Yeah, it would be much easier for them to just hire twice as many 20 hour a week employees instead of paying for the healthcare. Businesses do this stuff all the time. My brother was at a unionized retail store and he was "temporary part time" for years so that he wouldn't be in the union, and they could pay him half of the other guys. After that he was "permanent part time" which was in the union, so he go a little higher wage, but no benefits still. After about 7 years he was classified as "permanent full time" and finally was a full member of the union working at retail location making over $25 an hour + benefits. So the old boys club gets to rake in all the money and new employees have to work for close to minimum wage. Oh, and he was working 35+ hours a week for his entire "career" even when he was classified as temporary part time.
While I realize that there are some that can't adopt due to innefficiencies and high costs of adoption, I think the main reason is that many people just plain don't want kids anymore. In western society where they don't provide an income, and in actuality cost a lot of money, there's many reasons not to have kids. I have 3 myself, but I can see where people could be perfectly happy with no kids at all.
What about Monopoly? Perfectly fine english word that predates the popular board game. Trying making another game with the same name, even if it doesn't resemble the original in any way. You'll probably get sued. Also, I'm sure that 75% of these "Memory" games are probably clones of the original memory game.
We all depend on many other people to get our jobs done. Think of something as simple as a computer mouse. We need to drill for oil, refine the oil to make plastics. Mine for ore and process the ore into metals. Design logic circuits. Make screws. Create molds for the plastic. Create transistors and resistors and capacitors. None of this could be done all by a single person. We are only able to accomplish so much because we have such a large number of people who can do a bunch of really simple things, and they don't have to worry about how everyone else gets their job done. Basically our whole world is abstracted away, just as we have high level programming languages that extract away all the complications of the computer. You'd never end up with something like FireFox, iTunes, MySQL, or the Linux Kernel for example, if everything was written using assembly langauge, or even less abstracted, machine code.
Yeah, but if you keep saying that year after year the thing never gets built. If, instead, you just start building the thing, even if it takes 20 years, you are that much closer to completion. If you wait around 20 years complaining that it takes 20 years to build, you could have just built the thing, instead of making absolutely no progress for the last 20 years.
Yes, but from what I'm reading, you have to wait over a year between trips so the planets line up correctly so that you can make the trip in such a short period of time. Doesn't really help out that much. And better hope you don't miss your launch window, or you might have to wait until the next time the planets align. Also, even at 5 months, that still an extremely long time to be traveling through space.
I agree. I got the NES emulator for my Android, and about the only thing it's good for is RPGs like Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior. Of course that's exactly why I bought it, so I'm not unhappy, but playing games that were meant to be played with a game pad or analog stick on a touch screen is very frustrating.
I always like to refence this Hitchhiker's Guide quote
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
There's a big different between going to the moon and even something like going to Mars. It only took Apollo 11 astronauts 3 days to get to the moon. Even the shortest trips to Mars have taken close to 300 days. And Voyageur 1 has been travelling for 25 years and is only now reaching the edge of the solar system.
While warp speed and worm holes could allow matter to travel vast distances over short periods of time, I don't know if actual things could travel though a worm hole or at warp seed without being torn apart.
Discretion can be a tricky thing though. One of my favourites is "let's let everybody drive 20 km/h over the speed limit on the highway" thing. So 99% of the time, you are ok. But once in a while a cop will be having a bad day and decide to pull you over and give you a ticket for something that people do every day. I would much rather they set the speed limits at more reasonable levels and enforce them strictly rather than let everybody drive over the speed limit all the time and use it as a way to generate money on the day you decide to start enforcing it.
You're right. Instead of letting the small inventors who maybe own 1 to 5 patents take a little responsibility and keep track of how their patents are being used, we should make the people/organizations producing products (big and small) be responsible for wading through millions of patents to ensure they don't infringe on these patents before they release a product. Even if said patent is just sitting in a filing cabinet, and no product has ever been realized.
I'm not saying that all patents should be invalidated after some set period after some product has been released and no complaint has been filed. But there should be some expectation so thousands of companies can't go about using your "patented techology" for over a decade before you decide you are going to start complaining that they are violating your patent.
You should have some minimum time to file a suit against someone for using your patent or it should be invalidated. I see this all the time. Sony used a game controller for 3 years on their playstation and then somebody comes along saying they have a patent that Sony is infringing on. Why wasn't it brought up a couple months after the release? It's not like the playstation was some unknown product in some very small market that the patent holder couldn't have been expected to know about. If you have too many patents that you can't keep track of them, and don't even realize that somebody is infringing on them until years later, then it should be invalidated.
Might have a little trouble getting a cell phone jammer that doesn't affect the next room over (or then next 5 rooms on either side). Using dumb calculators is actually a very good solution. If I were a teacher, I'd actually opt for no calculators at all, or at least limit students to very basic scientific calculators such as the TI-30. Any exam in university that allowed fancy TI-86 calculators had about half the class with crib sheets programmed into them.
Yeah but it sure us nice being able to use it for a whole semester without having to change the batteries. Not to mention that I don't ever recall having to reboot my TI-86 in the middle of an exam. People complain about some of the outdated specs, but these things were reliable and got the job done. I love my android phone but wouldn't trust it to last a 3 hour exam followed by another 3 hour exam.
I imagine that you would have the help desk people not send out an email (directly). Emails that come into your system get entered (possibly automatically) into the customer support system, and the employee responds through the customer support system, which may or may not send out an email to the customer. This way not only do you get to monitor what they're sending out, because they aren't sending an email, but rather entering a support request, but you also get better tracking of customer satisfaction if you have a good support system. If employees want to send out personal emails, they can do so from their work email, but you should probably just let them access their webmail, and tell them to use that, but helpdesk staff should not be communicating with customers directly via email.
Do they require reboots, or does it just ask you to reboot. Because I find that 90% of the stuff that asks you to reboot doesn't actually require a reboot. It's just something developers put in, "just in case" but most of the time it's completely unnecessary. I think the only reason I reboot anymore is so Windows will stop complaining and install it's own updates.
I actually recall a bunch of older Japanese people wanting to help out with the clean-up specifically because of this reason. If cancer won't hit you until 30 years after exposure, they it's probably not that bad of an idea to help out with nuclear waste clean-up when you are 60 or 70. It's quite altruistic if you ask me.
Apple has the advantage that they only sell one phone and call it the iPhone. Samsung on the other hand has many Samsung Galaxy devices. A similar phenomenon exists for LG Optimus phones. So almost all of Apple's sales are concentrated on a single device. I wonder who sells more phones overall. Or more important, who makes more profit overall. I think Apple is still king on that one.
Not true for all ads. A full screen video ad started playing when I was in the music app. 2 guys, who I can only assume are musicians based on context (but I didn't recognize them) asking my to sign up for the xBox music service. If the app as called music store or something I might have expected it a little bit more. But it's simply identified as "Music" and shows a pair of headphones. As a user who didn't read much about Windows 8 before buying it, I figured this was what I should click on to play my music. Overall I'm not disappointed in my purchase. $39.99 is a great price. But MS made some pretty bad moves here.
Yeah, but I can use iTunes, I've used it often. It has the feature to buy music. It has not once shown me a full screen ad asking my to buy music. In fact, at least as I recall from using it on Windows, if you don't click on the store, which is a small thing on the left hand side, you never see the store. Whereas the "Music" app from Microsoft, is basically a store with the added feature of being able to play some music. If you want to listen to your own music, you have to scroll the screen to the left, which for most people is completely unintuitive because most people would assume you already start out on the far left of a horizontally scrollable interface, not some weird place in the middle. Also, Apple is not in a monopoly position, and Microsoft is, so that changes the rules a bit.
This kind of caught me off guard too. The music App started showing me ads, and not just little images off to the side, but full screen videos asking me to sign up for a subscription. I thought that the:"Music" app was what I was supposed to use to listen to the music I already owned. Not some nagware that tried to convince me to buy more music off the MS specific store. I promptly removed the music from my desktop after that and just went to download Winamp, since WMP and the new music app were completely unable to play FLAC files anyway. I can't see how MS isn't going to get in trouble for this one. If they got in trouble for doing it with browsers, which were mostly free anyway, even before they started including them, just think of how Apple is going to react to MS embedding a music store in the OS, or Steam is going to react to adding a games store in the OS.
But unless the phone is located in a the gas tank and has the same physical properties as gas, then the effect won't be the same. Gas tends to slosh around in the gas tank, especially as it empties, a phone would not slosh around. Ok, really I'm joking. You're The weight of the phone isn't going to make a lick of difference. The weight difference from the phone is peanuts compared to weight lost of burning gas or from sweating during the ride. Not to mention weight lost as the tires wear down. Which in a race is appreciable. The weight of the phone makes about as little difference as whether or not you just at a hamburger.
Also, seems like something they could use to trump up charges on people they didn't like. Oh, you didn't tell us about that account you created on www.example.com for that one comment you posted 2 years ago. So many sites require you to create accounts for even basic things like posting comments that most people probably couldn't be reasonably expected to remember every fake alias they've ever created.
I really don't understand why this isn't the norm. With any other loan, your loan and interest rate are based on your ability to pay it back, or for the bank to repossess collateral to cover the loan. The same should be true for student loans. Choose a degree with low chances of finding a job, your loan amount goes down, and your interest rate goes up. Choose a degree in a lucrative field, and your access to money goes up, and your interest rate goes down accordingly. Receive good marks in your classes, you interest rate should go down accordingly. Get some real world work experience through internships or co-op programme, and your interest rate should drop as well. The government shouldn't be spending money on loans that have 0% chance of being paid back. The people who are good achievers shouldn't be burdened by the interest rates of those who treat college as a 4 year party.
It will take many people to operate this kind of business. You have to have someone to answer the phones at all hours who can troubleshoot connection problems. People aren't going to want to wait until 7pm to get their internet back because you are busy at your day job and can't fix it until after you get off work.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it would be much easier for them to just hire twice as many 20 hour a week employees instead of paying for the healthcare. Businesses do this stuff all the time. My brother was at a unionized retail store and he was "temporary part time" for years so that he wouldn't be in the union, and they could pay him half of the other guys. After that he was "permanent part time" which was in the union, so he go a little higher wage, but no benefits still. After about 7 years he was classified as "permanent full time" and finally was a full member of the union working at retail location making over $25 an hour + benefits. So the old boys club gets to rake in all the money and new employees have to work for close to minimum wage. Oh, and he was working 35+ hours a week for his entire "career" even when he was classified as temporary part time.
While I realize that there are some that can't adopt due to innefficiencies and high costs of adoption, I think the main reason is that many people just plain don't want kids anymore. In western society where they don't provide an income, and in actuality cost a lot of money, there's many reasons not to have kids. I have 3 myself, but I can see where people could be perfectly happy with no kids at all.
What about Monopoly? Perfectly fine english word that predates the popular board game. Trying making another game with the same name, even if it doesn't resemble the original in any way. You'll probably get sued. Also, I'm sure that 75% of these "Memory" games are probably clones of the original memory game.
We all depend on many other people to get our jobs done. Think of something as simple as a computer mouse. We need to drill for oil, refine the oil to make plastics. Mine for ore and process the ore into metals. Design logic circuits. Make screws. Create molds for the plastic. Create transistors and resistors and capacitors. None of this could be done all by a single person. We are only able to accomplish so much because we have such a large number of people who can do a bunch of really simple things, and they don't have to worry about how everyone else gets their job done. Basically our whole world is abstracted away, just as we have high level programming languages that extract away all the complications of the computer. You'd never end up with something like FireFox, iTunes, MySQL, or the Linux Kernel for example, if everything was written using assembly langauge, or even less abstracted, machine code.
Yeah, but if you keep saying that year after year the thing never gets built. If, instead, you just start building the thing, even if it takes 20 years, you are that much closer to completion. If you wait around 20 years complaining that it takes 20 years to build, you could have just built the thing, instead of making absolutely no progress for the last 20 years.
Yes, but from what I'm reading, you have to wait over a year between trips so the planets line up correctly so that you can make the trip in such a short period of time. Doesn't really help out that much. And better hope you don't miss your launch window, or you might have to wait until the next time the planets align. Also, even at 5 months, that still an extremely long time to be traveling through space.
I agree. I got the NES emulator for my Android, and about the only thing it's good for is RPGs like Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior. Of course that's exactly why I bought it, so I'm not unhappy, but playing games that were meant to be played with a game pad or analog stick on a touch screen is very frustrating.
There's a big different between going to the moon and even something like going to Mars. It only took Apollo 11 astronauts 3 days to get to the moon. Even the shortest trips to Mars have taken close to 300 days. And Voyageur 1 has been travelling for 25 years and is only now reaching the edge of the solar system.
While warp speed and worm holes could allow matter to travel vast distances over short periods of time, I don't know if actual things could travel though a worm hole or at warp seed without being torn apart.
Discretion can be a tricky thing though. One of my favourites is "let's let everybody drive 20 km/h over the speed limit on the highway" thing. So 99% of the time, you are ok. But once in a while a cop will be having a bad day and decide to pull you over and give you a ticket for something that people do every day. I would much rather they set the speed limits at more reasonable levels and enforce them strictly rather than let everybody drive over the speed limit all the time and use it as a way to generate money on the day you decide to start enforcing it.
You're right. Instead of letting the small inventors who maybe own 1 to 5 patents take a little responsibility and keep track of how their patents are being used, we should make the people/organizations producing products (big and small) be responsible for wading through millions of patents to ensure they don't infringe on these patents before they release a product. Even if said patent is just sitting in a filing cabinet, and no product has ever been realized.
I'm not saying that all patents should be invalidated after some set period after some product has been released and no complaint has been filed. But there should be some expectation so thousands of companies can't go about using your "patented techology" for over a decade before you decide you are going to start complaining that they are violating your patent.
THIS
You should have some minimum time to file a suit against someone for using your patent or it should be invalidated. I see this all the time. Sony used a game controller for 3 years on their playstation and then somebody comes along saying they have a patent that Sony is infringing on. Why wasn't it brought up a couple months after the release? It's not like the playstation was some unknown product in some very small market that the patent holder couldn't have been expected to know about. If you have too many patents that you can't keep track of them, and don't even realize that somebody is infringing on them until years later, then it should be invalidated.
Might have a little trouble getting a cell phone jammer that doesn't affect the next room over (or then next 5 rooms on either side). Using dumb calculators is actually a very good solution. If I were a teacher, I'd actually opt for no calculators at all, or at least limit students to very basic scientific calculators such as the TI-30. Any exam in university that allowed fancy TI-86 calculators had about half the class with crib sheets programmed into them.
Yeah but it sure us nice being able to use it for a whole semester without having to change the batteries. Not to mention that I don't ever recall having to reboot my TI-86 in the middle of an exam. People complain about some of the outdated specs, but these things were reliable and got the job done. I love my android phone but wouldn't trust it to last a 3 hour exam followed by another 3 hour exam.
I imagine that you would have the help desk people not send out an email (directly). Emails that come into your system get entered (possibly automatically) into the customer support system, and the employee responds through the customer support system, which may or may not send out an email to the customer. This way not only do you get to monitor what they're sending out, because they aren't sending an email, but rather entering a support request, but you also get better tracking of customer satisfaction if you have a good support system. If employees want to send out personal emails, they can do so from their work email, but you should probably just let them access their webmail, and tell them to use that, but helpdesk staff should not be communicating with customers directly via email.
Do they require reboots, or does it just ask you to reboot. Because I find that 90% of the stuff that asks you to reboot doesn't actually require a reboot. It's just something developers put in, "just in case" but most of the time it's completely unnecessary. I think the only reason I reboot anymore is so Windows will stop complaining and install it's own updates.
Just as stupid as bamboo and cardboard bikes. There's nothing wrong with using steel or aluminium for your bike frame. If you treat it right, it will last 20+ years, at which point it can be recycled into a new bike. Even if you leave it out in the rain, the frame will most likely still last 10+ years, its the rest of the components that really don't like rain that much.
I actually recall a bunch of older Japanese people wanting to help out with the clean-up specifically because of this reason. If cancer won't hit you until 30 years after exposure, they it's probably not that bad of an idea to help out with nuclear waste clean-up when you are 60 or 70. It's quite altruistic if you ask me.
Apple has the advantage that they only sell one phone and call it the iPhone. Samsung on the other hand has many Samsung Galaxy devices. A similar phenomenon exists for LG Optimus phones. So almost all of Apple's sales are concentrated on a single device. I wonder who sells more phones overall. Or more important, who makes more profit overall. I think Apple is still king on that one.
Not true for all ads. A full screen video ad started playing when I was in the music app. 2 guys, who I can only assume are musicians based on context (but I didn't recognize them) asking my to sign up for the xBox music service. If the app as called music store or something I might have expected it a little bit more. But it's simply identified as "Music" and shows a pair of headphones. As a user who didn't read much about Windows 8 before buying it, I figured this was what I should click on to play my music. Overall I'm not disappointed in my purchase. $39.99 is a great price. But MS made some pretty bad moves here.
Yeah, but I can use iTunes, I've used it often. It has the feature to buy music. It has not once shown me a full screen ad asking my to buy music. In fact, at least as I recall from using it on Windows, if you don't click on the store, which is a small thing on the left hand side, you never see the store. Whereas the "Music" app from Microsoft, is basically a store with the added feature of being able to play some music. If you want to listen to your own music, you have to scroll the screen to the left, which for most people is completely unintuitive because most people would assume you already start out on the far left of a horizontally scrollable interface, not some weird place in the middle. Also, Apple is not in a monopoly position, and Microsoft is, so that changes the rules a bit.
This kind of caught me off guard too. The music App started showing me ads, and not just little images off to the side, but full screen videos asking me to sign up for a subscription. I thought that the :"Music" app was what I was supposed to use to listen to the music I already owned. Not some nagware that tried to convince me to buy more music off the MS specific store. I promptly removed the music from my desktop after that and just went to download Winamp, since WMP and the new music app were completely unable to play FLAC files anyway. I can't see how MS isn't going to get in trouble for this one. If they got in trouble for doing it with browsers, which were mostly free anyway, even before they started including them, just think of how Apple is going to react to MS embedding a music store in the OS, or Steam is going to react to adding a games store in the OS.
But unless the phone is located in a the gas tank and has the same physical properties as gas, then the effect won't be the same. Gas tends to slosh around in the gas tank, especially as it empties, a phone would not slosh around. Ok, really I'm joking. You're The weight of the phone isn't going to make a lick of difference. The weight difference from the phone is peanuts compared to weight lost of burning gas or from sweating during the ride. Not to mention weight lost as the tires wear down. Which in a race is appreciable. The weight of the phone makes about as little difference as whether or not you just at a hamburger.
Also, seems like something they could use to trump up charges on people they didn't like. Oh, you didn't tell us about that account you created on www.example.com for that one comment you posted 2 years ago. So many sites require you to create accounts for even basic things like posting comments that most people probably couldn't be reasonably expected to remember every fake alias they've ever created.
I really don't understand why this isn't the norm. With any other loan, your loan and interest rate are based on your ability to pay it back, or for the bank to repossess collateral to cover the loan. The same should be true for student loans. Choose a degree with low chances of finding a job, your loan amount goes down, and your interest rate goes up. Choose a degree in a lucrative field, and your access to money goes up, and your interest rate goes down accordingly. Receive good marks in your classes, you interest rate should go down accordingly. Get some real world work experience through internships or co-op programme, and your interest rate should drop as well. The government shouldn't be spending money on loans that have 0% chance of being paid back. The people who are good achievers shouldn't be burdened by the interest rates of those who treat college as a 4 year party.
THIS
It will take many people to operate this kind of business. You have to have someone to answer the phones at all hours who can troubleshoot connection problems. People aren't going to want to wait until 7pm to get their internet back because you are busy at your day job and can't fix it until after you get off work.