By "great friends", do you mean listen to you whenever you have something to complain about, bend their schedule around to do things with you, give up their saturday afternoon spent recompiling kernels to have lunch with you, and pay for more than 50% of the stuff along the way? Good friends... right, they're still hoping for something and getting used along the way:\
I was thinking about something even better as I was reading the article. Have a chimp demonstrate the redundant process to another chimp. I was thinking that the researchers might be overlooking some cross-species assumptions they were making. Basically, if you saw another species carry out a process, I think humans are more likely to look at the goals of those actions and attempt to achieve those goals. But if you see another human carry out a process, humans are more likely to imitate since they think the other human might know what they are doing. Whose to say the chimps aren't doing the same thing?
And besides that, you have me wondering whether I should answer "OK" or "Cancel" to a question that is asking for a "Yes" or "No" answer.
Seriously, wtf does "OK" mean in response to the question "Are you sure you want to take this action?" What if you went to the grocery store and the clerk asked if you needed help carrying your bags to your car and you responded "Cancel"... they would be like wtf?
Any particular reason? I did not RTFA, but it seems like this might be one of those solutions looking for a problem. If it's merely "just because" then I would have to vote nay on the project. Just build another one in Illinois, or Iowa, or something... you know, states that are bland anyhow. No reason to mess around constructing something in Alaska.
That's all fine and dandy for the manufacturer, but why in the hell does the retail store do rebates then? I used to do rebates all the time, and on a lot of the better deals you would have 1 rebate from the manufacturer and 2 or 3 rebates from the actual store itself. Why? (Other than counting on customers to not turn them in.) The supply chain argument doesn't work here because the store can just mark the price down themselves. About the only reason I can see is so the corporation can play games with its stores by offering rebates so that corporate pays out the discount, but the store still gets to count the full sale.
This may have different considerations, but I tried to do a chargeback on a purchase I made through PayPal where the product was not as advertised. The chargeback was denied. The purchase was for $100 total, and the CC company said that they viewed it as me paying PayPal to do "something", and PayPal fulfilled their duty by doing that "something" (ie, "something" being "take my $100 and do whatever you want with it"). And this was despite the fact that I tried disputing the purchase with PayPal before contacting my CC company (this was a couple years ago when PayPal customer service was absolutely and completely useless for anything... I dunno if they have changed, I stopped using PayPal and never looked back).
Anyways, one time use CC numbers are more straightforward from the start. Doesn't require any backtracking - I make the decision to use a one time number before I make the purchase... it doesn't require me to react and take action after the fact.
I've had a merchant account before, and the terms are not that bad. It's around $0.20 per transaction and 2% of the sale. So unless your average sale is like $4 where you are making less than $1 on each sale, then it's not that big of a deal. For a pizza place, I would imagine his average sale is around $15 to $20, and he is making $3 or $4 per sale... $.25 of that is not much. If your profits are that slim in the first place, you have other problems.
As well, you should probably get in a regular habit of generating one-time use numbers for each of your online purchases, and setting limits on them according to the purchase. This way you protect yourself in case you have a run-in with some moron like this camera retailer, where they attempt to make erroneous charges to your card. And you protect yourself against the retailer's negligence if someone gets into their database and pulls out customer credit card information. Nothing ticks me off more about a retailer than when I attempt to make a purchase and they show me the credit card number they saved from the last purchase.
You made the point yourself, so I don't know how to add to it, but at least I'll point it out again for anyone else that missed it:
"it wasn't society *as we know it*, but it was a society"
Exactly. Back in the day we could run around and kill each other, steal each other's things, infringe on their non-existent patents. There's no way we would be where we are today without these laws. Imagine what would happen over the next 5 or 10 years if laws against murder were suddenly repealed.
Inquisitions and holy wars alike merely used the religion as a guise for their acts. The people taking part in those actions were not acting true to the ideals of their religions, they had their own prerogatives to plunder, kill, rape, and burn. In fact, as I sit here now, I would be inclined to believe that Satan had more to do with these events than God.
I think what so many of these religion-backed groups are missing (in the case of Christianity) is that God does not want people to enforce their will on others in order to make them moral and ethical people. Instead, God wants people to talk to one another and share the benefits of a moral and ethical life - lead by example, not by leash. God does not want societal laws to mandate morality and ethics in people who do not want to adhere to them. God wants people to appreciate the results of those morals and ethics, and make their own decision to live that life.
To take this point to the extreme, we don't have laws against murder because it is an immoral action, or because the founding fathers were religious and believed this one little religious law would fit fine in our laws... We have laws against murder because our society could not properly operate without them. God would not want laws against murder, instead he would want everbody to appreciate everyone else enough that we would choose to discuss and resolve our problems instead of resorting to killing each other. Unfortunately, we have not yet achieved this altruistic state, so we do require such laws.
The same goes for many other laws that have existed for a long time - they exist because society as we know it could not survive without them, not because the government has mandated morality and ethics. However, many people dont see this (such as NIMF), and they are wrongly trying to mandate morality and ethics through law.
The food at the local soup kitchen is not truly free because I have to walk my ass over there to get it. Until the government is willing to come into my house and feed me intravenously while I'm lying in bed, I'm going to act indignant because I don't want to have to search out, chew, or digest my own food. F'ing government is always trying to screw me over with their supposedly "free" services that have all these hidden requirements.
Well, of course. No one spends $billions on a new missile system without writing the control routines from the ground up. They don't skimp by heading over to freshmeat.org to look for someone who has already written an IMU routine. However, the ground support equipment might very well use Linux. I wouldn't be too surprised to hear that.
I'm surprised more people didn't know about this. I've been doing this for a while now because I'm sick of spending 10 minutes wading through all the options. Although, depending on why I am calling, I might go through the options because I know it's a standard issue that needs to be resolved by a particular department.
What I find funny are the companies that try to hide the shortcuts. When I call my credit card company, this first 2 times you hit 0 the system says "sorry, I did not understand your input". Then when you finally hit 0 for a 3rd time it says "please hold for the next operator". And I don't think it's simply because you are mashing buttons, because it doesn't work for other numbers like pressing 8 three times.
"a good box with packing material is much more than you think"
Actually, it's usually less than people think. Sure, paint, coverings, and pretty pictures on them jack up the price. But when you are buying them in bulk from some plant in Mexico, they are dirt cheap. I've looked into buying small quantities (in the 1000s) of double corrugated mid-sized boxes before. That's the best the XBox360 is likely to be shipped in, and they may even be using thick single corrugated boxes. You can get the doubles for nearly $0.50 a piece, and the singles for nearly $0.20 a piece. Find your own covering facility, or use their's and it'll still be less than $1.00 per box. Add in some molded styrofoam, few plastic bags and twist ties, and the total cost is probably no more than $2 or $3 per unit.
Wow, you fucked up that saying good. Using whatever percentages you want, it goes like this:
Spend 20% of your time to solve 80% of the problem and the remaining 80% of your time to solve the remaining 20% of the problem.
Also, "quote FTA shows" should be "quote from TFA shows"... TFA is The Fucking Article. Your comment says something about Fucking The Article, which I imagine would give you some nasty paper cuts.
Sorry, I'm feeling a little bit Nazi-ish this morning.
"For every respectable site, there are three or four seedy places that you wouldn't want to be seen surfing by relatives."... Yet you still visit everyday.
I'd take a pay cut to live in some place that was quieter, with a lower cost-of-living.... I'd give anything to be outsourced to someplace I'd want to live, say New Mexico, Northern California.
Boy, is that funny. If by 'cheaper' and 'Northern California' you mean some shack on the side of a mountain in the middle of the Sierra Nevada where it takes you 1 day by donkey to the nearest fire road... then you might have a point. Otherwise, stick to New Jersey.
Or better yet, look somewhere else that is just as gorgeous... Oregon, Washington, Colorado... these places all have needs for high tech employees.
You know what's worse? Calling Comcast or the local power company in an urban area. They answer your call and say "Yo bitch, gimme ur account digits now... Fuck dis shitz - you be late on your payments fool... We be slappin some late charges on yo ass." And you can barely understand them anyhow because its some girl named Ayisha that inflects her voice in weird ways, or some guy named Pablo that slurs his words all together.
I dunno if this is true across the country, but I saw some kid playing it on an XBox 360 display at Walmart yesterday. I was in there to see if they had any information on the cheap laptop coming out yet.
My reaction: Whatever the gameplay may be like, it looked good for a console game. However, I don't think it looks any better than computer games from last year. HL2 looked a lot better.
Well one thing is for sure, if we do have a shortage of PhDs, we need do two things:
1) Up the average pay to encourage more people towards them.
Why would I want to spend upwards of 10 years of my life (4 years BS, 2 years MS, 4 years PhD... not an aggresive schedule at all) to only make a few extra dollars over a BS or MA? A BS starts out around $50k. An MS starts out around $65k. And a PhD starts out around $70k? I'd rather get my BS or MS, make a good wage, and spend those extra 6 or 4 years starting and running some other business to pull in another $100k or so rather than the extra $20k or $5k for the PhD.
2) Stop wasting PhDs.
I know a guy who spent most of his career developing some really cool dynamics models. But now his company has pushed him into a management position and he spends his days running cost and schedule numbers in Excel for the program he works on. It's pathetic, his intelligence is wasted.
Slashdot Mirror
Bush, Hitler, and Jesus are walking down the street. Bush and Hitler walk into a bar, Jesus ducks.
By "great friends", do you mean listen to you whenever you have something to complain about, bend their schedule around to do things with you, give up their saturday afternoon spent recompiling kernels to have lunch with you, and pay for more than 50% of the stuff along the way? Good friends ... right, they're still hoping for something and getting used along the way :\
One day, the governments will learn that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
I doubt it.
I was thinking about something even better as I was reading the article. Have a chimp demonstrate the redundant process to another chimp. I was thinking that the researchers might be overlooking some cross-species assumptions they were making. Basically, if you saw another species carry out a process, I think humans are more likely to look at the goals of those actions and attempt to achieve those goals. But if you see another human carry out a process, humans are more likely to imitate since they think the other human might know what they are doing. Whose to say the chimps aren't doing the same thing?
And besides that, you have me wondering whether I should answer "OK" or "Cancel" to a question that is asking for a "Yes" or "No" answer.
... they would be like wtf?
Seriously, wtf does "OK" mean in response to the question "Are you sure you want to take this action?" What if you went to the grocery store and the clerk asked if you needed help carrying your bags to your car and you responded "Cancel"
Any particular reason? I did not RTFA, but it seems like this might be one of those solutions looking for a problem. If it's merely "just because" then I would have to vote nay on the project. Just build another one in Illinois, or Iowa, or something ... you know, states that are bland anyhow. No reason to mess around constructing something in Alaska.
Discover
That's all fine and dandy for the manufacturer, but why in the hell does the retail store do rebates then? I used to do rebates all the time, and on a lot of the better deals you would have 1 rebate from the manufacturer and 2 or 3 rebates from the actual store itself. Why? (Other than counting on customers to not turn them in.) The supply chain argument doesn't work here because the store can just mark the price down themselves. About the only reason I can see is so the corporation can play games with its stores by offering rebates so that corporate pays out the discount, but the store still gets to count the full sale.
This may have different considerations, but I tried to do a chargeback on a purchase I made through PayPal where the product was not as advertised. The chargeback was denied. The purchase was for $100 total, and the CC company said that they viewed it as me paying PayPal to do "something", and PayPal fulfilled their duty by doing that "something" (ie, "something" being "take my $100 and do whatever you want with it"). And this was despite the fact that I tried disputing the purchase with PayPal before contacting my CC company (this was a couple years ago when PayPal customer service was absolutely and completely useless for anything ... I dunno if they have changed, I stopped using PayPal and never looked back).
... it doesn't require me to react and take action after the fact.
Anyways, one time use CC numbers are more straightforward from the start. Doesn't require any backtracking - I make the decision to use a one time number before I make the purchase
I've had a merchant account before, and the terms are not that bad. It's around $0.20 per transaction and 2% of the sale. So unless your average sale is like $4 where you are making less than $1 on each sale, then it's not that big of a deal. For a pizza place, I would imagine his average sale is around $15 to $20, and he is making $3 or $4 per sale ... $.25 of that is not much. If your profits are that slim in the first place, you have other problems.
As well, you should probably get in a regular habit of generating one-time use numbers for each of your online purchases, and setting limits on them according to the purchase. This way you protect yourself in case you have a run-in with some moron like this camera retailer, where they attempt to make erroneous charges to your card. And you protect yourself against the retailer's negligence if someone gets into their database and pulls out customer credit card information. Nothing ticks me off more about a retailer than when I attempt to make a purchase and they show me the credit card number they saved from the last purchase.
You made the point yourself, so I don't know how to add to it, but at least I'll point it out again for anyone else that missed it:
"it wasn't society *as we know it*, but it was a society"
Exactly. Back in the day we could run around and kill each other, steal each other's things, infringe on their non-existent patents. There's no way we would be where we are today without these laws. Imagine what would happen over the next 5 or 10 years if laws against murder were suddenly repealed.
Inquisitions and holy wars alike merely used the religion as a guise for their acts. The people taking part in those actions were not acting true to the ideals of their religions, they had their own prerogatives to plunder, kill, rape, and burn. In fact, as I sit here now, I would be inclined to believe that Satan had more to do with these events than God.
Well, at least you put "hate" in quotations.
... We have laws against murder because our society could not properly operate without them. God would not want laws against murder, instead he would want everbody to appreciate everyone else enough that we would choose to discuss and resolve our problems instead of resorting to killing each other. Unfortunately, we have not yet achieved this altruistic state, so we do require such laws.
I think what so many of these religion-backed groups are missing (in the case of Christianity) is that God does not want people to enforce their will on others in order to make them moral and ethical people. Instead, God wants people to talk to one another and share the benefits of a moral and ethical life - lead by example, not by leash. God does not want societal laws to mandate morality and ethics in people who do not want to adhere to them. God wants people to appreciate the results of those morals and ethics, and make their own decision to live that life.
To take this point to the extreme, we don't have laws against murder because it is an immoral action, or because the founding fathers were religious and believed this one little religious law would fit fine in our laws
The same goes for many other laws that have existed for a long time - they exist because society as we know it could not survive without them, not because the government has mandated morality and ethics. However, many people dont see this (such as NIMF), and they are wrongly trying to mandate morality and ethics through law.
The food at the local soup kitchen is not truly free because I have to walk my ass over there to get it. Until the government is willing to come into my house and feed me intravenously while I'm lying in bed, I'm going to act indignant because I don't want to have to search out, chew, or digest my own food. F'ing government is always trying to screw me over with their supposedly "free" services that have all these hidden requirements.
THAAD isn't boost phase - it's terminal phase.
Well, of course. No one spends $billions on a new missile system without writing the control routines from the ground up. They don't skimp by heading over to freshmeat.org to look for someone who has already written an IMU routine. However, the ground support equipment might very well use Linux. I wouldn't be too surprised to hear that.
I'm surprised more people didn't know about this. I've been doing this for a while now because I'm sick of spending 10 minutes wading through all the options. Although, depending on why I am calling, I might go through the options because I know it's a standard issue that needs to be resolved by a particular department.
What I find funny are the companies that try to hide the shortcuts. When I call my credit card company, this first 2 times you hit 0 the system says "sorry, I did not understand your input". Then when you finally hit 0 for a 3rd time it says "please hold for the next operator". And I don't think it's simply because you are mashing buttons, because it doesn't work for other numbers like pressing 8 three times.
"a good box with packing material is much more than you think"
Actually, it's usually less than people think. Sure, paint, coverings, and pretty pictures on them jack up the price. But when you are buying them in bulk from some plant in Mexico, they are dirt cheap. I've looked into buying small quantities (in the 1000s) of double corrugated mid-sized boxes before. That's the best the XBox360 is likely to be shipped in, and they may even be using thick single corrugated boxes. You can get the doubles for nearly $0.50 a piece, and the singles for nearly $0.20 a piece. Find your own covering facility, or use their's and it'll still be less than $1.00 per box. Add in some molded styrofoam, few plastic bags and twist ties, and the total cost is probably no more than $2 or $3 per unit.
Wow, you fucked up that saying good. Using whatever percentages you want, it goes like this:
... TFA is The Fucking Article. Your comment says something about Fucking The Article, which I imagine would give you some nasty paper cuts.
Spend 20% of your time to solve 80% of the problem and the remaining 80% of your time to solve the remaining 20% of the problem.
Also, "quote FTA shows" should be "quote from TFA shows"
Sorry, I'm feeling a little bit Nazi-ish this morning.
"For every respectable site, there are three or four seedy places that you wouldn't want to be seen surfing by relatives." ... Yet you still visit everyday.
I'd take a pay cut to live in some place that was quieter, with a lower cost-of-living.
Boy, is that funny. If by 'cheaper' and 'Northern California' you mean some shack on the side of a mountain in the middle of the Sierra Nevada where it takes you 1 day by donkey to the nearest fire road
Or better yet, look somewhere else that is just as gorgeous
You know what's worse? Calling Comcast or the local power company in an urban area. They answer your call and say "Yo bitch, gimme ur account digits now ... Fuck dis shitz - you be late on your payments fool ... We be slappin some late charges on yo ass." And you can barely understand them anyhow because its some girl named Ayisha that inflects her voice in weird ways, or some guy named Pablo that slurs his words all together.
I dunno if this is true across the country, but I saw some kid playing it on an XBox 360 display at Walmart yesterday. I was in there to see if they had any information on the cheap laptop coming out yet.
My reaction: Whatever the gameplay may be like, it looked good for a console game. However, I don't think it looks any better than computer games from last year. HL2 looked a lot better.
Well one thing is for sure, if we do have a shortage of PhDs, we need do two things:
... not an aggresive schedule at all) to only make a few extra dollars over a BS or MA? A BS starts out around $50k. An MS starts out around $65k. And a PhD starts out around $70k? I'd rather get my BS or MS, make a good wage, and spend those extra 6 or 4 years starting and running some other business to pull in another $100k or so rather than the extra $20k or $5k for the PhD.
1) Up the average pay to encourage more people towards them.
Why would I want to spend upwards of 10 years of my life (4 years BS, 2 years MS, 4 years PhD
2) Stop wasting PhDs.
I know a guy who spent most of his career developing some really cool dynamics models. But now his company has pushed him into a management position and he spends his days running cost and schedule numbers in Excel for the program he works on. It's pathetic, his intelligence is wasted.