This is where I think most people go wrong with exercise. They see it as something else they have to do. I think they should just make it more a part of their life. Find something that requires exercise that you enjoy doing. It can be anything. Weight lifting, hiking, photography (walking around while taking pictures), geocaching, just about anything other than watching TV or reading Slashdot. Make it a part of your daily/weekly routine, and it wouldn't seem like you're doing any work at all.
What if I don't like the gym? Can I get them to buy me a new bicycle? Seems like they should just give the people the extra money, and let them spend it as they see fit.
Simpson's did it. No seriously, I heard about a company that will analyze your vacation, and help you donate money to green funds to offset the amount of green-house gases generated on your vacation. So if you fly to Spain, and that creates 900 cubic metres (a number I made up) of greenhouse gases, then you pay them $500 (another number I made up), and they make sure that money goes to help research and organizations that are getting rid of greenhouse gases. Seems kind of like a scam to me. If you were really that worried, you could just give the money to the actual non-profit, and cut out the middleman, or just go camping, and not have such an environmentally unfriendly holiday in the first place.
I'm a Canadian, although not the GP poster, and I feel inclined to answer this question. Personally, I think the Canadian medical system works pretty well. When my wife give birth last year, the birthing room was quite large (20'x20' at least) and contained a bath in case she wanted to use it. There was a nurse in the room continuously from the time she was admitted, to the time we were moved to the patient room. After birth, she hemorrhaged, there was quite a few nurses at her side, and a doctor came very quickly. After we left the hospital, there was no bill, not for a single thing. Including all meds to help with the hemorrhaging, and the epidural.
The thing that people in Canada complain most about is the waiting times. While they aren't non-existent, they are usually on things like knee surgery, and other non-life-threatening issues. If you need an MRI for cancer diagnonsis, you get one pretty fast. Also, we have realized it's a problem, and started to do things to shorten the waiting times.
My only problem personally is with prescription drugs, which although cheaper than the US, are still quite expensive. I had shingles (damn that hurt) last year, and it cost me $100 for a week's worth of medication (luckily that's all it took). However, most employers are able to provide insurance in prescription drugs, eye-glasses, orthodontics, and even some covering massage therapy, because they don't have to bear the burden of providing medical insurance.
More people use Windows on their home computers. That doesn't mean it's the most reliable operating system. In this case, they use the BMI, because it is quick and cheap, and get's the job done, and be darned with the reliability of the system. Kind of like with Windows.
Yes, but anybody with any kind of muscle mass at all (and little fat) usually has a body mass index of over 30. I bike to work everyday. I'm 5'8", 165 lbs. That gives me a BMI of 25.1. That's borderline overweight. Yet most people would say I'm pretty skinny. My wife continually complains that I need to gain some weight. However, because of all that biking I have quite a bit of muscle in my legs, as well as a moderate amount of muscle on the rest of my body. I also for my entire life, have been very much not buoyant. I will sink in water, if I don't tread water, and always have, even when I didn't have as much muscle on me. So while the BMI can be a reasonable number for determining the overweightness of a population, on a single individual, it can be wrong quite often.
I have a Wii too, as I stated. However as a software developer, and a computer geek, I see a computer sitting on top of my TV, and I see a lot of potential. Basically, if the thing had support for MPEG2 video played over a windows shared folder, which would require no extra hardware, then I would be really happy. This is the reason that you see the XBox 360 with the core, premium and elite models. A lot of people don't want to spend $600 on a console, and that is fine. So they made the core model, which has no hard drive, and plays games just fine. However, when doing this, MS got a lot of people complaining that they shouldn't have different models, because it confuses the user. So we end up with the catch 22 of make a system that costs $600 for everyone to buy even if they don't need the features, or make a system that costs only $200, but leave out a lot of features that a lot of people would want.
That's what I thought. You shouldn't be allowed to make an agreement with someone that dictates how you should vote. If you can trade one vote for another vote, then how is that different from trading a vote for money? My other question is how do you guarantee who the other person is voting for. Say I want to vote for Nader, but that would mean that Bush would win in my state, so I trade my vote to a place where Bush cannot win, and I vote for Kerry. Now the guy I trade with just reneges on the deal and also votes for Kerry. So, now we have 2 votes for Kerry, and none for Nader. I could see the democrats using this as a way to increase the number of votes they get. Basically trade with someone who wants you go vote independant, so that the republicans don't win, and then make both votes democratic.
Well it seems that most of the consoles are moving towards being a media centre, and not just a place for games. I have a Wii, which doesn't have a hard drive, and I'll tell you why one would be nice.
The photo channel lets you look at pictures off an SD card. This is nice, but if it had an internet hard drive, you could just keep all your pictures on there, and then when people come over, you could show them all your pictures on the TV screen instead of having to place everything on an SD card or have everyone crown around a computer screen.
The virtual console games can take up quite a bit of space. Especially once you start looking at N64 games, the built in 512 MB of memory can get pretty small. Right now I'm doing fine on space, however, in 3 years, I will probably need quite a bit more space. Especially since I hear they are going to be bringing out NeoGeo games.
Saved games would be really nice to be able to store on a hard drive, because while flash memory is nice, it's kind of small. Sometimes you can see the developers have to get really creative with what and how they save, so that they don't eat up too much space. Twilight Princess only has 3 saved games slot, and it's 2007. They really should have unlimited slots. Super Swing golf only allows you to have 1 player profile on your system.
Putting MP3s on the console to play as background music in games is kind of nice. It's not fun for every game, but for things like NFS, it's definitely nice to listen to your own music instead of the included tracks.
A hard drive would be really nice for putting videos on, so that you could watch recorded TV shows. This would only make sense however, if the system supported MPEG4 (or at least MPEG2) video.
While all these represent the need for having a hard drive, they should always let the owner back up the entire thing, in part or in whole, to memory cards. It sucks not being able to bring your saved game profile over to a friend's house, or losing all your data when the hard drive does decide to fry itself. Also, it's 2007, and all the consoles support wireless. Make it so that the console can back itself up to a computer, possibly on a schedule, so that people don't have to worry about backing up their data.
I can't imagine playing a video game without having actual tactile feedback on the buttons. I think this would suck in a big way. It's a nice little hack, but I can't seriously see this being any fun. First, if you put your thumb on the screen, then it would immediately interpret a button press. but if you don't put your thumbs on the top of the screen, then it's probably going to fall out of your hands. also, telling what buttons/directions you're pressing would be quite difficult without continually moving your attention away from the action to look at your hands. Granted, the controls are just below the game display area, but I can be this will still be pretty distracting.
I've also known several women who said they'd be interested in IT, if only they knew more about computers
If they were at all interested in IT, then they would already know more about computers. Men don't just pop out of the womb knowing everything about computers. They see them, become interested in them, and then learn about them. I can learn a whole lot about history, and it isn't going to make me any more interested in it.
Wouldn't it just make sense for the hospital to hire a couple heavy-lifter type males to do all the heavy lifting, who don't require to be paid as much as a nurse. Have a couple standing around in the hospital at any point just to lift something if the need arises. You'll have a lot less nurses taking time off for back injuries, and you won't have to worry about finding nurses with enough physical strength, and can instead focus on finding nurses with good knowledge of their field and good beside manner.
Yes because a regular on-call sysadmin gets paid just as much and requires just as much schooling as your typical doctor/lawyer. Comparing being an on-call sysadmin to being a doctor or lawyer is ludicrous. Sure the hours are ridiculous for all three, but the sysadmin gets paid much less, and gets much less respect for their job at the end of the day.
I can't believe I had to read down this far for this issue to come up. I wouldn't expect that a project done at a company the size of ID would let something like this slip by without anyone saying anything. Then again, maybe some of the developers did say something, and their managers just told them to shut up or find another job. Maybe this really was just some small project, that only a few people worked on. If they had all the source code for the games, and are just running everything on DOSBox, then it wouldn't be unbelievable that there was only 5 or 6 people who only knew how the thing technically worked. Maybe they were given an impossible deadline, and this was the only way they could meet it.
Americans vote in November, but the guy who's elected doesn't get into office until January. For some unknown reason, they need the results within 2 hours.
You really should check out The Man Who Sued God. Basic premise is man loses his boat/home is struck by lightning, and the insurance company won't pay out because it is an "act of God". So he decides to sue God. The logic is that the church (God's representatives on earth), argue that God didn't destroy his boat, then the insurance company should have to pay him. Either way he's entitled to money from someone. Really funny movie that really shows the flawed logic insurance companies use to get out of paying. I really have to watch this again sometime.
Apparently women don't want to hear the right words. It's like that old episode of home improvement. I experience this with my wife all the time. I start using technical (ie. the correct words) and she just stops listening and insisting that I'm just trying to confuse her. She wanted to use edit photos, so I use words like palette, crop, layers, scale, saturation, and she immediately stopped listening. She went and bought a photoshop book, and was still kind of turned off with all the "big words". I tell her that we have words for a reason. So that people know what other people are talking about. Apparently she thinks it's better if we use words like "whats-its", "thing-a-me-bob", and "squiggly-thing". People who don't want to learn the proper terminology, are going to have a very hard time getting anywhere in any subject.
I'm with the other guy. While mass doesn't directly affect forming of life, I would wonder how intelligent beings would exist on a planet the size of jupiter. They certainly wouldn't be able to be as mobile as the life on earth, unless they had much better ways of getting energy. Even ignoring the fact that the would have to have really strong muscles and bones so that they could move (assuming they had muscles and bones), they would still need a lot of extra energy to move around on such a large planet. Also, for them to do any kind of space travel, escaping from such a large gravity would prove very difficult. Even if they were very intelligent, would they have any thought of flying? Since the gravity would be so strong, I would doubt that there would be any flying animals, or even leaves floating through the air to get the inspiration from.
But your parent poster was basically saying it's better to sell your software (for whatever price) than not to sell it at all. Obviously you probably won't recoup your dev costs if you sell it to everyone for a penny. But if you find a group of people who don't buy your product (like the chinese), and can get them to buy the product by reducing the price, then your are going to make more money. It's a profit maximization technique. They do this all the time in software. They charge the maximum that most people will pay, in order to maximize their profits. It just turns out that what people are willing to pay in China is much less than what they are willing to pay in Canada.
I've always find it kind of odd that they make such a big deal about how many people are dying in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places. Not that I don't appreciate that people have laid down their lives, but they act like it's tons of people. When you consider how many Americans, and Canadians are dying in recent wars, it's nothing like it used to be during Veitnam, WWII, and WWI. They seem to make a huge deal everytime 1 person dies. If they had done this during Vietnam, they probably would have required 5 or 6 channels, dedicated to displaying the list of people who had died.
A web designer should never assume that the user has any specific fonts on their machine. If your site doesn't look good with any serif,sans-serif, and monospace fonts, that I choose to use, then you didn't do a very good job with it. There's some other nice fonts, like fantasy, and cursive, that I would try to stay away from. Stick to the first 3 I mentioned, and stop worrying about whether or not you site looks exactly the same on everyone elses computer/browser as it does on yours. Because it never will.
That doesn't even make any sense. Anybody who rides the bus (I do) realizes that buses don't adhere to any time schedule, and usually around anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes early or late depending many things including weather, traffic, and phase of the moon. So, you should pretty much always show up 5 minutes early for the bus, especially if it comes infrequently like every 30 minutes or every hour. If the bus comes every 5-10 minutes, I wouldn't even bother checking the schedule. Saying you missed the bus because your watch was off by 10 seconds, or even 2 minutes, shows that you don't know how to anticipate that the bus will often be early.
Yes it is about choice. 10 years ago, you'd be really hard pressed to find lots of independent bands in your local record store. Now you can just stroll over to eMusic, and there's more indie music than you can shake a stick at. However, that choice includes Britney Spears. As much as some of us may not like her music, it appears that a lot of people do. There's still room for all kinds of music, more now that ever. The RIAA just has to realize that some people would rather listen to some obscure track by some indie band, then their latest top 10 hit of the week.
Making the top 10 used to mean something, back when pinball wizard was popular. Or maybe not. It's the same with having a New York Times best selling book. The fact that your book is on there, doesn't really mean it's top quality literature, just that it has mass appeal. Millions of people buy the newspaper every day. That doesn't mean it's intriguing. A lot of people buy books by Stephen King, Dean Koontz Tom Clancy, Janet Evanovich, J.K. Rowlings, and a bunch of other authors. That doesn't mean that they are literary masterpieces. They are just books that are fun to read, and don't make you think a whole lot. I think the same holds true for music. The stuff at the top 10 is just stuff that most people don't mind hearing on the radio, as background noise, played in malls, with a catchy tune you can humm to yourself.
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This is where I think most people go wrong with exercise. They see it as something else they have to do. I think they should just make it more a part of their life. Find something that requires exercise that you enjoy doing. It can be anything. Weight lifting, hiking, photography (walking around while taking pictures), geocaching, just about anything other than watching TV or reading Slashdot. Make it a part of your daily/weekly routine, and it wouldn't seem like you're doing any work at all.
What if I don't like the gym? Can I get them to buy me a new bicycle? Seems like they should just give the people the extra money, and let them spend it as they see fit.
Simpson's did it. No seriously, I heard about a company that will analyze your vacation, and help you donate money to green funds to offset the amount of green-house gases generated on your vacation. So if you fly to Spain, and that creates 900 cubic metres (a number I made up) of greenhouse gases, then you pay them $500 (another number I made up), and they make sure that money goes to help research and organizations that are getting rid of greenhouse gases. Seems kind of like a scam to me. If you were really that worried, you could just give the money to the actual non-profit, and cut out the middleman, or just go camping, and not have such an environmentally unfriendly holiday in the first place.
I'm a Canadian, although not the GP poster, and I feel inclined to answer this question. Personally, I think the Canadian medical system works pretty well. When my wife give birth last year, the birthing room was quite large (20'x20' at least) and contained a bath in case she wanted to use it. There was a nurse in the room continuously from the time she was admitted, to the time we were moved to the patient room. After birth, she hemorrhaged, there was quite a few nurses at her side, and a doctor came very quickly. After we left the hospital, there was no bill, not for a single thing. Including all meds to help with the hemorrhaging, and the epidural.
The thing that people in Canada complain most about is the waiting times. While they aren't non-existent, they are usually on things like knee surgery, and other non-life-threatening issues. If you need an MRI for cancer diagnonsis, you get one pretty fast. Also, we have realized it's a problem, and started to do things to shorten the waiting times.
My only problem personally is with prescription drugs, which although cheaper than the US, are still quite expensive. I had shingles (damn that hurt) last year, and it cost me $100 for a week's worth of medication (luckily that's all it took). However, most employers are able to provide insurance in prescription drugs, eye-glasses, orthodontics, and even some covering massage therapy, because they don't have to bear the burden of providing medical insurance.
And since a physical every 18 months should probably be covered by their insurance anyway, it would be at no cost to the employer or employee.
More people use Windows on their home computers. That doesn't mean it's the most reliable operating system. In this case, they use the BMI, because it is quick and cheap, and get's the job done, and be darned with the reliability of the system. Kind of like with Windows.
Yes, but anybody with any kind of muscle mass at all (and little fat) usually has a body mass index of over 30. I bike to work everyday. I'm 5'8", 165 lbs. That gives me a BMI of 25.1. That's borderline overweight. Yet most people would say I'm pretty skinny. My wife continually complains that I need to gain some weight. However, because of all that biking I have quite a bit of muscle in my legs, as well as a moderate amount of muscle on the rest of my body. I also for my entire life, have been very much not buoyant. I will sink in water, if I don't tread water, and always have, even when I didn't have as much muscle on me. So while the BMI can be a reasonable number for determining the overweightness of a population, on a single individual, it can be wrong quite often.
I have a Wii too, as I stated. However as a software developer, and a computer geek, I see a computer sitting on top of my TV, and I see a lot of potential. Basically, if the thing had support for MPEG2 video played over a windows shared folder, which would require no extra hardware, then I would be really happy. This is the reason that you see the XBox 360 with the core, premium and elite models. A lot of people don't want to spend $600 on a console, and that is fine. So they made the core model, which has no hard drive, and plays games just fine. However, when doing this, MS got a lot of people complaining that they shouldn't have different models, because it confuses the user. So we end up with the catch 22 of make a system that costs $600 for everyone to buy even if they don't need the features, or make a system that costs only $200, but leave out a lot of features that a lot of people would want.
That's what I thought. You shouldn't be allowed to make an agreement with someone that dictates how you should vote. If you can trade one vote for another vote, then how is that different from trading a vote for money? My other question is how do you guarantee who the other person is voting for. Say I want to vote for Nader, but that would mean that Bush would win in my state, so I trade my vote to a place where Bush cannot win, and I vote for Kerry. Now the guy I trade with just reneges on the deal and also votes for Kerry. So, now we have 2 votes for Kerry, and none for Nader. I could see the democrats using this as a way to increase the number of votes they get. Basically trade with someone who wants you go vote independant, so that the republicans don't win, and then make both votes democratic.
- The photo channel lets you look at pictures off an SD card. This is nice, but if it had an internet hard drive, you could just keep all your pictures on there, and then when people come over, you could show them all your pictures on the TV screen instead of having to place everything on an SD card or have everyone crown around a computer screen.
- The virtual console games can take up quite a bit of space. Especially once you start looking at N64 games, the built in 512 MB of memory can get pretty small. Right now I'm doing fine on space, however, in 3 years, I will probably need quite a bit more space. Especially since I hear they are going to be bringing out NeoGeo games.
- Saved games would be really nice to be able to store on a hard drive, because while flash memory is nice, it's kind of small. Sometimes you can see the developers have to get really creative with what and how they save, so that they don't eat up too much space. Twilight Princess only has 3 saved games slot, and it's 2007. They really should have unlimited slots. Super Swing golf only allows you to have 1 player profile on your system.
- Putting MP3s on the console to play as background music in games is kind of nice. It's not fun for every game, but for things like NFS, it's definitely nice to listen to your own music instead of the included tracks.
- A hard drive would be really nice for putting videos on, so that you could watch recorded TV shows. This would only make sense however, if the system supported MPEG4 (or at least MPEG2) video.
While all these represent the need for having a hard drive, they should always let the owner back up the entire thing, in part or in whole, to memory cards. It sucks not being able to bring your saved game profile over to a friend's house, or losing all your data when the hard drive does decide to fry itself. Also, it's 2007, and all the consoles support wireless. Make it so that the console can back itself up to a computer, possibly on a schedule, so that people don't have to worry about backing up their data.I can't imagine playing a video game without having actual tactile feedback on the buttons. I think this would suck in a big way. It's a nice little hack, but I can't seriously see this being any fun. First, if you put your thumb on the screen, then it would immediately interpret a button press. but if you don't put your thumbs on the top of the screen, then it's probably going to fall out of your hands. also, telling what buttons/directions you're pressing would be quite difficult without continually moving your attention away from the action to look at your hands. Granted, the controls are just below the game display area, but I can be this will still be pretty distracting.
Wouldn't it just make sense for the hospital to hire a couple heavy-lifter type males to do all the heavy lifting, who don't require to be paid as much as a nurse. Have a couple standing around in the hospital at any point just to lift something if the need arises. You'll have a lot less nurses taking time off for back injuries, and you won't have to worry about finding nurses with enough physical strength, and can instead focus on finding nurses with good knowledge of their field and good beside manner.
Yes because a regular on-call sysadmin gets paid just as much and requires just as much schooling as your typical doctor/lawyer. Comparing being an on-call sysadmin to being a doctor or lawyer is ludicrous. Sure the hours are ridiculous for all three, but the sysadmin gets paid much less, and gets much less respect for their job at the end of the day.
I can't believe I had to read down this far for this issue to come up. I wouldn't expect that a project done at a company the size of ID would let something like this slip by without anyone saying anything. Then again, maybe some of the developers did say something, and their managers just told them to shut up or find another job. Maybe this really was just some small project, that only a few people worked on. If they had all the source code for the games, and are just running everything on DOSBox, then it wouldn't be unbelievable that there was only 5 or 6 people who only knew how the thing technically worked. Maybe they were given an impossible deadline, and this was the only way they could meet it.
Americans vote in November, but the guy who's elected doesn't get into office until January. For some unknown reason, they need the results within 2 hours.
You really should check out The Man Who Sued God. Basic premise is man loses his boat/home is struck by lightning, and the insurance company won't pay out because it is an "act of God". So he decides to sue God. The logic is that the church (God's representatives on earth), argue that God didn't destroy his boat, then the insurance company should have to pay him. Either way he's entitled to money from someone. Really funny movie that really shows the flawed logic insurance companies use to get out of paying. I really have to watch this again sometime.
Apparently women don't want to hear the right words. It's like that old episode of home improvement. I experience this with my wife all the time. I start using technical (ie. the correct words) and she just stops listening and insisting that I'm just trying to confuse her. She wanted to use edit photos, so I use words like palette, crop, layers, scale, saturation, and she immediately stopped listening. She went and bought a photoshop book, and was still kind of turned off with all the "big words". I tell her that we have words for a reason. So that people know what other people are talking about. Apparently she thinks it's better if we use words like "whats-its", "thing-a-me-bob", and "squiggly-thing". People who don't want to learn the proper terminology, are going to have a very hard time getting anywhere in any subject.
I'm with the other guy. While mass doesn't directly affect forming of life, I would wonder how intelligent beings would exist on a planet the size of jupiter. They certainly wouldn't be able to be as mobile as the life on earth, unless they had much better ways of getting energy. Even ignoring the fact that the would have to have really strong muscles and bones so that they could move (assuming they had muscles and bones), they would still need a lot of extra energy to move around on such a large planet. Also, for them to do any kind of space travel, escaping from such a large gravity would prove very difficult. Even if they were very intelligent, would they have any thought of flying? Since the gravity would be so strong, I would doubt that there would be any flying animals, or even leaves floating through the air to get the inspiration from.
But your parent poster was basically saying it's better to sell your software (for whatever price) than not to sell it at all. Obviously you probably won't recoup your dev costs if you sell it to everyone for a penny. But if you find a group of people who don't buy your product (like the chinese), and can get them to buy the product by reducing the price, then your are going to make more money. It's a profit maximization technique. They do this all the time in software. They charge the maximum that most people will pay, in order to maximize their profits. It just turns out that what people are willing to pay in China is much less than what they are willing to pay in Canada.
I've always find it kind of odd that they make such a big deal about how many people are dying in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places. Not that I don't appreciate that people have laid down their lives, but they act like it's tons of people. When you consider how many Americans, and Canadians are dying in recent wars, it's nothing like it used to be during Veitnam, WWII, and WWI. They seem to make a huge deal everytime 1 person dies. If they had done this during Vietnam, they probably would have required 5 or 6 channels, dedicated to displaying the list of people who had died.
A web designer should never assume that the user has any specific fonts on their machine. If your site doesn't look good with any serif,sans-serif, and monospace fonts, that I choose to use, then you didn't do a very good job with it. There's some other nice fonts, like fantasy, and cursive, that I would try to stay away from. Stick to the first 3 I mentioned, and stop worrying about whether or not you site looks exactly the same on everyone elses computer/browser as it does on yours. Because it never will.
That doesn't even make any sense. Anybody who rides the bus (I do) realizes that buses don't adhere to any time schedule, and usually around anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes early or late depending many things including weather, traffic, and phase of the moon. So, you should pretty much always show up 5 minutes early for the bus, especially if it comes infrequently like every 30 minutes or every hour. If the bus comes every 5-10 minutes, I wouldn't even bother checking the schedule. Saying you missed the bus because your watch was off by 10 seconds, or even 2 minutes, shows that you don't know how to anticipate that the bus will often be early.
Yes it is about choice. 10 years ago, you'd be really hard pressed to find lots of independent bands in your local record store. Now you can just stroll over to eMusic, and there's more indie music than you can shake a stick at. However, that choice includes Britney Spears. As much as some of us may not like her music, it appears that a lot of people do. There's still room for all kinds of music, more now that ever. The RIAA just has to realize that some people would rather listen to some obscure track by some indie band, then their latest top 10 hit of the week.
Making the top 10 used to mean something, back when pinball wizard was popular. Or maybe not. It's the same with having a New York Times best selling book. The fact that your book is on there, doesn't really mean it's top quality literature, just that it has mass appeal. Millions of people buy the newspaper every day. That doesn't mean it's intriguing. A lot of people buy books by Stephen King, Dean Koontz Tom Clancy, Janet Evanovich, J.K. Rowlings, and a bunch of other authors. That doesn't mean that they are literary masterpieces. They are just books that are fun to read, and don't make you think a whole lot. I think the same holds true for music. The stuff at the top 10 is just stuff that most people don't mind hearing on the radio, as background noise, played in malls, with a catchy tune you can humm to yourself.