see any kind of big gaff on their part. One exception was a jersey I ordered for a Saints fan friend who wanted to piggyback on my jersey order. He wanted a Pierre Thomas jersey for his wife and he got it. Problem was it came in as "THMOS" on the back of the jersey instead of "THOMAS". I told the people I ordered it from about it and they sent me a replacement, no questions asked. I was really surprised at that kind of customer support from basically a counterfeiter. Then we opened it and saw that it too said "THMOS" on the back. Oh well. Win some you lose some...
I only buy counterfeit jerseys now and if you find the right source they're rarely much different from the real thing. The only "level" of jersey that shows a great deal of difference is the genuine "on-field" jersey that is supposed to be exactly like the one the players wear. In the case of those yes, the real ones are made of better, thicker material with stronger seams. I can get one for a fraction of the real price though that is almost indistinguishable from the real thing at 10 feet and that's all I care about. I own two real jerseys. Both cost upwards of $250 and both players are long gone from the team I follow. Won't make that mistake again.
Buying a real jersey is something you do towards the end of a HoF players career, not on draft day before you know anything about them or the career they're going to have. It's so easy to waste your money on this stuff if you go authentic. Every year I contact "My man in China" via email and get his latest URL. he moves all the time and gets busted every now and then. He's back up in days at a new site and his jerseys are around $30 for a beautiful copy with all sewn letters/numbers. He has new players available within weeks (sometimes even days) of their coming to a team. I buy about 4-5 jerseys a year this way and when a player gets traded, or cut I don't get burned like I did before. What always amazes me is how good the fakes are. A really bad screen-printed pretend jersey at Academy is over $60 and I can get a great looking fake on-field jersey for $30. Who in the hell is guying the screen-printed crap?
Every time they shut him down he pops back up. That's the new economic reality IP holders. Time to get your prices back to reality. If Keki in China can afford to crank out hundreds of thousands of jerseys like this and ship them in small packages all over the US then it's hard to miss that the NFL is fucking over it's fans with overpriced crap.
Many years ago I preferred an open environment. Minimal cubical walls and hearing everything going on worked for me then. Back around 2008 I was moved to another location following Hurricane Ike (I'm in Houston TX) and ended up in my own office. Then in 2012 I again moved to another location (entirely new department actually) and found myself in one of those areas where there are offices after a fashion but no doors or ceiling tiles. It's got a kind of loft feel to it I guess but the place just seems noisy to me. I hear so much background chatter and random noise that I find I have a hard time focusing on harder problems. I wonder if my age is a factor. I'm almost 50 now and find that as I get older I'm having a harder time separating background noise from people talking directly to me. Could be my hearing I guess. Either way I find myself missing my office and peace and quiet it came with.
You know, oddly enough I don't have nearly as much trouble using Metro/Modern on my servers as I do on my desktop. I guess it's because I only do a small number of things on the server and I can place those to the Start menu and go on about my business. For me it's the exact opposite on the desktop. Like a lot of people I have a bunch of programs that I use (and have used for years) and I just want my "desktop" when I'm working on my desktop.
Careful. You might get a cease and desist letter from Disney. I'm sure they own "Evil plan to TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!!" and probably have for quite some time.
I "pirate" a lot of media. It's a mixed bag really and not all of it is just completely freeloading. Example: I download rips of movies I already own on DVD/BR. I'm lazy and it's quicker than ripping it myself. Some of the guys who do this are excellent at keeping as much quality as possible while getting a smaller file footprint. I have no talent for this so why bother? I download music that I own on a variety of formats. I'm not going to re-buy digital content. If I own an old scratchy LP I feel no shame in downloading perfect mp3 files of the material. I also download movies that I skipped at the theater because I thought they'd suck. From time to time I pay for a good one on BR after the fact but more often than not I don't. The reason I responded to you though was your mention of a "free trial". When it started I downloaded Game of Thrones and got hooked pretty quickly. It's a good show. More importantly though my wife got hooked on it. We now subscribe to HBO which I would have bet the farm was never going to happen. We own books that we would not have otherwise bought. While I don't go much past that she spends money on all kinds of other Game of Thrones related junk. That all started because through word of mouth I heard that the show was good and downloaded a few episodes.
As a one time police officer who has been out of that line of work for almost 20 years I have to disagree with you. There are good cops. They are few and far between but they exist. You're on to one thing though and it's something that a lot of people just don't seem to understand. The police (speaking of the whole group and still maintaining that some do not fall into this group) are by and large exceptionally racist, which many people realize but what they don't get is that the police only really see two races. "Blue" and "You". Ok, it's not technically a racial issue but the reason I put it like that is because it's approached the same way by the police. I know because I was surrounded by people like that. If you're blue you're a fellow officer and most of them will tolerate a great deal in another officer. Crossing a line or two is nothing. A police officer has to almost be cornered before he'll hold another police officer to the same standard he'll hold you or I to. Even then it doesn't always end as it should because another officer further up the food chain will head that off if possible once the situation has moved beyond the public eye. I never really thought about it at the time but when I was in law enforcement I rarely kept my registration up to date. I drove one car for over two years without having to get it inspected or paying the registration fee. When I got pulled over I just whipped out "Badge Americard" and was given a pass. I drove as fast as I wanted without a care in the world. That's little stuff but it scales up. I didn't leave the profession out of outrage either. I left because I hurt my back (at home, not work related in any way) and had to move to a less physical career but when I did leave and stepped back I realized that I was part of a system that is almost entirely made up of bad cops. It's just that most of them are bad with a little "b".
Sometimes it is because they are evil or "bad guys".
Granted we don't know anything about these people and they don't have a whole lot of time to tell their story even if they're so inclined but if you do these kinds of things you're buying a ticket for a chance at the kind of death evil bad guys often get.
That's already happened. This was rural Mexico for crying out loud. The odds that they weren't bit by a snake, spider, or donkey are miniscule at best. I'm betting on them being pricked by an Agave cactus. I want to see a superhero (or supervillain, I'm not picky) who attacks by peeing a stream of radioactive tequila and dresses like the Frito Bandito.
I don't understand why so many nations are trying to reach a consensus on military action in Syria over a chemical weapon attack that may or may not have been done by the regime there but nobody has suggested multi-national cooperation to take over the mess in Fukushima. Japan has failed miserably at dealing with this crisis and continues to do so. It's time to tell them to get the fuck out of the way and bring world-wide resources to bear on this. The UN should be bringing countries together to solve problems like this.
That's rubbish. Political correctness is the only reason why we'd want a female Doctor. If all we wanted was an interesting character then it would be easier to invent a female Time Lord character and start a series based on her adventures. Nobody wants to do that though because it's easier to point to a male character and say "Well that's been going on too long and it isn't fair". Seriously this stuff is as ridiculous as making the next Superman black or turning the Golden Age Green Lantern homosexual.
In the context of the world Ansel Adams lived in yes of course. In the world today and going forward? Maybe not. The way this system works is changing and Ansel Adams today could still charge money for prints of his photographs. Most likely he couldn't make the enormous amount of money he made in the past because once a picture had reached a wide enough level of distribution someone would scan it and let fly a free copy of it. Right, wrong, I'm the one with the wide-format scanner. What could Adams do to offset this? That's what we're figuring out in the present. Who knows where it will end. He's going to be able to make a living tomorrow. It just won't be the kind of living he grew accustomed to when he was alive.
Nothing entitles people to be able to earn a living doing what they love. There's no guarantee that it will happen. Many of them will need to get a "day job" just as many do today. They can attempt to sell the products of their effort and if there's no market for it then they need another source of income. This also doesn't mean that book, songs, and pictures will cease to be created. It just means that the people doing it will be doing it most likely for "love of the game" and not the money.
I've seen one incident of a person using a phone in a theater. The time I did see it the person (middle aged man, white male if that matters) using the phone actually took a call while sitting in the theater. The theater was about three quarters full and his phone started ringing. Immediately people started with the "Come on man, take it outside". He ignored everyone, answered the phone, and started a conversation sitting right there. There was a short pause as everyone kind of took in the fact that he was going to do that and then it literally blew up. People started yelling at this guy. Someone got up to go get an usher and the guy using the phone turned halfway around and said something I couldn't hear to the people directly behind him. The "big guy" (of which there is one everywhere) got up, walked down to him and said something else I didn't hear. The man started to argue with him and just then a couple of ushers came in and got middle-age phone guy out of there. He shouted "Fuck you" to I think the whole room or maybe just to the big guy who talked to him as he left. I think general peer pressure is worse than anything the theaters can do and will work for most people. Some people are just going to do what they want and "Fuck you" to the rest of us.
Slashdot Mirror
And the United States is the only country in the world realistically capable of turning the USSR....err "Russia" into radioactive ash. For crying out loud are we really going to do all of this again? Why?
"Mistakes were made"?
Step One: Find someone born on Krypton......
Apple can't do it. They're busy with their immortality project. What? You didn't think Steve was really dead did you?
Love that comic. Bloom County was amazing and I miss it daily. Seen that particular one many times and had no interest in copying it from that website (I already own at least one book that includes it) until I tried to run my cursor over it. I just wanted to read it and kind of use my mouse cursor sometimes like a person would their fingertip to follow the text. The moment I did that the big red COPYNO.com image replaced what I was trying to read and it became my mission in life to copy the damned picture. Out comes my screenshot utility and moments later I'm sending that out to several people just because I can.
Who exactly would be strong enough to make the US back down? I'm just curious.
I think that the real issue is that a car, much like a home is one of the relatively few things in this world that Americans (for the most part) will ever negotiate the price of. In the US most things traditionally "cost what they cost". You decide what you want to buy, you go to where they sell it, and you pay them the price that they have on the price tag if you want it bad enough and/or think it is worth the asking price. Relatively few people in the US negotiate daily and for most of them it's not a comfortable experience. Most people don't have a comfortable understanding of the process and are worried that they're being taken advantage of when they settle on a price. The process doesn't do much to help get past this fear. The last time I bought a car I did it online. I was looking for a 2006 Pontiac GTO and went to Pontiac's website where I searched for one in Texas and Louisiana. I found them all, assembled all their email addresses for their online sales department, and sent them the same email. Basically "I want a 2006 GTO, I'm going to pay 18% off sticker, I don't care what color it is or whether it is an automatic or manual transmission (there were very few options on that car). Please contact me if you want to move a car right now. I have my own financing lined up. Thank You". I got a bunch of replies. Most said nobody would make that deal and three said they had a car they would sell me for that deal. I picked one (a silver one in Bastrop Texas) and drove there from Houston with my wife to pick it up. I was in the dealership for about 45 minutes.
Indeed this is true. Very similar to the way I built up my immunity to iocaine powder over the last couple of years!
Actually a lot of them don't do this anymore (pull them off the same line). That was a very common practice a few years ago where the company that produced the official product did so with the intention of running a "third shift" to make goods that would go unreported and sell them under the table. Now the guys making fakes (and nothing but fakes) are so good at what they do that something simple like an NFL logo is just too easy to copy perfectly. I buy them all the time and rarely ever see any kind of big gaff on their part. One exception was a jersey I ordered for a Saints fan friend who wanted to piggyback on my jersey order. He wanted a Pierre Thomas jersey for his wife and he got it. Problem was it came in as "THMOS" on the back of the jersey instead of "THOMAS". I told the people I ordered it from about it and they sent me a replacement, no questions asked. I was really surprised at that kind of customer support from basically a counterfeiter. Then we opened it and saw that it too said "THMOS" on the back. Oh well. Win some you lose some...
I only buy counterfeit jerseys now and if you find the right source they're rarely much different from the real thing. The only "level" of jersey that shows a great deal of difference is the genuine "on-field" jersey that is supposed to be exactly like the one the players wear. In the case of those yes, the real ones are made of better, thicker material with stronger seams. I can get one for a fraction of the real price though that is almost indistinguishable from the real thing at 10 feet and that's all I care about. I own two real jerseys. Both cost upwards of $250 and both players are long gone from the team I follow. Won't make that mistake again. Buying a real jersey is something you do towards the end of a HoF players career, not on draft day before you know anything about them or the career they're going to have. It's so easy to waste your money on this stuff if you go authentic. Every year I contact "My man in China" via email and get his latest URL. he moves all the time and gets busted every now and then. He's back up in days at a new site and his jerseys are around $30 for a beautiful copy with all sewn letters/numbers. He has new players available within weeks (sometimes even days) of their coming to a team. I buy about 4-5 jerseys a year this way and when a player gets traded, or cut I don't get burned like I did before. What always amazes me is how good the fakes are. A really bad screen-printed pretend jersey at Academy is over $60 and I can get a great looking fake on-field jersey for $30. Who in the hell is guying the screen-printed crap? Every time they shut him down he pops back up. That's the new economic reality IP holders. Time to get your prices back to reality. If Keki in China can afford to crank out hundreds of thousands of jerseys like this and ship them in small packages all over the US then it's hard to miss that the NFL is fucking over it's fans with overpriced crap.
Many years ago I preferred an open environment. Minimal cubical walls and hearing everything going on worked for me then. Back around 2008 I was moved to another location following Hurricane Ike (I'm in Houston TX) and ended up in my own office. Then in 2012 I again moved to another location (entirely new department actually) and found myself in one of those areas where there are offices after a fashion but no doors or ceiling tiles. It's got a kind of loft feel to it I guess but the place just seems noisy to me. I hear so much background chatter and random noise that I find I have a hard time focusing on harder problems. I wonder if my age is a factor. I'm almost 50 now and find that as I get older I'm having a harder time separating background noise from people talking directly to me. Could be my hearing I guess. Either way I find myself missing my office and peace and quiet it came with.
You know, oddly enough I don't have nearly as much trouble using Metro/Modern on my servers as I do on my desktop. I guess it's because I only do a small number of things on the server and I can place those to the Start menu and go on about my business. For me it's the exact opposite on the desktop. Like a lot of people I have a bunch of programs that I use (and have used for years) and I just want my "desktop" when I'm working on my desktop.
Bruce Willis? Think he has time?
Careful. You might get a cease and desist letter from Disney. I'm sure they own "Evil plan to TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!!" and probably have for quite some time.
I "pirate" a lot of media. It's a mixed bag really and not all of it is just completely freeloading. Example: I download rips of movies I already own on DVD/BR. I'm lazy and it's quicker than ripping it myself. Some of the guys who do this are excellent at keeping as much quality as possible while getting a smaller file footprint. I have no talent for this so why bother? I download music that I own on a variety of formats. I'm not going to re-buy digital content. If I own an old scratchy LP I feel no shame in downloading perfect mp3 files of the material. I also download movies that I skipped at the theater because I thought they'd suck. From time to time I pay for a good one on BR after the fact but more often than not I don't. The reason I responded to you though was your mention of a "free trial". When it started I downloaded Game of Thrones and got hooked pretty quickly. It's a good show. More importantly though my wife got hooked on it. We now subscribe to HBO which I would have bet the farm was never going to happen. We own books that we would not have otherwise bought. While I don't go much past that she spends money on all kinds of other Game of Thrones related junk. That all started because through word of mouth I heard that the show was good and downloaded a few episodes.
As a one time police officer who has been out of that line of work for almost 20 years I have to disagree with you. There are good cops. They are few and far between but they exist. You're on to one thing though and it's something that a lot of people just don't seem to understand. The police (speaking of the whole group and still maintaining that some do not fall into this group) are by and large exceptionally racist, which many people realize but what they don't get is that the police only really see two races. "Blue" and "You". Ok, it's not technically a racial issue but the reason I put it like that is because it's approached the same way by the police. I know because I was surrounded by people like that. If you're blue you're a fellow officer and most of them will tolerate a great deal in another officer. Crossing a line or two is nothing. A police officer has to almost be cornered before he'll hold another police officer to the same standard he'll hold you or I to. Even then it doesn't always end as it should because another officer further up the food chain will head that off if possible once the situation has moved beyond the public eye. I never really thought about it at the time but when I was in law enforcement I rarely kept my registration up to date. I drove one car for over two years without having to get it inspected or paying the registration fee. When I got pulled over I just whipped out "Badge Americard" and was given a pass. I drove as fast as I wanted without a care in the world. That's little stuff but it scales up. I didn't leave the profession out of outrage either. I left because I hurt my back (at home, not work related in any way) and had to move to a less physical career but when I did leave and stepped back I realized that I was part of a system that is almost entirely made up of bad cops. It's just that most of them are bad with a little "b".
Sometimes it is because they are evil or "bad guys". Granted we don't know anything about these people and they don't have a whole lot of time to tell their story even if they're so inclined but if you do these kinds of things you're buying a ticket for a chance at the kind of death evil bad guys often get.
That's already happened. This was rural Mexico for crying out loud. The odds that they weren't bit by a snake, spider, or donkey are miniscule at best. I'm betting on them being pricked by an Agave cactus. I want to see a superhero (or supervillain, I'm not picky) who attacks by peeing a stream of radioactive tequila and dresses like the Frito Bandito.
But are those "Enterprise SSDs"?
I don't understand why so many nations are trying to reach a consensus on military action in Syria over a chemical weapon attack that may or may not have been done by the regime there but nobody has suggested multi-national cooperation to take over the mess in Fukushima. Japan has failed miserably at dealing with this crisis and continues to do so. It's time to tell them to get the fuck out of the way and bring world-wide resources to bear on this. The UN should be bringing countries together to solve problems like this.
That's rubbish. Political correctness is the only reason why we'd want a female Doctor. If all we wanted was an interesting character then it would be easier to invent a female Time Lord character and start a series based on her adventures. Nobody wants to do that though because it's easier to point to a male character and say "Well that's been going on too long and it isn't fair". Seriously this stuff is as ridiculous as making the next Superman black or turning the Golden Age Green Lantern homosexual.
In the context of the world Ansel Adams lived in yes of course. In the world today and going forward? Maybe not. The way this system works is changing and Ansel Adams today could still charge money for prints of his photographs. Most likely he couldn't make the enormous amount of money he made in the past because once a picture had reached a wide enough level of distribution someone would scan it and let fly a free copy of it. Right, wrong, I'm the one with the wide-format scanner. What could Adams do to offset this? That's what we're figuring out in the present. Who knows where it will end. He's going to be able to make a living tomorrow. It just won't be the kind of living he grew accustomed to when he was alive.
Nothing entitles people to be able to earn a living doing what they love. There's no guarantee that it will happen. Many of them will need to get a "day job" just as many do today. They can attempt to sell the products of their effort and if there's no market for it then they need another source of income. This also doesn't mean that book, songs, and pictures will cease to be created. It just means that the people doing it will be doing it most likely for "love of the game" and not the money.
So true (#2)
I've seen one incident of a person using a phone in a theater. The time I did see it the person (middle aged man, white male if that matters) using the phone actually took a call while sitting in the theater. The theater was about three quarters full and his phone started ringing. Immediately people started with the "Come on man, take it outside". He ignored everyone, answered the phone, and started a conversation sitting right there. There was a short pause as everyone kind of took in the fact that he was going to do that and then it literally blew up. People started yelling at this guy. Someone got up to go get an usher and the guy using the phone turned halfway around and said something I couldn't hear to the people directly behind him. The "big guy" (of which there is one everywhere) got up, walked down to him and said something else I didn't hear. The man started to argue with him and just then a couple of ushers came in and got middle-age phone guy out of there. He shouted "Fuck you" to I think the whole room or maybe just to the big guy who talked to him as he left. I think general peer pressure is worse than anything the theaters can do and will work for most people. Some people are just going to do what they want and "Fuck you" to the rest of us.