They ship really fast, have great prices, and are unbelievable about customer support for defective products. Their account management interface is really good, too.
I think he should change it to view from the outside of a sphere, then market it to your local fortune-teller. A crystal ball interface for XP: there's no telling what it might predict!
I should be surprised, but I'm not. Way to miss the point. I get distracted for a moment and sign my name twice. That's critical there. The British kid themselves into thinking they're so different from the United States. Yes, you do have Activist royalty, like it or not.
It's your government that's elevating the status of celebrities rather than your bread and butter: people who are saving and improving actual lives. Sir Elton John? Come on. The examples I use, like them or not, are irrelevant.
This is symptomatic of the same problem worldwide: look at the scientific hacks that won the Nobel Prize in 2004!
So take my Karma. It doesn't mean anything to me. If you're going to send it to Hell, though, at least try to address the point.
You know, the Queen has got to be the biggest moron in the entire world.
Britain is having a science crisis - universities there are trying to cut science curricula altogether, and the government is stepping in to force them to keep science intact. This is symptomatic of the US and Britain's culture altogether: rampant scientific illiteracy and an overall lack of appreciation of what got us so far.
Meanwhile, the Grand High Idiot keeps knighting musicians and artists. Where's the research group who found the 100% safe and effective cure/vaccine for Type 1 Diabetes?
You make a video game that a few people like, you get knighted as a celebrity. You improve the quality and length of life for millions of people, and nobody even knows your name. You want to start improving the status of science in your culture? Let me tell you where to start.
This is just what we need. More confusion when the previous system worked fine.
I wanted to make some Candy for the holiday season this year, and all of my recipes are in English units: Ounces, cups, etc. Well, when I went to purchase ingredients, I found that many of the ingredients at the store were now given only in metric! It didn't say anywhere on the bottle how many cups / ounces / teaspoons were in the container anymore! I had to go buy a Snapple so that I could convert ounces to milliliters and cups and find out how much I needed.
The moral of the story is, even though the metric system is more convenient for science, we're definitely not ready to make the jump to "no English units provided" - metric is not compatible with old recipe books!
Telemarketers love listening to me play video games! If they interrupt my video game time, they get an earful of random First Person Shooter until they can get their supervisors to disconnect them. Let them forward their letters to Mr. Duke Nukem!
I am not a biologist, but don't infectious bacteria and virii typically have rather complex pathways through which to infect people? How would a Mars pathogen infect an Earth lifeform without ever having been exposed to anything but Mars stuff?
Everyone seems to be jumping on the "blame Anderson" and "blame Union Carbide" bandwagon, and while they are a party to the accident that killed so many, consider this:
Do you think that that plant would have been there in the first place if they were required to have the same liability for accidents and protection systems in place as in the US?
Do you think that India would get continued development by chemical countries if it pushed to punish DOW?
Of course not. This is a case of the India's government selling out the lives and well-being of its own people in order to remain competitive in a global marketplace. That is to say that if they aren't willing to let corporations cut costs, some other country will. The Indian government is as guilty as any safety operator at that plant.
Notice how all of the creationist slashdotters blame the evolutionists for starting the argument and not respecting their beliefs and the evolutionists blame the creationists for the same thing.
Maybe next we should start debating the chicken versus the egg... or would that be the same debate all over?
Yeah, if I could, I'd play games all day too. My solution was simple enough:
I got a 1-hour kitchen timer. If I want to play games and I know that I should be doing something else, I set the timer to one hour. When it rings, I set it to one hour again. I can't play games again until it rings.
Pavlovian? I suppose so. Effective, though, at least for me.
I remember reading something similar in a Reader's Digest a few years ago:
Apparently the US was tracking a Russian "Laundry Ship" north of Canada because they somehow found it suspicious. A while later, the helicopter pilot that had been filming the ship came to the doctor having vision problems. Upon close examination, there was a grid of little damaged, scar-tissue-surrounded holes in his retina. Upon examination of the video, they found a brief flash that when freeze-framed proved to be a grid of bright little laser points that had flashed at the helicopter from the boat! So it's nothing new to use lasers to destroy the vision of expensive-to-train pilots. The question is, was this stray laser light or something intentional as was the case with the "laundry ship"?
You know what would scare me away if I were breaking into a place?
Mirrors on the doors.
We used to have a huge mirror on a door in the hall. One night I got up to go get a drink, and for some reason someone had shut the door. I saw my reflection coming towards me in the dark after rounding the corner and nearly passed out from the shock!
So many people have been quick to blame this phenomenon on the programmers (and particularly, American programmers) for not having sufficient knowledge of local laws and political and religious sensitive points. Many of these issues seem like problems that are really only obvious in retrospect--how many people, honestly, would think twice about their coloring or name of a little region on a map while they're doing it, the connotations of a word they choose in countries they haven't studied that speak the same language when they're translating, or the source of a chant they put in the background of a game? It seems to me that a lot of these issues, even, wouldn't even be noticed by or much less bother much of the population of the country that they purportedly offend. There are a lot of people eager to jump on your throat about issues so minor that you would never see them coming everywhere, and I doubt that any class given to programmers or management will be able to appreciably reduce the number of these situations. The only effective prevention I can see would be to either hire a lot of local testers in every region or to hire a lot of local programmers in every region. Even then, though, I wonder how many of the locals take it personally that a region disputed by their country goes by a different name or details about how members of their religion are portrayed in a game. In most cases, we're talking about one offended bureaucrat, not mobs of offended civilians.
The worst movie I ever saw was West New York. I rented it thinking, "Gangs and extortion. There's got to be some car chases and explosions in there." Nope. Weak dialog, boring plot, and only one very cheesy gunfight.
But there is one complaint I have. Looking at the top 250, I'm noticing that The Lord of the Rings trilogy is rated only slightly lower than The Shawshank Redemption. The Lord of the Rings was a blatant selling out of my childhood memories of reading the books. They took the main events and added bad dialog, cookie cutter-ified characters and special effects in the new Hollywood formula that successfully tricked much of the population into believing that it was a brilliant movie. Bah. I can only hope that time brings the movie down to the average "5.0" it deserves, or lower.
The guys on the floor probably would have been reprimanded for modifying the procedure that the engineers worked out even if their way worked better. Imagine the consequences to them if it was found that they modified the procedure and it killed someone. With something that complex, you really can't be certain what's going to happen. There's a lot of heat at takeoff, a virtual vacuum in space, and then a lot of heat again. I imagine that the engineers worked out the procedure they used after extensive testing, and their method certainly wasn't scientifically tested at all.
That's the way most places work, especially when it gets as bureaucratic as NASA. I've worked at places under explicit orders not to comment code or to leave serious bugs that I find in the program, even when the problem is so obvious that it could be fixed in one line.
I don't see why Google expects their IPO to bring so much money. Realistically, a shareholder should buy stock if they plan for the company to have greater value in the future, e.g. some product or service of appreciable value. While their search engine is second to none, it's ultimately free to use, and you can't tell me that with pay-for-position fees and maybe banner ads are going to be worth much at all. And what would they do with all of this newfound finance money? Buy out another search engine or speculative associated product?
While Google is certainly great work, I just don't think a search engine is worth all that much in the big scheme of things. I expect that they want this to turn into a dot-com style cashout as a larger company buys them up. This certainly isn't a bad time to do so, as the competition is growing and Google may have trouble maintaining its clear #1 status much longer.
When my mother began to be seriously afflicted by Multiple Sclerosis, she tried to find ways that she could help around the house, and this was one of them. A local taxi service would even deliver the groceries for $5. However, she used to marvel that they could actually make money that way, and I am in that camp as well - the store has to pay someone to find the groceries on your list, bag them, take them to the car, like paying someone to be you at the store at no additional cost to you. On top of already low profit margins, I fear this is just going to flop again.
Blue LEDs aren't the only ones that can be irritatingly bright - I was in Prague a couple of weeks ago, and the LEDs on the thermostat were so bright that they lit up the hotel room at night! I had to put a sticker over them so that they would stop burning my retinas so that I could sleep. He's right - why do they need such bright lights for something that I don't normally care about, e.g. the mood of the heating system at the time?
My theory is that it's a selling point on the sales floor - I imagine that a lot of customers, like me, gravitate towards the shiniest and/or brightest option.
I agree - remember how MIR had lichen growing all over the bottom of it when it crashed into Earth? If this stuff isn't properly sterilized, it could end up that the moon grows a lichen lawn, becomes less reflective, and not only do we lose the ability to appreciate a very unique object in our night sky, but it'll lead to the extinction of a variety of species on Earth, including sea turtles that use the moon's light to find their way to sea after hatching.
Although, if there were some way to get it to spell "Ben Rules" with shiny foil...
Why bother with ROM emulation at all? The flash or cell-phone or game that hasn't blatantly copied the concept of an early Nintendo or Atari game is a rarity. Based on the unusual gameplay of some of the games that I've seen ripped off, I bet the cell-phone game programmers go to flea markets or eBay and buy up obscure games just so that they can copy the gameplay and concept and then rename them. I'm guessing that you can't copyright the concept of a game, only the title and manual, so illegalizing ROM emulation for the sake of profitting off of old games again is a moot-point: people are already captializing off of the game, possibly upgraded or modified slightly, under a different name.
Yes, as an independent contractor and an American, I am troubled by the disappearance of American jobs. When I saw it starting my Freshman year in college, I picked up an extra major and started doing lots of extracurricular activities. Fortunately, I still get lots of work at my normal, exorbitant rate, even from companies who also oursorce, because of all of the positive word-of-mouth: customers know they can count on me for a quality product and they can get it fast.
An awful lot of people I see graduating from the college I go to have truly pitiful skills, even after four years. I worked on a yearlong group project with people who couldn't write coherent or working code to save their lives. I tried to tutor a guy who was 1 semester away from his B.S. but couldn't write a "Hello World" program. Horrifyingly, there is even someone in my 400-level Physics class that can't do derivatives. I have no idea how she survived 100-level Physics. At a local software company that I once worked at, my desk was next to a woman freshly graduated from college as a computer scientist, and she never did any actual programming - she sat there and watched TechTV, pausing to stare at the screen when the supervisor walked in, for about a month until it was discovered that she couldn't really program at all and was fired. Two English majors e-mailed me recently with questions about my upcoming participation in the ACM World Finals. Their e-mails had approximately the coherence, spelling, and grammar I'd expect from a middle-school student. These people aren't unusual. They are, I'd say, the 30-40th percentile of a typical American college. People became so complacent during the economic boom that they thought that they could expect a 50K-plus salary without doing the mental analog of breaking a sweat and by doing the bare minimum amount of work when it came to maintaining or advancing their skill. These people, I think, ruined the market for those who actually worked in their training. I imagine that it tends to be easier to keep all of your department staff in the same place, and for the drastically reduced price (assuming you're going to get a large quantity of workers who just can't produce and a few that can anyway), you may as well just go all outsourced.
Anyway, yes. I blame the slackers (and the companies who practically sell certification) who devalued degrees in their complacence.
Slashdot Mirror
I've gotten a lot of good deals from buy.com
They ship really fast, have great prices, and are unbelievable about customer support for defective products. Their account management interface is really good, too.
~Ben
So much for bobbing for Apples.
~Ben
1. Kill people
2. Blame actions on video game retailers and manufactuers and sue them.
3. Profit!!!
Brilliant.
~Ben
I think he should change it to view from the outside of a sphere, then market it to your local fortune-teller. A crystal ball interface for XP: there's no telling what it might predict!
~Ben
I should be surprised, but I'm not. Way to miss the point. I get distracted for a moment and sign my name twice. That's critical there. The British kid themselves into thinking they're so different from the United States. Yes, you do have Activist royalty, like it or not.
It's your government that's elevating the status of celebrities rather than your bread and butter: people who are saving and improving actual lives. Sir Elton John? Come on. The examples I use, like them or not, are irrelevant.
This is symptomatic of the same problem worldwide: look at the scientific hacks that won the Nobel Prize in 2004!
So take my Karma. It doesn't mean anything to me. If you're going to send it to Hell, though, at least try to address the point.
I'll sign three times for you this time!
~Ben
~Ben
~Ben
You know, the Queen has got to be the biggest moron in the entire world.
Britain is having a science crisis - universities there are trying to cut science curricula altogether, and the government is stepping in to force them to keep science intact. This is symptomatic of the US and Britain's culture altogether: rampant scientific illiteracy and an overall lack of appreciation of what got us so far.
Meanwhile, the Grand High Idiot keeps knighting musicians and artists. Where's the research group who found the 100% safe and effective cure/vaccine for Type 1 Diabetes?
You make a video game that a few people like, you get knighted as a celebrity. You improve the quality and length of life for millions of people, and nobody even knows your name. You want to start improving the status of science in your culture? Let me tell you where to start.
~Ben
~Ben
This is just what we need. More confusion when the previous system worked fine.
I wanted to make some Candy for the holiday season this year, and all of my recipes are in English units: Ounces, cups, etc. Well, when I went to purchase ingredients, I found that many of the ingredients at the store were now given only in metric! It didn't say anywhere on the bottle how many cups / ounces / teaspoons were in the container anymore! I had to go buy a Snapple so that I could convert ounces to milliliters and cups and find out how much I needed.
The moral of the story is, even though the metric system is more convenient for science, we're definitely not ready to make the jump to "no English units provided" - metric is not compatible with old recipe books!
~Ben
Telemarketers love listening to me play video games! If they interrupt my video game time, they get an earful of random First Person Shooter until they can get their supervisors to disconnect them. Let them forward their letters to Mr. Duke Nukem!
~Ben
I am not a biologist, but don't infectious bacteria and virii typically have rather complex pathways through which to infect people? How would a Mars pathogen infect an Earth lifeform without ever having been exposed to anything but Mars stuff?
~Ben
Everyone seems to be jumping on the "blame Anderson" and "blame Union Carbide" bandwagon, and while they are a party to the accident that killed so many, consider this:
Do you think that that plant would have been there in the first place if they were required to have the same liability for accidents and protection systems in place as in the US?
Do you think that India would get continued development by chemical countries if it pushed to punish DOW?
Of course not. This is a case of the India's government selling out the lives and well-being of its own people in order to remain competitive in a global marketplace. That is to say that if they aren't willing to let corporations cut costs, some other country will. The Indian government is as guilty as any safety operator at that plant.
~Ben
Notice how all of the creationist slashdotters blame the evolutionists for starting the argument and not respecting their beliefs and the evolutionists blame the creationists for the same thing.
Maybe next we should start debating the chicken versus the egg... or would that be the same debate all over?
~Ben
Yeah, if I could, I'd play games all day too. My solution was simple enough:
I got a 1-hour kitchen timer. If I want to play games and I know that I should be doing something else, I set the timer to one hour. When it rings, I set it to one hour again. I can't play games again until it rings.
Pavlovian? I suppose so. Effective, though, at least for me.
~Ben
I remember reading something similar in a Reader's Digest a few years ago:
Apparently the US was tracking a Russian "Laundry Ship" north of Canada because they somehow found it suspicious. A while later, the helicopter pilot that had been filming the ship came to the doctor having vision problems. Upon close examination, there was a grid of little damaged, scar-tissue-surrounded holes in his retina. Upon examination of the video, they found a brief flash that when freeze-framed proved to be a grid of bright little laser points that had flashed at the helicopter from the boat! So it's nothing new to use lasers to destroy the vision of expensive-to-train pilots. The question is, was this stray laser light or something intentional as was the case with the "laundry ship"?
~Ben
You know what would scare me away if I were breaking into a place?
Mirrors on the doors.
We used to have a huge mirror on a door in the hall. One night I got up to go get a drink, and for some reason someone had shut the door. I saw my reflection coming towards me in the dark after rounding the corner and nearly passed out from the shock!
~Ben
So many people have been quick to blame this phenomenon on the programmers (and particularly, American programmers) for not having sufficient knowledge of local laws and political and religious sensitive points. Many of these issues seem like problems that are really only obvious in retrospect--how many people, honestly, would think twice about their coloring or name of a little region on a map while they're doing it, the connotations of a word they choose in countries they haven't studied that speak the same language when they're translating, or the source of a chant they put in the background of a game? It seems to me that a lot of these issues, even, wouldn't even be noticed by or much less bother much of the population of the country that they purportedly offend. There are a lot of people eager to jump on your throat about issues so minor that you would never see them coming everywhere, and I doubt that any class given to programmers or management will be able to appreciably reduce the number of these situations. The only effective prevention I can see would be to either hire a lot of local testers in every region or to hire a lot of local programmers in every region. Even then, though, I wonder how many of the locals take it personally that a region disputed by their country goes by a different name or details about how members of their religion are portrayed in a game. In most cases, we're talking about one offended bureaucrat, not mobs of offended civilians.
~Ben
The worst movie I ever saw was West New York. I rented it thinking, "Gangs and extortion. There's got to be some car chases and explosions in there." Nope. Weak dialog, boring plot, and only one very cheesy gunfight.
But there is one complaint I have. Looking at the top 250, I'm noticing that The Lord of the Rings trilogy is rated only slightly lower than The Shawshank Redemption. The Lord of the Rings was a blatant selling out of my childhood memories of reading the books. They took the main events and added bad dialog, cookie cutter-ified characters and special effects in the new Hollywood formula that successfully tricked much of the population into believing that it was a brilliant movie. Bah. I can only hope that time brings the movie down to the average "5.0" it deserves, or lower.
~Ben
The guys on the floor probably would have been reprimanded for modifying the procedure that the engineers worked out even if their way worked better. Imagine the consequences to them if it was found that they modified the procedure and it killed someone. With something that complex, you really can't be certain what's going to happen. There's a lot of heat at takeoff, a virtual vacuum in space, and then a lot of heat again. I imagine that the engineers worked out the procedure they used after extensive testing, and their method certainly wasn't scientifically tested at all.
That's the way most places work, especially when it gets as bureaucratic as NASA. I've worked at places under explicit orders not to comment code or to leave serious bugs that I find in the program, even when the problem is so obvious that it could be fixed in one line.
~Ben
I don't see why Google expects their IPO to bring so much money. Realistically, a shareholder should buy stock if they plan for the company to have greater value in the future, e.g. some product or service of appreciable value. While their search engine is second to none, it's ultimately free to use, and you can't tell me that with pay-for-position fees and maybe banner ads are going to be worth much at all. And what would they do with all of this newfound finance money? Buy out another search engine or speculative associated product?
While Google is certainly great work, I just don't think a search engine is worth all that much in the big scheme of things. I expect that they want this to turn into a dot-com style cashout as a larger company buys them up. This certainly isn't a bad time to do so, as the competition is growing and Google may have trouble maintaining its clear #1 status much longer.
~Ben
New slashdot poll maybe?
Once the producers decide that the never losing fad gets old:
-They enter Trebek as both host and contestant.
-Jeopardy goes the way of reality television and the other contestants vote him off the show.
-Knowing that women are Kryptonite to nerds, they make an entire show with non-pornographic female-related questions.
When my mother began to be seriously afflicted by Multiple Sclerosis, she tried to find ways that she could help around the house, and this was one of them. A local taxi service would even deliver the groceries for $5. However, she used to marvel that they could actually make money that way, and I am in that camp as well - the store has to pay someone to find the groceries on your list, bag them, take them to the car, like paying someone to be you at the store at no additional cost to you. On top of already low profit margins, I fear this is just going to flop again.
~Ben
Don't worry, if you're not a terrorist, you probably don't have anything to worry about!
Just another reason why I'm re-voting against Ed Rendell, the most nearsighted governor of all time, when his turn comes around.
~Ben
Blue LEDs aren't the only ones that can be irritatingly bright - I was in Prague a couple of weeks ago, and the LEDs on the thermostat were so bright that they lit up the hotel room at night! I had to put a sticker over them so that they would stop burning my retinas so that I could sleep. He's right - why do they need such bright lights for something that I don't normally care about, e.g. the mood of the heating system at the time?
My theory is that it's a selling point on the sales floor - I imagine that a lot of customers, like me, gravitate towards the shiniest and/or brightest option.
~Ben
I agree - remember how MIR had lichen growing all over the bottom of it when it crashed into Earth? If this stuff isn't properly sterilized, it could end up that the moon grows a lichen lawn, becomes less reflective, and not only do we lose the ability to appreciate a very unique object in our night sky, but it'll lead to the extinction of a variety of species on Earth, including sea turtles that use the moon's light to find their way to sea after hatching.
Although, if there were some way to get it to spell "Ben Rules" with shiny foil...
~Ben
Why bother with ROM emulation at all? The flash or cell-phone or game that hasn't blatantly copied the concept of an early Nintendo or Atari game is a rarity. Based on the unusual gameplay of some of the games that I've seen ripped off, I bet the cell-phone game programmers go to flea markets or eBay and buy up obscure games just so that they can copy the gameplay and concept and then rename them. I'm guessing that you can't copyright the concept of a game, only the title and manual, so illegalizing ROM emulation for the sake of profitting off of old games again is a moot-point: people are already captializing off of the game, possibly upgraded or modified slightly, under a different name.
~Ben
Yes, as an independent contractor and an American, I am troubled by the disappearance of American jobs. When I saw it starting my Freshman year in college, I picked up an extra major and started doing lots of extracurricular activities. Fortunately, I still get lots of work at my normal, exorbitant rate, even from companies who also oursorce, because of all of the positive word-of-mouth: customers know they can count on me for a quality product and they can get it fast.
An awful lot of people I see graduating from the college I go to have truly pitiful skills, even after four years. I worked on a yearlong group project with people who couldn't write coherent or working code to save their lives. I tried to tutor a guy who was 1 semester away from his B.S. but couldn't write a "Hello World" program. Horrifyingly, there is even someone in my 400-level Physics class that can't do derivatives. I have no idea how she survived 100-level Physics. At a local software company that I once worked at, my desk was next to a woman freshly graduated from college as a computer scientist, and she never did any actual programming - she sat there and watched TechTV, pausing to stare at the screen when the supervisor walked in, for about a month until it was discovered that she couldn't really program at all and was fired. Two English majors e-mailed me recently with questions about my upcoming participation in the ACM World Finals. Their e-mails had approximately the coherence, spelling, and grammar I'd expect from a middle-school student. These people aren't unusual. They are, I'd say, the 30-40th percentile of a typical American college. People became so complacent during the economic boom that they thought that they could expect a 50K-plus salary without doing the mental analog of breaking a sweat and by doing the bare minimum amount of work when it came to maintaining or advancing their skill. These people, I think, ruined the market for those who actually worked in their training. I imagine that it tends to be easier to keep all of your department staff in the same place, and for the drastically reduced price (assuming you're going to get a large quantity of workers who just can't produce and a few that can anyway), you may as well just go all outsourced.
Anyway, yes. I blame the slackers (and the companies who practically sell certification) who devalued degrees in their complacence.
~Ben