I attempted the same -- and got the same result as you -- but this is only temporary anyway. I got a 0% deal on a rather substantial home improvement through these characters, and then they'll be out of my life in less than a year.
I'll play games for 5 points on a five-figure loan, but what I won't do is buy Windows or install Netscape to please someone else. I at least get the satisfaction of knowing that they'll make little if any money off me (more likely the latter) and they get to field complaints about their crappy website for the privilege. It's quite awesome, actually, now that I think about it.
I wouldn't base anything solely site statistics either. Some number of the IE on Win hits are certainly someone with Safari, Firefox, or some other browser using a user agent switcher to lie to a particular site just to gain access to it.
I have to play this game with my bank every time I want to check my account. They "only support IE5 or greater on Windows or Netscape on MacOS." If you have something else, you talk to the hand.... unless you set FF to report itself as IE on Win, at which point it works just fine. Why certain corps feel the need to block access to any other browser, or worse, force people into stupid browser choices for their OS of choice (Netscape on MacOS?!? How about at least supporting the standard browser for the platform?) is somewhat of a mystery. If they just don't want to support it, even if it works, why not just say so?
Yes, Gods forbid that patent might ever net them some royalty money that could be put back into, I don't know, further research. It always pisses me off when a bunch of research scientist sons-a-bitches work the system and find ways to continue their endeavors.
Man, we should all reject the whole concept of money -- especially if it's derived from the evil patent system -- and find a way to just live on love.
"If you give someone permission to do something that infringes copyright, that in itself is infringement as if you'd done it yourself. Even if you don't do the infringing act yourself, if you more or less condone someone else doing it, that's an infringing act."
Hmm. What if I link to someone who links to the alleged infringer? Am I still guilty of infringment? I support and condone linking to other people on the Internet. How far do I need to take this before the Australian government's collective heads explode?
After reading through this thread a week later, I know I don't want the Matrix dropping a duece in my brain either. I like your subtle twist on that, BTW.
It sounds like you are a professor trying to protect your job, or a student who is trying justify the cost of your education. The truth is most students who go to college do so because they want to be employable with decent salaries after they get their deploma.
Sorry, but nice try. I'm not professor material, and I did most of the work of getting my education financed long before I got there ferreting out a portion of the tons of free money that mostly goes untapped year to year. So fortunately, four years and diploma only ended up costing me about $2500/yr.
Unfortunately, it seems like most potential students are too lazy to do any reserch beyond how much they can get for Stafford loans or Pell grants when all kinds of other money is available and unused that could be had through their school of choice, private scholarships, civic organizations, etc. All it takes is 3 or 4 months of Saturday afternoons and you can get an enducation without coming out of pocket more than a few grand. Really. I'm living proof. Not trade school either, friend. Private, expensive, liberal arts in my case.
While many use it as a terific opertunity to learn more then just what they need for their job, they still want to be able to enter the work force at a good wage after they are done.
You bet your sweet ass I did. Why anyone would bother if all they want is a good job at the end (whatever the hell that is exactly) is a mystery to me.
"learning about a larger world, a variety of different disciplines and develop a love of learning" is a good cause, and they do help out a bit, but they fail to cover what it needs to live in the larger world that they learned about.
The pay I commanded coming out of school hardly qualified as good. Latin American History, The Role of the Aristocracy in Britain, Multivariable Calculus, and Ceramics didn't give me the tools I needed to immediately get to a good job or the accompanying paycheck. But what it did give me was an awareness of various branches of human thought -- some of which were interesting enough to pursue outside of class, the discipline to pursue them on my own, and A LOT of practice learning how to write and speak like someone you might let out of the server room when clients come by. According to your logic my time would have been better spent at ITT learning to run a soldering gun instead? I don't think so. I'll take my university instilled love of learning and ability to have civil discourse with all kinds of people over C++ GUI design, thanks. I interviewed into progressively better jobs and they sent me to the Learning Tree to pick that up anyway.
It is the colleges responcibilty to prepare the student to an extent for living outside of the protected education enviroment. They can do this while helping students to learn "about a larger world, a variety of different disciplines and develop a love of learning" they are not indepent of each other. It just requires colleges and universites to get their noses out of their butt and poke them in the comerical world and see what they are doing there.
No it's not! That's your parents' job, if it's anyone's at all! And they ARE independent of each other. What they are not is mutually exclusive. However, it's not the college's job to, as you put it, "get their noses out of their butt and poke them in the comerical(sp) world and see what they are doing there." That is totally on you. You can get summer jobs and internships, and I even know a few people who managed to work full-time and go to school everyday.
By the way, in spite of my college experience that left me totally unprepared to plug right into the commercial world, I have a good job that pays very well (which is the standard people who think in your mindset use as the yard stick, is it not?). I maintain it has fuck all to do with learning query optimization and everything to with the Role of the Arisotcracy in Britain. And I taught myself how to run a soldering gun a couple years ago too, hanging out with an old friend from my college days.
How is that wrong exactly? A university education is not about job skills. Trade school is about job skills. How terrible that someone would spend four years learning about a larger world, a variety of different disciplines and develop a love of learning for its own sake. College is not, thankfully, a means to end. Nor should it be.
The Predator looks really much closer to Elder Scrolls cameleonism than invsibiliy, to me. Andvanced tech-induced camo is more likely what this may end up as, practically speaking.
From the articlae:
Invisibility is an optical illusion that the object or person is not there. Leonhardt uses the example of water circling around a stone. The water flows in, swirls around the stone and then leaves as if nothing was there.
"If you replace the water with light then you would not see that there was something present because the light is guided around the person or object. You would see the light coming from the scenery behind as if there was nothing in front," he said.
So what happens if you move around in the water? And once you get it out of the water, I'd bet you'll still be pretty noisy, if invisible, assuming the field could really keep up with your movement.
Infrared invisibility, coupled with this, would really be kick ass. It's got Navy Seals written all over it.
But you're leaving out the option of two chicks at the same time! Twice the prostate cancer prevention! Unless you meant husband and wives. Now that's unlawful.
"If I want to eat". So do religious people. It is not about that. It is about following the constitution and patiently overriding the obstacles on the way.
Nice try at redirecting an already offtopic discussion back to the parent. Unfortunately, it is precisely about that. What exactly are you trying to patiently override in our Constitution?
I have an oppositve experience. Things I have been struggling with for months have been resolved next day after successful prayer. But it won't prove anything to you, will it?
Perhaps you make over-reaching your assumptions yourself, compadre. I've been a student of Western religion for quite a while -- that includes Muhammed, BTW -- welcome to the tribe. Fortunately, I discovered that everything prayer supposedly "resolved" for me in the past really got solved by me rather than some higher power.
So, how's it feel to be a dependent punk? You'll die someday and so will I, but I'll have lived a life without self-dilusion. Are you confident you'll be able to say the same? You probably will, since someone laid out the plan so well for you that you'd never need to consider it might all be a grand manipulation, much less that you'd be the butt of the joke.
"I, I, I, indeed." At least when I believed in the supposed power of prayer, I wasn't praying for myself. If you stick with the prayer plan, you might consider praying for the benfit of someone aside from yourself. Put that in your hooka and smoke it.
Yeah. Right. There doesn't seem to be much of a shortage of faith in the muslim world lately. Sadly, there's no shortage here in America either. It's been argued that the muslim world finds itself lagging behind the rest of us as a direct result of turning inward on religion.
If I want to eat, I go plant things in my garden, or get food I've put up from past seasons. I certainly wouldn't wait around for ethereal beings or their decesased minions to dump it in lap. Even if I beg them to, that doesn't seem to work.
From my view, failures -- both personal and collective -- tend to come from a failure to get the lead out.
Wish in one hand and crap in the other, see which one gets full first.
That's not entirely accurate. That term applies to the, largely protestant, Scottish and Irish immigrants that settled the American south -- a lot of whom started in Virginia and migrated further west from there.
The (largely) Catholic Irish migration following the potato famine is not a part of that classification of immigrants.
Sounds good, but I'd rather they just released a spreadsheet app I could host myself rather than having to give my data back to them when I'm done working on it.
This is a perennial problem with ASPs in my line of work. A team of our users want something like this, someone from the $ASP sales department comes in and sells them on the "benefits of online collaboration, centralized storage, and blah, blah, blah." They buy into the service and then later discover what a PITA it is to get your hands on all of their data when they need to break it out of ASP prison, how universally horrible (and slow in most cases) the third party technical support is, and all the (often outrageous) "hosting fees."
I don't mind browser based solutions at all -- they save a lot of time customizing and distributing applications through the enterprise -- but vendor-hosted stuff... bah!
Maybe Apple and Adobe are talking about a merger? I have no idea if that's actually the case, but I suspect that may have, at least, something to do with it. The idea has been floated before.
Really? You must be joking. How would they find you? Leaving that aside, how is this any different from broadcasting music over an (FM-band) iTrip on a current iPod, aside from it being Bluetooth? You don't seriously think the RIAA or ASCAP is going to start sending out subpoenas to iTrip users, do you? Bring it. I'll volunteer to be the first test case.
Should I worry about turning my stereo up loud enough that my neighbors can hear it for fear of ASCAP demanding royalties?
No. Unless your iPod/Cell/Whatever can broadcast at a radiated power of over 100 watts on some regulated FM band, I doubt the FCC would care. Bluetooth "broadcasts" would happen in an unreglated band anyway, right?
I had a similar procedure done about a year ago (very happy with the results, BTW).
Actually, when your optometrist/laser surgeon are evaluating your vision to see if you're a suitable candidate for the procedure, one of the key elements that is a factor in making the decision to go forward is the stability of your prescription.
So, I would say, no. If your vision is gradually deteriorating from year to year, this will probably not help you much for long, if at all from a practical standpoint.
My vision was crap beforehand (-5.75 in the left eye and -5.50 in the right -- everything was a fuzzy blur beyond about a foot from my face). It's 20/20 now in both eyes. But going to surgery, it hadn't changed once in over 12 years.
Your prescription will still probably change again as you age, even after the "permanent" correction. Upshot being, you'll probably need reading glasses once your eyes go through their next big change, which according to my optometrist is somewhere in the mid-forties to -fifies for most people.
That said, it's still worth every penny, if you can get it, for all those years of unaided viewing, IMO.
But don't take my word for it. Talk to your doctor, there may be something they can do for you. If nothing else, they may be able to surgically correct your eyes to the point where you can go without glasses for a few years. If not, you may be able to at least scale back to much thinner, non-Coke-bottle lenses after you get zapped.
Or goverment agencies, or libraries, or anyone involved in a process that presently requires processing, review, markup, and storage of vast amounts of documents (i.e. file formats that have grown out of being traditionally comitted to 8.5x11, A4, etc.).
Really? If you can include features like the parent describes, along with the ones in my earlier post in this thread, it could turn out to be less expensive in the end. Paper is only cheap up front. Storing paper is what makes it expensive. The cost of disk space is plummeting, while the cost of real estate is rising. Not to mention, the paper making process creates some of the most toxic chemicals known to man.
I'd think of the TCO for this the same way I do with shoes. Don't be afraid to spend the money on better quality. They'll last longer, you'll comsume less, and you won't have to replace them, nearly as frequently. A few pairs of carefully chosen, high quality shoes will save you more money than a closet full of cheap ones in the long run without sacrificing too much flexibility.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll play games for 5 points on a five-figure loan, but what I won't do is buy Windows or install Netscape to please someone else. I at least get the satisfaction of knowing that they'll make little if any money off me (more likely the latter) and they get to field complaints about their crappy website for the privilege. It's quite awesome, actually, now that I think about it.
I have to play this game with my bank every time I want to check my account. They "only support IE5 or greater on Windows or Netscape on MacOS." If you have something else, you talk to the hand.... unless you set FF to report itself as IE on Win, at which point it works just fine. Why certain corps feel the need to block access to any other browser, or worse, force people into stupid browser choices for their OS of choice (Netscape on MacOS?!? How about at least supporting the standard browser for the platform?) is somewhat of a mystery. If they just don't want to support it, even if it works, why not just say so?
Man, we should all reject the whole concept of money -- especially if it's derived from the evil patent system -- and find a way to just live on love.
So RMS learned to fly?
After reading through this thread a week later, I know I don't want the Matrix dropping a duece in my brain either. I like your subtle twist on that, BTW.
Unfortunately, it seems like most potential students are too lazy to do any reserch beyond how much they can get for Stafford loans or Pell grants when all kinds of other money is available and unused that could be had through their school of choice, private scholarships, civic organizations, etc. All it takes is 3 or 4 months of Saturday afternoons and you can get an enducation without coming out of pocket more than a few grand. Really. I'm living proof. Not trade school either, friend. Private, expensive, liberal arts in my case.
You bet your sweet ass I did. Why anyone would bother if all they want is a good job at the end (whatever the hell that is exactly) is a mystery to me. The pay I commanded coming out of school hardly qualified as good. Latin American History, The Role of the Aristocracy in Britain, Multivariable Calculus, and Ceramics didn't give me the tools I needed to immediately get to a good job or the accompanying paycheck. But what it did give me was an awareness of various branches of human thought -- some of which were interesting enough to pursue outside of class, the discipline to pursue them on my own, and A LOT of practice learning how to write and speak like someone you might let out of the server room when clients come by. According to your logic my time would have been better spent at ITT learning to run a soldering gun instead? I don't think so. I'll take my university instilled love of learning and ability to have civil discourse with all kinds of people over C++ GUI design, thanks. I interviewed into progressively better jobs and they sent me to the Learning Tree to pick that up anyway. No it's not! That's your parents' job, if it's anyone's at all! And they ARE independent of each other. What they are not is mutually exclusive. However, it's not the college's job to, as you put it, "get their noses out of their butt and poke them in the comerical(sp) world and see what they are doing there." That is totally on you. You can get summer jobs and internships, and I even know a few people who managed to work full-time and go to school everyday.By the way, in spite of my college experience that left me totally unprepared to plug right into the commercial world, I have a good job that pays very well (which is the standard people who think in your mindset use as the yard stick, is it not?). I maintain it has fuck all to do with learning query optimization and everything to with the Role of the Arisotcracy in Britain. And I taught myself how to run a soldering gun a couple years ago too, hanging out with an old friend from my college days.
Damnit, do I feel ripped off.
Apologies. After closer reading, it appears we're in agreement.
How is that wrong exactly? A university education is not about job skills. Trade school is about job skills. How terrible that someone would spend four years learning about a larger world, a variety of different disciplines and develop a love of learning for its own sake. College is not, thankfully, a means to end. Nor should it be.
Infrared invisibility, coupled with this, would really be kick ass. It's got Navy Seals written all over it.
But you're leaving out the option of two chicks at the same time! Twice the prostate cancer prevention! Unless you meant husband and wives. Now that's unlawful.
You know what, Stuart? I like you. You're not like the other people here in the trailer park.
You've got big balls, Broseph, and you don't roll back down off 'em. I'm gonna go out on a limb and become your very first fan.
What do you have to say about this? Or this?
If I want to eat, I go plant things in my garden, or get food I've put up from past seasons. I certainly wouldn't wait around for ethereal beings or their decesased minions to dump it in lap. Even if I beg them to, that doesn't seem to work.
From my view, failures -- both personal and collective -- tend to come from a failure to get the lead out.
Wish in one hand and crap in the other, see which one gets full first.
The (largely) Catholic Irish migration following the potato famine is not a part of that classification of immigrants.
This is a perennial problem with ASPs in my line of work. A team of our users want something like this, someone from the $ASP sales department comes in and sells them on the "benefits of online collaboration, centralized storage, and blah, blah, blah." They buy into the service and then later discover what a PITA it is to get your hands on all of their data when they need to break it out of ASP prison, how universally horrible (and slow in most cases) the third party technical support is, and all the (often outrageous) "hosting fees."
I don't mind browser based solutions at all -- they save a lot of time customizing and distributing applications through the enterprise -- but vendor-hosted stuff... bah!
Maybe Apple and Adobe are talking about a merger? I have no idea if that's actually the case, but I suspect that may have, at least, something to do with it. The idea has been floated before.
Should I worry about turning my stereo up loud enough that my neighbors can hear it for fear of ASCAP demanding royalties?
No. Unless your iPod/Cell/Whatever can broadcast at a radiated power of over 100 watts on some regulated FM band, I doubt the FCC would care. Bluetooth "broadcasts" would happen in an unreglated band anyway, right?
Actually, when your optometrist/laser surgeon are evaluating your vision to see if you're a suitable candidate for the procedure, one of the key elements that is a factor in making the decision to go forward is the stability of your prescription.
So, I would say, no. If your vision is gradually deteriorating from year to year, this will probably not help you much for long, if at all from a practical standpoint.
My vision was crap beforehand (-5.75 in the left eye and -5.50 in the right -- everything was a fuzzy blur beyond about a foot from my face). It's 20/20 now in both eyes. But going to surgery, it hadn't changed once in over 12 years.
Your prescription will still probably change again as you age, even after the "permanent" correction. Upshot being, you'll probably need reading glasses once your eyes go through their next big change, which according to my optometrist is somewhere in the mid-forties to -fifies for most people.
That said, it's still worth every penny, if you can get it, for all those years of unaided viewing, IMO.
But don't take my word for it. Talk to your doctor, there may be something they can do for you. If nothing else, they may be able to surgically correct your eyes to the point where you can go without glasses for a few years. If not, you may be able to at least scale back to much thinner, non-Coke-bottle lenses after you get zapped.
Or goverment agencies, or libraries, or anyone involved in a process that presently requires processing, review, markup, and storage of vast amounts of documents (i.e. file formats that have grown out of being traditionally comitted to 8.5x11, A4, etc.).
I'd think of the TCO for this the same way I do with shoes. Don't be afraid to spend the money on better quality. They'll last longer, you'll comsume less, and you won't have to replace them, nearly as frequently. A few pairs of carefully chosen, high quality shoes will save you more money than a closet full of cheap ones in the long run without sacrificing too much flexibility.