California 2003-2004 state budget: $165 billion US
Canadian Federal Government budget 2003: ~$144.58 Billion US
I looked at the California budget summaries for the last couple of decades and was shocked. WTF has been going on in California that the state budget has increased 65% between 1997-98 and 2003-04?
Also, when you consider that the Canadian federal government budget is paying for a hell of a lot more services (including health care - the bulk of medicare funding still comes from the federal government), California voters have a right to feel ripped off.
Wikipedia announces that almost 12000 of the articles are completely accurate and authoritative, and the number of entries that have been updated with staggeringly inaccurate information by inebriated freshmen has been cut down by over 15% since 2002.
In other news, the authorities responsible will act suprised when the next little kid goes missing and a group of neighborhood vigilantes decides to go and beat the crap out of the nearest sex offender on the off chance that he might have had something to do with it.
And, since most pedophiles who've already been busted will be smart enough to prowl away from their home turf, it probably won't end up making kids in Maine any safer on the whole.
Jim: Allright already! Sheesh, here's your twenty bucks.
Bill: Thanks - I told you they'd fall for it.
Jim: I still can't believe they took that seriously. Hey - what happened to your suggestion that we make vendors refer to DB25 gender changers as "Transgendered Serial Interfaces"?
Bill: It's on the agenda for the next council meeting...
Why couldn't this be sustained? I'm sure people aren't talking about replying manually to the spam in their inboxes. This easy is easy to automate - make it an optional feature in the Mozilla mail client (or any other email client). Something like a check box called "autoreply to messages marked as junk mail" with a text box for the email address to use when replying would do the trick nicely.
And yet over 70% of Saskatchewan's population has access to DSL service - with only a million people scattered across a province the size of California.
And almost none of us live within 50 miles of the US border
And the government system of going with the lowest bidder is bound to cause some problems as the more expensive engineers would no doubt bring better experience and know how with them. When you bring in the inexperienced because they are cheap, you frequently end up spending more in the long run than if you had paid for the expertise up front.
So how would you assign government contracts, if not by tendering? The problem isn't that governments go with the lowest bidder, it's that they often fail to put sufficient conditions on the contract to discourage low-quality bidders.
An RFID tag identfies a particular item, not just a product. It can also be read without your knowledge, after the item is sold to you, by persons other than the original retailer. If you can't imagine the potential for abuse this has, you have very little imagination.
Being paranoid and afraid of technology isn't the same thing as being able to forsee abuses which will inevitably occur once a technology is widely used. Having rules and controls in place beforehand to prohibit unscrupulous behaviour is the logical action to take.
Normal law enforcement officials investigate people without notifying them all the time. Telling someone that you're going to investigate them for criminal activities (therefore giving them a chance to cover their tracks) is just silly. They can find out all they want about the investigation once their trial starts.
...the International Federation of Saddle Makers has decried the popularity of automobiles. "The level of horsemanship displayed by the average twelve year old in North America has declined dramatically since 1903" claims IFSM spkoesperson John Q. Luddite. "Hardly any of them even know how to mount a horse nowadays. What are we going to do?"
You know, unless you have a small business or some other complicated feature on your tax return, it's pretty easy to do your own taxes by hand. For a normal wage slave with a T4 or two and normal deductions (tuition, RRSPs, etc), doing it yourself doesn't take much longer than following Quicktax's interview process.
I'd used Quicktax for several years before this one, and I decided to skip it because of the restrictions in this year's edition, and because I was curious as to whether the software actually saved any time. As it turned out, the software would have saved me about forty-five minutes over the course of doing returns for my wife and myself (from what I recall from last year with Quicktax).
Now, both telefiling and efiling are free, but telefiling takes a lot longer, since you have to enter in the data from a bunch of lines by hand. So add another fifteen minutes extra to the total to telefile. Since I don't make more than $30/hour, I figure I came out ahead doing them myself, and I got my refund just as quickly as someone who'd efiled.
1. Now that his address has been posted to Slashdot, how much snail mail do you think Mr. Feldstein is going to get next week?
2. Does anyone else think it's a coincidence that the site that comes up first when you google for "free catalog" (cabelas.com) is running rather slowly right now?:)
That only happens if you're a big enough account that Coke or Pepsi gives you freebies. I spent a couple of summers helping deliver pop for Pepsi, and while the chain restaurants and the bigger independant accounts got free CO2, small accounts had to pay for it. It doesn't get in the bottle by itself, you know:)
I think most of my bitterness came from his implication that competition from Canadians was somehow unfair. Both countries agreed to free trade, presumably in good faith, yet the US has acted in bad faith on major trade issues a number of times since then.
As an example, the US (under pressure from domestic farm groups who dislike Canadian competition in their home market) has repeatedly accused the Canadian Wheat Board of unfairly subsidizing Canadian farmers, dumping wheat on the US market, etc. in spite of having these claims discredited and rejected repeatedly during arbitration. Typically, they wait six months or a year, then make essentially the same claim as last time (though none of the facts have changed), and reimpose tariffs. The tariffs paid are eventually refunded, but no compensation is given for lost trade because of the customers that were scared away by them. The US has also been engaing in similar tactics against the Canadian softwood lumber industry.
The common theme in these cases is US industries or workers claiming that the competition has an "unfair" advantage whenever they are losing business to Canadian competitors. This is exactly what the original poster was implying. Sure it's not fair to him that he lost his job through no fault of his own, but it doesn't follow that foreign competitors must therefore have an unfair advantage that needs to be rectified through tariffs.
....are already subject to enough punitive measures by Americans who don't want competition, even in spite of NAFTA. Ask a BC logger or a Saskatchewan wheat farmer.
Why is an American programmer any more entitled to a job than one in Calgary? It's not like you can claim that the Canadian is working for ten dollars a week like one in India.
This is typical of the American attitude towards international trade: other countries exist to serve as markets, not sources of competition. Buying things from Americans good, selling things to Americans bad!
Slashdot Mirror
...I hear Ashcroft was this close to putting out a worldwide APB on a bald guy in a grey suit who puts his pinky to his mouth when he talks.
He was a little embarassed at first, but Lockheed Martin now has a $10 Million contract to study the feasability of sharks with frickin' laser beams.
Why on earth would the FTC have any jurisdiction?
Canadian Federal Government budget 2003: ~$144.58 Billion US
I looked at the California budget summaries for the last couple of decades and was shocked. WTF has been going on in California that the state budget has increased 65% between 1997-98 and 2003-04?
Also, when you consider that the Canadian federal government budget is paying for a hell of a lot more services (including health care - the bulk of medicare funding still comes from the federal government), California voters have a right to feel ripped off.
"nothing destroys evidence like building a city over it"
How about burning down everything in the area first, then building a city over it?:)
Wikipedia announces that almost 12000 of the articles are completely accurate and authoritative, and the number of entries that have been updated with staggeringly inaccurate information by inebriated freshmen has been cut down by over 15% since 2002.
In other news, the authorities responsible will act suprised when the next little kid goes missing and a group of neighborhood vigilantes decides to go and beat the crap out of the nearest sex offender on the off chance that he might have had something to do with it.
And, since most pedophiles who've already been busted will be smart enough to prowl away from their home turf, it probably won't end up making kids in Maine any safer on the whole.
Jim: Allright already! Sheesh, here's your twenty bucks.
Bill: Thanks - I told you they'd fall for it.
Jim: I still can't believe they took that seriously. Hey - what happened to your suggestion that we make vendors refer to DB25 gender changers as "Transgendered Serial Interfaces"?
Bill: It's on the agenda for the next council meeting...
Why couldn't this be sustained? I'm sure people aren't talking about replying manually to the spam in their inboxes. This easy is easy to automate - make it an optional feature in the Mozilla mail client (or any other email client). Something like a check box called "autoreply to messages marked as junk mail" with a text box for the email address to use when replying would do the trick nicely.
And yet over 70% of Saskatchewan's population has access to DSL service - with only a million people scattered across a province the size of California.
And almost none of us live within 50 miles of the US border
And the government system of going with the lowest bidder is bound to cause some problems as the more expensive engineers would no doubt bring better experience and know how with them. When you bring in the inexperienced because they are cheap, you frequently end up spending more in the long run than if you had paid for the expertise up front.
So how would you assign government contracts, if not by tendering? The problem isn't that governments go with the lowest bidder, it's that they often fail to put sufficient conditions on the contract to discourage low-quality bidders.
An RFID tag identfies a particular item, not just a product. It can also be read without your knowledge, after the item is sold to you, by persons other than the original retailer. If you can't imagine the potential for abuse this has, you have very little imagination.
Being paranoid and afraid of technology isn't the same thing as being able to forsee abuses which will inevitably occur once a technology is widely used. Having rules and controls in place beforehand to prohibit unscrupulous behaviour is the logical action to take.
OK... now can we do the same thing for some of the AV codecs?
Huh? Did you read the article? The patent wasn't found invalid - it simply expired, as all patents do.
Case #1:
>
#include<stdio.h>
#include<stdlib.h>
#inc lude<math.h>
#include<limits.h>
#include<time.h
More cases of flagrant copyright infrigement of System V source code by Linux kernal hackers is to come!
Normal law enforcement officials investigate people without notifying them all the time. Telling someone that you're going to investigate them for criminal activities (therefore giving them a chance to cover their tracks) is just silly. They can find out all they want about the investigation once their trial starts.
...the International Federation of Saddle Makers has decried the popularity of automobiles. "The level of horsemanship displayed by the average twelve year old in North America has declined dramatically since 1903" claims IFSM spkoesperson John Q. Luddite. "Hardly any of them even know how to mount a horse nowadays. What are we going to do?"
who read the blurb and expected the printer to start printing out little cards reading "Teacher", "Doctor", "20,000", "100,000", etc? :)
You know, unless you have a small business or some other complicated feature on your tax return, it's pretty easy to do your own taxes by hand. For a normal wage slave with a T4 or two and normal deductions (tuition, RRSPs, etc), doing it yourself doesn't take much longer than following Quicktax's interview process.
I'd used Quicktax for several years before this one, and I decided to skip it because of the restrictions in this year's edition, and because I was curious as to whether the software actually saved any time. As it turned out, the software would have saved me about forty-five minutes over the course of doing returns for my wife and myself (from what I recall from last year with Quicktax).
Now, both telefiling and efiling are free, but telefiling takes a lot longer, since you have to enter in the data from a bunch of lines by hand. So add another fifteen minutes extra to the total to telefile. Since I don't make more than $30/hour, I figure I came out ahead doing them myself, and I got my refund just as quickly as someone who'd efiled.
Steve Ballmer probably did his monkey boy dance all over the office when he heard about this...
As bulk emailers, we are doing you a FAVOR, so get over it.
How so? I didn't ask for any of your garbage, and I definately don't want it. Go smoke some more of your herbal viagra.
Nice troll, BTW. I doubt anyone will fall for the fake addy. Besides, I never said *I* was going to send someone a catalog they didn't want.
1. Now that his address has been posted to Slashdot, how much snail mail do you think Mr. Feldstein is going to get next week?
2. Does anyone else think it's a coincidence that the site that comes up first when you google for "free catalog" (cabelas.com) is running rather slowly right now?:)
Why not just take twenty million dollars and use it for a bonfire? Same effect for the investors, and much quicker.
I'll bet that they could've gotten the rights for Pong much cheaper - and both games have about the same story potential.
That only happens if you're a big enough account that Coke or Pepsi gives you freebies. I spent a couple of summers helping deliver pop for Pepsi, and while the chain restaurants and the bigger independant accounts got free CO2, small accounts had to pay for it. It doesn't get in the bottle by itself, you know:)
I think most of my bitterness came from his implication that competition from Canadians was somehow unfair. Both countries agreed to free trade, presumably in good faith, yet the US has acted in bad faith on major trade issues a number of times since then.
As an example, the US (under pressure from domestic farm groups who dislike Canadian competition in their home market) has repeatedly accused the Canadian Wheat Board of unfairly subsidizing Canadian farmers, dumping wheat on the US market, etc. in spite of having these claims discredited and rejected repeatedly during arbitration. Typically, they wait six months or a year, then make essentially the same claim as last time (though none of the facts have changed), and reimpose tariffs. The tariffs paid are eventually refunded, but no compensation is given for lost trade because of the customers that were scared away by them. The US has also been engaing in similar tactics against the Canadian softwood lumber industry.
The common theme in these cases is US industries or workers claiming that the competition has an "unfair" advantage whenever they are losing business to Canadian competitors. This is exactly what the original poster was implying. Sure it's not fair to him that he lost his job through no fault of his own, but it doesn't follow that foreign competitors must therefore have an unfair advantage that needs to be rectified through tariffs.
....are already subject to enough punitive measures by Americans who don't want competition, even in spite of NAFTA. Ask a BC logger or a Saskatchewan wheat farmer.
Why is an American programmer any more entitled to a job than one in Calgary? It's not like you can claim that the Canadian is working for ten dollars a week like one in India.
This is typical of the American attitude towards international trade: other countries exist to serve as markets, not sources of competition. Buying things from Americans good, selling things to Americans bad!
Aging Hippie Nostalgia Syndrome