Calling someone a "christian fundamentalist fool" and misspelling the word "fool": priceless.
Fool is a good word in his context, but "tool" is just as good - as in "someone who is used". I believe he's implying there are a bunch of numb-minded christian fundamentalists who are being used as tools of their leadership.
That's what god tells me, anyway. An angel read it to me off some pretty golden plates.
Actually, I didn't make anything up. I did a spot check against a list found at http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0777460.html. Without doing a thorough comparison, there were many common entries on both lists.
So, doing a careful comparison, there are 26 out of the 43 that support the death penalty. In either case, both list puts the US in some pretty sad company.
The fact that it's just more than half are shared between the two lists doesn't really do a whole lot to make me stand up and say I'm proud to be an American. As an American and a veteran, I'd personally like to see my country hold itself to a higher standard.
Countries that both support the Death Penalty and are not signatories to the land mine ban: Bahrain China Cuba Egypt India Indonesia Iran Iraq Kazakhstan Korea, North Korea, South Kuwait Kyrgyzstan Lebanon Libya Mongolia Oman Pakistan Saudi Arabia Singapore Somalia Syria United Arab Emirates United States Uzbekistan Vietnam
reads like a whos who of third world countries and banana republics, what good company USA keeps
That list is not so different from the list of countries that still permit the death penalty. I suppose that comes from a general disregard for human life common to countries in both lists.
Well, that explains why Google is giving so much room in their inboxes. You just never know when you might receive an internet or two. Next thing you know, you'll be getting whole spam internets.
Actually its more like your girlfriend calling you, yelling 'Help m-' and then hearing the phone being crushed before the line is cut. Then calling her home phone, her workplace and her friends to learn no one knows where she is or whats shes doing.
Something like that practically happened to me. My girlfriend had been living in Paris for a few weeks and on the day she was leaving Paris for another town, I get this phone call. It wakes me up at 4:00AM. It's international, her cellphone, and all I can hear is what sounds like a lot of scuffling and some muffled cries and then the phone goes dead. This was shortly after that girl got kidnapped and killed while on the phone with her boyfriend.
I tried calling her back on her phone with no luck. No answer. I tried her old apartment.. disconnected. I kept calling. No luck.
I started going through ideas in my head - what could I do? Call the Paris Police? And tell them what?
I kept trying to call her cellphone.
After about 30 minutes, she answers with a perky, "Hello?"
Turns out her phone was in her purse and the send button got pushed while she was running for the train and she didn't know about it. The cries were a child in the same cabin she was in. That's the story she told me, anyway.
But, it's a big feeling of helplessness to think someone you care about is in trouble and there's really nothing you can do.
This was a study made up of 40 volunteers in a driving simulator. I'm not so sure that's a very good predictor of how I will drive or how I will drive with a cellphone.
I offer as evidence of my driving ability 20 years of driving experience with over a million miles driven in a wide variety of situations, weather, and settings. No accidents. Several close calls - mostly from other people who almost hit me - that I was able to drive myself out of.
Like someone else said, assume everyone else can't drive, and then drive accordingly. Give yourself as much distance as is practical, and keep you eyes on everything around you. Only fidget with the radio, cds, AC, cellphone, when it is safe.
I feel my record demonstrates that I'm capable of making that judgement. Or maybe I'm just lucky - but then again, I don't believe in luck.
If you can't drive and talk, that's fine - don't. But don't try to pass a law saying nobody else can - especially based on the evidence from a study of 40 people who weren't even in real-life driving situations.
I'm not saying anything about being at home and immune to the law.
What I'm saying is that the school should have no jurisdiction over what the kid does at home. That's what is parents and law enforcement are for. It may be against school rules to run in the halls with scissors. If a kid does this at home, the school should have no say in the matter - as that should be reserved for the parents. In Loco Parentis should only apply when the kid is at school or in school-related activities.
By that logic, we should simply ban all driving except by constantly certified professionals.
In fact we should ban anything that a person might do where they are not as good as they think they are.
I'll stop playing piano right now, lest I actually drive my neighbors to suicide while I think I'm playing well. You should stop cooking too. I know you think you can handle a stove with 400 degree temperatures - but you are probably overestimating your abilities and may burn down the whole building. Oh, and we should ban pumping gas because that gasoline is very dangerous and most people over-estimate their ability to handle it (oh wait, I live in Oregon - we already did that).
Either you let people drive or you don't. People are devilishly crafty and they'll find ways to distract themselves regardless of what laws you pass.
And besides, I personally believe this is all about small-minded miserable people who want to inhibit and control others. "By god, if I'm stuck in traffic and am miserable, there's no way anyone else should have the escape of talking on a cell-phone." You see these people everywhere, but most concentrated in places like PTAs, community associations, and town halls. They thrive on forcing their ways on everyone else.
So, if you are worried about drivers with cellphones, you better be worried about drivers with hair curlers, hamburgers, cds, radio dials, billboards, newspapers, blowjobs, talking passengers, temperature controls, daydreams, bad days, hot girlfiends, and anything else that may distract them.
How about this: You drive defensively, and I'll do my best not to hit you. If I hit you, you can sue me and my insurance will cover the bill.
Life is risky and comes with no guarantees. The more you try to legislate and regulate to make it risk-free the more end up with a repressive and oppressive society.
Public schools have policies that restrict the constitutional rights of students and they can therefore punish students where an adult citizen might only be investigated.
I believe that concept is called in loco parentis. It means "in place of the parent" - that the school acts in the place of the parent while the child is at school. The problem is, it should only apply when the kids "in loco" the school. The kid at home should be free to say what he wants or put whatever he wants on his IM.
Boring road: I can handle it. I've driven a lot and in a lot of conditions. I'm a good judge of when I need to pay full attention and when I can drive on "autopilot". If you can't be distracted by radios, cellphones and hamburgers, it's good that you know that.
Before you leave: a typical trip may take anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours. It's not always appropriate to make that call before I leave. What's the point of calling for takeout 3 hours before I need it? I know I'm a good judge on whether the traffic is safe to call in. When it's not safe, I don't call. I see no problem with being at a stand-still in traffic and calling ahead to say I'm going to be late. For god's sake, nobody is even moving.
9-11: Maybe it's on the other side of the freeway. Maybe there's a gang beating up somoeone and I don't feel safe stopping? And as for helping before the EMT's get there, I'm not going to risk that lawsuit. Sure, there are good samaritan laws, but those are only as good as the lawyers you can afford to defend yourself.
What it all boils down to the fact that I'm an adult who is responsible for what I do. I make decisions every day that can impact other people. If I make a bad decision then I end up paying for it somehow. I know, that with many years experience, I know when I can talk on the phone and when I shouldn't.
Your experience teaches you that you can't handle it at all. That's just fine. In fact, I'm glad you know your limits. But don't go trying to limit me based on what you can't handle. Too many stupid laws come out of thinking like that.
I think the real problem is that people don't pay attention to their driving and to themselves when they are driving.
I don't think I'm any kind of uber-driver, but I pay attention to what's going on and how I'm reacting. I know that if the traffic situation is tense I almost automatically turn down the radio and cut out other distractions. It's the same when I'm on a cellphone while driving. If I'm getting more tense from the driving condition, I quickly tell the person I'll call them back and I pay attention. Driving doesn't always require 100% attention.
There's no reason a responsible person shouldn't be able to use their cellphone while driving to a) pass time on boring stretches of roads, b) call ahead for take-out, c) call home to see if anything is needed, d) call ahead to let them know you'll be late, e) call and ask for directions, and f) call 9-11 because you just saw an accident or drunk driver.
This is all about a group of whiny people who want to control what other people do. Punish people for what they do that actually harms others, not what could possibly harm others.
Because we know that the thief was a linux user who carries a copy of knoppix in their back pocket.
That really doesn't matter now, does it?
I'm making the point that someone could easily get that data off that laptop without booting into the OS (and changing modify dates) and copy all the data. They don't even have to remove the drive from the computer to do it.
So at its essense, the point I'm making is that the government is telling some full-of-shit story about how the data wasn't accessed or copied in order to placate the public. It's either that, or the government investigators are criminally incompetent.
On one hand, there's a good chance that the person who stole the laptop was just after something he could easily fence. But there's also a good chance that the theif knew exactly what he was after and had marked his target and got what he wanted. There's a thriving business in identity information out there. I certainly don't trust that the government when it says the data wasn't accessed and that I have nothing to worry about.
While I'm sure it's great to get the firewire working at full speed, why don't you just put the drives on separate IDE channels in the same machine. You'll get a much higher throughput.
You'd still need to use something like xcopy32 (or boot in linux and use tar - if both drives are fat32)... or find a windows version of tar (url:http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/)
Do you really believe them when they say the data was not accessed? Ignoring the fact that the data can be accessed with no evidence left on the drive. You're a veteran, and you still believe what the government tells you when it's good news for them?
The real fault lies with the credit reporting/monitoring companies.
They have created a system where it's easy for anyone to get credit in another person's name. Their solution, of course, is to pay them to monitor your credit in case someone tries to do it.
The data is not very valuable for most ID theives if they cannot open up instant credit. So, the "solution" is to for the VA to pay the very companies that make it easy to get instant credit for monitoring services.
What a racket.
The easiest first step is to require those agencies to allow every person to put a credit freeze on their credit records. This would stop the instant credit and at the same time would stop a vast majority of the ID theft going on.
Those very same companies have lobbyist to prevent this, of course.
As long as it has a CD and you can boot from it (most government laptops do/can), you just need to use a nice bootable version of linux to make a binary copy of the drive. No need to remove screws or even boot up in the orignal OS.
Just imagine how much money this reporter's wife could make turning tricks near an army base... she could probably make 20 times his salary. That's just money left on the table. I wonder why he doesn't have her do that?
Agreed. If they can make a circular saw that can stop dead the moment it touches human flesh (resulting in a possible scratch rather than a severed finger), then i'm sure they can put some better safety features into robots.
But you're forgetting how clever idiots can be.
I used to work in a print shop. I had a large machine for cutting stacks of paper. You have to manually move the paper around under the blades to get it where you want. BUT, to activate the blade and do the cutting, you had to push in two different switches that were a couple feet apart. The idea was that you had to use both hands to activate the blade - and thus, both hands would be away from blade when it cut. It even had spacers that kept you from leaning against the switch.
Well, one idiot I worked with would tape down one of the switches so he could operate the blade with one hand while moving the paper with the other. Sure enough, he lost a finger. Even stupider, he continued to tape one of the switches down.
You just can't engineer aound stupidity like that.
these employers using google and myspace to research their prospective employees may as well be basing their decisions on the bible or the magic 8 ball.
And to take it a step further, how can they even know that the myspace account that is "yours" is really by you?
Suppose you made enemies at a previous job or in school and they decide to set up a myspace account that portrays you as a drug using pedophile. They're good with photoshop, so it looks like you in the pictures with the 12-year olds, etc.
While I'm sure that would probably be considered libel, but I'm sure the employer is not going to tell you that they didn't hire you because of what they saw on myspace. You didn't get the job - the damage is done.
This just seems like an unreliable way to screen candidates and I think any HR department would be foolish to rely on such an unreliable source of information.
My coworker from India always gives the rest of us grief in the office whenever the cost of education comes up (we all have MBAs).
His bachelors degree cost him a total of $400 in India. And while you might say that it wasn't a good education, or comparable to a BS in the US, he got his MBA from Wharton - where he was accepted with his degree from India and graduated in the top 5% of his class.
The benefit is that with this option, if it's done right, you can have access to many more movies than any retailer would ever want to keep in stock.
Imagine this. A store like Target still has a traditional display of DVDs in shiny cases, and it has one of these machines. The machine would have maybe a thousand or two movies in its local storage. It also has access, via high-speed connection, to a databank of hundreds of thousands of movies.
You know you want to buy a movie and you're going shopping at Target. You go online, and sure enough, they have it in plastic for $20, and from the machine for $15. You could even order it and pay for it online and it will be waiting for you at target (you pick it up like you would some film you had developed).
Or, you're at Target and browse available titles at the kiosk. You decide you want a movie and order it, and it's ready in 5 minutes.
Or, you want an obscure movie. You browse for it, and sure enough, it's in the main database, but not on the local machine. You can order it and it will be ready in about an hour. In fact, you could have ordered it from home.
It's this last option that will help a lot against piracy. I can spend a day or more trying to download a movie on P2P and hope that it will come out okay. Or, I can order it for $9.95 and it will be at Target, on a DVD, in DVD quality, in a few hours.
It could be a win for a lot of people: - the retailer keeps a smaller inventory, which saves them money - you have ready access to a ton of movies - you have fairly convenient access to a shit-load of movies - studios have more incentive to master esoteric films to DVD, since they don't have to rely on physical distribution to make a profit on them... they could have as part of their website a "request a movie you don't see" and with enough requests, they could decide to master that movie - by providing older movies at a cheap price, the studios get a purchase rather than someone downloading it from P2P
I'd say married workers are more pliable, more risk-averse, more likely to put up with a shitty work situation, and more likely to "go along to get along".
While losing a job is tough on anyone, a single person can quit to leave a shitty situation and only be putting themselves at risk. A married person with kids is likely to be more docile because if they quit/get fired, they have to take care of the spouse and rug-rats.
So, of course management likes married people with kids, as it's a shackle they didn't even have to pay for.
Sounds like a PDP-something my boss had as a (working) museum piece. It had a board with magnetic-core memory. Something like if the loop of wire went through the hoop it was a 1 and if it went around it was a 0.
Slashdot Mirror
Calling someone a "christian fundamentalist fool" and misspelling the word "fool": priceless.
Fool is a good word in his context, but "tool" is just as good - as in "someone who is used". I believe he's implying there are a bunch of numb-minded christian fundamentalists who are being used as tools of their leadership.
That's what god tells me, anyway. An angel read it to me off some pretty golden plates.
Actually, I didn't make anything up. I did a spot check against a list found at http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0777460.html. Without doing a thorough comparison, there were many common entries on both lists.
So, doing a careful comparison, there are 26 out of the 43 that support the death penalty. In either case, both list puts the US in some pretty sad company.
The fact that it's just more than half are shared between the two lists doesn't really do a whole lot to make me stand up and say I'm proud to be an American. As an American and a veteran, I'd personally like to see my country hold itself to a higher standard.
Countries that both support the Death Penalty and are not signatories to the land mine ban:
Bahrain
China
Cuba
Egypt
India
Indonesia
Iran
Iraq
Kazakhstan
Korea, North
Korea, South
Kuwait
Kyrgyzstan
Lebanon
Libya
Mongolia
Oman
Pakistan
Saudi Arabia
Singapore
Somalia
Syria
United Arab Emirates
United States
Uzbekistan
Vietnam
reads like a whos who of third world countries and banana republics, what good company USA keeps
That list is not so different from the list of countries that still permit the death penalty. I suppose that comes from a general disregard for human life common to countries in both lists.
Well, that explains why Google is giving so much room in their inboxes. You just never know when you might receive an internet or two. Next thing you know, you'll be getting whole spam internets.
Actually its more like your girlfriend calling you, yelling 'Help m-' and then hearing the phone being crushed before the line is cut. Then calling her home phone, her workplace and her friends to learn no one knows where she is or whats shes doing.
Something like that practically happened to me. My girlfriend had been living in Paris for a few weeks and on the day she was leaving Paris for another town, I get this phone call. It wakes me up at 4:00AM. It's international, her cellphone, and all I can hear is what sounds like a lot of scuffling and some muffled cries and then the phone goes dead. This was shortly after that girl got kidnapped and killed while on the phone with her boyfriend.
I tried calling her back on her phone with no luck. No answer. I tried her old apartment.. disconnected. I kept calling. No luck.
I started going through ideas in my head - what could I do? Call the Paris Police? And tell them what?
I kept trying to call her cellphone.
After about 30 minutes, she answers with a perky, "Hello?"
Turns out her phone was in her purse and the send button got pushed while she was running for the train and she didn't know about it. The cries were a child in the same cabin she was in. That's the story she told me, anyway.
But, it's a big feeling of helplessness to think someone you care about is in trouble and there's really nothing you can do.
This was a study made up of 40 volunteers in a driving simulator. I'm not so sure that's a very good predictor of how I will drive or how I will drive with a cellphone.
I offer as evidence of my driving ability 20 years of driving experience with over a million miles driven in a wide variety of situations, weather, and settings. No accidents. Several close calls - mostly from other people who almost hit me - that I was able to drive myself out of.
Like someone else said, assume everyone else can't drive, and then drive accordingly. Give yourself as much distance as is practical, and keep you eyes on everything around you. Only fidget with the radio, cds, AC, cellphone, when it is safe.
I feel my record demonstrates that I'm capable of making that judgement. Or maybe I'm just lucky - but then again, I don't believe in luck.
If you can't drive and talk, that's fine - don't. But don't try to pass a law saying nobody else can - especially based on the evidence from a study of 40 people who weren't even in real-life driving situations.
Please don't yell.
I'm not saying anything about being at home and immune to the law.
What I'm saying is that the school should have no jurisdiction over what the kid does at home. That's what is parents and law enforcement are for. It may be against school rules to run in the halls with scissors. If a kid does this at home, the school should have no say in the matter - as that should be reserved for the parents. In Loco Parentis should only apply when the kid is at school or in school-related activities.
By that logic, we should simply ban all driving except by constantly certified professionals.
In fact we should ban anything that a person might do where they are not as good as they think they are.
I'll stop playing piano right now, lest I actually drive my neighbors to suicide while I think I'm playing well.
You should stop cooking too. I know you think you can handle a stove with 400 degree temperatures - but you are probably overestimating your abilities and may burn down the whole building.
Oh, and we should ban pumping gas because that gasoline is very dangerous and most people over-estimate their ability to handle it (oh wait, I live in Oregon - we already did that).
Either you let people drive or you don't. People are devilishly crafty and they'll find ways to distract themselves regardless of what laws you pass.
And besides, I personally believe this is all about small-minded miserable people who want to inhibit and control others. "By god, if I'm stuck in traffic and am miserable, there's no way anyone else should have the escape of talking on a cell-phone." You see these people everywhere, but most concentrated in places like PTAs, community associations, and town halls. They thrive on forcing their ways on everyone else.
So, if you are worried about drivers with cellphones, you better be worried about drivers with hair curlers, hamburgers, cds, radio dials, billboards, newspapers, blowjobs, talking passengers, temperature controls, daydreams, bad days, hot girlfiends, and anything else that may distract them.
How about this: You drive defensively, and I'll do my best not to hit you. If I hit you, you can sue me and my insurance will cover the bill.
Life is risky and comes with no guarantees. The more you try to legislate and regulate to make it risk-free the more end up with a repressive and oppressive society.
Public schools have policies that restrict the constitutional rights of students and they can therefore punish students where an adult citizen might only be investigated.
I believe that concept is called in loco parentis. It means "in place of the parent" - that the school acts in the place of the parent while the child is at school. The problem is, it should only apply when the kids "in loco" the school. The kid at home should be free to say what he wants or put whatever he wants on his IM.
It's still a dumb thing to do.
Boring road: I can handle it. I've driven a lot and in a lot of conditions. I'm a good judge of when I need to pay full attention and when I can drive on "autopilot". If you can't be distracted by radios, cellphones and hamburgers, it's good that you know that.
Before you leave: a typical trip may take anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours. It's not always appropriate to make that call before I leave. What's the point of calling for takeout 3 hours before I need it? I know I'm a good judge on whether the traffic is safe to call in. When it's not safe, I don't call. I see no problem with being at a stand-still in traffic and calling ahead to say I'm going to be late. For god's sake, nobody is even moving.
9-11: Maybe it's on the other side of the freeway. Maybe there's a gang beating up somoeone and I don't feel safe stopping? And as for helping before the EMT's get there, I'm not going to risk that lawsuit. Sure, there are good samaritan laws, but those are only as good as the lawyers you can afford to defend yourself.
What it all boils down to the fact that I'm an adult who is responsible for what I do. I make decisions every day that can impact other people. If I make a bad decision then I end up paying for it somehow. I know, that with many years experience, I know when I can talk on the phone and when I shouldn't.
Your experience teaches you that you can't handle it at all. That's just fine. In fact, I'm glad you know your limits. But don't go trying to limit me based on what you can't handle. Too many stupid laws come out of thinking like that.
I think the real problem is that people don't pay attention to their driving and to themselves when they are driving.
I don't think I'm any kind of uber-driver, but I pay attention to what's going on and how I'm reacting. I know that if the traffic situation is tense I almost automatically turn down the radio and cut out other distractions. It's the same when I'm on a cellphone while driving. If I'm getting more tense from the driving condition, I quickly tell the person I'll call them back and I pay attention. Driving doesn't always require 100% attention.
There's no reason a responsible person shouldn't be able to use their cellphone while driving to a) pass time on boring stretches of roads, b) call ahead for take-out, c) call home to see if anything is needed, d) call ahead to let them know you'll be late, e) call and ask for directions, and f) call 9-11 because you just saw an accident or drunk driver.
This is all about a group of whiny people who want to control what other people do. Punish people for what they do that actually harms others, not what could possibly harm others.
Because we know that the thief was a linux user who carries a copy of knoppix in their back pocket.
That really doesn't matter now, does it?
I'm making the point that someone could easily get that data off that laptop without booting into the OS (and changing modify dates) and copy all the data. They don't even have to remove the drive from the computer to do it.
So at its essense, the point I'm making is that the government is telling some full-of-shit story about how the data wasn't accessed or copied in order to placate the public. It's either that, or the government investigators are criminally incompetent.
On one hand, there's a good chance that the person who stole the laptop was just after something he could easily fence. But there's also a good chance that the theif knew exactly what he was after and had marked his target and got what he wanted. There's a thriving business in identity information out there. I certainly don't trust that the government when it says the data wasn't accessed and that I have nothing to worry about.
While I'm sure it's great to get the firewire working at full speed, why don't you just put the drives on separate IDE channels in the same machine. You'll get a much higher throughput.
You'd still need to use something like xcopy32 (or boot in linux and use tar - if both drives are fat32)... or find a windows version of tar (url:http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/)
Do you really believe them when they say the data was not accessed? Ignoring the fact that the data can be accessed with no evidence left on the drive. You're a veteran, and you still believe what the government tells you when it's good news for them?
The real fault lies with the credit reporting/monitoring companies.
They have created a system where it's easy for anyone to get credit in another person's name. Their solution, of course, is to pay them to monitor your credit in case someone tries to do it.
The data is not very valuable for most ID theives if they cannot open up instant credit. So, the "solution" is to for the VA to pay the very companies that make it easy to get instant credit for monitoring services.
What a racket.
The easiest first step is to require those agencies to allow every person to put a credit freeze on their credit records. This would stop the instant credit and at the same time would stop a vast majority of the ID theft going on.
Those very same companies have lobbyist to prevent this, of course.
As long as it has a CD and you can boot from it (most government laptops do/can), you just need to use a nice bootable version of linux to make a binary copy of the drive. No need to remove screws or even boot up in the orignal OS.
See my previous post for the exaxt syntax...
You don't even have to pull the drive.
Just boot with knoppix, or some other bootable linux on a cd and do something like:
dd if=/dev/hda |gzip -9 |ssh -l someuser somemachine.com "dd of=stolendrivebackup.gz"
Just imagine how much money this reporter's wife could make turning tricks near an army base... she could probably make 20 times his salary. That's just money left on the table. I wonder why he doesn't have her do that?
Agreed. If they can make a circular saw that can stop dead the moment it touches human flesh (resulting in a possible scratch rather than a severed finger), then i'm sure they can put some better safety features into robots.
But you're forgetting how clever idiots can be.
I used to work in a print shop. I had a large machine for cutting stacks of paper. You have to manually move the paper around under the blades to get it where you want. BUT, to activate the blade and do the cutting, you had to push in two different switches that were a couple feet apart. The idea was that you had to use both hands to activate the blade - and thus, both hands would be away from blade when it cut. It even had spacers that kept you from leaning against the switch.
Well, one idiot I worked with would tape down one of the switches so he could operate the blade with one hand while moving the paper with the other. Sure enough, he lost a finger. Even stupider, he continued to tape one of the switches down.
You just can't engineer aound stupidity like that.
these employers using google and myspace to research their prospective employees may as well be basing their decisions on the bible or the magic 8 ball.
And to take it a step further, how can they even know that the myspace account that is "yours" is really by you?
Suppose you made enemies at a previous job or in school and they decide to set up a myspace account that portrays you as a drug using pedophile. They're good with photoshop, so it looks like you in the pictures with the 12-year olds, etc.
While I'm sure that would probably be considered libel, but I'm sure the employer is not going to tell you that they didn't hire you because of what they saw on myspace. You didn't get the job - the damage is done.
This just seems like an unreliable way to screen candidates and I think any HR department would be foolish to rely on such an unreliable source of information.
My coworker from India always gives the rest of us grief in the office whenever the cost of education comes up (we all have MBAs).
His bachelors degree cost him a total of $400 in India. And while you might say that it wasn't a good education, or comparable to a BS in the US, he got his MBA from Wharton - where he was accepted with his degree from India and graduated in the top 5% of his class.
The benefit is that with this option, if it's done right, you can have access to many more movies than any retailer would ever want to keep in stock.
Imagine this. A store like Target still has a traditional display of DVDs in shiny cases, and it has one of these machines. The machine would have maybe a thousand or two movies in its local storage. It also has access, via high-speed connection, to a databank of hundreds of thousands of movies.
You know you want to buy a movie and you're going shopping at Target. You go online, and sure enough, they have it in plastic for $20, and from the machine for $15. You could even order it and pay for it online and it will be waiting for you at target (you pick it up like you would some film you had developed).
Or, you're at Target and browse available titles at the kiosk. You decide you want a movie and order it, and it's ready in 5 minutes.
Or, you want an obscure movie. You browse for it, and sure enough, it's in the main database, but not on the local machine. You can order it and it will be ready in about an hour. In fact, you could have ordered it from home.
It's this last option that will help a lot against piracy. I can spend a day or more trying to download a movie on P2P and hope that it will come out okay. Or, I can order it for $9.95 and it will be at Target, on a DVD, in DVD quality, in a few hours.
It could be a win for a lot of people:
- the retailer keeps a smaller inventory, which saves them money
- you have ready access to a ton of movies
- you have fairly convenient access to a shit-load of movies
- studios have more incentive to master esoteric films to DVD, since they don't have to rely on physical distribution to make a profit on them... they could have as part of their website a "request a movie you don't see" and with enough requests, they could decide to master that movie
- by providing older movies at a cheap price, the studios get a purchase rather than someone downloading it from P2P
I'd say married workers are more pliable, more risk-averse, more likely to put up with a shitty work situation, and more likely to "go along to get along".
While losing a job is tough on anyone, a single person can quit to leave a shitty situation and only be putting themselves at risk. A married person with kids is likely to be more docile because if they quit/get fired, they have to take care of the spouse and rug-rats.
So, of course management likes married people with kids, as it's a shackle they didn't even have to pay for.
I would imagine that your $732/week, particularly after taxes, buys a lot less than the Indian fellow's $800/month.
Sounds like a PDP-something my boss had as a (working) museum piece. It had a board with magnetic-core memory. Something like if the loop of wire went through the hoop it was a 1 and if it went around it was a 0.
Crazy stuff.
I thought Real Men(TM) wrote the assembly codes directly into memory using debug?!