I flew US Airways. I got charged $15 for my checked bag. I also have a laptop bag which can go under the seat, and a backpack which takes up very little room in the overhead.
Several people each flight brought two large bags that each took up over half of an overhead bin, and then argued with the flight attendants for 5-10 minutes about how they should be allowed to bring as much as they want on the plane. This held up my flights for several minutes each, that WOULD have left a few minutes early.
Personally I'd rather pay the damn $15 than look like a douchebag and hold up a flight with 50+ people on it.
Then there's the people that bring bags that will NOT fit in an overhead, and hold up the boarding process trying to fit it in an overhead. We went over this shit in first grade. You know, the little game where you put the shaped blocks in the correctly shaped holes? Yeah, these people all fail that game.
Leave China out of this. They have the resources and know-how to put down any kind of revolution or protest. At best they'd ignore the protesters, and at worse they'd just mow them down with a few machine guns.
India, maybe I can see. India isn't itself wholly united yet, though, and they've been through some pretty rough times. It'd be a miracle if the people could unite enough to demand better wages. But look at what happens if they do. Will the companies stay in India, knowing that they might have to pay competing wages for the same terrible service? Nope. They'll be off to find another country to exploit. So the workers might be reluctant..after all, working 12 hours a day to stay fed and clothed is better than working 0 hours a day and starving.
Its about time that we taxed software and support from US companies that outsource.
You want to outsource your programmers or call center to India? That's just fine. Now show us how many hours your foreign staff has worked. Alright, now we're going to tax you so much that you end up paying 2/3rds of what you would have paid if you had stayed in the USA. We're putting this money towards unemployment benefits and other social programs, to offset the number of workers you dumped so you could hire someone to do it for five dollars a day.
Illegal exploitation: Someone takes pictures of girl under the age of consent, sexual in nature, and distributes them for profit or for free. This is contrast to photography or normal pornography of someone over the age of consent because the minor does not have the ability to consent to anything. Technically they shouldn't be allowed to make purchases or enter contracts, but it still happens.
By this definition of exploitation, you cannot exploit yourself. Taking pictures of yourself and storing them is not illegal since you never had to make the allow/deny decision. You didn't have to consent to anything. If having self-porn is illegal for those under the age of consent, I'd hate to see what happens if someone gets arrested for masturbation or leering at themselves in the mirror.
Phantom limb usually happens in people that suddenly lose a limb. Like they wake up in the hospital after a particularly vicious night of drinking and are missing their arm or leg. Or they get their arm blown off in whichever war is currently being called 'the war'
It mostly stems from the brain's need to be able to tell the exact position of limbs in relation to the rest of the body.
The penis, usually being several inches long, is not at the top of the brain's priority when it comes to this. As a male, I can safely say that I have no idea what direction my penis is currently facing, and would have no idea what direction it were facing even when erect unless I had some kind of environmental clues, or if I didn't know which way it faced naturally.
The brain doesn't particularly care about the exact location of the penis relative to the rest of the body. Although us males do tend to spend quite a lot of time wishing about the places it could be!
A kind of tagging system is how we relate most things.
For example, fire might be tagged as awesome, hot, dangerous, orange, red, etc. All of those could be appropriate tags to people. Unfortunately, there's no right or wrong when it comes to tagging, its all about learning. You might learn that its hot when you put your hand on a candle as a toddler. You might learn it being dangerous from all the fire safety things they teach in early school, or even the stuff your parents might teach you. When you learn your colors you'll realize that its orange/red/etc.
This tagging system can get seriously complex.
It also explains a lot of seemingly advanced behaviors like food preference. That hamburger was pretty tasty, so you learn to tag all hamburgers as delicious unless further specified. Like a Carl's Jr. burger is delicious, however, a White Castle burger is not nearly as delicious.
This learning is the hard part. It pretty much has to be individually experienced..of course with AI's this might be a good test of massively parallel systems.
If they're going to take out computer labs, I want my technology fee back. In fact, since most places also add the cost of the technology to the tuition as well, I trust they'll have no problem lowering tuition accordingly?
I've been in places where there's a line for the computer lab. Its not pretty when your next class is in an hour and all you have to do is print one document, but the people currently IN the computer lab are mostly watching youtube videos or are just starting their papers..
The more companies that drop out of a particular market, the more the remaining companies will try to screw you.
Look for a massive hike in price at Comcast in the coming months. Either a price hike, tightening of the bandwidth cap, both, or something else that shows how important competition is.
Is infrastructure in place to punish those responsible for such invasions?
What could the affected countries do against China to discourage them from doing this again? I don't think its act-of-war level but I think its at least sue-for-billions-and-billions-and-billions worthy.
Of course animals prefer to be in the element that suits them.
Our #1 method of detecting predators is by sight. If we're in the dark, its no longer the #1. We must rely on hearing, smell, touch, etc. And most likely if you smell the predator, as a human, you're about to become lunch.
Evolution favored people that feared and respected the dark.
I don't think it has caused any trouble for any company as of yet. As far as they know, its practically free advertising. People see that a friend is inviting them to the site, and they're more likely to subscribe themselves.
Its like those pain in the ass sites that offer to post on your Facebook for you when you've done something at their site.
When I send someone an email through Facebook, I EXPECT it to be somewhat private. Is it wrong to expect your email to be private? You can bet your ass I'd sue if I emailed a friend and told them I was flying to (location) this weekend and the FBI showed up at my door wanting to play 20 questions about my legal and in no way suspicious trip.
If I didn't want it to be private, I might write a comment on their 'wall' or comments section or whatever.
Driving skill isn't just about not running off the road randomly, but its also about how to avoid accidents when something bad happens.
For example, if you're aware of your surroundings, its not too big of a deal to avoid that SUV driver that changes lanes suddenly and without looking. If you're eating your big mac and talking on your phone, the first indication that you're going to have is the fact that SUV slamming into your side. Trust me, I'd rather avoid the accident altogether than let insurance take care of it.
Lets face it. Most people have enough driving skill to get them from point A to point B in one piece. That's all we'll ever have to rely on 99% of the time. The other 1% of the time is when you hit the black ice and start sliding, or a soccer mom in the SUV in front of you slams on her brakes at 70mph because a squirrel ran across the interstate. Since we don't actively train in accident avoidance, its usually luck when people avoid these kinds of accidents.
Side note: I like to pick on SUVs because 90% of the issues I have on the road come from people driving SUVs. They're the most likely to just come over into your lane whether you're in it or not. They're the most likely to be eating, drinking, talking on a cell phone, and watching their dash-mounted TV, they're the most likely to be applying make-up or reading a book, etc. I'm all for requiring a special certification on your drivers' license to be able to drive one, simply because so many people buy them for 'safety' which gives them the feeling that they can do whatever they want in them.
All electronics are vulnerable, but communication and power systems are especially vulnerable. This is due to the long-run copper wires that serve as antennas to pick up the flood of electrons. If nuclear war DID happen, the first two things to be affected would be the power grid and the communication networks.
Ever since this DRM thing came out, the big companies have been asking their lawyers if its legal to make a game stop working (like imagine if you had it through steam) when the follow-up game came out. The general consensus is no..but if you were to patch the game and make it worse and/or unplayable, that would be just peachy.
I don't think it has been done yet, but I think that time is coming. I don't think steam would cater to the kind of company that would do this, but there are other ways of distributing games.
If the place had a corporate office you should have called and asked them what they were going to do to fix the situation, or if you should work it out through the legal system. If you can prove they've tried to pull a bait and switch, they're liable for some pretty hefty civil penalties.
If you meet your quota, that's more money for Target! If you don't, you don't get a raise..more money for Target!
When I used to work collections we were told that it was normal for 20% of the people we called to pay up right then..if not the whole amount then a good faith payment (to reset the statute of limitations on debts, but shh). We were told what would happen if you consistently failed to meet this, up to and including decreases in pay and termination.
Turned out that only about 1% of people ever actually paid, as confirmed by multiple people on 'the floor' when I got out of training. At the end of my first week here comes my manager telling me they need to talk. I told them if they're in that much of a rush to fire me, go ahead, but I'm not accepting a pay cut, as I had already signed for a wage. She just looked at me, dumbfounded, and never heard another word about it.
Some of the other employees though, were incredibly stressed out. To the point of having panic attacks.
Quotas are bullshit and are almost always unmeetable. Besides not having to pay you extra, now they can get rid of you whenever they want, as they have a nice reason to right there.
You mean to say, don't underestimate the dangers of the native population using guerrilla tactics against an invading force.
They get a bonus for knowing the land. They get a bonus for not identifying themselves as combatants. They get a bonus for being able to accurately identify their enemies, who are loud and obvious. They get a bonus for being sneaky.
The odds are stacked against us, even with all of our equipment and training.
We can take care of any traditional army in the world without much trouble, barring larger countries like China and Russia. We cannot, however, easily quash a pissed off and unorganized army in a small shit hole of a country. Russia learned this years ago, as they made the same mistake, and they were better prepared than we were!
The moral of the story is that snipers, IEDs, and guerrilla warfare, are all coming together in places like Iraq and Afganistan. A single civilian with a rifle or a 150mm shell can take out an entire squad of Marines and still make it home for lunch.
Actually, this is the successor for City of Heroes.
Successors must be made into successors before they become suitable heirs for the throne. The King doesn't promote the prince to king as soon as he is born. The prince must be educated and raised before the king will step down.
Actually, there used to be a scam site that mainly sold digital cameras.
The big scam was two fold. First, the warranty. They said their parts came with no warranty at all, and you had to buy one in order to buy a camera from them. Secondly, the cameras were body only. So you pay for the body, which is some what normal in the photography world if you already have a set of decent lenses that work with that body. But the thing was, the body supposedly had no mounting hardware, since they didn't ship from the makers this way, so you had to pay extra for that. So far, all of this has been a complete lie by the scammers. If you refused the warranty, or all the extra shit they tried to sell you, they'd tell you that they were currently out of stock but that your order has been processed and you'd receive it when they got it in stock. Then your credit card would get charged from random places all the time, because it had been stolen.
I don't know if they were still around, but there were many lawsuits filed and they just reopened under new names.
Since the scammers couldn't be proven to have used the credit info them selves, beyond a shadow of a doubt since it would be a felony charge, the only way people could actually nail them for their scam was by catching them in that 'out of stock' lie. Something about bait and switch, false advertising, etc, etc.
If someone tells you they have something in stock and suddenly they don't when you don't want to buy their scammy extras, you could have a bait-and-switch case.
If we could achieve with nuclear fusion what we have achieved with DHS, we'd all be living off of cheap and reliable energy.
Suffice to say, the DHS is rather self-sustaining. If it isn't keeping liquids off aircraft or your electronics in the baggage handlers' pockets, its harassing and keeping us American citizens in fear.
But I don't know how much longer it'll be allowed to live by the ISPs.
We're kind of on a roller coaster ride debate as to whether or not ISPs should be able to decide what data goes over their lines. They want to be able to charge more for certain types of data (and you can bet your ass that data that competes with another wing of their business will be pretty damn expensive).
When Bush was in office, I wouldn't have even blinked in surprise if I were told suddenly the ISPs decided that all YouTube traffic is now set to 14.4k speeds unless you pay more for it, but now that Obama's in office, its actually a debate rather than a eventuality.
Slashdot Mirror
You got it easy.
I flew US Airways. I got charged $15 for my checked bag. I also have a laptop bag which can go under the seat, and a backpack which takes up very little room in the overhead.
Several people each flight brought two large bags that each took up over half of an overhead bin, and then argued with the flight attendants for 5-10 minutes about how they should be allowed to bring as much as they want on the plane. This held up my flights for several minutes each, that WOULD have left a few minutes early.
Personally I'd rather pay the damn $15 than look like a douchebag and hold up a flight with 50+ people on it.
Then there's the people that bring bags that will NOT fit in an overhead, and hold up the boarding process trying to fit it in an overhead. We went over this shit in first grade. You know, the little game where you put the shaped blocks in the correctly shaped holes? Yeah, these people all fail that game.
Leave China out of this. They have the resources and know-how to put down any kind of revolution or protest. At best they'd ignore the protesters, and at worse they'd just mow them down with a few machine guns.
India, maybe I can see. India isn't itself wholly united yet, though, and they've been through some pretty rough times. It'd be a miracle if the people could unite enough to demand better wages. But look at what happens if they do. Will the companies stay in India, knowing that they might have to pay competing wages for the same terrible service? Nope. They'll be off to find another country to exploit. So the workers might be reluctant..after all, working 12 hours a day to stay fed and clothed is better than working 0 hours a day and starving.
Its about time that we taxed software and support from US companies that outsource.
You want to outsource your programmers or call center to India? That's just fine. Now show us how many hours your foreign staff has worked. Alright, now we're going to tax you so much that you end up paying 2/3rds of what you would have paid if you had stayed in the USA. We're putting this money towards unemployment benefits and other social programs, to offset the number of workers you dumped so you could hire someone to do it for five dollars a day.
Illegal exploitation: Someone takes pictures of girl under the age of consent, sexual in nature, and distributes them for profit or for free. This is contrast to photography or normal pornography of someone over the age of consent because the minor does not have the ability to consent to anything. Technically they shouldn't be allowed to make purchases or enter contracts, but it still happens.
By this definition of exploitation, you cannot exploit yourself. Taking pictures of yourself and storing them is not illegal since you never had to make the allow/deny decision. You didn't have to consent to anything. If having self-porn is illegal for those under the age of consent, I'd hate to see what happens if someone gets arrested for masturbation or leering at themselves in the mirror.
But wait..don't some religions ban masturbation?
Uhoh, this could be bad.
Phantom limb usually happens in people that suddenly lose a limb. Like they wake up in the hospital after a particularly vicious night of drinking and are missing their arm or leg. Or they get their arm blown off in whichever war is currently being called 'the war'
It mostly stems from the brain's need to be able to tell the exact position of limbs in relation to the rest of the body.
The penis, usually being several inches long, is not at the top of the brain's priority when it comes to this. As a male, I can safely say that I have no idea what direction my penis is currently facing, and would have no idea what direction it were facing even when erect unless I had some kind of environmental clues, or if I didn't know which way it faced naturally.
The brain doesn't particularly care about the exact location of the penis relative to the rest of the body. Although us males do tend to spend quite a lot of time wishing about the places it could be!
A kind of tagging system is how we relate most things.
For example, fire might be tagged as awesome, hot, dangerous, orange, red, etc. All of those could be appropriate tags to people. Unfortunately, there's no right or wrong when it comes to tagging, its all about learning. You might learn that its hot when you put your hand on a candle as a toddler. You might learn it being dangerous from all the fire safety things they teach in early school, or even the stuff your parents might teach you. When you learn your colors you'll realize that its orange/red/etc.
This tagging system can get seriously complex.
It also explains a lot of seemingly advanced behaviors like food preference. That hamburger was pretty tasty, so you learn to tag all hamburgers as delicious unless further specified. Like a Carl's Jr. burger is delicious, however, a White Castle burger is not nearly as delicious.
This learning is the hard part. It pretty much has to be individually experienced..of course with AI's this might be a good test of massively parallel systems.
Why go on a wild goose chase?
China has been known to threaten entire families to keep one person from causing a ruckus.
China has been known to execute entire families to make an example out of one person that caused a ruckus.
If they're going to take out computer labs, I want my technology fee back. In fact, since most places also add the cost of the technology to the tuition as well, I trust they'll have no problem lowering tuition accordingly?
I've been in places where there's a line for the computer lab. Its not pretty when your next class is in an hour and all you have to do is print one document, but the people currently IN the computer lab are mostly watching youtube videos or are just starting their papers..
The more companies that drop out of a particular market, the more the remaining companies will try to screw you.
Look for a massive hike in price at Comcast in the coming months. Either a price hike, tightening of the bandwidth cap, both, or something else that shows how important competition is.
Is infrastructure in place to punish those responsible for such invasions?
What could the affected countries do against China to discourage them from doing this again? I don't think its act-of-war level but I think its at least sue-for-billions-and-billions-and-billions worthy.
Of course animals prefer to be in the element that suits them.
Our #1 method of detecting predators is by sight. If we're in the dark, its no longer the #1. We must rely on hearing, smell, touch, etc. And most likely if you smell the predator, as a human, you're about to become lunch.
Evolution favored people that feared and respected the dark.
And why should they have a problem with it?
I don't think it has caused any trouble for any company as of yet. As far as they know, its practically free advertising. People see that a friend is inviting them to the site, and they're more likely to subscribe themselves.
Its like those pain in the ass sites that offer to post on your Facebook for you when you've done something at their site.
When I send someone an email through Facebook, I EXPECT it to be somewhat private. Is it wrong to expect your email to be private? You can bet your ass I'd sue if I emailed a friend and told them I was flying to (location) this weekend and the FBI showed up at my door wanting to play 20 questions about my legal and in no way suspicious trip.
If I didn't want it to be private, I might write a comment on their 'wall' or comments section or whatever.
Driving skill isn't just about not running off the road randomly, but its also about how to avoid accidents when something bad happens.
For example, if you're aware of your surroundings, its not too big of a deal to avoid that SUV driver that changes lanes suddenly and without looking. If you're eating your big mac and talking on your phone, the first indication that you're going to have is the fact that SUV slamming into your side. Trust me, I'd rather avoid the accident altogether than let insurance take care of it.
Lets face it. Most people have enough driving skill to get them from point A to point B in one piece. That's all we'll ever have to rely on 99% of the time. The other 1% of the time is when you hit the black ice and start sliding, or a soccer mom in the SUV in front of you slams on her brakes at 70mph because a squirrel ran across the interstate. Since we don't actively train in accident avoidance, its usually luck when people avoid these kinds of accidents.
Side note: I like to pick on SUVs because 90% of the issues I have on the road come from people driving SUVs. They're the most likely to just come over into your lane whether you're in it or not. They're the most likely to be eating, drinking, talking on a cell phone, and watching their dash-mounted TV, they're the most likely to be applying make-up or reading a book, etc. I'm all for requiring a special certification on your drivers' license to be able to drive one, simply because so many people buy them for 'safety' which gives them the feeling that they can do whatever they want in them.
Except for the EMP effects, of course.
All electronics are vulnerable, but communication and power systems are especially vulnerable. This is due to the long-run copper wires that serve as antennas to pick up the flood of electrons. If nuclear war DID happen, the first two things to be affected would be the power grid and the communication networks.
Actually, you might not be far from the truth.
Ever since this DRM thing came out, the big companies have been asking their lawyers if its legal to make a game stop working (like imagine if you had it through steam) when the follow-up game came out. The general consensus is no..but if you were to patch the game and make it worse and/or unplayable, that would be just peachy.
I don't think it has been done yet, but I think that time is coming. I don't think steam would cater to the kind of company that would do this, but there are other ways of distributing games.
This is whats called bait and switch.
If the place had a corporate office you should have called and asked them what they were going to do to fix the situation, or if you should work it out through the legal system. If you can prove they've tried to pull a bait and switch, they're liable for some pretty hefty civil penalties.
Because that's a win-win situation for Target.
If you meet your quota, that's more money for Target! If you don't, you don't get a raise..more money for Target!
When I used to work collections we were told that it was normal for 20% of the people we called to pay up right then..if not the whole amount then a good faith payment (to reset the statute of limitations on debts, but shh). We were told what would happen if you consistently failed to meet this, up to and including decreases in pay and termination.
Turned out that only about 1% of people ever actually paid, as confirmed by multiple people on 'the floor' when I got out of training. At the end of my first week here comes my manager telling me they need to talk. I told them if they're in that much of a rush to fire me, go ahead, but I'm not accepting a pay cut, as I had already signed for a wage. She just looked at me, dumbfounded, and never heard another word about it.
Some of the other employees though, were incredibly stressed out. To the point of having panic attacks.
Quotas are bullshit and are almost always unmeetable. Besides not having to pay you extra, now they can get rid of you whenever they want, as they have a nice reason to right there.
You mean to say, don't underestimate the dangers of the native population using guerrilla tactics against an invading force.
They get a bonus for knowing the land. They get a bonus for not identifying themselves as combatants. They get a bonus for being able to accurately identify their enemies, who are loud and obvious. They get a bonus for being sneaky.
The odds are stacked against us, even with all of our equipment and training.
We can take care of any traditional army in the world without much trouble, barring larger countries like China and Russia. We cannot, however, easily quash a pissed off and unorganized army in a small shit hole of a country. Russia learned this years ago, as they made the same mistake, and they were better prepared than we were!
The moral of the story is that snipers, IEDs, and guerrilla warfare, are all coming together in places like Iraq and Afganistan. A single civilian with a rifle or a 150mm shell can take out an entire squad of Marines and still make it home for lunch.
Actually, this is the successor for City of Heroes.
Successors must be made into successors before they become suitable heirs for the throne. The King doesn't promote the prince to king as soon as he is born. The prince must be educated and raised before the king will step down.
They're illegal, but the people are either proxied to hell and back so they could be about anyone.
In reality, they're probably in a country that doesn't give a damn and will refuse to let them be extradited anyway.
Actually, there used to be a scam site that mainly sold digital cameras.
The big scam was two fold. First, the warranty. They said their parts came with no warranty at all, and you had to buy one in order to buy a camera from them. Secondly, the cameras were body only. So you pay for the body, which is some what normal in the photography world if you already have a set of decent lenses that work with that body. But the thing was, the body supposedly had no mounting hardware, since they didn't ship from the makers this way, so you had to pay extra for that. So far, all of this has been a complete lie by the scammers. If you refused the warranty, or all the extra shit they tried to sell you, they'd tell you that they were currently out of stock but that your order has been processed and you'd receive it when they got it in stock. Then your credit card would get charged from random places all the time, because it had been stolen.
I don't know if they were still around, but there were many lawsuits filed and they just reopened under new names.
Since the scammers couldn't be proven to have used the credit info them selves, beyond a shadow of a doubt since it would be a felony charge, the only way people could actually nail them for their scam was by catching them in that 'out of stock' lie. Something about bait and switch, false advertising, etc, etc.
If someone tells you they have something in stock and suddenly they don't when you don't want to buy their scammy extras, you could have a bait-and-switch case.
If we could achieve with nuclear fusion what we have achieved with DHS, we'd all be living off of cheap and reliable energy.
Suffice to say, the DHS is rather self-sustaining. If it isn't keeping liquids off aircraft or your electronics in the baggage handlers' pockets, its harassing and keeping us American citizens in fear.
VoIP is legal here in the United States.
But I don't know how much longer it'll be allowed to live by the ISPs.
We're kind of on a roller coaster ride debate as to whether or not ISPs should be able to decide what data goes over their lines. They want to be able to charge more for certain types of data (and you can bet your ass that data that competes with another wing of their business will be pretty damn expensive).
When Bush was in office, I wouldn't have even blinked in surprise if I were told suddenly the ISPs decided that all YouTube traffic is now set to 14.4k speeds unless you pay more for it, but now that Obama's in office, its actually a debate rather than a eventuality.
You know, a lot of violence in the world brings forth mental images of the chimps/monkeys/primates/etc from the 2001 movie.
The only difference is we can talk and try to hide our violent tendencies behind things like religion and beliefs.