Boondock Saints was awesome. I love to hear the sound bites of their prayers, but my favorite has to be the last one:
Connor: "Now you will receive us." Murph: "We do not ask for your poor or your hungry." C: "We do not want your tired and sick." M: "It is your corrupt we claim." C: "It is your evil that will be sought by us." M: "With every breath we shall hunt them down." C: "Each day we will spill their blood until it rains down from the sky." M: "Do not kill, do not rape, do not steal. These are principles which every man of every faith can embrace." C: "These are not polite suggestions. These are codes of behavior and those of you that ignore them will pay the dearest cost." M: "There are varying degrees of evil. We urge you lesser forms of filth no to push the bounds and cross over into true corruption, into our domain." C: "But if you do, you one day will look behind you and you will see we three, and on that day, you will reap it." M: "And we will send you to whatever god you wish." M, C, and Il Duce: "And shepherds we shall be, for Thee, My Lord, for Thee. Power hath descended forth from Thy hand that our feet may swiftly carry out Thy command. So we shall flow a river forth to Thee, and teeming with souls shall it ever be." I: "In nomine patris..." C: "Et fili..." M: "Et spiritus sancti."
As horrible as the movie was, I did get a laugh out of it when the subhuman folks learned to fly the multi-thousand year old Harrier jets inside of a week or so. And then jumped around throwing their arms like the gorilla in the old samsonite commercials.
I'm a Linux newbie, and I agree with what the parent post had to say regarding man pages, but I think the post ignored the many LUG's (Linux Users Groups) scattered around the country, which are a terrific resource. The Jacksonville Linux Users Group has Installfests every couple of months where newbies can gather together and get lots of help from more experienced folks. They've also been having beginners classes two or three times a year.
People talk about newbies getting told to RTFM, but I've found that experienced Linux users are more than happy to help out a newbie, especially if the newbie has sincerely attempted to help himself.
I'm not sure if this was exclusive to the Audigy, but the way Creative Playcenter works is nearly indispensible (sp?) for what my wife was doing. She's studying for the bar exam, and she has 48 audio tapes worth of study material that she wanted to take notes on. I piped them all to mp3 (not sure if that's against the rules, but I'm not distributing them, and my wife's neck problems make it hard for her to reach over to the tape player constantly), then with the Playcenter, she can play at 50% speed, with proper tone. And it also has a function where you can just hop forward or backward in 10-second increments, which is very handy for what she's doing. Microsofts media player will do the slow playback, but you can't do the 10 second jumps. I'm sure I could've found something to do this in Linux, but my wife isn't ready for that yet.
OTOH, my mobo is based on the KT266A chipset, and I've already had to do a complete WinXP reinstall mostly because of conflicts between the Audigy and the mobo. Even now, the soundcard isn't recogized 15-20% of the time when I power the computer up. So it seems that Via chipsets and Creative soundcards don't get along. Will this be fixed with the Audigy 2?
I wonder if it would work to just hold your scanner up to your computer screen. Of course, if someone had they time, they could always type data into another app as long as they could read it on the screen.
My wife is a lawyer, and in her last job she clerked for a federal magistrate. The interesting thing about her situation is that she has back and neck injuries that *prevent* her from pulling down the hard copy books, because they're just so heavy (she can lift a max of about two pounds). This injury makes it necessary for her to do all of her legal research on Westlaw, or services like it, where she can print out pages as necessary. Hopefully if she goes to work for a private firm they will provide access to some database, but if they don't, it'll be a deal-breaker.
As far as Westlaw and LexisNexis are concerned, I think that they should be paid for their services, and they should be able to set those rates as they wish. But, I think that there should be somewhere that the average citizen can go and access the government case law, even if it is old. As was mentioned in the article, case law cannot be copyrighted by any private company since it is the work product of our justice system. So if Westlaw or LexisNexis want to build a super-neato database with proprietary search algorithims, that's fine, because that is their work product. But if I want to look at some case law for free (except for the cost of bandwidth, I suppose), the government should make it accessible (even if it doesn't include things like KeyCite and editorial comments from the folks at WestLaw), since it's part of the public record.
I know some people have pointed out that hard copies are available, but even for the able-bodied, this isn't necessarily true. Some law schools will allow the general public to access their law libraries, but here in Jacksonville, the only law school around (Florida Coastal) won't let anyone from outside the school access their law library. They sort of have an inferiority complex, I think, since they're a new school and they just barely got accredited. If someone walks in and tries to get into the library, the gatekeeper librarian will tell them that as soon as *their* law school (Harvard Law or whatever) offers reciprocal rights to people from Florida Coastal, then Florida Coastal will let those people into the library. I'm not sure, but I didn't imagine that most law schools would forbid people from other law schools from accessing the libraries, which would negate the need for an explicit reciprocity agreement.
I read the Linux IPv6 FAQ, but it only explained that we currently use IPv4, and that people are trying to switch to IPv6, but nothing at all was said about IPv5. I'd think it'd be a common enough question to be in the FAQ.
You've made some good points, and I guess there has to be a middle of the road approach somewhere that motivates, but still leaves time for school. I, too, have seen friends get side jobs to support themselves, only to drop out of college (it's always "just for a semester" of course).
Maybe if I'd picked a major that I was more interested in, I'd have spent more time and effort on school, but as it was, I seemed to expend just enough effort to get by, which kept me there an extra two years.
Shame about your parents retirement. I'd much prefer to deal with thirty or forty thousand dollars in student loans rather than support my parents because they spent their retirement money on me (which, in turn, was probably spent by me on random crap). Fortunately, I don't think my parents gave me much more than $10k over my college career. I've got a female friend who got married a few years back. Her parents didn't have much saved up for retirement, if anything at all (they'd filed for bankruptcy maybe 10 years previously because of a business failure). Her Dad told her that her wedding was her special day, so he would get her whatever she wanted. Final pricetag was $60,000, not including the ring that her husband payed for (and she was a pharmaceutical rep making upwards of 60k/year at the time). To see her parents blow an amount approximately equal to their annual income on her wedding really chapped my hide. More accurately, I guess she blew the money, but if I'd been her dad, I would've pulled the plug *far* before then. What's the punch line? Marriage lasted 8 months.
You're right, except for the experience portion. That is different from state to state. Most require four years of experience, and it doesn't always have to be under a professional engineer. It just has to be the type of experience where you make "engineering" decisions. Also, you have to have the experience verified by a number of people (again, some states require PE's to do experience verification, some states don't, and the number of people varies, typically four or five).
Regardless, getting a Professional Engineer license involves a lot more than taking a test (though the PE test wasn't necessarily easy, either).
BTW, I just received my passing score and received my PE seal yesterday.
Take care of your own retirement first, both you and your kid will be better off in the long run.
I just got out of college a few years back, and my parents helped me some, along with loans. I went to an in-state public university, so it wasn't too expensive, but I *did* want to go to Georgia Tech for a while, but being out of state I couldn't afford it.
Looking back on the whole situation, I think that I would've probably done better in college if I would've been funding my education, as opposed to my parents. Since they were paying the bills, along with student loans, I could afford to sit back and take my time about getting a degree. Of course, everything depends on the individual, but at least for me (and quite a few others I saw), having others pay my bills allowed me to be lazy.
What about using some sort of water absorbent media that is hung up in vertical sheets, exposed to sunlight? Couldn't the algae grow in that configuration? I know the water would move down the sheet with gravity, but you could pump back up to the top, and it seems to me that the algae would mostly stay stuck to the spot where it is growing.
There are a number of somewhat profound directions that I've thought about taking my life in. I am giving serious thought to becoming an economist, or maybe a lawyer (at some conservative/libertarian think tank, like the Cato Institute). But on a more basic level, something in me wants to be a cop. That desire doesn't have so much to do with protecting and serving...I just want to shoot a belligerent drunk with a TASER and watch him jiggle. Pepper spray would be cool, too. It's not that I'm sadistic, or that I'd like to make a life out of police work, but after years of watching hoods on COPS (the TV show), I just wish I could be there to whack one of them in the head with my nightstick.
Haven't they already tried cooperatives in Israel, and a number of other places? (I forget what they were called in Israel). From what I can figure, cooperatives won't work on a large scale because of human nature. People, by nature, want to minimize the work they do and maximize the reward. On a small scale, they're possible, I'm sure, because the small community can use peer pressure to put the lazy folks in line, but not on a large scale.
BTW, it seems like some of the original pilgrims who settled America tried a co-op for a year, but it didn't work out.
The nuclear bombing of Japan was not a war crime by any means. It's a shame that it had to happen, but the US had already lost far too many soldiers in their island hopping campaign in the Pacific. Remember, the Japanese tended to fight to the death of the last man.
From what I've read, Japanese authorities were training the civilian population to fight in the streets, which would've increased the potential US casualties even more. If the Americans had been forced to land on the beaches of Japan and take it by force, many more Japanese civilians and military would have died, in good part because of the cultural unwillingness to give up.
The US didn't start the conflict. Germany and Japan did. They could've quit at any time. I know many won't agree with this, but I believe that during wartime, the lives of one's allies count more than the lives of the enemy. Japan was the country that took this principal to a criminal level, with their treatment of Allied POW's (Bataan Death March, summary executions, a bit of cannibalism, etc.), the Rape of Nanking (which *is* a good example of unnecessary targeting of the civilian population), and the taking of Korean 'comfort girls' for the pleasure of Japanese soldiers.
Individual soldiers on all sides engaged in atrocities, I'm sure, but the Japanese were the ones that had total disdain for human life at the heart of their culture.
Here's a final thought. If the situation were reversed and Japan had nuclear weapons and the capability to deliver them to targets in the United States, I believe wholeheartedly that they would have used them without any hesitation, whether they expected surrender to result or not. If you think that Japan wouldn't have taken advantage of that capability, I'd like to hear your thoughts (and justification for them).
When I was a kid, we moved into a new house. The first night that we were there, my dad evidently found a rubber halloween monster mask in the top of a closet. I was asleep, and he came into my room, leaned over me, and started howling. This was not a fun way to wake up...he scared the heck out of me.
I was probably in tenth grade when this happened, so it doesn't count as an early memory, but the parent post reminded me of this.
Dangit, sorry I modded this comment down as flamebait, it was not intentional. For some reason, here at work, with IE 6, all of the pull down menu things get trashed if I try to scroll up. I can scroll down, and I'm fine, but if I scroll up, they don't line up, or disappear altogether. Then even if I reload, they won't get right. I was trying to just click on the mod menu to see if it was where I thought it was, and it accidentally modded.
Does anyone know how to fix this problem I'm having with the menu display?
I don't think that the CEO:worker salary ratio accurately indicates their relative worth, but at the same time, I know that there is something that makes a good CEO worth lots of money.
I'm reminded of when Ben & Jerry's ice cream was on a search for a CEO, as the company had outgrown the management skills of Ben & Jerry, or whoever they had running it. They originally had ideas about some 10:1 CEO:line worker salary ratio, or something along those lines (since they were a "socially responsible" hippy company), but that idea went out the window as they searched for truly competent people. I am not sure of the salary for the guy they ended up hiring, but it was a *lot* more than they originally thought was proper, because when they looked for people with the skill set they wanted, the people they found wanted a lot more money than they had conceived.
Bottom line: In capitalism, relative worth and salary don't correlate on a linear scale. It's not *fair*, but that's the way capitalism works (and even though it is unfair, I think it is the best system). Remember also that this doesn't only apply for comparisons between CEO's and workers, it also applies to comparisons between we as engineers/programmers/techies and other less-skilled people. Is a programmer at $80k/year really worth four times as much as a trash man at $20k/year? No, but we accept it (or, at least, most of us accept it, especially since the trash man can go to college and better himself).
I know the at-will thing bothers some people, but I don't see why the employee should have rights that the employer doesn't have. I figure that employment is a mutual agreement between two parties, wherein one works in return for compensation as worked out between the parties. When one party doesn't like it, they *should* be free to end the agreement. I haven't seen anyone advocate that an employee shouldn't be allowed to quit except for a "good reason", so I figure the employer should be able to end the agreement for the same reasons. Many folks on/. have probably quit jobs because they thought their boss was a jerk, so why can't a boss fire you because he thinks you're a jerk?
Hmm, interesting question. But IT books are only good for a short season, since technology changes so quickly. People's innards, on the other hand, don't vary too much from one year to the next, so the medical books would seem to be current for a longer season. BTW, the main used book store here in Jacksonville, FL that I know about (Chamblin's Bookmine) stopped carrying IT books altogether, because they couldn't make any money on them. I think people tend to keep the IT books that they buy for as long as they are useful, so they don't make it into the used market until they're hopelessly out of date.
I find that I could only play FPS games online for an hour or two at a time because I got so tense while playing that I had to go chill out for a bit.
I've stayed away from MMORPG's because of the addictive aspect. Similarly, back in *my* days at U of F, my friends tried to get me to play Magic, the Gathering, but I saw how much time it took and I stayed away (sometimes it's good if you don't know what you're missing, I guess I would say).
My addiction started in the CSE computer lab (by the French Fries, if it's got a different name now. Back then people played MUD's on the VAX terminals, and I got addicted for a semester (they eventually banned MUD'ing in that lab, so we played in a computer lab on the top floor of Weil Hall). Then I my parents pulled me out for the spring and I came back in the fall and didn't MUD.
I remember mornings where I started playing Friday night and kept on until bright and early Saturday morning, and had to go straight from mudding to Gator Band practice before the game.
Sorry, if this rambled a bit, but seeing another UF student brings back memories.
This reminds me of Y2K. At my church the pastor had referenced the Y2K problem since the beginning of 1999 (or before), talking about how folks needed to get financially stable and make prudent arrangements because of potentially tough times ahead. The funny part is that at a womens meeting, the pastors wife was trying to sell butane-powered hair curlers to the other ladies (in case the power died). I wasn't too worried about 9/11, but I got a kick out of thinking about those ladies trying to make sure that their hair was done up proper in the event that they found themselves in a post-apocalypse society (I'd think you'd want to be less attractive after the fall, so you'd be less likely to be raped by the rampaging gangs of the warlords).
In any case, I think people would be willing to withstand 6 minutes total at 1g (3 minutes at each end), if it meant that you didn't arrive in China with a numb rear end. Many people would consider it to be enjoyable, in fact, since they pay for the same thing at the amusement park (or fair).
Slashdot Mirror
I almost forgot this movie until you mentioned it. Definitely towards the top of my list.
"We've got a piper down."
Boondock Saints was awesome. I love to hear the sound bites of their prayers, but my favorite has to be the last one:
Connor: "Now you will receive us."
Murph: "We do not ask for your poor or your hungry."
C: "We do not want your tired and sick."
M: "It is your corrupt we claim."
C: "It is your evil that will be sought by us."
M: "With every breath we shall hunt them down."
C: "Each day we will spill their blood until it rains down from the sky."
M: "Do not kill, do not rape, do not steal. These are principles which every man of every faith can embrace."
C: "These are not polite suggestions. These are codes of behavior and those of you that ignore them will pay the dearest cost."
M: "There are varying degrees of evil. We urge you lesser forms of filth no to push the bounds and cross over into true corruption, into our domain."
C: "But if you do, you one day will look behind you and you will see we three, and on that day, you will reap it."
M: "And we will send you to whatever god you wish."
M, C, and Il Duce: "And shepherds we shall be, for Thee, My Lord, for Thee. Power hath descended forth from Thy hand that our feet may swiftly carry out Thy command. So we shall flow a river forth to Thee, and teeming with souls shall it ever be."
I: "In nomine patris..."
C: "Et fili..."
M: "Et spiritus sancti."
As horrible as the movie was, I did get a laugh out of it when the subhuman folks learned to fly the multi-thousand year old Harrier jets inside of a week or so. And then jumped around throwing their arms like the gorilla in the old samsonite commercials.
I'm a Linux newbie, and I agree with what the parent post had to say regarding man pages, but I think the post ignored the many LUG's (Linux Users Groups) scattered around the country, which are a terrific resource. The Jacksonville Linux Users Group has Installfests every couple of months where newbies can gather together and get lots of help from more experienced folks. They've also been having beginners classes two or three times a year.
People talk about newbies getting told to RTFM, but I've found that experienced Linux users are more than happy to help out a newbie, especially if the newbie has sincerely attempted to help himself.
I'm not sure if this was exclusive to the Audigy, but the way Creative Playcenter works is nearly indispensible (sp?) for what my wife was doing. She's studying for the bar exam, and she has 48 audio tapes worth of study material that she wanted to take notes on. I piped them all to mp3 (not sure if that's against the rules, but I'm not distributing them, and my wife's neck problems make it hard for her to reach over to the tape player constantly), then with the Playcenter, she can play at 50% speed, with proper tone. And it also has a function where you can just hop forward or backward in 10-second increments, which is very handy for what she's doing. Microsofts media player will do the slow playback, but you can't do the 10 second jumps. I'm sure I could've found something to do this in Linux, but my wife isn't ready for that yet.
OTOH, my mobo is based on the KT266A chipset, and I've already had to do a complete WinXP reinstall mostly because of conflicts between the Audigy and the mobo. Even now, the soundcard isn't recogized 15-20% of the time when I power the computer up. So it seems that Via chipsets and Creative soundcards don't get along. Will this be fixed with the Audigy 2?
I wonder if it would work to just hold your scanner up to your computer screen. Of course, if someone had they time, they could always type data into another app as long as they could read it on the screen.
My wife is a lawyer, and in her last job she clerked for a federal magistrate. The interesting thing about her situation is that she has back and neck injuries that *prevent* her from pulling down the hard copy books, because they're just so heavy (she can lift a max of about two pounds). This injury makes it necessary for her to do all of her legal research on Westlaw, or services like it, where she can print out pages as necessary. Hopefully if she goes to work for a private firm they will provide access to some database, but if they don't, it'll be a deal-breaker.
As far as Westlaw and LexisNexis are concerned, I think that they should be paid for their services, and they should be able to set those rates as they wish. But, I think that there should be somewhere that the average citizen can go and access the government case law, even if it is old. As was mentioned in the article, case law cannot be copyrighted by any private company since it is the work product of our justice system. So if Westlaw or LexisNexis want to build a super-neato database with proprietary search algorithims, that's fine, because that is their work product. But if I want to look at some case law for free (except for the cost of bandwidth, I suppose), the government should make it accessible (even if it doesn't include things like KeyCite and editorial comments from the folks at WestLaw), since it's part of the public record.
I know some people have pointed out that hard copies are available, but even for the able-bodied, this isn't necessarily true. Some law schools will allow the general public to access their law libraries, but here in Jacksonville, the only law school around (Florida Coastal) won't let anyone from outside the school access their law library. They sort of have an inferiority complex, I think, since they're a new school and they just barely got accredited. If someone walks in and tries to get into the library, the gatekeeper librarian will tell them that as soon as *their* law school (Harvard Law or whatever) offers reciprocal rights to people from Florida Coastal, then Florida Coastal will let those people into the library. I'm not sure, but I didn't imagine that most law schools would forbid people from other law schools from accessing the libraries, which would negate the need for an explicit reciprocity agreement.
I guess I'm just ignorant, but where is IPv5?
I read the Linux IPv6 FAQ, but it only explained that we currently use IPv4, and that people are trying to switch to IPv6, but nothing at all was said about IPv5. I'd think it'd be a common enough question to be in the FAQ.
You've made some good points, and I guess there has to be a middle of the road approach somewhere that motivates, but still leaves time for school. I, too, have seen friends get side jobs to support themselves, only to drop out of college (it's always "just for a semester" of course).
Maybe if I'd picked a major that I was more interested in, I'd have spent more time and effort on school, but as it was, I seemed to expend just enough effort to get by, which kept me there an extra two years.
Shame about your parents retirement. I'd much prefer to deal with thirty or forty thousand dollars in student loans rather than support my parents because they spent their retirement money on me (which, in turn, was probably spent by me on random crap). Fortunately, I don't think my parents gave me much more than $10k over my college career. I've got a female friend who got married a few years back. Her parents didn't have much saved up for retirement, if anything at all (they'd filed for bankruptcy maybe 10 years previously because of a business failure). Her Dad told her that her wedding was her special day, so he would get her whatever she wanted. Final pricetag was $60,000, not including the ring that her husband payed for (and she was a pharmaceutical rep making upwards of 60k/year at the time). To see her parents blow an amount approximately equal to their annual income on her wedding really chapped my hide. More accurately, I guess she blew the money, but if I'd been her dad, I would've pulled the plug *far* before then.
What's the punch line? Marriage lasted 8 months.
You're right, except for the experience portion. That is different from state to state. Most require four years of experience, and it doesn't always have to be under a professional engineer. It just has to be the type of experience where you make "engineering" decisions. Also, you have to have the experience verified by a number of people (again, some states require PE's to do experience verification, some states don't, and the number of people varies, typically four or five).
Regardless, getting a Professional Engineer license involves a lot more than taking a test (though the PE test wasn't necessarily easy, either).
BTW, I just received my passing score and received my PE seal yesterday.
Take care of your own retirement first, both you and your kid will be better off in the long run.
I just got out of college a few years back, and my parents helped me some, along with loans. I went to an in-state public university, so it wasn't too expensive, but I *did* want to go to Georgia Tech for a while, but being out of state I couldn't afford it.
Looking back on the whole situation, I think that I would've probably done better in college if I would've been funding my education, as opposed to my parents. Since they were paying the bills, along with student loans, I could afford to sit back and take my time about getting a degree. Of course, everything depends on the individual, but at least for me (and quite a few others I saw), having others pay my bills allowed me to be lazy.
At that depth, the pressure is about 16000 psi. At least you'd never know about a mistake.
What about using some sort of water absorbent media that is hung up in vertical sheets, exposed to sunlight? Couldn't the algae grow in that configuration? I know the water would move down the sheet with gravity, but you could pump back up to the top, and it seems to me that the algae would mostly stay stuck to the spot where it is growing.
There are a number of somewhat profound directions that I've thought about taking my life in. I am giving serious thought to becoming an economist, or maybe a lawyer (at some conservative/libertarian think tank, like the Cato Institute). But on a more basic level, something in me wants to be a cop. That desire doesn't have so much to do with protecting and serving...I just want to shoot a belligerent drunk with a TASER and watch him jiggle. Pepper spray would be cool, too. It's not that I'm sadistic, or that I'd like to make a life out of police work, but after years of watching hoods on COPS (the TV show), I just wish I could be there to whack one of them in the head with my nightstick.
Haven't they already tried cooperatives in Israel, and a number of other places? (I forget what they were called in Israel). From what I can figure, cooperatives won't work on a large scale because of human nature. People, by nature, want to minimize the work they do and maximize the reward. On a small scale, they're possible, I'm sure, because the small community can use peer pressure to put the lazy folks in line, but not on a large scale.
BTW, it seems like some of the original pilgrims who settled America tried a co-op for a year, but it didn't work out.
The nuclear bombing of Japan was not a war crime by any means. It's a shame that it had to happen, but the US had already lost far too many soldiers in their island hopping campaign in the Pacific. Remember, the Japanese tended to fight to the death of the last man.
From what I've read, Japanese authorities were training the civilian population to fight in the streets, which would've increased the potential US casualties even more. If the Americans had been forced to land on the beaches of Japan and take it by force, many more Japanese civilians and military would have died, in good part because of the cultural unwillingness to give up.
The US didn't start the conflict. Germany and Japan did. They could've quit at any time. I know many won't agree with this, but I believe that during wartime, the lives of one's allies count more than the lives of the enemy. Japan was the country that took this principal to a criminal level, with their treatment of Allied POW's (Bataan Death March, summary executions, a bit of cannibalism, etc.), the Rape of Nanking (which *is* a good example of unnecessary targeting of the civilian population), and the taking of Korean 'comfort girls' for the pleasure of Japanese soldiers.
Individual soldiers on all sides engaged in atrocities, I'm sure, but the Japanese were the ones that had total disdain for human life at the heart of their culture.
Here's a final thought. If the situation were reversed and Japan had nuclear weapons and the capability to deliver them to targets in the United States, I believe wholeheartedly that they would have used them without any hesitation, whether they expected surrender to result or not. If you think that Japan wouldn't have taken advantage of that capability, I'd like to hear your thoughts (and justification for them).
The story about your dad had me LMAO.
When I was a kid, we moved into a new house. The first night that we were there, my dad evidently found a rubber halloween monster mask in the top of a closet. I was asleep, and he came into my room, leaned over me, and started howling. This was not a fun way to wake up...he scared the heck out of me.
I was probably in tenth grade when this happened, so it doesn't count as an early memory, but the parent post reminded me of this.
Dangit, sorry I modded this comment down as flamebait, it was not intentional. For some reason, here at work, with IE 6, all of the pull down menu things get trashed if I try to scroll up. I can scroll down, and I'm fine, but if I scroll up, they don't line up, or disappear altogether. Then even if I reload, they won't get right. I was trying to just click on the mod menu to see if it was where I thought it was, and it accidentally modded.
Does anyone know how to fix this problem I'm having with the menu display?
I don't think that the CEO:worker salary ratio accurately indicates their relative worth, but at the same time, I know that there is something that makes a good CEO worth lots of money.
I'm reminded of when Ben & Jerry's ice cream was on a search for a CEO, as the company had outgrown the management skills of Ben & Jerry, or whoever they had running it. They originally had ideas about some 10:1 CEO:line worker salary ratio, or something along those lines (since they were a "socially responsible" hippy company), but that idea went out the window as they searched for truly competent people. I am not sure of the salary for the guy they ended up hiring, but it was a *lot* more than they originally thought was proper, because when they looked for people with the skill set they wanted, the people they found wanted a lot more money than they had conceived.
Bottom line: In capitalism, relative worth and salary don't correlate on a linear scale. It's not *fair*, but that's the way capitalism works (and even though it is unfair, I think it is the best system). Remember also that this doesn't only apply for comparisons between CEO's and workers, it also applies to comparisons between we as engineers/programmers/techies and other less-skilled people. Is a programmer at $80k/year really worth four times as much as a trash man at $20k/year? No, but we accept it (or, at least, most of us accept it, especially since the trash man can go to college and better himself).
I know the at-will thing bothers some people, but I don't see why the employee should have rights that the employer doesn't have. I figure that employment is a mutual agreement between two parties, wherein one works in return for compensation as worked out between the parties. When one party doesn't like it, they *should* be free to end the agreement. I haven't seen anyone advocate that an employee shouldn't be allowed to quit except for a "good reason", so I figure the employer should be able to end the agreement for the same reasons. Many folks on /. have probably quit jobs because they thought their boss was a jerk, so why can't a boss fire you because he thinks you're a jerk?
You know, Swingline is selling red staplers
now (the one in Office Space was actually painted
for the movie).
Here's the link
http://www.swingline.com/
Hmm, interesting question. But IT books are only good for a short season, since technology changes so quickly. People's innards, on the other hand, don't vary too much from one year to the next, so the medical books would seem to be current for a longer season. BTW, the main used book store here in Jacksonville, FL that I know about (Chamblin's Bookmine) stopped carrying IT books altogether, because they couldn't make any money on them. I think people tend to keep the IT books that they buy for as long as they are useful, so they don't make it into the used market until they're hopelessly out of date.
I find that I could only play FPS games online for an hour or two at a time because I got so tense while playing that I had to go chill out for a bit.
I've stayed away from MMORPG's because of the addictive aspect. Similarly, back in *my* days at U of F, my friends tried to get me to play Magic, the Gathering, but I saw how much time it took and I stayed away (sometimes it's good if you don't know what you're missing, I guess I would say).
My addiction started in the CSE computer lab (by the French Fries, if it's got a different name now. Back then people played MUD's on the VAX terminals, and I got addicted for a semester (they eventually banned MUD'ing in that lab, so we played in a computer lab on the top floor of Weil Hall). Then I my parents pulled me out for the spring and I came back in the fall and didn't MUD.
I remember mornings where I started playing Friday night and kept on until bright and early Saturday morning, and had to go straight from mudding to Gator Band practice before the game.
Sorry, if this rambled a bit, but seeing another UF student brings back memories.
Rich
Mechanical Engineering, Fall '97
This reminds me of Y2K. At my church the pastor had referenced the Y2K problem since the beginning of 1999 (or before), talking about how folks needed to get financially stable and make prudent arrangements because of potentially tough times ahead. The funny part is that at a womens meeting, the pastors wife was trying to sell butane-powered hair curlers to the other ladies (in case the power died). I wasn't too worried about 9/11, but I got a kick out of thinking about those ladies trying to make sure that their hair was done up proper in the event that they found themselves in a post-apocalypse society (I'd think you'd want to be less attractive after the fall, so you'd be less likely to be raped by the rampaging gangs of the warlords).
In any case, I think people would be willing to withstand 6 minutes total at 1g (3 minutes at each end), if it meant that you didn't arrive in China with a numb rear end. Many people would consider it to be enjoyable, in fact, since they pay for the same thing at the amusement park (or fair).