I've been using Linux as my exclusive desktop for 10 years, at work and at home, with only two exceptions:
1) After Microsoft bought my previous employer, I was required to use Windows as my desktop whether I liked it or not; fair enough, Windows is their product, after all.
2) In my current job, I use a MacBook Pro for email (Entourage is a far better solution in an Exchange environment than is Evolution) and sometimes for remote work because I don't want to have any company IP on a personally-owned machine.
The way that boils down is that Linux has been my exclusive personal desktop OS for all of the least 10 years, my exclusive work desktop OS for most of the last 10 years, is currently my primary work desktop OS, and the only time it wasn't my primary/exclusive work desktop OS was the time I spent as a Microsoft employee.
Moreover, I know *lots* of people who do this. If you don't believe anyone who says so, it's because of your ignorance and bias, not the veracity of your interlocutors.
Actually, that's not capitalism, it's a distortion of capitalism. Capitalism requires free and open markets. Cell carrier siloes are monopolism, not capitalism.
But, just for fun, I'm going to momentarily except your version of capitalism as true, so that I can use the word "ironic."
hen I lived in Viet Nam, an ostensibly communist country, I could buy any cell phone and use it on any carrier's network. They were all unlocked. As far as I can tell, there's no such thing as a carrier-locked cell phone in Viet Nam. Of course, people pay full market price for their cell phones, something which is also capitalist.
The irony is, of course, that the cell phone market in ostensibly communist Viet Nam is far more capitalistic than the cell phone market in the ostensibly capitalist United States, where most phones are simply not available unlocked. If you want an unlocked phone here, DIY is almost the only way to get one.
While they may not have given consent to be screened, they didn't have to. In most countries (all?), you don't have the right to not be screened at immigration in pretty much whatever way they see fit. I used to live in Viet Nam, and that's certainly the case there. If, upon entering the country, I were to be asked to undergo some form of secondary screening and were to refuse, my options would be:
1) To be arrested
2) To be detained and be put back on a plane leaving the country
3) To be detained until I changed my mind about screening
4) To be detained and screened whether I liked it or not. Then, the possibility of being arrested or deported rather than allowed to enter the country as planned.
Keep in mind that the immigration authorities of *any* country don't have to let anyone in if they don't want to. Even if you show up with a visa in your passport, that means nothing. It's just permission from a consulate or embassy abroad for you to be given a visa when you arrive, but the *real* visa is what the person at the immigration desk stamps in your passport. And they pretty much have the right to refuse to let you in for any reason or for none. This is true even in western democracies. The immigration authorities have the legal right to not let you in if they don't want to, and in many places they also have the legal right to screen you in pretty much any way they want. Even if the legal right is unclear, the practical fact is that they have the power to do so, regardless of what the law may or may not say.
Don't be so sure. Having lived in Viet Nam and being married to a Vietnamese national, one thing I can tell you about the place is that if people can find a way to beat the system (and I say that with the utmost respect; systems are there to be beaten, and the VNese are very good at it), they will. TFA states that the passengers had traveled in the United States or Australia, from which I'm going to infer that most or all of them were either VNese nationals or Viet kieu. That's mostly what you see on flights between the US west coast and Viet Nam, so it's also a statistical likelihood.
While I'm sure they also felt bad, I'm pretty sure there was intent to beat the system, too.
I lived in Asia during the SARS outbreak. Temperature scanners were used then, too, and they were pretty effective. SARS caused such high fevers that taking a fever-reducer probably wouldn't get you past screening. No crying wolf, there.
Mad cow/BSE? Has a bit in common with Y2K. The reason Y2K caused only minor, scattered problems was because of all the work that went into patching in the months before the end of 1999. I was a sysadmin at the time and was involved in that. Mad cow is the same way. It's a very serious disease, with no cure, and it's spread was contained and halted by aggressive controls on beef from countries with infections, and aggressive culling of infected herds.
Hoof-and-mouth was once a very serious disease that caused a lot of livestock losses. Because of that, it's still a great concern if there's an outbreak.
West Nile? 50/50. It's a pretty serious disease and has a relatively high fatality rate, especially in children and the elderly. It's typically fatal in animals that get it, but it hasn't spread very much in humans in the United States. That's partly because mosquito control has helped contain it in areas where it's been found. However, West Nile is a problem probably on the order of malaria in its indigenous range.
None of the cases you cite are cases of crying wolf. They are cases of effective response containing and ameliorating problems. If no one had done anything, you wouldn't be saying that. Instead, you'd be talking about them in the same breath as HIV, a problem that wasn't solved before it got out of hand and that still isn't solved today.
Depends on what you want. If you want to get the work done at a good price, being straightforward is IMO the best approach. If you want to piss the developer off, those approaches might work well. It's not like open source developers are (usually) trying to jack people up for a ton of money to implement paid features; IMO, most of them are very happy to have somebody pay them to work on their personal project and will do so at a very good price. "Very good" as in "You probably couldn't outsource it to south Asia for less."
Where it gets really bad is that there are just soooo many crazy aggressive players in online poker these days. My wife is a pretty decent poker player (where "decent" is defined as consistently making money at it), but the crazies have made it a lot harder than it used to be. In a heads-up game they aren't so bad - she had a game last week where the dude's strategy was to go all-in pre-flop on every hand. Happily, the genius kept on accepting rematches for quite a while. He eventually gave up, but she'd beaten him 80% of the time. I guess he finally got tired of handing over his money.
The hard part is when you get 3 or 4 people at a full-handed table who'll literally play any two cards. Any one person like that will lose against a decent player most of the time, but when you have several of them, the chances of one of them hitting the crazy hand become a lot higher and they become a pain in the ass. Overall, these donks have got to be losing money, but they make it a lot harder for people with skill to make money.
Things didn't used to be this way, even a year ago. My pulled-from-orifice theory is that more and more people are watching poker on TV and figuring that's the way you play, without realizing that televised WSOP is just a highlight reel with commentary, it's not the whole tournament. It's especially bad when they see people like Kido Pham, who really is a hyper-aggressive player and is highly skilled enough to be fairly successful at that style of play. The concept of trying to actually be a good poker player seems utterly lost on this latest crop of noobs; to them, it seems that poker is nothing more than a slot machine handle.
Sadly, anything that becomes popular usually becomes worse.
Store that hot model Ford (or Chrysler; I'd like a Challenger SRT in Hemi Orange, thanks very much) anyway. Anybody who bought a 1970 Hemi Challenger or 'Cuda and stored it away has a very valuable item. Ditto for other serious classics like an Original Boss 302 Mustang or a GTO Judge. A friend of mine going all the way to middle school is the second owner of a '69 GTO Judge. Everything is original except the rear axle, which was replaced after the original owner blew the factory one, but it's in, well, less than pristine condition. He was 18 or 19 when he bought that car, and has kept it all these years. At the time, the engine was out and in pieces in a garage, and the vehicle was a bargain at $600.
Forgot to add that as a five year old in 1967, I knew perfectly well that Crunchberries were not berries, and I never thought they were, not even in the TV commercials. She had to have been trying to pull a Darl here. What she should have realized it that it didn't work out so well for Darl, either.
I can only believe that this is a scam. As little faith as I have in people's intelligence (being in the computer security biz and all), it defies imagination that she could not know this. As a five-year old in 1967, I ate Captain Crunch with Crunchberries (they were only red back then) because I saw the TV commercials and badgered my parents to buy them. It was my favorite cereal for a while. Even before that, I'd been eating the regular Captain Crunch cereal. Never like the peanut butter version, though. Blech. What genius thought that one up?
In all likelihood, she's not Japanese. Her given name is Janine (while some English names have limited popularity as given names in Japan, that's not one of them), and the court was in the eastern district of California. Most of the actual Japanese in California are living either here in the SF Bay area (where I live) or in the LA area (where I used to live).
I'm also not entirely certain she's as stupid as we think. She may just be an utterly dishonest person who thought she could make a few bucks off of PepsiCo by filing a lawsuit like this and settling out of court, but their lawyers flipped her lawyer the bird.
Sound implausible? Remember that Darl & SCO tried that, depending on who you ask, is only a little bit more or a little bit less ridiculous.
Some years ago, I was working for an ISP that was looking to replace its webmail interface, which was not only aging, creaking, and proprietary, but had a one-off hack grafted onto it by someone who no longer worked there in order to make it work in Japanese. That hack prevent upgrading, and since the person who'd written had left under, well, less than ideal circumstances, there would have been zero interest on either side in getting him to update it. It was so badly written that no one could even figure it out.
So, the decision was made to replace it and I was tasked with finding the replacement. Working perfectly in English and Japanese, and having (at least) an E-J bilingual UI out of the box was a core requirement. After looking at a lot of things, IlohaMail (http://ilohamail.org/) seemed like the best choice, except for one problem: at that time, it only supported IMAP, and POP3 access was also a core requirement for us.
So, I went to the engineering manager with the recommendation that we choose IlohaMail and pay the developer to add POP3 support and GPL it as part of the main IlohaMail package. I got a greenlight for that, and that's how POP3 support came to be in IlohaMail. I don't recall the exact dates of this, but I left that job in the Fall of 2002 and IlohaMail had already been up and running for some time before I left.
The point of this narrative is that if a company likes some Free software project but it lacks one or more features they need or want very badly, going to the author(s) and paying them to implement those features in the mainline of the project can be very effective. Not many things are better in work than to get paid for working on a project you like so much you do it for free anyway, especially when you are getting paid to work on it in complete freedom. It's sort of like being a professional fisherman or poker player, minus the grueling life on the tournament circuit. OK, the BASS tour is probably more grueling than the the poker circuit, but both are life on the road.
So rather than a sprint, done by people who may have no prior involvement in a project, funding development of features you want may be the most effective way to go. Will it cost more than a sprint? Probably. Will it yield better results? Certainly. You're not only getting the work done by those most familiar with the project, you're getting done exactly what you want done.
In case of objections along the lines of "But if we fund Free development, our competitors will be able to use the same features we do!" the counterarguments are:
-Yes, in theory, but we will still have the jump on them because we are funding these features and will be prepared to use them as soon as they are available because we know they are coming. This is true even for competitors who are already using it;
-That assumes that our competitors not only know about this project, but will want to use it in place of whatever they are using now;
-It also assumes they can execute on these features better than we can. Since we want these features and already know how we are going to use them, that probably won't be the case;...
-Your concerns are well-taken and prudent, but for the reasons outlined above, even if our competitors pick up on these features and use them, we will execute more effectively, and may also gain a certain amount of good will in some quarters as the funder of these new features.
The only thing I would add to this very insightful post, other than my regret at having squandered all my mod points yesterday, is the most likely reason for GM building its own battery research facility even though the DOE funds a lot of research in this area: anything the DOE funds would (presumably) be in the public domain, at least with regard to US citizens and businesses (and AFAIK the world), thus making DOE-funded discoveries a level playing field. If GM builds its own lab, it's proprietary and can give them a potential advantage over other auto makers.
GM (and every other auto maker) funds a lot of R&D. Engine technology, suspension, body and paint materials, etc. Battery technology will become just one more area of R&D spending for a lot of auto makers. Indeed, it has already done so.
My night like that was when I was in my mid-teens and on a vacation with my parents in our motorhome and we spent a night in a campground at Craters of the Moon National Monument, in Idaho, in the 1970s. Idaho for those who don't know it, is a fairly sparsely populated state. Most of the people are in Boise, and even Boise isn't a terribly large city (the whole metro area was 600K people in the 2007 census) as such things go.
Craters of the Moon is far from pretty much everything. At the time, there wasn't anything around there of any size for probably 100 miles in any direction. Some small towns and small cities, but nothing at all within probably 50 miles except a nuclear power plant. It was summer and hot and rather than sleep inside, I took my sleeping bag and a couple cold drinks out to the picnic table and slept there. Well, I didn't sleep for a long time. I spent hours looking up at the impossibly dark sky with the Milky Way like a painted white stripe across it, and the regular appearance of meteorites, and satellites zipping across it from time to time. "Glorious" is an insufficient word to describe it.
But, I don't complain about light at night here in California, where I've spent most of my life. It is necessary for safety (of various sorts) in these big cities. As others have noted, it's a trade-off. I could live in a place with a stunning view of the night sky, but I couldn't live there and enjoy the salary I enjoy here in the Silicon Valley area. It's like I wouldn't be able to find employment in IT at all. Granted, it wouldn't bother me to drop out of the IT business and own a fishing tackle shop or something, but that's not in the cards for a long, long while.
As a father of three and a taxpayer myself, I think it's a good idea. Heck, I already reward my kids for good academic performance, don't you? Some of that reward comes in the form of cash. Why not?
Philosophical and high-minded issues, my arse. It's about motivation.
Paying people for public service and volunteer work? Old news. FDR called it the WPA. It was actually pretty effective in getting some things done that might otherwise have not been done.
And let's not forget that for most people to do volunteer/public service work, they need the affluence to be able to do something for free. Making clear at an early age the link between performance and pay is likely to help more kids someday have the affluence to do volunteer work.
And let's face it: didn't we - at least most of us - wish we could have been paid to go to school when we were in school? Sure, I got pretty good grades anyway, I was self-motivated to do well. Not everyone is like that. Heck, not even most people are like that. We just tend to think so because that's the kind of people that tend to hang around/. and work in the tech industry. The whole world ain't like that.
Hmmm, let's see. I'll start with mugging. Kids already get mugged for things like having expensive sneakers. Plus, since the payment comes in the form of a check, mugging won't even be all that effective. Do I smell troll? Or is it just the smell of a strawman?
Kids cheating to score higher? Check. They're already doing that. In fact, cheating is so rampant that I find it hard to believe that it would get appreciably worse if they were being paid for good grades. Do I smell a troll? Or is just the smell of a strawman?
Get beaten for not scoring well? Hmmm, getting punished for failing to get a good grade. What a concept! I like it! Maybe I should try it on my own kids? Oh, wait. I already do. They get rewarded for doing well and lose privleges for doing badly. As for beating, well, that's already illegal. Odds are slim that anyone who doesn't already beat their kids is going to start over pay for grades. Do I smell a troll, or is that just the smell of a strawman?
This looks like it's actually a pretty good solution to the problem. It's simple, it's direct, it makes clear at an early age the positive correlation between performance and pay, and most importantly, it works.
Oh, wait, I know what that smell is. It's the smell of a liberal arts type who thinks kids should learn just for the sake of learning.
According to the Wikipedia link you cite, Flight 1549 *was* an Airbus A320-214.
One thing I do recall from a few years ago when I used to commute past LAX was an Airbus with some kind of problem circling for hours to burn off fuel before making a landing because it had no capacity to manually dump the fuel, as a Boeing does. Good thing they had the time luxury to do that, even though the landing was successful and without risk of fire.
That's exactly wrong. Corporate income tax is to no one's advantage and should be abolished.
Why?
Corporate income tax is like any other cost of production: it's rolled into the price of the product. Thus, when I buy $ITEM, the corporate income tax is paid by *me* in addition to the other components of the price of the product.
If corporate income tax were abolished, it would all be paid by personal income tax, and then we'd see how much we're *really* paying, and maybe - just maybe - that would be enough to make people refuse to stand for it anymore.
Oh wait, maybe corporate income tax is to one entity's advantage - the government's as a tool to help it pull the wool over the eyes of the people.
Of course, if they would abolish it and make the US a corporate tax haven, it would bring so much business and jobs to the United States that we could get along just fine with lower income taxes, too.
There are no ethical objections to a tracking device, either. He has a right to know where his kid is. Period. His kid does not have a right to not have her parents know where she is. Period.
Not only can you password-protect it, but you can set it to erase itself after 10 incorrect password entries. I recently got an iPhone and was very happy to see that. Needless to say, I activated that on day one.
> If you had been in that situation, an undercover agent might have manipulated you into going along with the plot.
I have been in situations of great financial need, but there's no way *anyone* could have manipulated me into doing something like that. Not for love, money, drugs, alcohol, pussy, or $NAME_YOUR_PRICE. I'd be willing to die first, and I have, on at least one occasion, looked death right in the eye. Sure, I was scared, but I made it.
> There's at least one case that I can remember of a group of innocent Irish people who were convicted of terrorism charges in England
Totally non sequitur. Your point is?
> Prejudice unsupported by facts. The Israelis commit just as much terrorism as Arabs and Muslims
I don't just call bullshit, I call fucking bullshit. Terrorist Israelis are the minority, whereas Muslims who either are terrorists or support terrorists are the majority of their faith. The link you cite proves my point, not yours. Yigal Amir was notable not for the fact that he assassinated Rabin, but for the fact that such things are extraordinary among Israelis. It's SOP in the Islamic world. Not that Yigal Amir was a terrorist; he was just an assassin. Terrorists kill people who are not directly involved, in the hope that others will influence those who are directly involved. Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't a terrorist either; like YA, he was just an assassin.
> Many of these terrorist cases meet all 3 requirements.
They don't meet point 3.
There's no way anyone who wasn't sympathetic to that kind of activity would agree to do it for just money. More than a few people who make their living through stripping, prostitution, etc., do so only because of circumstances. However, you'd be hard pressed to find a stripper or prostitute who would whack somebody for money. You could find one, but not easily. But go looking at young Muslim males and you won't have to look too hard to find somebody who'll whack somebody for ideology.
I don't know how familiar you are with the Koran, but I suspect the answer is not very. You ought to check it out, it might surprise you. Unlike New Testament (AKA the Christian Bible), and beyond what you can find in the Old Testament (AKA the Hebrew Bible), the Koran not only condones conquest and conversion at the point of the sword, it's very clear that Mohammed himself not only supported such things, but endorsed them. His followers, in the early days, supported themselves by robbing caravans going to and from Mecca, which was not at that time a Muslim holy city. Not only did they do so, but they did so with Mohammed's blessing. A base point of Christianity is, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." A base point of Islam is "Do unto others, so long as they aren't Muslims. Or even if they are, so long as they are Muslims who believe differently than you do." Mohammed's followers fell to killing one another as soon as he was gone. That's how Shia and Sunni got started, and over all the centuries from then until now, the only place they've buried the hatchet is in each others' heads.
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I've been using Linux as my exclusive desktop for 10 years, at work and at home, with only two exceptions:
1) After Microsoft bought my previous employer, I was required to use Windows as my desktop whether I liked it or not; fair enough, Windows is their product, after all.
2) In my current job, I use a MacBook Pro for email (Entourage is a far better solution in an Exchange environment than is Evolution) and sometimes for remote work because I don't want to have any company IP on a personally-owned machine.
The way that boils down is that Linux has been my exclusive personal desktop OS for all of the least 10 years, my exclusive work desktop OS for most of the last 10 years, is currently my primary work desktop OS, and the only time it wasn't my primary/exclusive work desktop OS was the time I spent as a Microsoft employee.
Moreover, I know *lots* of people who do this. If you don't believe anyone who says so, it's because of your ignorance and bias, not the veracity of your interlocutors.
You're not only the liar here, you're stupid besides.
Actually, that's not capitalism, it's a distortion of capitalism. Capitalism requires free and open markets. Cell carrier siloes are monopolism, not capitalism.
But, just for fun, I'm going to momentarily except your version of capitalism as true, so that I can use the word "ironic."
hen I lived in Viet Nam, an ostensibly communist country, I could buy any cell phone and use it on any carrier's network. They were all unlocked. As far as I can tell, there's no such thing as a carrier-locked cell phone in Viet Nam. Of course, people pay full market price for their cell phones, something which is also capitalist.
The irony is, of course, that the cell phone market in ostensibly communist Viet Nam is far more capitalistic than the cell phone market in the ostensibly capitalist United States, where most phones are simply not available unlocked. If you want an unlocked phone here, DIY is almost the only way to get one.
Judging by TFA, it was apparently vetted by their city attorney. Maybe even written by him.
Oh, wait. Anyone with a clue. Never mind. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along, move along.
Of course, Kirk also seemed to like most any humanoid female he came across...
While they may not have given consent to be screened, they didn't have to. In most countries (all?), you don't have the right to not be screened at immigration in pretty much whatever way they see fit. I used to live in Viet Nam, and that's certainly the case there. If, upon entering the country, I were to be asked to undergo some form of secondary screening and were to refuse, my options would be:
1) To be arrested
2) To be detained and be put back on a plane leaving the country
3) To be detained until I changed my mind about screening
4) To be detained and screened whether I liked it or not. Then, the possibility of being arrested or deported rather than allowed to enter the country as planned.
Keep in mind that the immigration authorities of *any* country don't have to let anyone in if they don't want to. Even if you show up with a visa in your passport, that means nothing. It's just permission from a consulate or embassy abroad for you to be given a visa when you arrive, but the *real* visa is what the person at the immigration desk stamps in your passport. And they pretty much have the right to refuse to let you in for any reason or for none. This is true even in western democracies. The immigration authorities have the legal right to not let you in if they don't want to, and in many places they also have the legal right to screen you in pretty much any way they want. Even if the legal right is unclear, the practical fact is that they have the power to do so, regardless of what the law may or may not say.
Don't be so sure. Having lived in Viet Nam and being married to a Vietnamese national, one thing I can tell you about the place is that if people can find a way to beat the system (and I say that with the utmost respect; systems are there to be beaten, and the VNese are very good at it), they will. TFA states that the passengers had traveled in the United States or Australia, from which I'm going to infer that most or all of them were either VNese nationals or Viet kieu. That's mostly what you see on flights between the US west coast and Viet Nam, so it's also a statistical likelihood.
While I'm sure they also felt bad, I'm pretty sure there was intent to beat the system, too.
I lived in Asia during the SARS outbreak. Temperature scanners were used then, too, and they were pretty effective. SARS caused such high fevers that taking a fever-reducer probably wouldn't get you past screening. No crying wolf, there.
Mad cow/BSE? Has a bit in common with Y2K. The reason Y2K caused only minor, scattered problems was because of all the work that went into patching in the months before the end of 1999. I was a sysadmin at the time and was involved in that. Mad cow is the same way. It's a very serious disease, with no cure, and it's spread was contained and halted by aggressive controls on beef from countries with infections, and aggressive culling of infected herds.
Hoof-and-mouth was once a very serious disease that caused a lot of livestock losses. Because of that, it's still a great concern if there's an outbreak.
West Nile? 50/50. It's a pretty serious disease and has a relatively high fatality rate, especially in children and the elderly. It's typically fatal in animals that get it, but it hasn't spread very much in humans in the United States. That's partly because mosquito control has helped contain it in areas where it's been found. However, West Nile is a problem probably on the order of malaria in its indigenous range.
None of the cases you cite are cases of crying wolf. They are cases of effective response containing and ameliorating problems. If no one had done anything, you wouldn't be saying that. Instead, you'd be talking about them in the same breath as HIV, a problem that wasn't solved before it got out of hand and that still isn't solved today.
Depends on what you want. If you want to get the work done at a good price, being straightforward is IMO the best approach. If you want to piss the developer off, those approaches might work well. It's not like open source developers are (usually) trying to jack people up for a ton of money to implement paid features; IMO, most of them are very happy to have somebody pay them to work on their personal project and will do so at a very good price. "Very good" as in "You probably couldn't outsource it to south Asia for less."
Where it gets really bad is that there are just soooo many crazy aggressive players in online poker these days. My wife is a pretty decent poker player (where "decent" is defined as consistently making money at it), but the crazies have made it a lot harder than it used to be. In a heads-up game they aren't so bad - she had a game last week where the dude's strategy was to go all-in pre-flop on every hand. Happily, the genius kept on accepting rematches for quite a while. He eventually gave up, but she'd beaten him 80% of the time. I guess he finally got tired of handing over his money.
The hard part is when you get 3 or 4 people at a full-handed table who'll literally play any two cards. Any one person like that will lose against a decent player most of the time, but when you have several of them, the chances of one of them hitting the crazy hand become a lot higher and they become a pain in the ass. Overall, these donks have got to be losing money, but they make it a lot harder for people with skill to make money.
Things didn't used to be this way, even a year ago. My pulled-from-orifice theory is that more and more people are watching poker on TV and figuring that's the way you play, without realizing that televised WSOP is just a highlight reel with commentary, it's not the whole tournament. It's especially bad when they see people like Kido Pham, who really is a hyper-aggressive player and is highly skilled enough to be fairly successful at that style of play. The concept of trying to actually be a good poker player seems utterly lost on this latest crop of noobs; to them, it seems that poker is nothing more than a slot machine handle.
Sadly, anything that becomes popular usually becomes worse.
Store that hot model Ford (or Chrysler; I'd like a Challenger SRT in Hemi Orange, thanks very much) anyway. Anybody who bought a 1970 Hemi Challenger or 'Cuda and stored it away has a very valuable item. Ditto for other serious classics like an Original Boss 302 Mustang or a GTO Judge. A friend of mine going all the way to middle school is the second owner of a '69 GTO Judge. Everything is original except the rear axle, which was replaced after the original owner blew the factory one, but it's in, well, less than pristine condition. He was 18 or 19 when he bought that car, and has kept it all these years. At the time, the engine was out and in pieces in a garage, and the vehicle was a bargain at $600.
Forgot to add that as a five year old in 1967, I knew perfectly well that Crunchberries were not berries, and I never thought they were, not even in the TV commercials. She had to have been trying to pull a Darl here. What she should have realized it that it didn't work out so well for Darl, either.
I can only believe that this is a scam. As little faith as I have in people's intelligence (being in the computer security biz and all), it defies imagination that she could not know this. As a five-year old in 1967, I ate Captain Crunch with Crunchberries (they were only red back then) because I saw the TV commercials and badgered my parents to buy them. It was my favorite cereal for a while. Even before that, I'd been eating the regular Captain Crunch cereal. Never like the peanut butter version, though. Blech. What genius thought that one up?
In all likelihood, she's not Japanese. Her given name is Janine (while some English names have limited popularity as given names in Japan, that's not one of them), and the court was in the eastern district of California. Most of the actual Japanese in California are living either here in the SF Bay area (where I live) or in the LA area (where I used to live).
I'm also not entirely certain she's as stupid as we think. She may just be an utterly dishonest person who thought she could make a few bucks off of PepsiCo by filing a lawsuit like this and settling out of court, but their lawyers flipped her lawyer the bird.
Sound implausible? Remember that Darl & SCO tried that, depending on who you ask, is only a little bit more or a little bit less ridiculous.
Instead of pizza, I would suggest cash.
Some years ago, I was working for an ISP that was looking to replace its webmail interface, which was not only aging, creaking, and proprietary, but had a one-off hack grafted onto it by someone who no longer worked there in order to make it work in Japanese. That hack prevent upgrading, and since the person who'd written had left under, well, less than ideal circumstances, there would have been zero interest on either side in getting him to update it. It was so badly written that no one could even figure it out.
So, the decision was made to replace it and I was tasked with finding the replacement. Working perfectly in English and Japanese, and having (at least) an E-J bilingual UI out of the box was a core requirement. After looking at a lot of things, IlohaMail (http://ilohamail.org/) seemed like the best choice, except for one problem: at that time, it only supported IMAP, and POP3 access was also a core requirement for us.
So, I went to the engineering manager with the recommendation that we choose IlohaMail and pay the developer to add POP3 support and GPL it as part of the main IlohaMail package. I got a greenlight for that, and that's how POP3 support came to be in IlohaMail. I don't recall the exact dates of this, but I left that job in the Fall of 2002 and IlohaMail had already been up and running for some time before I left.
The point of this narrative is that if a company likes some Free software project but it lacks one or more features they need or want very badly, going to the author(s) and paying them to implement those features in the mainline of the project can be very effective. Not many things are better in work than to get paid for working on a project you like so much you do it for free anyway, especially when you are getting paid to work on it in complete freedom. It's sort of like being a professional fisherman or poker player, minus the grueling life on the tournament circuit. OK, the BASS tour is probably more grueling than the the poker circuit, but both are life on the road.
So rather than a sprint, done by people who may have no prior involvement in a project, funding development of features you want may be the most effective way to go. Will it cost more than a sprint? Probably. Will it yield better results? Certainly. You're not only getting the work done by those most familiar with the project, you're getting done exactly what you want done.
In case of objections along the lines of "But if we fund Free development, our competitors will be able to use the same features we do!" the counterarguments are:
-Yes, in theory, but we will still have the jump on them because we are funding these features and will be prepared to use them as soon as they are available because we know they are coming. This is true even for competitors who are already using it;
-That assumes that our competitors not only know about this project, but will want to use it in place of whatever they are using now;
-It also assumes they can execute on these features better than we can. Since we want these features and already know how we are going to use them, that probably won't be the case; ...
-Your concerns are well-taken and prudent, but for the reasons outlined above, even if our competitors pick up on these features and use them, we will execute more effectively, and may also gain a certain amount of good will in some quarters as the funder of these new features.
The only thing I would add to this very insightful post, other than my regret at having squandered all my mod points yesterday, is the most likely reason for GM building its own battery research facility even though the DOE funds a lot of research in this area: anything the DOE funds would (presumably) be in the public domain, at least with regard to US citizens and businesses (and AFAIK the world), thus making DOE-funded discoveries a level playing field. If GM builds its own lab, it's proprietary and can give them a potential advantage over other auto makers.
GM (and every other auto maker) funds a lot of R&D. Engine technology, suspension, body and paint materials, etc. Battery technology will become just one more area of R&D spending for a lot of auto makers. Indeed, it has already done so.
My night like that was when I was in my mid-teens and on a vacation with my parents in our motorhome and we spent a night in a campground at Craters of the Moon National Monument, in Idaho, in the 1970s. Idaho for those who don't know it, is a fairly sparsely populated state. Most of the people are in Boise, and even Boise isn't a terribly large city (the whole metro area was 600K people in the 2007 census) as such things go.
Craters of the Moon is far from pretty much everything. At the time, there wasn't anything around there of any size for probably 100 miles in any direction. Some small towns and small cities, but nothing at all within probably 50 miles except a nuclear power plant. It was summer and hot and rather than sleep inside, I took my sleeping bag and a couple cold drinks out to the picnic table and slept there. Well, I didn't sleep for a long time. I spent hours looking up at the impossibly dark sky with the Milky Way like a painted white stripe across it, and the regular appearance of meteorites, and satellites zipping across it from time to time. "Glorious" is an insufficient word to describe it.
But, I don't complain about light at night here in California, where I've spent most of my life. It is necessary for safety (of various sorts) in these big cities. As others have noted, it's a trade-off. I could live in a place with a stunning view of the night sky, but I couldn't live there and enjoy the salary I enjoy here in the Silicon Valley area. It's like I wouldn't be able to find employment in IT at all. Granted, it wouldn't bother me to drop out of the IT business and own a fishing tackle shop or something, but that's not in the cards for a long, long while.
As a father of three and a taxpayer myself, I think it's a good idea. Heck, I already reward my kids for good academic performance, don't you? Some of that reward comes in the form of cash. Why not?
Philosophical and high-minded issues, my arse. It's about motivation.
Paying people for public service and volunteer work? Old news. FDR called it the WPA. It was actually pretty effective in getting some things done that might otherwise have not been done.
And let's not forget that for most people to do volunteer/public service work, they need the affluence to be able to do something for free. Making clear at an early age the link between performance and pay is likely to help more kids someday have the affluence to do volunteer work.
And let's face it: didn't we - at least most of us - wish we could have been paid to go to school when we were in school? Sure, I got pretty good grades anyway, I was self-motivated to do well. Not everyone is like that. Heck, not even most people are like that. We just tend to think so because that's the kind of people that tend to hang around /. and work in the tech industry. The whole world ain't like that.
Hmmm, let's see. I'll start with mugging. Kids already get mugged for things like having expensive sneakers. Plus, since the payment comes in the form of a check, mugging won't even be all that effective. Do I smell troll? Or is it just the smell of a strawman?
Kids cheating to score higher? Check. They're already doing that. In fact, cheating is so rampant that I find it hard to believe that it would get appreciably worse if they were being paid for good grades. Do I smell a troll? Or is just the smell of a strawman?
Get beaten for not scoring well? Hmmm, getting punished for failing to get a good grade. What a concept! I like it! Maybe I should try it on my own kids? Oh, wait. I already do. They get rewarded for doing well and lose privleges for doing badly. As for beating, well, that's already illegal. Odds are slim that anyone who doesn't already beat their kids is going to start over pay for grades. Do I smell a troll, or is that just the smell of a strawman?
This looks like it's actually a pretty good solution to the problem. It's simple, it's direct, it makes clear at an early age the positive correlation between performance and pay, and most importantly, it works.
Oh, wait, I know what that smell is. It's the smell of a liberal arts type who thinks kids should learn just for the sake of learning.
According to the Wikipedia link you cite, Flight 1549 *was* an Airbus A320-214.
One thing I do recall from a few years ago when I used to commute past LAX was an Airbus with some kind of problem circling for hours to burn off fuel before making a landing because it had no capacity to manually dump the fuel, as a Boeing does. Good thing they had the time luxury to do that, even though the landing was successful and without risk of fire.
That's exactly wrong. Corporate income tax is to no one's advantage and should be abolished.
Why?
Corporate income tax is like any other cost of production: it's rolled into the price of the product. Thus, when I buy $ITEM, the corporate income tax is paid by *me* in addition to the other components of the price of the product.
If corporate income tax were abolished, it would all be paid by personal income tax, and then we'd see how much we're *really* paying, and maybe - just maybe - that would be enough to make people refuse to stand for it anymore.
Oh wait, maybe corporate income tax is to one entity's advantage - the government's as a tool to help it pull the wool over the eyes of the people.
Of course, if they would abolish it and make the US a corporate tax haven, it would bring so much business and jobs to the United States that we could get along just fine with lower income taxes, too.
There are no ethical objections to a tracking device, either. He has a right to know where his kid is. Period. His kid does not have a right to not have her parents know where she is. Period.
Ah, yes, Slashdot where nothing will get you a flamebait mod faster than telling the truth.
Not only can you password-protect it, but you can set it to erase itself after 10 incorrect password entries. I recently got an iPhone and was very happy to see that. Needless to say, I activated that on day one.
> If you had been in that situation, an undercover agent might have manipulated you into going along with the plot.
I have been in situations of great financial need, but there's no way *anyone* could have manipulated me into doing something like that. Not for love, money, drugs, alcohol, pussy, or $NAME_YOUR_PRICE. I'd be willing to die first, and I have, on at least one occasion, looked death right in the eye. Sure, I was scared, but I made it.
> There's at least one case that I can remember of a group of innocent Irish people who were convicted of terrorism charges in England
Totally non sequitur. Your point is?
> Prejudice unsupported by facts. The Israelis commit just as much terrorism as Arabs and Muslims
I don't just call bullshit, I call fucking bullshit. Terrorist Israelis are the minority, whereas Muslims who either are terrorists or support terrorists are the majority of their faith. The link you cite proves my point, not yours. Yigal Amir was notable not for the fact that he assassinated Rabin, but for the fact that such things are extraordinary among Israelis. It's SOP in the Islamic world. Not that Yigal Amir was a terrorist; he was just an assassin. Terrorists kill people who are not directly involved, in the hope that others will influence those who are directly involved. Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't a terrorist either; like YA, he was just an assassin.
> Many of these terrorist cases meet all 3 requirements.
They don't meet point 3.
There's no way anyone who wasn't sympathetic to that kind of activity would agree to do it for just money. More than a few people who make their living through stripping, prostitution, etc., do so only because of circumstances. However, you'd be hard pressed to find a stripper or prostitute who would whack somebody for money. You could find one, but not easily. But go looking at young Muslim males and you won't have to look too hard to find somebody who'll whack somebody for ideology.
I don't know how familiar you are with the Koran, but I suspect the answer is not very. You ought to check it out, it might surprise you. Unlike New Testament (AKA the Christian Bible), and beyond what you can find in the Old Testament (AKA the Hebrew Bible), the Koran not only condones conquest and conversion at the point of the sword, it's very clear that Mohammed himself not only supported such things, but endorsed them. His followers, in the early days, supported themselves by robbing caravans going to and from Mecca, which was not at that time a Muslim holy city. Not only did they do so, but they did so with Mohammed's blessing. A base point of Christianity is, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." A base point of Islam is "Do unto others, so long as they aren't Muslims. Or even if they are, so long as they are Muslims who believe differently than you do." Mohammed's followers fell to killing one another as soon as he was gone. That's how Shia and Sunni got started, and over all the centuries from then until now, the only place they've buried the hatchet is in each others' heads.