the pervasive pressure that's exerted against people who aren't like you [...] But we can get even better than that and be pretty good and inclusive.
So why must the pendulum swing the other way? Why can't Google offer free coding lessons to anyone and try their best to employ processes to make sure that they are advertising so as diverse a population as possible and nothing is in place that might favor one group over another? (Bonus points for transparency in that.) And if, despite their best efforts to be inclusive, the turnout is vastly white male it would be useful to find out why. Are the minorities/women threatened by the prospect of being around so many white males? Are they disinterested in coding in general? In how Google was presenting it?
Do Asians get to take part in this? Or are they not allowed because their quota has been met? At least here in America, they're still a minority (Wiki says 6% in 2010.)
I guarantee you if the headline read "Google is Offering Free Coding Lessons to White Males" the same "equal rights" people who view their current action as a Very Good Thing would rage with the power of a thousand suns. I'm not against equality, but I'm for equal equality. I wouldn't try to stop Google from doing this (I don't see it as a bad thing, I just think it's misguided, and it's a private initiative), but I await the day when elementary schools and nursing programs having hiring/teaching days targeting males.
What needs to happen is a permanent recording of all interactions with people so they can't just get together and decide what their story will be.
Agreed. At the same time, legal teams and individual citizens can tie up the courts with counter-claims, so not only would constant monitoring of the police keep the system from abusing the people, but it would decrease the potential for the people to abuse the system. So these systems save a lot of headache (at the very least) for a lot of people and should be mandatory for all standard police forces.
I'm a long-time gamer, and I was astounded at the demo as well. It doesn't claim otherwise, so I assume the video is not from in-game footage, but just the design and suggestion really riled my inner geek. If their final product can reach even 70% of what the video suggests, it will be amazing......and that's the problem. As beautiful as the trailer is to me, there is a lot being promised and I doubt they can deliver on that, much like Fable. Fable (at least the first one) was still a good game, but it was far more limited than originally promised. And Molyneaux probably had a team of more than 10 people behind him when he made those promises.
Sadly, this is probably either vaporware or will be underwhelming when released.
I went to an interview for a tech company (can't remember what they did now, this was years ago) and one of the questions went something like "We're looking for people who will be dedicated to our small company; right now most everyone regularly works 10 hours a day. Would this be a problem for you?" I can't remember my exact answer, but I tried to be clear but soft that I had no interest in doing that on a constant basis. While there were more questions, the interview basically ended at that point for me and, I'm sure, for them.
Crunch time happens, but it should be rare and compensated. If it's not rare, then something is seriously wrong at the company in the way it manages people, it's business, or all of the above. Thankfully, at my current job when I hit 40 hours I'm out the door unless there is something seriously wrong or I'm way behind a massive deadline (and those are rare to begin with). No one makes a peep about this, and everyone else does the same. My income isn't high compared to averages for the area for my job, but so long as I can survive I'm okay with that if it means not being beat like a rented mule.
Seriously. Try getting by on $30-35K a year. Now try doing it WITH STUDENT LOANS.
Adjusted to my situations. Thanks to believing the lies/myth that if I go to college and get a degree I'll get out with, at worst, a moderately paying job and those loans will be no biggy.
So, being a white male that did almost no extracurricular activities in high school, I had almost no scholarships and just put in for massive loans each year to also help cover room & board. It didn't help that I chose to go to an expensive, out of state, private university. (In fact, Yahoo! Finance did a piece recently on university costs, using my alma matter as a central example. Apparently it's now about $37K/yr there; when I was a freshman a decade ago it was about $30K.) And so I graduated, right after the Great Recession started, with approx. $150,000 in student loan debt. Unable to get a job, I did a stint in the military and took part in their Loan Repayment Program; between that and regular, minimum payments of $900/mo I'm down to $111,000.
I'm able to pay it with my current job (roughly $38K take home), but I live paycheck to paycheck and with such a massive debt over my head as I near 30 I don't even consider things like relationships, hobbies, or getting a place of my own.
It's classic divide and conquer, helped along with everyone thinking they're not only above average but such special snowlakes they can write their own ticket as soon as someone notices their talents - any day now.
I never thought about it that way, but perhaps this is the result of the ideal in many schools/communities that everyone is completely equal no matter what they do. "Okay, you all played kick ball, so everyone gets a blue ribbon, yay!" "Oh, you won the championship kick ball game? Good job, here's your blue participation ribbon!"
The result being that when you grow up you think you're on the same level as everyone, regardless of actually being better or worse in any particular area, so you don't see the point in unions because "everyone is the same, they can just go to management and talk it out!" because they think management is also the same. And then management, who grew up in a different generation and/or knows better, takes full advantage of this.
That being said, it's remarkable they're still in business.
Aye, but I'm thankful they are. I think it's because general trust in them is so deep that they keep a steady readership. They also lock most of their stuff online behind a paywall (especially auto reviews, which I'm sure gets them most of their attention; after all, if you're looking to buy an $XXK car, dropping $5-10 for a short subscription to their site makes sense.)
It also wouldn't surprise me if they were extremely zealous in keeping sites from reposting their material, though I've not actually heard of actions on their part.
Or they can what Consumer Reports does: Buy the models themselves. I didn't see mention of it while skimming TFA, but many review sites/publications use samples/loaners from companies, making this kind of bait-and-switch easy.
Sure, this means they might not get the review out before it's released, but that also makes this kind of thing far harder to do. (They could still release a first batch of high-quality items, and then successive batches use lower-quality parts, but that still costs more money and will mean less people swindled.)
You're making a big assumption, in that our metaphorical bread winner has a car. This isn't always the case, and in poor areas the lack of a car not only makes getting a job harder, but it also makes getting proper food harder due to the lack of local markets. And, even if that person somehow had unlimited funds for food, they are still at a disadvantage because they can't buy in bulk, being limited to whatever they can carry in that trip.
Sprawling suburbs have the same problem, but we don't notice it because we're used to driving multiple miles, sometimes out of our way, to go grocery shopping. This is thanks to many of our zoning laws, because having a small shopping center in the middle of suburban areas is somehow a travesty to many people (NIMBYs?)
Because most grocers don't like losing shedloads of money due to food-stamp/EBT fraud, shoplifting, robberies, etc.
It's not just due to those, but the added cost of getting food (especially fresh food) into dense cities, and that's just on the financial side. You can't regularly drive huge 18 wheelers down the streets of an urban population, to my knowledge. Food deserts are a relatively new problem.
Second, I read an article last year (or the year before) that tried to work out how many people it actually takes to get someone on the ballot. I wish I could find it now, it was incredibly insightful. (My first born to the man or woman who can find it in my stead.) It talked about the primaries, the selection of convention delegates, how people are chosen to run, etc., some of which is controlled by state laws (like having to register as a party to partake in that party's primary.) I believe the final number was something like a few tens of thousands people decide who gets on the ballot in the major parties, leaving the millions of people who staunchly tow their respective parties to have "only" one option (because, what, vote for third party? You're mad, that's just throwing your vote away!)
The problems in our national politics are far deeper than people voting only with regard to "their" party, though if we could at least get them to acknowledge third parties that would be a major advancement.
Oh, come now. Given our political climate, I'm sure any despot that the oligarchy put on the ballot (for either party) would be just as happy to allow or order such acts.
It's not that you give President Obama too much blame, it's that you give him too much credit.
Then you are naive, at best. Even if he came back to the states today, there is no possible way for him to get a fair trial. It would be a huge miracle for such a trial to even be public, given our government.
Consider that it took one person eight years to get taken off the no-fly list after being put on for what is reportedly a government mistake. Part of the reason (if not the entire reason) for that was the continued insistence by the Justice Department that they couldn't reveal why she was on the list, even just to her own attorneys, because it was a state secret:
Holder and Clapper argue that U.S. national security could be seriously or significantly harmed if Ibrahim or her lawyers are provided with classified information about whether she was the subject of an intelligence or terrorism investigation or about the standards for inclusion in a database called the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) could harm national security.
This is how our government reacts for a single individual who has been unable to use air travel because of the mistake of a lone public worker.
While he did technically break many laws, it was justifiable because of the sincere good it did in revealing just how unconstitutional our government acts, which is the first step necessary to making it stop. In order to prove that it was justified, he would have to present evidence of the wrong-doing of the government. Do you honestly believe he wouldn't be completely stonewalled and railroaded by the Justice Department, Congress, and whoever was the President? Even if the documents are now in the public eye, they can still be withheld from trial; nevermind the mountain he would have to claim to extricate extra documentation from the NSA proving how much shit they do.
The only way for Snowden to come back with any hint of safety is a Presidential Pardon; I'll know our nation has finally grown up and stopped being scared of the invisible monster under its bed once that happens, if it ever does.
In 120 years people will laugh at the primitives from the early 2000's who reacted with shock and horror to Google glass.
Yes, and in 120 years there will be a similar uproar over FutureBrainWave's BrainReader, wearable tech which can roughly read the thoughts of people in a specific vicinity and upload them to the Stratosphere (the replacement of the Cloud).
The tinfoil in me says that these "stingrays" don't exist at all; instead, whenever law enforcement gets info from their NSA buddies concerning cell phone use/location, these mysterious "stingray" devices are stated as the way the defendant was found. The documents the ALCU would have obtained probably showed the devices (if there are even any physical objects) to be 100% useless at best, leading to further digging, and the eventual revelation of unconstitutional searches that these "devices" lead to.
Maybe it's just the cynic in me speaking, but what if the whole thing is a false flag? "Well, if $100M can't fix public education, perhaps we should [[raise|remove] the H1B cap | make it easier to start private schools and give them all the money | some other bullshit]."
In addition, according to the MSN article:
In 2010, Mayor Booker found a loophole in getting money to help fund Newark's educational reform. It came in the form of philanthropic donations, which, unlike government funding, required no public review of priorities or spending. Gov. Christie approved the plan, and Booker's job was to find the donors. [...] The reform ended up looking like this: taking low-performing public schools and closing them, turning them into charter schools and "themed" high schools. But there was no easy way to expand charters without destabilizing traditional public schools.
In the months following the gift announcement, Booker and Christie still had no superstar superintendent and no reform plan.
(Emphasis mine.) This only happened due to a "loophole" in the law, which tells me that there were no good intentions when it went into place. It was probably just as much a bribe--sorry, lobbying effort--to friends and family of Christie, Booker, or both, as it was a school reform effort. And, unfortunately, even if it was totally legit, it wouldn't have worked thanks to an issue mentioned in the article:
Booker appointed Cami Anderson for the job. She implemented ways to help students and improve schools (all which The New Yorker detailed), but there were roadblocks along the way, like how the students brought the issues going on in their homes with them to the classroom.
You could have the best classrooms, the best tech, the best teachers, and no nagging administration; but if the students aren't getting meals outside of school, if they have to walk to/from school worried about being accosted by gangs or thugs, if their parents aren't around (be it from abandonment or working multiple jobs) and able to be involved in both making sure the student studies and within the school, then scores and the graduation rate will likely improve at a rate that would be considered a rounding error.
If that money had gone to improve the community (primarily through offering local, well-paying jobs to the parents, secondarily through safety concerns) then I believe it would have done far, far more to improve student education then any effort they undertook.
2. laugh track (these annoy the living crap out of me...."hahahahahha"....)
I actually appreciate these. If I'm looking at new shows and one has laughing overdubbed (be it a live audience or laughtrack), it lets me know the show is worthless and saves me a bunch of time. If a show thinks it need to prompt me to laugh, it certainly has horrible writing.
All the comedies I've enjoyed in the past decade have been without such a track. Arrested Development, The Office, Parks & Rec, Community, none of these have laugh tracks as a regular thing (some may have done an ep or two with them as a rip on such comedies); they all tend to have deeper stories than laughtrack fodder, too. I think the last show I really enjoyed that had a track/audience was Frasier.
Just because I see so many friends/family rave about it, I figure one day I should watch at least one episode of TBBT, but the fact that none of those people are someone I'd consider "geeky" in the least does not give me any optimism about such a viewing.
Something else I've wondered about is why, if we believe these people are the worst of the worst, we don't use them as case studies in psychoanalysis/physiology. Sure, few might be willing to participate (any number of offered privileges could be used as incentive, though), and even if they do it wouldn't be an ideal situation (if the examiner/pshrink could even be in the same room, they'd be surrounded by guards and/or council, likely), but they could so provide valuable insight into human development that might allow us to recognize these kind of people at an earlier stage and get them proper help.
Could well be that the people our society are so interested in killing are worth more to us alive than dead.
I think a part of this is that, as we grow up, we think back to the things we loved and give them a deeper look. We find a number of lesser questions and plotholes and try to answer those questions or fill those holes, both within our own minds and in discussions with fellow fans. Over time pockets of the fandom (or even just a lone super-fan) come to a rough consensus on this or that, and it becomes "headcanon". So when we go back to watch the movies, the headcanon comes with us and our glasses stay tinted. But kids, or even people new to the property, have no such glasses or headcanon, and so the more action/CGI-heavy films make it easier to keep them entertained.
The problem is the people that vote because of the last commercial they saw. There are a lot of uninformed, stupid, lazy people who think it is a good idea that they vote anyway.
I don't disagree about people being stupid and uniformed. But the more money you have, the more frequent your ads can be, the more likely they become the "last commercial". So if people vote by that standard (and I'd argue that you're giving them too much credit; many just look for that R or D and call it a day) then "Big X" still controls how they vote through their financial support.
I don't know about recycling--if there really are that many cartridges, you could make some chic video game partitions or something out of them, assuming the only thing physically wrong with them is having some dirt/dust.
What is the possibility for another SOPA-level response? Some internet companies, like Facebook, might like this because they will happily pay for any chance to trounce fledgling competitors, but certainly other bastions of the Internet like Wikipedia would be quite hurt by it.
I doubt any senator (of either party) really gives a flying fuck, and would in fact support this change because their buddies^W^W^W^Wlobbyists^W^W^W^W^Wconstituents told them they should, so only a public outcry of such proportions would do anything to reverse it.
But be wary of their intervention: If they intervened they would put the kibosh on a "speed lane", but at the same time they would probably add a shitload of other things that benefits the NSA and/or "constituents". And funding for a few statues and other non-related issues for shits and giggles.
Re:Hello, they are douchebags, what is the problem
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Hulu Blocks VPN Users
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Aye. The only reason I use Hulu primarily is because I can get it for free, and in exchange for that I'm fine with the ads. But the minute that the free version goes away, or the average commercial time per show outpaces regular TV (right now I believe it's 25% less or so) I will completely drop them and get a Netflix account.
If Hulu Plus were ad free or, hell, I could just watch the "Free" content with no ads for the same (or even double!) the price, I would have signed up years ago. Their excuse for still having ads when Hulu Plus was first announced (dunno if they still cling to it) was that the subscription fees are strictly for paying for the licensing fees of the "expanded content" (which doesn't seem that expanded,) but I (and others here, it seems) suspect that Hulu is an ad-delivery network, where the ads are supported by content, and closing the VPNs was about keeping their various ways of tracking people from becoming less effective.
Personally, I'm done paying for ads. It's the same reason I don't buy magazines anymore; I had a subscription to Wired for a few years, but when I realized that each issue contained more pages of ads than content I stopped renewing (I spent a fun 10 minutes finding and ripping out every page in one issue that was an ad on both sides, and after that the issue felt 1/4 lighter and still had ads almost every other page.) I'm willing to deal with ads or pay money (as possible), but not both.
Just want to give a second to T-Mobile. While their coverage is paltry compared to Verizon, I dropped Verizon (and had a poor time with their customer service trying to get pro-rated) back in October and am quite happy with my decision, even with that extra pain.
Since I barely use my phone I got a pay-as-you-go plan and, at least as I was informed, I can easily upgrade that to a monthly no-contract plan if I need to. (I'll be testing that next month when I upgrade briefly since I'm going on a trip I think I'll be using it a lot on.) So far I've paid about $10-15/mo, compared to my Verizon monthly bill of $75 (they required me to get a data plan since I had a smartphone, which is another reason I dropped them since I didn't want the data.)
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So why must the pendulum swing the other way? Why can't Google offer free coding lessons to anyone and try their best to employ processes to make sure that they are advertising so as diverse a population as possible and nothing is in place that might favor one group over another? (Bonus points for transparency in that.) And if, despite their best efforts to be inclusive, the turnout is vastly white male it would be useful to find out why. Are the minorities/women threatened by the prospect of being around so many white males? Are they disinterested in coding in general? In how Google was presenting it?
Do Asians get to take part in this? Or are they not allowed because their quota has been met? At least here in America, they're still a minority (Wiki says 6% in 2010.)
I guarantee you if the headline read "Google is Offering Free Coding Lessons to White Males" the same "equal rights" people who view their current action as a Very Good Thing would rage with the power of a thousand suns. I'm not against equality, but I'm for equal equality. I wouldn't try to stop Google from doing this (I don't see it as a bad thing, I just think it's misguided, and it's a private initiative), but I await the day when elementary schools and nursing programs having hiring/teaching days targeting males.
Agreed. At the same time, legal teams and individual citizens can tie up the courts with counter-claims, so not only would constant monitoring of the police keep the system from abusing the people, but it would decrease the potential for the people to abuse the system. So these systems save a lot of headache (at the very least) for a lot of people and should be mandatory for all standard police forces.
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
I'm a long-time gamer, and I was astounded at the demo as well. It doesn't claim otherwise, so I assume the video is not from in-game footage, but just the design and suggestion really riled my inner geek. If their final product can reach even 70% of what the video suggests, it will be amazing... ...and that's the problem. As beautiful as the trailer is to me, there is a lot being promised and I doubt they can deliver on that, much like Fable. Fable (at least the first one) was still a good game, but it was far more limited than originally promised. And Molyneaux probably had a team of more than 10 people behind him when he made those promises.
Sadly, this is probably either vaporware or will be underwhelming when released.
I went to an interview for a tech company (can't remember what they did now, this was years ago) and one of the questions went something like "We're looking for people who will be dedicated to our small company; right now most everyone regularly works 10 hours a day. Would this be a problem for you?" I can't remember my exact answer, but I tried to be clear but soft that I had no interest in doing that on a constant basis. While there were more questions, the interview basically ended at that point for me and, I'm sure, for them.
Crunch time happens, but it should be rare and compensated. If it's not rare, then something is seriously wrong at the company in the way it manages people, it's business, or all of the above. Thankfully, at my current job when I hit 40 hours I'm out the door unless there is something seriously wrong or I'm way behind a massive deadline (and those are rare to begin with). No one makes a peep about this, and everyone else does the same. My income isn't high compared to averages for the area for my job, but so long as I can survive I'm okay with that if it means not being beat like a rented mule.
Adjusted to my situations. Thanks to believing the lies/myth that if I go to college and get a degree I'll get out with, at worst, a moderately paying job and those loans will be no biggy.
So, being a white male that did almost no extracurricular activities in high school, I had almost no scholarships and just put in for massive loans each year to also help cover room & board. It didn't help that I chose to go to an expensive, out of state, private university. (In fact, Yahoo! Finance did a piece recently on university costs, using my alma matter as a central example. Apparently it's now about $37K/yr there; when I was a freshman a decade ago it was about $30K.) And so I graduated, right after the Great Recession started, with approx. $150,000 in student loan debt. Unable to get a job, I did a stint in the military and took part in their Loan Repayment Program; between that and regular, minimum payments of $900/mo I'm down to $111,000.
I'm able to pay it with my current job (roughly $38K take home), but I live paycheck to paycheck and with such a massive debt over my head as I near 30 I don't even consider things like relationships, hobbies, or getting a place of my own.
It's classic divide and conquer, helped along with everyone thinking they're not only above average but such special snowlakes they can write their own ticket as soon as someone notices their talents - any day now.
I never thought about it that way, but perhaps this is the result of the ideal in many schools/communities that everyone is completely equal no matter what they do. "Okay, you all played kick ball, so everyone gets a blue ribbon, yay!" "Oh, you won the championship kick ball game? Good job, here's your blue participation ribbon!"
The result being that when you grow up you think you're on the same level as everyone, regardless of actually being better or worse in any particular area, so you don't see the point in unions because "everyone is the same, they can just go to management and talk it out!" because they think management is also the same. And then management, who grew up in a different generation and/or knows better, takes full advantage of this.
Don't forget all the dancing!
Aye, but I'm thankful they are. I think it's because general trust in them is so deep that they keep a steady readership. They also lock most of their stuff online behind a paywall (especially auto reviews, which I'm sure gets them most of their attention; after all, if you're looking to buy an $XXK car, dropping $5-10 for a short subscription to their site makes sense.)
It also wouldn't surprise me if they were extremely zealous in keeping sites from reposting their material, though I've not actually heard of actions on their part.
Or they can what Consumer Reports does: Buy the models themselves. I didn't see mention of it while skimming TFA, but many review sites/publications use samples/loaners from companies, making this kind of bait-and-switch easy.
Sure, this means they might not get the review out before it's released, but that also makes this kind of thing far harder to do. (They could still release a first batch of high-quality items, and then successive batches use lower-quality parts, but that still costs more money and will mean less people swindled.)
You're making a big assumption, in that our metaphorical bread winner has a car. This isn't always the case, and in poor areas the lack of a car not only makes getting a job harder, but it also makes getting proper food harder due to the lack of local markets. And, even if that person somehow had unlimited funds for food, they are still at a disadvantage because they can't buy in bulk, being limited to whatever they can carry in that trip.
Sprawling suburbs have the same problem, but we don't notice it because we're used to driving multiple miles, sometimes out of our way, to go grocery shopping. This is thanks to many of our zoning laws, because having a small shopping center in the middle of suburban areas is somehow a travesty to many people (NIMBYs?)
It's not just due to those, but the added cost of getting food (especially fresh food) into dense cities, and that's just on the financial side. You can't regularly drive huge 18 wheelers down the streets of an urban population, to my knowledge. Food deserts are a relatively new problem.
Actually, no. Not for the two sides of the Establishment Party, anyway.
First, in 2011, 196 people provided almost 80% of the funding to all Super PACs. The one with the most funding is also often the winner, though thankfully we have a recent case to show there are outliers.
Second, I read an article last year (or the year before) that tried to work out how many people it actually takes to get someone on the ballot. I wish I could find it now, it was incredibly insightful. (My first born to the man or woman who can find it in my stead.) It talked about the primaries, the selection of convention delegates, how people are chosen to run, etc., some of which is controlled by state laws (like having to register as a party to partake in that party's primary.) I believe the final number was something like a few tens of thousands people decide who gets on the ballot in the major parties, leaving the millions of people who staunchly tow their respective parties to have "only" one option (because, what, vote for third party? You're mad, that's just throwing your vote away!)
The problems in our national politics are far deeper than people voting only with regard to "their" party, though if we could at least get them to acknowledge third parties that would be a major advancement.
Oh, come now. Given our political climate, I'm sure any despot that the oligarchy put on the ballot (for either party) would be just as happy to allow or order such acts.
It's not that you give President Obama too much blame, it's that you give him too much credit.
Then you are naive, at best. Even if he came back to the states today, there is no possible way for him to get a fair trial. It would be a huge miracle for such a trial to even be public, given our government.
Consider that it took one person eight years to get taken off the no-fly list after being put on for what is reportedly a government mistake. Part of the reason (if not the entire reason) for that was the continued insistence by the Justice Department that they couldn't reveal why she was on the list, even just to her own attorneys, because it was a state secret:
This is how our government reacts for a single individual who has been unable to use air travel because of the mistake of a lone public worker.
While he did technically break many laws, it was justifiable because of the sincere good it did in revealing just how unconstitutional our government acts, which is the first step necessary to making it stop. In order to prove that it was justified, he would have to present evidence of the wrong-doing of the government. Do you honestly believe he wouldn't be completely stonewalled and railroaded by the Justice Department, Congress, and whoever was the President? Even if the documents are now in the public eye, they can still be withheld from trial; nevermind the mountain he would have to claim to extricate extra documentation from the NSA proving how much shit they do.
The only way for Snowden to come back with any hint of safety is a Presidential Pardon; I'll know our nation has finally grown up and stopped being scared of the invisible monster under its bed once that happens, if it ever does.
Yes, and in 120 years there will be a similar uproar over FutureBrainWave's BrainReader, wearable tech which can roughly read the thoughts of people in a specific vicinity and upload them to the Stratosphere (the replacement of the Cloud).
The tinfoil in me says that these "stingrays" don't exist at all; instead, whenever law enforcement gets info from their NSA buddies concerning cell phone use/location, these mysterious "stingray" devices are stated as the way the defendant was found. The documents the ALCU would have obtained probably showed the devices (if there are even any physical objects) to be 100% useless at best, leading to further digging, and the eventual revelation of unconstitutional searches that these "devices" lead to.
Maybe it's just the cynic in me speaking, but what if the whole thing is a false flag? "Well, if $100M can't fix public education, perhaps we should [[raise|remove] the H1B cap | make it easier to start private schools and give them all the money | some other bullshit]."
In addition, according to the MSN article:
(Emphasis mine.) This only happened due to a "loophole" in the law, which tells me that there were no good intentions when it went into place. It was probably just as much a bribe--sorry, lobbying effort--to friends and family of Christie, Booker, or both, as it was a school reform effort. And, unfortunately, even if it was totally legit, it wouldn't have worked thanks to an issue mentioned in the article:
You could have the best classrooms, the best tech, the best teachers, and no nagging administration; but if the students aren't getting meals outside of school, if they have to walk to/from school worried about being accosted by gangs or thugs, if their parents aren't around (be it from abandonment or working multiple jobs) and able to be involved in both making sure the student studies and within the school, then scores and the graduation rate will likely improve at a rate that would be considered a rounding error.
If that money had gone to improve the community (primarily through offering local, well-paying jobs to the parents, secondarily through safety concerns) then I believe it would have done far, far more to improve student education then any effort they undertook.
Hahaha, excellent joke! Caught me completely by surprise. Are you a comedian, per chance?
I actually appreciate these. If I'm looking at new shows and one has laughing overdubbed (be it a live audience or laughtrack), it lets me know the show is worthless and saves me a bunch of time. If a show thinks it need to prompt me to laugh, it certainly has horrible writing.
All the comedies I've enjoyed in the past decade have been without such a track. Arrested Development, The Office, Parks & Rec, Community, none of these have laugh tracks as a regular thing (some may have done an ep or two with them as a rip on such comedies); they all tend to have deeper stories than laughtrack fodder, too. I think the last show I really enjoyed that had a track/audience was Frasier.
Just because I see so many friends/family rave about it, I figure one day I should watch at least one episode of TBBT, but the fact that none of those people are someone I'd consider "geeky" in the least does not give me any optimism about such a viewing.
Something else I've wondered about is why, if we believe these people are the worst of the worst, we don't use them as case studies in psychoanalysis/physiology. Sure, few might be willing to participate (any number of offered privileges could be used as incentive, though), and even if they do it wouldn't be an ideal situation (if the examiner/pshrink could even be in the same room, they'd be surrounded by guards and/or council, likely), but they could so provide valuable insight into human development that might allow us to recognize these kind of people at an earlier stage and get them proper help.
Could well be that the people our society are so interested in killing are worth more to us alive than dead.
I think a part of this is that, as we grow up, we think back to the things we loved and give them a deeper look. We find a number of lesser questions and plotholes and try to answer those questions or fill those holes, both within our own minds and in discussions with fellow fans. Over time pockets of the fandom (or even just a lone super-fan) come to a rough consensus on this or that, and it becomes "headcanon". So when we go back to watch the movies, the headcanon comes with us and our glasses stay tinted. But kids, or even people new to the property, have no such glasses or headcanon, and so the more action/CGI-heavy films make it easier to keep them entertained.
I don't disagree about people being stupid and uniformed. But the more money you have, the more frequent your ads can be, the more likely they become the "last commercial". So if people vote by that standard (and I'd argue that you're giving them too much credit; many just look for that R or D and call it a day) then "Big X" still controls how they vote through their financial support.
I don't know about recycling--if there really are that many cartridges, you could make some chic video game partitions or something out of them, assuming the only thing physically wrong with them is having some dirt/dust.
What is the possibility for another SOPA-level response? Some internet companies, like Facebook, might like this because they will happily pay for any chance to trounce fledgling competitors, but certainly other bastions of the Internet like Wikipedia would be quite hurt by it.
I doubt any senator (of either party) really gives a flying fuck, and would in fact support this change because their buddies^W^W^W^Wlobbyists^W^W^W^W^Wconstituents told them they should, so only a public outcry of such proportions would do anything to reverse it.
But be wary of their intervention: If they intervened they would put the kibosh on a "speed lane", but at the same time they would probably add a shitload of other things that benefits the NSA and/or "constituents". And funding for a few statues and other non-related issues for shits and giggles.
Aye. The only reason I use Hulu primarily is because I can get it for free, and in exchange for that I'm fine with the ads. But the minute that the free version goes away, or the average commercial time per show outpaces regular TV (right now I believe it's 25% less or so) I will completely drop them and get a Netflix account.
If Hulu Plus were ad free or, hell, I could just watch the "Free" content with no ads for the same (or even double!) the price, I would have signed up years ago. Their excuse for still having ads when Hulu Plus was first announced (dunno if they still cling to it) was that the subscription fees are strictly for paying for the licensing fees of the "expanded content" (which doesn't seem that expanded,) but I (and others here, it seems) suspect that Hulu is an ad-delivery network, where the ads are supported by content, and closing the VPNs was about keeping their various ways of tracking people from becoming less effective.
Personally, I'm done paying for ads. It's the same reason I don't buy magazines anymore; I had a subscription to Wired for a few years, but when I realized that each issue contained more pages of ads than content I stopped renewing (I spent a fun 10 minutes finding and ripping out every page in one issue that was an ad on both sides, and after that the issue felt 1/4 lighter and still had ads almost every other page.) I'm willing to deal with ads or pay money (as possible), but not both.
Just want to give a second to T-Mobile. While their coverage is paltry compared to Verizon, I dropped Verizon (and had a poor time with their customer service trying to get pro-rated) back in October and am quite happy with my decision, even with that extra pain.
Since I barely use my phone I got a pay-as-you-go plan and, at least as I was informed, I can easily upgrade that to a monthly no-contract plan if I need to. (I'll be testing that next month when I upgrade briefly since I'm going on a trip I think I'll be using it a lot on.) So far I've paid about $10-15/mo, compared to my Verizon monthly bill of $75 (they required me to get a data plan since I had a smartphone, which is another reason I dropped them since I didn't want the data.)