Well, say what you want but I went from getting a couple of credit card offers each day on average to getting one every couple of months. It works. I did everything that "they" say to do to cut down on junk mail and it actually dramatically cut down my junk mail.
It was not possible to write an OS in Fortran. You lacked pointers, memory management and pretty much everything useful except the ability to do math and some basic I/O.
You do realize that you just described MS-DOS, right?
We simply recognize that government by necessity must be limited. Think of government like a fire. I use fire to heat my house. By carefully controlling the fire and keeping it in a furnace, I reap the benefits (warmth) without suffering the ill effects (being burned or having property destroyed). If I didn't control that fire, my house would be destroyed. That doesn't mean I have disdain for fire or I hate fire, I just recognize that it must be controlled to be useful.
I wish I could mod you up. Carter was incompetent, but he was honest to a fault. He's a good man, and I don't think this country will ever see another like him in the presidency.
I know I'm late to the party, but just saw this posted by a friend on Facebook:
"I get up this morning & on the news I hear about a code red drill at ______ _______ High School today, a school that my husband attended & my daughter _____ briefly, so it hit home is why I'm posting this. So they will lock teachers & students in classrooms today & fire blanks into the school while police sweep the school to "familiarize" students & staff with the sounds of gun fire in the school. So too far or good idea?"
I'm choosing "too far". Why in the hell would people need to be familiar with the sounds of gunfire in a school?
I was not aware we had an infinite supply of anything, let alone of skilled / employable CS or IT workers.
If I have a 10 gallon bucket, 11 gallons of water is the same as "infinite" for some operations. The bottom line is that if x IT jobs open up in the US then we can always find x foreign workers to fill them at a lower wage. For the market to think the supply is infinite, I only need one more worker than there are jobs.
Look, I explained this in an earlier post on this subject. My wife came here on an H-1A as an RN. They brought her to work for substandard wages at shitty nursing homes. The nursing homes could easily have hired Americans to work for them, but they found it was cheaper to claim they couldn't find anybody (a legal requirement for petitioning an H-1x) and then hire some foreigner to do it at a paltry wage. They're supposed to treat them well, but trust me - there's a world of difference between a boss that can fire you and one that can put your ass on a plane back to Asia.
I obviously benefitted greatly from this arrangement, and I'm damned glad that I have an asian babe for a wife. Seriously. But the bottom line is that these companies are depressing wages by bringing folks like her over here and then creating a vicious cycle whereby the depressed wages cause even fewer people to want to join that part of the labor market causing them to bring over more foreigners.
I'm not anti-corporate. Hell, I have an ownership stake in multiple companies. What you see here is crony capitalism, and it's good for the cronies and bad for the rest of us. We need to put an end to work visas like this all together and let the market pull these wages up to the level that they should be.
I doubt Friedman would have looked positively on this. I'm a libertarian, and I'm totally against this. It's interfering with a market. There will always be "more demand" because they'll just drive wages low enough that no American will want the jobs.
This isn't the free market at work. The free market raises wages when there's a labor shortage. No, this is crony capitalism, a very different beast.
>'This should be a relatively smooth transition that won't affect current customers"
Every time some corporate droid has told me this regarding a {buyout, merger, acquisition, sale, re-org} a major cockup has followed. The only thing worse is when they use the phrase, "transparent to the end user," and you know the apocalypse is coming next week.
The major cockup started a few years ago shortly after Cisco bought them. It can't get worse under Belkin.
It's sad, really. Back in the day I bought 7 or 8 Linksys routers, many of which were put into service in other ways using openwrt. The replaceable antennae was a wonderful feature that I never needed. A few of them didn't even have the radio turned on.
Anyway, I gave up with the Cisco fiasco and started buying Netgear. While Cisco was busy trying to sell the lowest-spec'd machines that still performed the basic functionality Netgear was selling me a router with the *very* decent hardware specs printed on the box. It totally kicks the asses of desktops that I was using 10 years ago.
So it's good to see Linksys isn't under Cisco anymore. Sad that it's with Belkin, but, whatever. At least there's still some competition.
Start by not using their language. They didn't "confiscate" his camera - they robbed him and stole his camera. See how that's suddenly a different story? But that's the *correct* version of it. "Confiscation" implies that they took it temporarily under some statutory authority. What they actually did was "strong-arm robbery", with an aggravating circumstance of "under color of law" or "with a gun", or both. That's a felony any way you slice it.
I read a lot of these stories, and the press and everybody discussing it uses the weasel language created by law enforcement to cover up LEO crimes. So, a kidnapping becomes a "false arrest" (no such thing, as an "arrest" is defined as "taking someone into custody *under legal authority*"), robbery becomes "confiscation", perjury becomes "made a mistake while filing a sworn affidavit", assault becomes "excessive force", etc. This is a problem. Start calling the crimes by their proper names and it suddenly becomes a lot more difficult to justify it or write it off.
The victim needs to go straight to the DA and demand prosecution. It wouldn't happen unless the prosecutor is honest (and there actually are a few), but with enough noise he'll get his camera back and hopefully someone will get at least a stern talking-to.
I actually thought of that as a snappy comeback on facebook a few days ago. But the fact is that it's not evolution, it's "artificial selection". It's the same process that turned wolves into man's best friend over the last 20,000 or so years.
They'd have to give a discount on food as well. At least in the US popcorn and a drink run you as much as the ticket.
"Have to"? Why? Because you'd shrivel up and die if you don't have a dose of artificially-flavored popcorn with artificially-sweetened fizzy water within a 2-hour window?
There's likely an "insensitive clod" joke in there....
Take a good look at all of those squares. Want to guess how big they are? The land is platted in acres, of which there are 640 per square mile. Normally in that area, the townships are 36 square miles - known as sections - and individual pieces of land go down to 1/16th of that. Obviously they can be subdivided smaller, but the 40 acre plot is common. See here:
Preach it, brother. When my youngest was in kindergarten his teacher wrote me a note one day that said "Joby seems to be obsessed with guns and always draws them." I wrote back "Yes, he is what's known as a "boy", and they do those things. Please contact me if you see him becoming obsessed with Barbie dolls." She never wrote back. This was a lady who's "top students" each year tended to be girls, go figure.
Are knives also "exempt"? Look, the point of a gun is to kill or destroy something, the only safety aspect is that the shooter should remain safe (i.e. the gun shouldn't blow up and maim me when I shoot it). Beyond that they're not safe, and, furthermore, that's the entire point.
My entire family knows how to shoot and handle guns. If someone breaks in while my kids are home and I'm not, they know how to take care of business. God forbid there would be a gun that they would point at someone and it had a "safety" feature that cost them their lives.
Likewise, I'd hate to be a police officer or soldier and know that if one of my colleagues was shot and possibly put out of action I wouldn't have his weapon available if I needed it.
I don't even know why we're having these "debates" except that a bunch of gun-hating imbeciles are always looking for some way to get their camels nose under the tent.
Re:Perl where are you tonight
on
Perl Turns 25
·
· Score: 2
Gov. Martin O'Malley said Tuesday that state law bars contractors from being paid based on the number of citations issued or paid —an approach used by Baltimore City, Baltimore County, Howard County and elsewhere. 'The law says you're not supposed to charge by volume. I don't think we should charge by volume,' O'Malley said. "If any county is, they need to change their program."
Really? And what are you going to do if they don't change their programs? Oh, I know the answer: nothing.
Florida recently passed a state law regulating guns in the state. The law explicitly preempts any local laws. Good start.
But, then they added teeth:
"Ay public official who passes or enforces gun regulations below the state level faces a $5,000 personal fine and could even be removed from office by the governor for enacting or enforcing local gun laws."
See, it's one thing to say "duh, hey, you ain't supposed to do that". It's quite another to say "You can't do that, and if you do you will personally pay a $5,000 fine".
If you're serious about keeping municipalities from awarding contracts for speed cameras that are based on volume then you need to amend your law so that any officials in any municipality that does award or pay on such a contract is personally fined. It'll end tomorrow.
While you're at it you need to point out to your AG that an officer perjured himself when he signed off on this ticket. He needs to be prosecuted.
Why not require cops to put video/audio recorders in all their cars and require them to keep the tapes for 2 years. Make any missing tape a felony so that the incentive to "lose" them disappears. That would do more to make our country a better place than keeping SMS messages.
Why not just buy the cheaper, Windows version, reject the EULA and demand a refund, then install Linux yourself?
Good question. The answer is that Dell has put in extra work (and, therefore, money) to make good Linux drivers to support their specific hardware out of the box. To most people who's time is worth anything north of minimum wage $50 is a pretty good deal for not having to spend hours of time trying to get everything to work. Given that they will sell 50-100 times as many Windows laptops in this line (literally) it makes sense that the Linux solution will cost a little more to cover their overhead.
I'm thinking of getting a new Linux laptop and frankly this looks like a decent option.
Exactly what I came to say. I still use on a daily basis the original Microsoft IntelliMouse on my Windows gaming machine. I have a couple of other Microsoft mice, also. I think I paid $95 for the IntelliMouse - this is when LED mice first came out. It was/is worth every penny.
If they were taking it "seriously" it wouldn't have went on for so long. I got a call on my cell phone yesterday evening from them, and was sometimes getting 3 each day on our home phone. The DNC list is useless if it's not followed up.
My wife is from the Philippines where she became an RN pretty much specifically so she could move to the US. There's an entire industry set up between here and there to bring nurses into the US.
She worked a few jobs when she came to the US, but when I met her she was working at a nursing home. Nearly all of the RNs there were from the Philippines, and they were being paid below-market wages. It was also understaffed. I encouraged (ahem) her to get a better job after we got married and she did. The nursing home ended up having a nasty fire that killed a couple of the residents a few years later.
I keep seeing "capitalism" here. This has nothing to do with capitalism. It's about free markets. In the free market, there's a slight nursing shortage so the wages paid to nurses goes up. As a result, people see that nursing pays more and so more people decide to become RNs. At some point there's an equilibrium established and the wages stabilize but at a higher level than the original.
The government screws up the market. Businesses claim that they can't find nurses (and, in fact, are required to swear to that claim to hire H1-Bs) but in reality they can't find nurses who will work for the crap wages that they want to pay. So they lobby the government to allow them to bring in workers from overseas. They are required to pay them at the same rates that they would pay Americans, but that's irrelevant for three reasons. First, the government doesn't check so nobody does it. Second, by bringing in a bunch of nurses they are messing with the supply/demand curve (adding supply) which results in a lower wage (Econ 101). Third, there's a terrible imbalance of power which results in much worse working conditions and wages. A company can fire an American worker and they'll have to go find another job. But an H1-B? "Firing" means "move back to your home country". My wife mentioned that this was always on her mind.
The bottom line is that we need to let the free market do its thing, which means that wages will rise. It also means the cost of staying in a nursing home will rise. That's how markets work. It's preferable to our workers getting screwed because companies don't want to pay enough.
And I say that as a business owner. I'm familiar with the process because I've actually looked at it from the employer standpoint.
The bottom line is that if you can't find people to take your job, you're not paying enough. Raise your salary offering and you'll get people. Quit using the government to skew the market in your favor.
There's a difference between "capitalism" and "free markets", and you're talking about markets here. The free market pushes the cost of labor up in this case, so employers lobby the government to allow them to bring in cheaper workers to push the cost back down. The problem is (as usual) government.
When was the last time you heard of an airplane hijack after we pumped up security?
There have been multiple attempts since then, including people who have been able to smuggle explosives on board (shoe bomber, underwear bomber, etc.). In every single case *the other passengers* were able to stop the attack.
Look, hijacking only works when you have the cooperation of the other passengers. Even with a weapon, a few guys can't fight 100 others. So traditionally they would tell the other passengers to stay calm and we'll land somewhere else. That's what the 9/11 hijackers did, although on at least one plane they killed some people, also.
9/11 changed all of that, starting over Shanksville. One of the hijackers was left outside the cockpit to watch the other passengers. They ended up torturing him, possibly to death. He was beaten with a fire extinguisher and had boiling water poured on him. The other hijackers ditched the plane when the good guys had broken through the cockpit door. They had likely seen what happened to their buddy outside the door and decided they would rather just die a quick easy death.
Hijacking is finished. It won't happen again because passengers will never again cooperate. This has nothing to do with the TSA.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, say what you want but I went from getting a couple of credit card offers each day on average to getting one every couple of months. It works. I did everything that "they" say to do to cut down on junk mail and it actually dramatically cut down my junk mail.
It was not possible to write an OS in Fortran. You lacked pointers, memory management and pretty much everything useful except the ability to do math and some basic I/O.
You do realize that you just described MS-DOS, right?
We simply recognize that government by necessity must be limited. Think of government like a fire. I use fire to heat my house. By carefully controlling the fire and keeping it in a furnace, I reap the benefits (warmth) without suffering the ill effects (being burned or having property destroyed). If I didn't control that fire, my house would be destroyed. That doesn't mean I have disdain for fire or I hate fire, I just recognize that it must be controlled to be useful.
Government is exactly the same.
I wish I could mod you up. Carter was incompetent, but he was honest to a fault. He's a good man, and I don't think this country will ever see another like him in the presidency.
I know I'm late to the party, but just saw this posted by a friend on Facebook:
"I get up this morning & on the news I hear about a code red drill at ______ _______ High School today, a school that my husband attended & my daughter _____ briefly, so it hit home is why I'm posting this. So they will lock teachers & students in classrooms today & fire blanks into the school while police sweep the school to "familiarize" students & staff with the sounds of gun fire in the school. So too far or good idea?"
I'm choosing "too far". Why in the hell would people need to be familiar with the sounds of gunfire in a school?
I was not aware we had an infinite supply of anything, let alone of skilled / employable CS or IT workers.
If I have a 10 gallon bucket, 11 gallons of water is the same as "infinite" for some operations. The bottom line is that if x IT jobs open up in the US then we can always find x foreign workers to fill them at a lower wage. For the market to think the supply is infinite, I only need one more worker than there are jobs.
Look, I explained this in an earlier post on this subject. My wife came here on an H-1A as an RN. They brought her to work for substandard wages at shitty nursing homes. The nursing homes could easily have hired Americans to work for them, but they found it was cheaper to claim they couldn't find anybody (a legal requirement for petitioning an H-1x) and then hire some foreigner to do it at a paltry wage. They're supposed to treat them well, but trust me - there's a world of difference between a boss that can fire you and one that can put your ass on a plane back to Asia.
I obviously benefitted greatly from this arrangement, and I'm damned glad that I have an asian babe for a wife. Seriously. But the bottom line is that these companies are depressing wages by bringing folks like her over here and then creating a vicious cycle whereby the depressed wages cause even fewer people to want to join that part of the labor market causing them to bring over more foreigners.
I'm not anti-corporate. Hell, I have an ownership stake in multiple companies. What you see here is crony capitalism, and it's good for the cronies and bad for the rest of us. We need to put an end to work visas like this all together and let the market pull these wages up to the level that they should be.
I doubt Friedman would have looked positively on this. I'm a libertarian, and I'm totally against this. It's interfering with a market. There will always be "more demand" because they'll just drive wages low enough that no American will want the jobs.
This isn't the free market at work. The free market raises wages when there's a labor shortage. No, this is crony capitalism, a very different beast.
>'This should be a relatively smooth transition that won't affect current customers"
Every time some corporate droid has told me this regarding a {buyout, merger, acquisition, sale, re-org} a major cockup has followed. The only thing worse is when they use the phrase, "transparent to the end user," and you know the apocalypse is coming next week.
The major cockup started a few years ago shortly after Cisco bought them. It can't get worse under Belkin.
It's sad, really. Back in the day I bought 7 or 8 Linksys routers, many of which were put into service in other ways using openwrt. The replaceable antennae was a wonderful feature that I never needed. A few of them didn't even have the radio turned on.
Anyway, I gave up with the Cisco fiasco and started buying Netgear. While Cisco was busy trying to sell the lowest-spec'd machines that still performed the basic functionality Netgear was selling me a router with the *very* decent hardware specs printed on the box. It totally kicks the asses of desktops that I was using 10 years ago.
So it's good to see Linksys isn't under Cisco anymore. Sad that it's with Belkin, but, whatever. At least there's still some competition.
Start by not using their language. They didn't "confiscate" his camera - they robbed him and stole his camera. See how that's suddenly a different story? But that's the *correct* version of it. "Confiscation" implies that they took it temporarily under some statutory authority. What they actually did was "strong-arm robbery", with an aggravating circumstance of "under color of law" or "with a gun", or both. That's a felony any way you slice it.
I read a lot of these stories, and the press and everybody discussing it uses the weasel language created by law enforcement to cover up LEO crimes. So, a kidnapping becomes a "false arrest" (no such thing, as an "arrest" is defined as "taking someone into custody *under legal authority*"), robbery becomes "confiscation", perjury becomes "made a mistake while filing a sworn affidavit", assault becomes "excessive force", etc. This is a problem. Start calling the crimes by their proper names and it suddenly becomes a lot more difficult to justify it or write it off.
The victim needs to go straight to the DA and demand prosecution. It wouldn't happen unless the prosecutor is honest (and there actually are a few), but with enough noise he'll get his camera back and hopefully someone will get at least a stern talking-to.
I actually thought of that as a snappy comeback on facebook a few days ago. But the fact is that it's not evolution, it's "artificial selection". It's the same process that turned wolves into man's best friend over the last 20,000 or so years.
If Stuart is to be convicted, they will need to prove that charge to a jury.
Which will be hard to do after the government takes all their money and they're left with a public defender assigned by the court.
"Have to"? Why? Because you'd shrivel up and die if you don't have a dose of artificially-flavored popcorn with artificially-sweetened fizzy water within a 2-hour window?
There's likely an "insensitive clod" joke in there....
Besides the fact that it's pointless (why does it matter that my 180km drive is 180,000 meters?) there are reasons to not change. I'm from Brazil, IN:
http://goo.gl/maps/GQt46
Take a good look at all of those squares. Want to guess how big they are? The land is platted in acres, of which there are 640 per square mile. Normally in that area, the townships are 36 square miles - known as sections - and individual pieces of land go down to 1/16th of that. Obviously they can be subdivided smaller, but the 40 acre plot is common. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_(United_States_land_surveying)
People who advocate for changing to all metric don't know what kind of clusterf*ck they're wishing on themselves.
Preach it, brother. When my youngest was in kindergarten his teacher wrote me a note one day that said "Joby seems to be obsessed with guns and always draws them." I wrote back "Yes, he is what's known as a "boy", and they do those things. Please contact me if you see him becoming obsessed with Barbie dolls." She never wrote back. This was a lady who's "top students" each year tended to be girls, go figure.
Are knives also "exempt"? Look, the point of a gun is to kill or destroy something, the only safety aspect is that the shooter should remain safe (i.e. the gun shouldn't blow up and maim me when I shoot it). Beyond that they're not safe, and, furthermore, that's the entire point.
My entire family knows how to shoot and handle guns. If someone breaks in while my kids are home and I'm not, they know how to take care of business. God forbid there would be a gun that they would point at someone and it had a "safety" feature that cost them their lives.
Likewise, I'd hate to be a police officer or soldier and know that if one of my colleagues was shot and possibly put out of action I wouldn't have his weapon available if I needed it.
I don't even know why we're having these "debates" except that a bunch of gun-hating imbeciles are always looking for some way to get their camels nose under the tent.
In case you need the tune:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpNJuS3b0So
Really? And what are you going to do if they don't change their programs? Oh, I know the answer: nothing.
Florida recently passed a state law regulating guns in the state. The law explicitly preempts any local laws. Good start.
But, then they added teeth:
"Ay public official who passes or enforces gun regulations below the state level faces a $5,000 personal fine and could even be removed from office by the governor for enacting or enforcing local gun laws."
See, it's one thing to say "duh, hey, you ain't supposed to do that". It's quite another to say "You can't do that, and if you do you will personally pay a $5,000 fine".
If you're serious about keeping municipalities from awarding contracts for speed cameras that are based on volume then you need to amend your law so that any officials in any municipality that does award or pay on such a contract is personally fined. It'll end tomorrow.
While you're at it you need to point out to your AG that an officer perjured himself when he signed off on this ticket. He needs to be prosecuted.
Why not require cops to put video/audio recorders in all their cars and require them to keep the tapes for 2 years. Make any missing tape a felony so that the incentive to "lose" them disappears. That would do more to make our country a better place than keeping SMS messages.
We have a black hole in DC that accounts for 20 something % of our economic mass...
Why not just buy the cheaper, Windows version, reject the EULA and demand a refund, then install Linux yourself?
Good question. The answer is that Dell has put in extra work (and, therefore, money) to make good Linux drivers to support their specific hardware out of the box. To most people who's time is worth anything north of minimum wage $50 is a pretty good deal for not having to spend hours of time trying to get everything to work. Given that they will sell 50-100 times as many Windows laptops in this line (literally) it makes sense that the Linux solution will cost a little more to cover their overhead.
I'm thinking of getting a new Linux laptop and frankly this looks like a decent option.
Exactly what I came to say. I still use on a daily basis the original Microsoft IntelliMouse on my Windows gaming machine. I have a couple of other Microsoft mice, also. I think I paid $95 for the IntelliMouse - this is when LED mice first came out. It was/is worth every penny.
If they were taking it "seriously" it wouldn't have went on for so long. I got a call on my cell phone yesterday evening from them, and was sometimes getting 3 each day on our home phone. The DNC list is useless if it's not followed up.
My wife is from the Philippines where she became an RN pretty much specifically so she could move to the US. There's an entire industry set up between here and there to bring nurses into the US.
She worked a few jobs when she came to the US, but when I met her she was working at a nursing home. Nearly all of the RNs there were from the Philippines, and they were being paid below-market wages. It was also understaffed. I encouraged (ahem) her to get a better job after we got married and she did. The nursing home ended up having a nasty fire that killed a couple of the residents a few years later.
I keep seeing "capitalism" here. This has nothing to do with capitalism. It's about free markets. In the free market, there's a slight nursing shortage so the wages paid to nurses goes up. As a result, people see that nursing pays more and so more people decide to become RNs. At some point there's an equilibrium established and the wages stabilize but at a higher level than the original.
The government screws up the market. Businesses claim that they can't find nurses (and, in fact, are required to swear to that claim to hire H1-Bs) but in reality they can't find nurses who will work for the crap wages that they want to pay. So they lobby the government to allow them to bring in workers from overseas. They are required to pay them at the same rates that they would pay Americans, but that's irrelevant for three reasons. First, the government doesn't check so nobody does it. Second, by bringing in a bunch of nurses they are messing with the supply/demand curve (adding supply) which results in a lower wage (Econ 101). Third, there's a terrible imbalance of power which results in much worse working conditions and wages. A company can fire an American worker and they'll have to go find another job. But an H1-B? "Firing" means "move back to your home country". My wife mentioned that this was always on her mind.
The bottom line is that we need to let the free market do its thing, which means that wages will rise. It also means the cost of staying in a nursing home will rise. That's how markets work. It's preferable to our workers getting screwed because companies don't want to pay enough.
And I say that as a business owner. I'm familiar with the process because I've actually looked at it from the employer standpoint.
The bottom line is that if you can't find people to take your job, you're not paying enough. Raise your salary offering and you'll get people. Quit using the government to skew the market in your favor.
There's a difference between "capitalism" and "free markets", and you're talking about markets here. The free market pushes the cost of labor up in this case, so employers lobby the government to allow them to bring in cheaper workers to push the cost back down. The problem is (as usual) government.
There have been multiple attempts since then, including people who have been able to smuggle explosives on board (shoe bomber, underwear bomber, etc.). In every single case *the other passengers* were able to stop the attack.
Look, hijacking only works when you have the cooperation of the other passengers. Even with a weapon, a few guys can't fight 100 others. So traditionally they would tell the other passengers to stay calm and we'll land somewhere else. That's what the 9/11 hijackers did, although on at least one plane they killed some people, also.
9/11 changed all of that, starting over Shanksville. One of the hijackers was left outside the cockpit to watch the other passengers. They ended up torturing him, possibly to death. He was beaten with a fire extinguisher and had boiling water poured on him. The other hijackers ditched the plane when the good guys had broken through the cockpit door. They had likely seen what happened to their buddy outside the door and decided they would rather just die a quick easy death.
Hijacking is finished. It won't happen again because passengers will never again cooperate. This has nothing to do with the TSA.