Listen you want good service, quit villifying comissioned sales. I worked in my youth at Circuit City (RIP) and when someone returned something I lost the money. If I sold a customer something I wanted it out the door and to stay out the door. No way in hell would I want my TMI (Total Margin Income) battered to hell by return and get the Nasty-Gram from some CSR (Customer Service Rep) who processed the return.
If I made $20 commission on something and someone brought it back my next paycheck (if this spanned paychecks) they would deduct $20 from the commissioned I had earn up to that point all the way down to base pay. Too many returns = unemployment at the very least.
I would take it a step further and take an additional 10% of the commission value (so in this example rather then -$20 you would -$22)
But in the end we come back to : "You get what you pay for"
Don't like idiot boobs selling you crap, buy from a competent boutique seller that knows their shit inside and out until they get borged by incompetent boobs with big wallets...
If they check 1 line of code every second it would take 133,101.85 years to check 11.5 billion lines of code. At 1000 lines of code every second you are looking at 133.10 years to check that much code. At 4000 lines of code every second (e.g. 4GHz) you are looking at 33.2 years to check that much code.
A: We know they didn't check the code by hand. B: The methodology didn't classify defects (cosmetic, seucrity, minor, major. etc.) C: The numbers aren't normalized nor broken by application size. D: The use of a bug reporting database needs to be measured in regards to a baseline filing\fix % not a total volume (as we need to correlate new lines of code being added)
I'll only say this. Their methodology is not very good and thus any outcome they draw from is only as vaid as their methodology...
A 1% defect rate in an application, say the size of the Linux Kernel is a very different animal then say a 1% defect rate in say, VIM. In addition, 44 minor defects is very different then 6 majors. A minor defect could be as trival as a field not being aligned properly on a form.
You need to see a comparison such that:
App A 23 Minor 14 Major 3 Critical
and the accompaning resolution rates for the MMCs.
Usually it's
Minor : 95% Major : 99% Critical : 100%
Volume of defects is proportional to complexity, not lines of code.
That's like crying there is an epidemic of 5000 people dead every year... With a population of billions that is not even in the area of insignificant. 5000 people dead in a since town... that is a serious problem when the population is only 65000... SCOPE counts in data analysis.
This is garbage reporting... I don't care about the outcome, I don't agree or disagree but the methdology I see so far... I would fail this as an assignment in high school... If you are going to publish news about a report, part of the reporting is to indicate the methodology...
It reads like something from the Onion. "Gartner reported today that Gumby is more popular then Spongbob by using a computer!"
At the very least you need to throw in "Gartner reported today that Gumby is more popular then Spongebob by using a computer model that took people between the ages of 50 and 89 and had them fillout a survey. After normalizing the data and eliminating outliers Gartner consultants were able to determine that Gumby was more recognizable then Spongbob by a margin of over 90%."
All those reveiws and not 1 of them tested a Lynnfield chip that I could find to see if the dual 8x pci-e slots get pinned when running a DX11 card in SLI. Not one review used a typical median computer that someone would currently own.
So after all those 'reviews' *cough advertisements* we still don't know if someone with a Core2 Duo at 3 Ghz can even feed that card effectively. No DDR2 systems, no Quad Core Core2 running DDR3... just the usual i7 Etremes that tell typical consumers anything. We don't know, after all those review if it's even worth buying based on a typical machine. ZZZzzzz....
If anyone can find a Core2 system tested with this new card let te rest of us know if any of us who don't own $1000 processors get a benefit...
All of the photos are post-processed. I have never in all my years seen a raw photo make it into a publication. YOu have to adjust color levels based on the print media, light correction, cropping, resizing, dpi adjustment, etc.
And in my experience, all of this is okay, n no small part because you could do it all in the old film darkrooms.
Airbrushing is standard even in most high school yearbooks to clear up acne or remove a bruise.
This is probably fine for yearbook photos, but in photojournalism it's a strict no-no because you've changed the story at that point.
In the case of photojournalism that is subjective. Otherwise black and white photos would be a no-no since it doesn't accurately display the scene. "He was wearing a blue shirt, not a grey shirt!" Photojournalists have been doing black and white for centuries yet misrepresenting the colors in the scene doesn't seem to detract from the content of the scene... 100% accuracy has never been a standard yet... so what at what limit of alteration is acceptable and what is not? Do we honestly want a government setting that standard? I can't tell in this black and white photo if that is blood or chocolate syrup... hmm....
All of the photos are post-processed. I have never in all my years seen a raw photo make it into a publication. YOu have to adjust color levels based on the print media, light correction, cropping, resizing, dpi adjustment, etc. Airbrushing is standard even in most high school yearbooks to clear up acne or remove a bruise. Even the "natural" pictures still ahve saturation adjustments for print material. Printing on a black background verus a white background requires level adjustments to ensure the picture doesn't wash out based on the printer.
Once again France shows the common sense and the law are mutually exclusive...
Corporations are considered people to a great extent. They can hold property, file civil suits, be the target of civil suits, they have to pay taxes, can be found criminally liable, etc. By the nature of how corporate law functions Corporations are people, and physically represented by the executive management (CEO, CFO, CCO, etc.) with a great deal of the burden on the CEO.
Without Corporations as a person mentality companies wouldn't be able to function (hold propety, etc.) The concept of a corporation was that for the public good, an organization could become incorportated and function as an individual where the liability was help by the corporation not the shareholders. Publically traded companies wouldn't exist without that concept otherwise in the case of Exxon would little Danny who has a gift share in the company be held liable for the oil spill? Of course not, the corporation itself (as a person) is held liable and the executive management then can be held accountable to a degree on a per person basis. It's a rather broad philisophical topic and there are many great reads out there at your library on the concepts (rather then specifics) of a corporation.
There are still a few BBS's I used to sysop that still are running the combination of DOS/Quarterdeck QEMM/DESQview combo running on 28.8 dialup (for the purests) and TCP/IP backends (for telnet access.) Oh the memory but DESQview was damn near an OS and a few have custom handbuild OS subsystems for their BBS. Suprisingly it wasn't that hard to write up a custom BBS system back then. There are still a few PC\DOS PS1 gateway (as in gateway services, not the brand) boxes out there.
Renegade 4 EVAH! EAT IT WILDCAT AND YOU PROBOARD WEAK SAUCED POSERS!!! ACiD > TRiBE iCE MUAHAAHHAAHHH the ANSI wars are ONE!! BWHAHHAHAAA errr.. crap I'm old...
No one is exempt from stupidity and certainly not ignorance. No man can know all things let he be a God among men.
I've met the brightest that Harvard graduated and they thought you could get the swine flu from eating pork.
I work with a Yale man that couldn't replace his air filter in his car.
I've worked with two former NASA engineers and a Ballistic Warhead designer from UDLP that couldn't install an electrical outlet in thier home.
Ignorance is relative people. How many of you know when to harvest garlic? When you put down your fertilizer? How many days do you let alfalfa dry between cutting and baling? Know how to shoe a horse? How about stitch a wound? At what rate should you run the reverse rehometer to prevent scaling on a polymer test?
There is a difference between stupidity and ignorance. You can mock stupidity till you are blue in the face; just make damn sure you know the difference between the two or all you will accomplish is proving how big of a jackass you are.
We don't want these jurors looking up information and being educated. Just what we tell them. Period. No dictionaries, thesarus, the more ignorant and impressionable we can keep jurors the better...
Seriously, what government in their right mind wants jurors not to have resources to research what they are being told?
First off there is no such thing as the Mafia. It is nothing more then the realm of conspiracy theory nut jobs wearing tin foil hats.
There is no way such a large scale criminal organization could exist. Such a large scale operation is simply the result of an over active imagination.
If there was such a large network of organized crime the implications are staggering. Democrats and Republicans alike could easily be seen as a bed and wed member of such organizations with a network of judges, law enforcement; the list runs top to bottom. No institution would be safe if such organizations existed.
With out much effort a simple shallow dig could easily expose connections to such organizations. If such agencies of criminal behavior existed the people would easily rise up and topple such an organization as hiding such activities on such a large scale would be near impossible.
In fact to supress such scrutinty would take a coordinated effort of industry titans, politicians, and the complete hijacking of main stream media outlets.
Total nonsense. Mafia... psh.. the wet dream of tin foil hat wearing fruit cakes. There is no such thing as the Mafia nor any evidence that large portions of the global political elite are involved.
Move along... nothing to see here. I said MOVE ALONG!
If there was such an organization it would be far to easy to put the pieces together and actually see an organized effort to supress basic rights, enslaved people to a tiny elite, and rebuild the old world aristocracy and build a new world order with such a corrupt organization at the helm.
Nope... no such thing. This story is a total fabrication. Get your tin foil hats out if you are willing to believe such nonsense...
No a corrupt organization wouldn't fabricate circumstances to enrich themselves... why next thing you'll believe that politicians have consistently invested in dead end industries then used legislation 5-8 years later to suddenly transform once dead industries into economic powerhouses fueled by new legislation. That kind of conspiracy is the realm of fiction authors not real life. And certainly tracking the salvage industry back 10 years wouldn't lend itself to some suprising names who are all ready to clean up this mess. Double the bonus, skip out on the expensive disposal and clean up... well cleaning up. That kind of consipiracy is total nonsense and anyone beliving it must be a tin foil hat wearing fruit loop. No such thing as conspiracies, cartels, price fixing corporate ceos, mafia, and all that nonsense. Life is simply too complex for the pesantry to understand and Mafias and big evil boogie men are just an easy out for intellectually challenged cattle... err people.
Check you county ordinances. Here where I live disposing of a CFL in the trash is a $200 fine. You have to bring it to the hazerdous waste dispoal drop off (same place for paint, oil, etc.) and they charge $1 a bulb for disposal.
I switched the whole house to CFL. Every light. These bulbs are supposed to last 3-5 years.
I have replaced EVERY CFL BULB IN THE HOUSE within a year. EVERY ONE. GE Brand. No electrical voodoo in the house (I have a line conditioner even at the main). EVERY ONE. I shipped every damn one of them back to GE and Philips for a refund and explaination on why they failed. ZERO response.
Yeah my electric bill went down. $4 a month after replacing EVERY BULB in my house. That is 38 bulbs. You only save oodles of money provided you run them 5 hours a day constantly to cover the cost of the bulb. If have those 5 minute hall and closet lights along with perhaps 2-8 bulbs on for 5 hours (reading lamp, kitchen lights) you lose money. I barely saved money due to the living room lights being on all day. The livingroom, kitchen, and my office are the only high use lights and effectively had to subsidize all the other lights in the home. The $4 a month doesn't cover the $90+ spend on the bulbs...
Now every bulb was replaced back then as the old incandescent ones died off. So they were replaced over a 6 month period when we moved in (The old bulbs were at the oldest 4 years old.) So it can't be blamed on a bad batch of bulbs or a specific store (Target, Home Depot, Menards, and Walmart were sources for the bulbs)
So the CFLs being cheaper is pure bull shit as far as a home is concerned. That useless philips halogen crap in the garage that was supposed to be a 5 year bulb worked out to 8 months and didn't survive the winter.
Total scam in my opinion on CFLs. Until they can get an LED to match a 100 watt bulb (because I like to be able to see in my house rather then some crap ass 60-watt equivalent...) get it as cheap as a normal bulb, I keep my nice 100 watt incadescents thank you. When they burn out I don't have to fork over $3 to replace them.
I won't even get into the discussion about the quality of light from CFLs and LEDs vs. Incandescent bulbs... more useless ineffective crap to protect your new found god...
Telling us it saves $25 bucks a month if bullshit. I'll buy 1. It goes in my garage. If it can survive 3 years I MIGHT consider buying a second one for the bathroom and if that survies another 3 years... then we'll talk. So far this low-energy lighting scam is just that.. a scam as far as my experience has gone.
My criteria from now on: Full Spectrum, 100 Watts, NO STROBING, NO FLICKERING.
CFLs are a joke and LEDs have a long way to go. Too bad it looks like government has to subsidize and legistate to prop up yet another failure... How long till they ban those nice incandescent lights... oh wait...
Dear pesants, we need you to use less water since fresh water is getting scarce on Earth. We need you smelly unwashed masses to use less of OUR water so we can have pools and fountains and allow us elite types to shower more. So here, we offer this scary article to curb that water usage so there is more for our artifical private lakes we like to jet ski in. Remember don't drive that nasty green house spewing car as we drive around in private jets and boats that burn more fuel in an hour then you use in a month to tell you how you are hurting OUR environment.
Please, next you'll see them marketing cheaper 'disposable' shower heads so the ignorant pesants buy more cheap crap.
Step 1: Remove shower head Step 2: Fill a bucket with warm water Step 3: Add 1/2 a cup of bleach to the bucket of warm water Step 4: Drop shower head in said bucket Step 5: Go work in the cubical fields wage slave! Step 6: Come back and remove shower head from the now cold, heartless bucket of water. Step 7: (For the extra paranoid)spray the showhead with some Lysol or give it a second dip in some CLR if you have lime scale or calcium deposits. Step 8: Reattach shower head Step 9: Cowtow to the picture of your boss and thank them for privilege of allowing you to work for them. Step 10: Take a shower just to piss them off after you come to your senses. Step 11: Beg the water warden not to rat you out after you used more then your 1/2 gallon of water you were rationed for the day. Meanwhile the wealthy will enjoy steam rooms, lap pools, fountains and other nice things while you fester in filthy 3 day recycled bath water...
The Improbability of Improbability
on
The Magicians
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
C.S. Lewis was out to make a point and tell a story. So was Tolkien. In contrast Potter seems to be "just a story" without an underlying point. This has no bearing on the merits but rather the structure and origin.
It struck me that Both Lewis and Tolkien (as well as Herbert for you Sci-Fi fans) sat down and said, "What message do I want to send... okay.. now how about a good story to communicate that..."
Potter struck me as, "Ok here is the overall story. Let's see if we can work a bigger message into it."
As the review pointed out sometimes the story can get overshadowed by the message\point the author is trying to make.
People, for some odd reason alawsys have an axe to grind with Lewis. Be it Christan bigotry or the exact opposite, alas the "Jesus isn't an animal!" rabid foaming at the mouth fundamentalists I find it almost ironic that Rowling, Tolkien, and Lewis now form this weird "Fantasy Trinity" of core writers.
Interestingly enough though I hear little of Ann Mcaffrey, Margret Weis and Tracy Hickman; and albiet biased, Terry Brooks.
It goes back to world crafting which is difficult to do, for authors even more so do to limited space.
Perhaps the success of those three was their ability, intentional or otherwise, was to draw the reader into the world with little effort.
Perhaps we should measure this work against that standard on how easily "we can step through the wardrobe", or quickly "we can make the journey to the undying lands", or how siftly we can "catch a train to Hogwarts"
Until property speculators and big business start buying land and mineral right to bank on then when the political dollars dry up the supplies would start flowing again if they would stop in the first place...
The UN years back said, as best as I can paraphrase, "The soverignty of a planet is dicated by it's inhabitants."
Effectively the first people to get there own Mars as a whole.
First people there get to start carving up the planet into lots and sell them.
That is a lot of industrial space for landfills, mining operations, toxic waste storage, etc.
I for one would gladly go with a team of 6-12 people just for the purpose of establishing the Martian Government, then promptly emminent domaining the whole friggin planet and granting equal portions of the planet to the 6-12 people living there. Then a few UN treaties later bequeathing my land stake to my relatives back on Earth since international and Interplanetary treaties are "The law of the land."
Think of the wealth opportunities and you will get MILLIONS of volunteers to go. 5 million square miles of potential mineralogical weath is more then enough motivation to secure your bloodline's fortunes far beyond even those crooks the Kennedy's could ever have dreamed. Even from a raw space issue a 4 mile deep toxic waste storage facility is going to pan out money.
I know 40 elderly 70+ folks that would go just to die on another planet. Hell (ironic?) we could turn Mars, at the very least into a giant planet sized mosoluem\graveyard.
"The soverignty of a planet is dicated by it's inhabitants."
-1 Troll, article has nothing to do with Sony and Open Source. Not including, a closed source hypervisor on a console that fewer then a million people ever used the Linux option to lower the cost of a console.
The hypervision wasn't open source and that is what they removed so how does this relate to open source in any way?
I smell an XBOX 360 fanboy behind this train wreck of an article...
Take some lessions from the poltical world before you try a tech-hatchet job.
Better check and see if this is an M$ employee again...
The simple fact is that the game where you hit pedestrians may simply have been more entertaining and thus the ads more memorable.
There was a great Onion TV spot about a "Shoot people in the face" game which while violent also looked as boring as hell. So what they really need to do is have a boring, yet violent game, and use that as a control.
They failed to separate if the results was due to the game being more entertaining rather then just violent.
Case point, solitaire with violent images on the cards, do they improve the ad recall?
While it is at least a fruit to fruit comparision they still need to figure out if people perfer oranges to lemons because of taste or the fact that they were rubbing the lemon juice on open cuts during the study...
Correlation doesn't imply causation because of this very scenario. We cannot tell if the results (despite the obviously biased report) were because the pedestrian game was violent or merely more entertaining.
A great example would have been to compare a poorly done "Road Killing Game" with bad graphics to Grand Turismo. I'd wager a bet that ad recall will be better on... well... a better more entertaining game.
Clearly if the killing version of the game is more entertaining then that goes a long way in briding the gap in the TV inconsistency...
Thus only large uber-corporations will provide ISP\Web hosting with strict controls putting the Internet solely in the hands of multinationals that can afford the risk.
Freedom takes another blow and more and more of the Internet as we knew it vanishes. Soon there will be nothing left except big business and big government on the Internet... or whatever you want to call what it has become...
I'm not big on conspiracies but all these dominos falling seem a tad too corrdinated for my tastes...
Step 1: Gain control of communications Step 2: Commoditize communication Step 3: Litgate liability Step 4: Censor in the name of controlling liability Step 5: Control the flow of information Step 6: Persecute, I mean prosecute those who share 'dangerous and subversive' information
Hilter, Stalin, and Mao would be proud of the direction we are headed... The Internet was a great dream and a place for freedom. Now there are so few dominos left to fall before that dream lies dead...
Face it, we are heading back to royalty and peasantry quicker and quicker. Not long and they'll have us back in chains. I knew a former employee of Anderson who was fired after lunch because he had a spot of soup on his tie.
"At $85 fucking dollars an hour I expect your monkey ass to be fucking spotless, get the fuck out of my office you unkempt shit!"
That is why I got out of consulting as I was sitting outside the door during this exchange. I once lost a contract from having a 102 fever and couldn't drive to drop off a floppy disk with a script for a novell printer remap even though there was 12 copies of the disk sitting on my desk 2 cubes over from where my boss sat...
"If you can't get to work when we need you, then we don't fucking need you. You can mail us the pager and badge, your fucking done in this town!"
We are pesants, get used to it. I still see the same H1B guys in Minneapolis (Now what, 13 year later) who put 38-40 hours on their time sheets but a simple check of the parking ramp's badge log and they are there 2-3 days straight and the workstation log shows 80-90 hours a week working. They don't dare put their real time down or it is "back on the boat" for them (I hear that crap from their managers all the time).
I've been out of consulting now for about 4 years and you couldn't pay me to go back into it. I'm lucky where I am at but the horrors I see here in the Twin Cities makes me ill on how they treat employees. I saw on gal get fired because "she's too pretty" and another "because she dates too much", another "I don't need some fat shit blocking my view..."
I've even been told by a few executives "I'm a fucking piece of livestock" on several occasions (twice ironically at the same resturant "The Palimino", Minneapolis in the La Salle tower. Nice place btw.)
It gets worse every year and you wonder why no one goes into IT anymore. I cannot speak outside of the IT\MIS field but I have found that, given a sourge, most would use it on someone. The USA corporate culture is getting bad, real bad. Madoff and the like are just the tip of the iceberg in bad behavior. You should hear the kind of shit they say while on Lake Minnetonka or up on the White Fish chain by Cross Lake and hear what they really think about "the fucking toothless braindead pesants I have working for me". The greed is getting worse not better... so much for being an enlightened society....
Sadly it also appears to be 2nd generation types too. The old man was nice and polite, his children on the otherhand... what the hell happened? I'd rather have the old days before the Mafia wen't legit and brought their business methods with them.
If they fire her for wrong doing it won't count towards "Turnover Count" but if they let her go it would impact the turn-over numbers. If they haven't had any turnover for say 5 years then there is incentive to ensure the "good record" goes unblemished.
How about making no apologies for the past and moving on. if you want to carry generation after generation of grudges for past wrongs move to the middle east, they've taken 8000 year old grudges to an art form.
What's done is done. You can't undo it, you can right a past wrong. It's done, it's over, he's dead. Move on and try not to make new mistakes rather then wasting time and energy trying to save face on old mistakes...
Slashdot Mirror
Listen you want good service, quit villifying comissioned sales. I worked in my youth at Circuit City (RIP) and when someone returned something I lost the money. If I sold a customer something I wanted it out the door and to stay out the door. No way in hell would I want my TMI (Total Margin Income) battered to hell by return and get the Nasty-Gram from some CSR (Customer Service Rep) who processed the return.
If I made $20 commission on something and someone brought it back my next paycheck (if this spanned paychecks) they would deduct $20 from the commissioned I had earn up to that point all the way down to base pay. Too many returns = unemployment at the very least.
I would take it a step further and take an additional 10% of the commission value (so in this example rather then -$20 you would -$22)
But in the end we come back to : "You get what you pay for"
Don't like idiot boobs selling you crap, buy from a competent boutique seller that knows their shit inside and out until they get borged by incompetent boobs with big wallets...
If they check 1 line of code every second it would take 133,101.85 years to check 11.5 billion lines of code. At 1000 lines of code every second you are looking at 133.10 years to check that much code. At 4000 lines of code every second (e.g. 4GHz) you are looking at 33.2 years to check that much code.
A: We know they didn't check the code by hand.
B: The methodology didn't classify defects (cosmetic, seucrity, minor, major. etc.)
C: The numbers aren't normalized nor broken by application size.
D: The use of a bug reporting database needs to be measured in regards to a baseline filing\fix % not a total volume (as we need to correlate new lines of code being added)
I'll only say this. Their methodology is not very good and thus any outcome they draw from is only as vaid as their methodology...
A 1% defect rate in an application, say the size of the Linux Kernel is a very different animal then say a 1% defect rate in say, VIM. In addition, 44 minor defects is very different then 6 majors. A minor defect could be as trival as a field not being aligned properly on a form.
You need to see a comparison such that:
App A
23 Minor
14 Major
3 Critical
and the accompaning resolution rates for the MMCs.
Usually it's
Minor : 95%
Major : 99%
Critical : 100%
Volume of defects is proportional to complexity, not lines of code.
That's like crying there is an epidemic of 5000 people dead every year... With a population of billions that is not even in the area of insignificant. 5000 people dead in a since town... that is a serious problem when the population is only 65000... SCOPE counts in data analysis.
This is garbage reporting... I don't care about the outcome, I don't agree or disagree but the methdology I see so far... I would fail this as an assignment in high school... If you are going to publish news about a report, part of the reporting is to indicate the methodology...
It reads like something from the Onion. "Gartner reported today that Gumby is more popular then Spongbob by using a computer!"
At the very least you need to throw in "Gartner reported today that Gumby is more popular then Spongebob by using a computer model that took people between the ages of 50 and 89 and had them fillout a survey. After normalizing the data and eliminating outliers Gartner consultants were able to determine that Gumby was more recognizable then Spongbob by a margin of over 90%."
Dear Lord journalism is dead...
All those reveiws and not 1 of them tested a Lynnfield chip that I could find to see if the dual 8x pci-e slots get pinned when running a DX11 card in SLI. Not one review used a typical median computer that someone would currently own.
So after all those 'reviews' *cough advertisements* we still don't know if someone with a Core2 Duo at 3 Ghz can even feed that card effectively. No DDR2 systems, no Quad Core Core2 running DDR3... just the usual i7 Etremes that tell typical consumers anything. We don't know, after all those review if it's even worth buying based on a typical machine. ZZZzzzz....
If anyone can find a Core2 system tested with this new card let te rest of us know if any of us who don't own $1000 processors get a benefit...
All of the photos are post-processed. I have never in all my years seen a raw photo make it into a publication. YOu have to adjust color levels based on the print media, light correction, cropping, resizing, dpi adjustment, etc.
And in my experience, all of this is okay, n no small part because you could do it all in the old film darkrooms.
Airbrushing is standard even in most high school yearbooks to clear up acne or remove a bruise.
This is probably fine for yearbook photos, but in photojournalism it's a strict no-no because you've changed the story at that point.
In the case of photojournalism that is subjective. Otherwise black and white photos would be a no-no since it doesn't accurately display the scene. "He was wearing a blue shirt, not a grey shirt!" Photojournalists have been doing black and white for centuries yet misrepresenting the colors in the scene doesn't seem to detract from the content of the scene... 100% accuracy has never been a standard yet... so what at what limit of alteration is acceptable and what is not? Do we honestly want a government setting that standard? I can't tell in this black and white photo if that is blood or chocolate syrup... hmm....
I am still amazed that we find it necessary to have 50 mirros of something when a single bit torrent link would suffice...
All of the photos are post-processed. I have never in all my years seen a raw photo make it into a publication. YOu have to adjust color levels based on the print media, light correction, cropping, resizing, dpi adjustment, etc. Airbrushing is standard even in most high school yearbooks to clear up acne or remove a bruise. Even the "natural" pictures still ahve saturation adjustments for print material. Printing on a black background verus a white background requires level adjustments to ensure the picture doesn't wash out based on the printer.
Once again France shows the common sense and the law are mutually exclusive...
Corporations are considered people to a great extent. They can hold property, file civil suits, be the target of civil suits, they have to pay taxes, can be found criminally liable, etc. By the nature of how corporate law functions Corporations are people, and physically represented by the executive management (CEO, CFO, CCO, etc.) with a great deal of the burden on the CEO.
Without Corporations as a person mentality companies wouldn't be able to function (hold propety, etc.) The concept of a corporation was that for the public good, an organization could become incorportated and function as an individual where the liability was help by the corporation not the shareholders. Publically traded companies wouldn't exist without that concept otherwise in the case of Exxon would little Danny who has a gift share in the company be held liable for the oil spill? Of course not, the corporation itself (as a person) is held liable and the executive management then can be held accountable to a degree on a per person basis. It's a rather broad philisophical topic and there are many great reads out there at your library on the concepts (rather then specifics) of a corporation.
There are still a few BBS's I used to sysop that still are running the combination of DOS/Quarterdeck QEMM/DESQview combo running on 28.8 dialup (for the purests) and TCP/IP backends (for telnet access.) Oh the memory but DESQview was damn near an OS and a few have custom handbuild OS subsystems for their BBS. Suprisingly it wasn't that hard to write up a custom BBS system back then. There are still a few PC\DOS PS1 gateway (as in gateway services, not the brand) boxes out there.
Renegade 4 EVAH! EAT IT WILDCAT AND YOU PROBOARD WEAK SAUCED POSERS!!! ACiD > TRiBE iCE MUAHAAHHAAHHH the ANSI wars are ONE!! BWHAHHAHAAA errr.. crap I'm old...
No one is exempt from stupidity and certainly not ignorance. No man can know all things let he be a God among men.
I've met the brightest that Harvard graduated and they thought you could get the swine flu from eating pork.
I work with a Yale man that couldn't replace his air filter in his car.
I've worked with two former NASA engineers and a Ballistic Warhead designer from UDLP that couldn't install an electrical outlet in thier home.
Ignorance is relative people. How many of you know when to harvest garlic? When you put down your fertilizer? How many days do you let alfalfa dry between cutting and baling? Know how to shoe a horse? How about stitch a wound? At what rate should you run the reverse rehometer to prevent scaling on a polymer test?
There is a difference between stupidity and ignorance. You can mock stupidity till you are blue in the face; just make damn sure you know the difference between the two or all you will accomplish is proving how big of a jackass you are.
We don't want these jurors looking up information and being educated. Just what we tell them. Period. No dictionaries, thesarus, the more ignorant and impressionable we can keep jurors the better...
Seriously, what government in their right mind wants jurors not to have resources to research what they are being told?
fuck that I'll go back to candles and lanterns first. I make bacon fat lanterns all the time out of masion jars and recycled bed sheets turned wicks.
First off there is no such thing as the Mafia. It is nothing more then the realm of conspiracy theory nut jobs wearing tin foil hats.
There is no way such a large scale criminal organization could exist. Such a large scale operation is simply the result of an over active imagination.
If there was such a large network of organized crime the implications are staggering. Democrats and Republicans alike could easily be seen as a bed and wed member of such organizations with a network of judges, law enforcement; the list runs top to bottom. No institution would be safe if such organizations existed.
With out much effort a simple shallow dig could easily expose connections to such organizations. If such agencies of criminal behavior existed the people would easily rise up and topple such an organization as hiding such activities on such a large scale would be near impossible.
In fact to supress such scrutinty would take a coordinated effort of industry titans, politicians, and the complete hijacking of main stream media outlets.
Total nonsense. Mafia... psh.. the wet dream of tin foil hat wearing fruit cakes. There is no such thing as the Mafia nor any evidence that large portions of the global political elite are involved.
Move along... nothing to see here. I said MOVE ALONG!
If there was such an organization it would be far to easy to put the pieces together and actually see an organized effort to supress basic rights, enslaved people to a tiny elite, and rebuild the old world aristocracy and build a new world order with such a corrupt organization at the helm.
Nope... no such thing. This story is a total fabrication. Get your tin foil hats out if you are willing to believe such nonsense...
No a corrupt organization wouldn't fabricate circumstances to enrich themselves... why next thing you'll believe that politicians have consistently invested in dead end industries then used legislation 5-8 years later to suddenly transform once dead industries into economic powerhouses fueled by new legislation. That kind of conspiracy is the realm of fiction authors not real life. And certainly tracking the salvage industry back 10 years wouldn't lend itself to some suprising names who are all ready to clean up this mess. Double the bonus, skip out on the expensive disposal and clean up... well cleaning up. That kind of consipiracy is total nonsense and anyone beliving it must be a tin foil hat wearing fruit loop. No such thing as conspiracies, cartels, price fixing corporate ceos, mafia, and all that nonsense. Life is simply too complex for the pesantry to understand and Mafias and big evil boogie men are just an easy out for intellectually challenged cattle... err people.
Move along. Nothing to see here.
Check you county ordinances. Here where I live disposing of a CFL in the trash is a $200 fine. You have to bring it to the hazerdous waste dispoal drop off (same place for paint, oil, etc.) and they charge $1 a bulb for disposal.
I switched the whole house to CFL. Every light. These bulbs are supposed to last 3-5 years.
I have replaced EVERY CFL BULB IN THE HOUSE within a year. EVERY ONE. GE Brand. No electrical voodoo in the house (I have a line conditioner even at the main). EVERY ONE. I shipped every damn one of them back to GE and Philips for a refund and explaination on why they failed. ZERO response.
Yeah my electric bill went down. $4 a month after replacing EVERY BULB in my house. That is 38 bulbs. You only save oodles of money provided you run them 5 hours a day constantly to cover the cost of the bulb. If have those 5 minute hall and closet lights along with perhaps 2-8 bulbs on for 5 hours (reading lamp, kitchen lights) you lose money. I barely saved money due to the living room lights being on all day. The livingroom, kitchen, and my office are the only high use lights and effectively had to subsidize all the other lights in the home. The $4 a month doesn't cover the $90+ spend on the bulbs...
Now every bulb was replaced back then as the old incandescent ones died off. So they were replaced over a 6 month period when we moved in (The old bulbs were at the oldest 4 years old.) So it can't be blamed on a bad batch of bulbs or a specific store (Target, Home Depot, Menards, and Walmart were sources for the bulbs)
So the CFLs being cheaper is pure bull shit as far as a home is concerned. That useless philips halogen crap in the garage that was supposed to be a 5 year bulb worked out to 8 months and didn't survive the winter.
Total scam in my opinion on CFLs. Until they can get an LED to match a 100 watt bulb (because I like to be able to see in my house rather then some crap ass 60-watt equivalent...) get it as cheap as a normal bulb, I keep my nice 100 watt incadescents thank you. When they burn out I don't have to fork over $3 to replace them.
I won't even get into the discussion about the quality of light from CFLs and LEDs vs. Incandescent bulbs... more useless ineffective crap to protect your new found god...
Telling us it saves $25 bucks a month if bullshit. I'll buy 1. It goes in my garage. If it can survive 3 years I MIGHT consider buying a second one for the bathroom and if that survies another 3 years... then we'll talk. So far this low-energy lighting scam is just that.. a scam as far as my experience has gone.
My criteria from now on: Full Spectrum, 100 Watts, NO STROBING, NO FLICKERING.
CFLs are a joke and LEDs have a long way to go. Too bad it looks like government has to subsidize and legistate to prop up yet another failure... How long till they ban those nice incandescent lights... oh wait...
Dear pesants, we need you to use less water since fresh water is getting scarce on Earth. We need you smelly unwashed masses to use less of OUR water so we can have pools and fountains and allow us elite types to shower more. So here, we offer this scary article to curb that water usage so there is more for our artifical private lakes we like to jet ski in. Remember don't drive that nasty green house spewing car as we drive around in private jets and boats that burn more fuel in an hour then you use in a month to tell you how you are hurting OUR environment.
Please, next you'll see them marketing cheaper 'disposable' shower heads so the ignorant pesants buy more cheap crap.
Step 1: Remove shower head
Step 2: Fill a bucket with warm water
Step 3: Add 1/2 a cup of bleach to the bucket of warm water
Step 4: Drop shower head in said bucket
Step 5: Go work in the cubical fields wage slave!
Step 6: Come back and remove shower head from the now cold, heartless bucket of water.
Step 7: (For the extra paranoid)spray the showhead with some Lysol or give it a second dip in some CLR if you have lime scale or calcium deposits.
Step 8: Reattach shower head
Step 9: Cowtow to the picture of your boss and thank them for privilege of allowing you to work for them.
Step 10: Take a shower just to piss them off after you come to your senses.
Step 11: Beg the water warden not to rat you out after you used more then your 1/2 gallon of water you were rationed for the day. Meanwhile the wealthy will enjoy steam rooms, lap pools, fountains and other nice things while you fester in filthy 3 day recycled bath water...
C.S. Lewis was out to make a point and tell a story. So was Tolkien. In contrast Potter seems to be "just a story" without an underlying point. This has no bearing on the merits but rather the structure and origin.
It struck me that Both Lewis and Tolkien (as well as Herbert for you Sci-Fi fans) sat down and said, "What message do I want to send... okay.. now how about a good story to communicate that..."
Potter struck me as, "Ok here is the overall story. Let's see if we can work a bigger message into it."
As the review pointed out sometimes the story can get overshadowed by the message\point the author is trying to make.
People, for some odd reason alawsys have an axe to grind with Lewis. Be it Christan bigotry or the exact opposite, alas the "Jesus isn't an animal!" rabid foaming at the mouth fundamentalists I find it almost ironic that Rowling, Tolkien, and Lewis now form this weird "Fantasy Trinity" of core writers.
Interestingly enough though I hear little of Ann Mcaffrey, Margret Weis and Tracy Hickman; and albiet biased, Terry Brooks.
It goes back to world crafting which is difficult to do, for authors even more so do to limited space.
Perhaps the success of those three was their ability, intentional or otherwise, was to draw the reader into the world with little effort.
Perhaps we should measure this work against that standard on how easily "we can step through the wardrobe", or quickly "we can make the journey to the undying lands", or how siftly we can "catch a train to Hogwarts"
Until property speculators and big business start buying land and mineral right to bank on then when the political dollars dry up the supplies would start flowing again if they would stop in the first place...
The UN years back said, as best as I can paraphrase, "The soverignty of a planet is dicated by it's inhabitants."
Effectively the first people to get there own Mars as a whole.
First people there get to start carving up the planet into lots and sell them.
That is a lot of industrial space for landfills, mining operations, toxic waste storage, etc.
I for one would gladly go with a team of 6-12 people just for the purpose of establishing the Martian Government, then promptly emminent domaining the whole friggin planet and granting equal portions of the planet to the 6-12 people living there. Then a few UN treaties later bequeathing my land stake to my relatives back on Earth since international and Interplanetary treaties are "The law of the land."
Think of the wealth opportunities and you will get MILLIONS of volunteers to go. 5 million square miles of potential mineralogical weath is more then enough motivation to secure your bloodline's fortunes far beyond even those crooks the Kennedy's could ever have dreamed. Even from a raw space issue a 4 mile deep toxic waste storage facility is going to pan out money.
I know 40 elderly 70+ folks that would go just to die on another planet. Hell (ironic?) we could turn Mars, at the very least into a giant planet sized mosoluem\graveyard.
"The soverignty of a planet is dicated by it's inhabitants."
That phase carries weight many are missing...
-1 Troll, article has nothing to do with Sony and Open Source. Not including, a closed source hypervisor on a console that fewer then a million people ever used the Linux option to lower the cost of a console.
The hypervision wasn't open source and that is what they removed so how does this relate to open source in any way?
I smell an XBOX 360 fanboy behind this train wreck of an article...
Take some lessions from the poltical world before you try a tech-hatchet job.
Better check and see if this is an M$ employee again...
The simple fact is that the game where you hit pedestrians may simply have been more entertaining and thus the ads more memorable.
There was a great Onion TV spot about a "Shoot people in the face" game which while violent also looked as boring as hell. So what they really need to do is have a boring, yet violent game, and use that as a control.
They failed to separate if the results was due to the game being more entertaining rather then just violent.
Case point, solitaire with violent images on the cards, do they improve the ad recall?
While it is at least a fruit to fruit comparision they still need to figure out if people perfer oranges to lemons because of taste or the fact that they were rubbing the lemon juice on open cuts during the study...
Correlation doesn't imply causation because of this very scenario. We cannot tell if the results (despite the obviously biased report) were because the pedestrian game was violent or merely more entertaining.
A great example would have been to compare a poorly done "Road Killing Game" with bad graphics to Grand Turismo. I'd wager a bet that ad recall will be better on ... well... a better more entertaining game.
Clearly if the killing version of the game is more entertaining then that goes a long way in briding the gap in the TV inconsistency...
Thus only large uber-corporations will provide ISP\Web hosting with strict controls putting the Internet solely in the hands of multinationals that can afford the risk.
Freedom takes another blow and more and more of the Internet as we knew it vanishes. Soon there will be nothing left except big business and big government on the Internet... or whatever you want to call what it has become...
I'm not big on conspiracies but all these dominos falling seem a tad too corrdinated for my tastes...
Step 1: Gain control of communications
Step 2: Commoditize communication
Step 3: Litgate liability
Step 4: Censor in the name of controlling liability
Step 5: Control the flow of information
Step 6: Persecute, I mean prosecute those who share 'dangerous and subversive' information
Hilter, Stalin, and Mao would be proud of the direction we are headed... The Internet was a great dream and a place for freedom. Now there are so few dominos left to fall before that dream lies dead...
Face it, we are heading back to royalty and peasantry quicker and quicker. Not long and they'll have us back in chains. I knew a former employee of Anderson who was fired after lunch because he had a spot of soup on his tie.
"At $85 fucking dollars an hour I expect your monkey ass to be fucking spotless, get the fuck out of my office you unkempt shit!"
That is why I got out of consulting as I was sitting outside the door during this exchange. I once lost a contract from having a 102 fever and couldn't drive to drop off a floppy disk with a script for a novell printer remap even though there was 12 copies of the disk sitting on my desk 2 cubes over from where my boss sat...
"If you can't get to work when we need you, then we don't fucking need you. You can mail us the pager and badge, your fucking done in this town!"
We are pesants, get used to it. I still see the same H1B guys in Minneapolis (Now what, 13 year later) who put 38-40 hours on their time sheets but a simple check of the parking ramp's badge log and they are there 2-3 days straight and the workstation log shows 80-90 hours a week working. They don't dare put their real time down or it is "back on the boat" for them (I hear that crap from their managers all the time).
I've been out of consulting now for about 4 years and you couldn't pay me to go back into it. I'm lucky where I am at but the horrors I see here in the Twin Cities makes me ill on how they treat employees. I saw on gal get fired because "she's too pretty" and another "because she dates too much", another "I don't need some fat shit blocking my view..."
I've even been told by a few executives "I'm a fucking piece of livestock" on several occasions (twice ironically at the same resturant "The Palimino", Minneapolis in the La Salle tower. Nice place btw.)
It gets worse every year and you wonder why no one goes into IT anymore. I cannot speak outside of the IT\MIS field but I have found that, given a sourge, most would use it on someone. The USA corporate culture is getting bad, real bad. Madoff and the like are just the tip of the iceberg in bad behavior. You should hear the kind of shit they say while on Lake Minnetonka or up on the White Fish chain by Cross Lake and hear what they really think about "the fucking toothless braindead pesants I have working for me". The greed is getting worse not better... so much for being an enlightened society....
Sadly it also appears to be 2nd generation types too. The old man was nice and polite, his children on the otherhand... what the hell happened? I'd rather have the old days before the Mafia wen't legit and brought their business methods with them.
If they fire her for wrong doing it won't count towards "Turnover Count" but if they let her go it would impact the turn-over numbers. If they haven't had any turnover for say 5 years then there is incentive to ensure the "good record" goes unblemished.
How about making no apologies for the past and moving on. if you want to carry generation after generation of grudges for past wrongs move to the middle east, they've taken 8000 year old grudges to an art form.
What's done is done. You can't undo it, you can right a past wrong. It's done, it's over, he's dead. Move on and try not to make new mistakes rather then wasting time and energy trying to save face on old mistakes...
Perhaps Marvel will help Disney with their "anti-two parent home" rage. Disney has always HATED two parent families.
Don't believe me?
Where are Donald's nephews parents?
Ariel's mother?
Goofey's Wife?
Scrooge's Parents?
Mickey's?
Miney's?
That little brat from Tailspin?
Jasmine?
I mean holy crap they hate parents apparently they are either dead or MIA!
Marvel has plenty of Parents, Kids, Grandkids, hell whole genetic lineages running through the ages.
Perhaps, just maybe, Disney will learn from Marvel... we can hope some day for an answer to the anti-parent obsession the Disney corp has...
Stop teh h8 Disney! Stop teh h8! :)