If I can get a 10 year, blanket coverage warranty on the Trane HVAC system I'm going to have to install in order to keep it cool, not to mention the active damper system to keep the noise level bearable. Oh, and It'd be pretty cool to have some kind of rebate in place so I can recoup the cost of upgrading the outlets and the breaker box in the house to 100 Amp's a piece.
There was an article on/. a while back about that wonderful, yet dying, breed of adventure game. There's just not enough money in it anymore. The whole industry has seemingly shifted to all FPS and 3D MMORPG's.
I do miss the old days of Lucasarts and Sierra though, they just don't make em like that anymore.:( I would also be voting with my wallet for these games if they still were actually on the market.
See, but you illustrate my point for me. The situation that I originally brought to light, and then you reinforced..shows that a pure libertarian society would be more ruled by FUD than the one we're living in now. Whomever had the biggest guns would rule, and the scary part is, who knows who exactly is going to have those guns. Its easy to say "Well, me", but you don't know that, because there's alot of people out there that are more twisted, and more connected to the means of production than you are.
As in all things, the real answer lies somewhere in the middle.
If I'm not mistaken BMW is still a closely held family company. They've been notorious for years for being low on the reliability totem pole, usually due to German over-engineering. The higher the price != better quality, I know one M3 owner thats had to have 3 rear transaxle replacements due to faulty manufacturing. I know several others who go in at least once a month to get something or other worked on that would be simple in an American Car.
Poppin' and lockin' B-boy that works in a Novell shop. Yes, I get more play than everyone else in the office. Caucasian women seem to respond really well when I break out the beats in the server room and do windmills...eat THAT suit and tie monkeyboy!
As a person who used to DJ and work the sampler into sets from time to time, I can honestly say I probably got better quality ass than the bonafide 'musicians' in local bands from the area. Rock chicks are dirty. At least with the strobelight hunny she'll be waxed, plucked and scented to perfection..Not to mention packaged in some pretty suggestive clothing.
I'll take that over skanky rocker chick any day of the week.
Note: I am a fan of many different flavors of music, so don't think I"m being a reactionary bastard.
Not to be grim, but.. Most people on those flights were probably your typical suburbanites (I'm assuming here, I know), and if you've lived in suburbia for any amount of time, you know that physical, person on person violence is almost alien to most of them, so it doesn't surprise me that nobody got up to make a stand. At the time, people probably cowered in their seats hoping that somehow someone ELSE would take care of the problem. Its the typical softening up of America that I see in this generation (especially this generation) of kids. As we continually shield our people more and more from just about any kind of 'danger', the less they're prepared for it when the shit hits the fan.
I guess the one good thing out of all of this is the flight staff on every plane flying in the US knows that if push comes to shove, anyone making potentially life threatening funnybusiness on a flight nowadays will get their asses beat, and badly not just by the people appointed to do so, but the normal passengers too.
Well, I would theorize that since they have so much heavy equipment down there, something may be suspect. They could very well be testing some kind of equipment to prepare for the RNC.
Its probably the fact that LIRR, Amtrack and NJT operate right across the street from the Copa. Notice the big cement wall that pretty much encapsulates those two blocks..those are the railyards beneath you.
As much as I'd like to agree with this sentiment, working in CompUSA and other places with in house computer support is very akin to working in a Call Center. You only see the bad apples (because the good ones don't make much trouble) and everyone...and I stress EVERYONE has an angle. You'd be very amazed at just how far people will go to get over on you for as little as a dollar. Its shameful.
I'd like to see more information on the technology thats being infringed upon. If Cornice is indeed taking patented technology, ripping it off and using it for their own benefit, then they should be stopped and have to pay for it.
Unlike software patents, which should be treated differently, hardware patents have quite a bit much more riding on the line for the company that chooses to undertake the endeavor of actually designing and manufacturing a piece of hardware.
Oh knock it off with the fear mongering. The erosion of 1st (speech/assembly), 4th (unlawful search/siezure) and 5th (due process/unfair imprisonment) ammendment rights is much more useful as a gauge of where we stand on privacy and liberty issues than whether or not you get to carry a piece. They also paint a much more teffifying picture of where we're headed as a Country.
I never understand why you guys (gun people, of which I am one. Don't own currently, but have in the past) never just come out and say you like guns because you simply..like owning them. Why turn it into a political hot button issue? I can understand the need to address the left's pressure here, but they're wrong too. It shouldn't be that big of a political issue because criminals and other unsavory types WILL find a way to get their hands on guns illegally, so theres no need for a ban. Period.
So stop trying to make some kind of nebulous connection between a police officer's ability to ask for an ID under the law and owning a sidearm. What are you gonna do? Pull it on the cop because he asked you to produce your license??! This is the kind of bullshit thats polluted our system of government away from rational thinking to knee jerk political grandstanding.
The motto in most call centers is: "The customer is always lying", and truthfully..having worked in Tech support for 3 years before getting a full time sysadmin job, I can honestly say that motto is more accurate than the typical mouthbreathers sitting in the queue will ever admit to themselves.
You'd be amazed how many people will call up and blatantly lie about what happened to the equipment even though you KNOW, through experience, what the cause and the fix is. People will complain just for the sake of complaining, or even worse, complain because they know some idiot manager is going to give them a free month of service. Its all a crock of shit.
I will admit though, that the quality of people that they hire nowadays is quite a bit lower than when I first got in the game late last century. Its once again the McDonalds conundrum rearing its ugly head: The pay is 8 bucks an hour if you're lucky. You expect top notch service, yet you wouldn't take that job for that price, so how do we fix the problem? Answer: There is no fix.
Frankly dude, you have nothing to complain about. You're making 150K a year (more than most human beings, college educated or not, will see yearly in a lifetime), you're married and you've probably got a whole lotta respect for what you do.
I'm one of those kids thats half your age, but I failed out of school and immediately went to work during the boom years. After sitting, and learning, in a call center (In Suburban Florida, no less...thats Florida USA! Whodathunkit..;) ) for a couple of years surrounded by ex IBM engineers, millitary guys and various assortments of geeks I managed to work my way up (after moving a 1000 miles north for better pay scales) to a very comfortable position with respect from my peers and superiors. I can honestly say I wouldn't be this far along had I taken a second shot at school and sunk more of my precious time studying theory rather than using practical application..and that brings me to my next point...I'm also not in debt up to my eyeballs, as many people who went to college are, but thats another conversation entirely.
No offense dude, but your little jibe about being a 'fake' IT guy is quite frankly insulting to me and probably every other IT person thats out there who can 'become' the computer. You don't learn this shit in school. You don't learn it by reading books or listening to some PHD drone on about the particulars of database linking. You become it through immersion. The elitist attitude pushed by colleges around the country making it seem like their way is the only way is bunk. If you want to learn a database, learn it...there's no information out there that can be taught in a classroom that can't be found just lying around waiting to be read. Why waste the money and the time away from your kids? So you can get a couple more letters by your name?
Try harder..
What I don't understand is..why doesn't SCO just ask for a quarter or something per copy. I know I know, that requires a checking of personal greed, but when you think about it, thats all they really deserve. They aren't the ones actually doing the improvement on the code base, or finding new and innovative ways to implement it, thats what the open source community does. With a proper tracking system (or at least one that could estimate properly, like ASCAP or BMI licensing if I remember correctly..(please someone explain this if i'm wrong), this could be feasible.
Sco simply doesn't deserve to get paid exhorbinantly for what others have innovated, even if they created it in the first place. Its like saying "Well, yeah you had the idea on how to use it properly, but I would have had that idea eventually too..pay me!"..BS..total BS.. I do hope the courts look at it like this and new law is drafted to address it.
I'm in a sorta same position as you. I work for a government institution (higher education) and they do the same thing. State mandates a 35 hour week (gotta love government). If I only work 32 hours, I'll have to use some personal time to even it out, but I can work over 40 and they can deny OT (which they usually do). There has got to be a law about this somewhere, especially in the case of Government employment.
I have to say though, i really don't mind putting in overtime without pay because this environment is so typically union that all the productivity gains I make (on my own initiative) for the school by streamlining the system means that they leave me to my own devices 95 percent of the time (excluding the mandatory mountain of, mostly useless, paperwork thats customary with Civil Service.). I also don't put in 60 hour weeks very often, my timeclocks usually ending up in the 43-45 hour range. I feel for ya though, if you're doing 60+ regularly. I used to do that when I worked in corporate and I hated it dearly.
This man makes very good points (even though in an RIAA conversation, none of this should have ever come up). African dictators have killed literally MILLIONS of their countrymen. Thats pretty daunting, and yet we did (and do) nothing about it. Same thing goes for Southeast asia during the time of the khmer rouge. Pol Pot and his cronies (under the name of democracy no less!) killed over 1.5 million Cambodians over the course of a decade and we never said squat...
America is a selective liberator, and no one should aruge with that. The problem with this is, the government can't come right out and say why we attacked Iraq in the first place because humanitarians and the general mouthbreathing "accept what you see on TV" populace would freak.
I don't understand why someone made this flamebait, it was very informative.
Being an on again off again import tuner enthusiast, I had an idea about cast vs. forged rims, but I never knew aluminum's properties behaved like that under the stresses that you mentioned. I find that kind of ironic considering all the idiot teenagers driving pimped out 3 series bimwahs all over the suburb I call home.
..Someone mod this up..
Where do the jobs come from in this? Quite simply: They dont. Look at a city like Detroit and other rust belt towns. They're gutted and burned out. They used to be big time producers of product for the American market. Yeah, the products were aimed at Americans but we were paying Americans to construct said products. Now, we're targeting Americans to buy producs but we're paying someone else, so instead of the money just getting sloshed back and forth in house we now are paying an outside entity and trying to sell to the inside, even though the only reason the inside could afford it before was because we were paying themn to build it in the first place..The object of the game, in my simple opionion, would seem to be to earn foreign monies and have them converted into dollars from the outside..because the money system, other than the govt. issuing new bills, is finite..
Ugh, there really isn't any rosey ending at the end of the tunnel for this. Grim indeed..
You ask some mighty important and mighty scary questions. The only straight answer that I've gotten on the whole subject of offshoring and outsourcing is pretty much either (and I'm taking this from Fast company, a couple issues back):
In the Case of Pro: "These countries love American products, they will buy American products when their economy progresses enough"
OR
In the case of Con: "We're giving the keys to our own kingdom away. These countries are not going to give back to us once we give them a good leg to stand on, nor are they going to respect the IP rights that OUR laws (which have been used, frequently, to hurt THEM in the past) afford us.
Now I'm all for being an endless optimist (me being a pretty sappy idealist at heart) but the fact is, humans are a vindictive spiteful bunch that will look to fuck over anyone they can to get ahead. I'm much more inclined to agree with the Con side of things when it comes to predicting whats going to happen. When we were locked in the cold war and even afterwards into the 90's, we've pretty much made an artform out of screwing the little guy over. We touted to the world about how much we have, and how great we are and guess what...the rest of the world now hates us, not for the simple fact that we've achieved, but that (figuratively) we're sitting up in our big house in the gated community thumbing our noses at the rest of the town.. We're like that spoiled little rich bitch that got everything. Is that spoiled little bitch useful? Sure..Can that spoiled little bitch earn when he/she wants to? Hellz yeah, but the perception of the matter is we're a bunch of thankless fatasses that gorge ourselves on everything with little care for anything in this life but ourselves. Well, comeuppance is a bitch and your enemies WILL give it to you when they finally get the means..
And we are giving them those means as we speak...
I know that comes off as fear fueled ranting, but I took a long hard look at what I'd do if I was someone in India or some other quasi third world country, and the only solution I could come to was "Fuck em, I want to get paid"..
The next 20 years should be mighty interesting..
I always find it laughable when people believe that we can go around acting like the villian, give the people we used to fist up the ass all the technology they ever wanted, then NOT expect those same previously-fisted little people to find any way they possibly can to screw us over.. It seriously makes me laugh my ass off..
Whats going to happen is simple: Once these people have a flourishing growing economy like we had decades ago, they're pretty much going to give us the finger and do it all in house, then all we'll get is another situation where india can produce it 100 times cheaper and sell to their own populace with us left out in the cold. If you don't think these countries are going to do this to us, I sincerely hope you take those blinders off your frickin' head.
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If I can get a 10 year, blanket coverage warranty on the Trane HVAC system I'm going to have to install in order to keep it cool, not to mention the active damper system to keep the noise level bearable. Oh, and It'd be pretty cool to have some kind of rebate in place so I can recoup the cost of upgrading the outlets and the breaker box in the house to 100 Amp's a piece.
There was an article on /. a while back about that wonderful, yet dying, breed of adventure game. There's just not enough money in it anymore. The whole industry has seemingly shifted to all FPS and 3D MMORPG's.
:( I would also be voting with my wallet for these games if they still were actually on the market.
I do miss the old days of Lucasarts and Sierra though, they just don't make em like that anymore.
See, but you illustrate my point for me. The situation that I originally brought to light, and then you reinforced..shows that a pure libertarian society would be more ruled by FUD than the one we're living in now. Whomever had the biggest guns would rule, and the scary part is, who knows who exactly is going to have those guns. Its easy to say "Well, me", but you don't know that, because there's alot of people out there that are more twisted, and more connected to the means of production than you are.
As in all things, the real answer lies somewhere in the middle.
Right, libertarianism works...until you realize I have a larger caliber weapon than you..and better aim...and a truck to load all your shit in. ;)
If I'm not mistaken BMW is still a closely held family company. They've been notorious for years for being low on the reliability totem pole, usually due to German over-engineering. The higher the price != better quality, I know one M3 owner thats had to have 3 rear transaxle replacements due to faulty manufacturing. I know several others who go in at least once a month to get something or other worked on that would be simple in an American Car.
Poppin' and lockin' B-boy that works in a Novell shop. Yes, I get more play than everyone else in the office. Caucasian women seem to respond really well when I break out the beats in the server room and do windmills...eat THAT suit and tie monkeyboy!
As a person who used to DJ and work the sampler into sets from time to time, I can honestly say I probably got better quality ass than the bonafide 'musicians' in local bands from the area. Rock chicks are dirty. At least with the strobelight hunny she'll be waxed, plucked and scented to perfection..Not to mention packaged in some pretty suggestive clothing.
I'll take that over skanky rocker chick any day of the week.
Note: I am a fan of many different flavors of music, so don't think I"m being a reactionary bastard.
Not to be grim, but.. Most people on those flights were probably your typical suburbanites (I'm assuming here, I know), and if you've lived in suburbia for any amount of time, you know that physical, person on person violence is almost alien to most of them, so it doesn't surprise me that nobody got up to make a stand. At the time, people probably cowered in their seats hoping that somehow someone ELSE would take care of the problem. Its the typical softening up of America that I see in this generation (especially this generation) of kids. As we continually shield our people more and more from just about any kind of 'danger', the less they're prepared for it when the shit hits the fan.
I guess the one good thing out of all of this is the flight staff on every plane flying in the US knows that if push comes to shove, anyone making potentially life threatening funnybusiness on a flight nowadays will get their asses beat, and badly not just by the people appointed to do so, but the normal passengers too.
Well, I would theorize that since they have so much heavy equipment down there, something may be suspect. They could very well be testing some kind of equipment to prepare for the RNC.
Its probably the fact that LIRR, Amtrack and NJT operate right across the street from the Copa. Notice the big cement wall that pretty much encapsulates those two blocks..those are the railyards beneath you.
As much as I'd like to agree with this sentiment, working in CompUSA and other places with in house computer support is very akin to working in a Call Center. You only see the bad apples (because the good ones don't make much trouble) and everyone...and I stress EVERYONE has an angle. You'd be very amazed at just how far people will go to get over on you for as little as a dollar. Its shameful.
I'd like to see more information on the technology thats being infringed upon. If Cornice is indeed taking patented technology, ripping it off and using it for their own benefit, then they should be stopped and have to pay for it.
Unlike software patents, which should be treated differently, hardware patents have quite a bit much more riding on the line for the company that chooses to undertake the endeavor of actually designing and manufacturing a piece of hardware.
Oh knock it off with the fear mongering. The erosion of 1st (speech/assembly), 4th (unlawful search/siezure) and 5th (due process/unfair imprisonment) ammendment rights is much more useful as a gauge of where we stand on privacy and liberty issues than whether or not you get to carry a piece. They also paint a much more teffifying picture of where we're headed as a Country.
I never understand why you guys (gun people, of which I am one. Don't own currently, but have in the past) never just come out and say you like guns because you simply..like owning them. Why turn it into a political hot button issue? I can understand the need to address the left's pressure here, but they're wrong too. It shouldn't be that big of a political issue because criminals and other unsavory types WILL find a way to get their hands on guns illegally, so theres no need for a ban. Period.
So stop trying to make some kind of nebulous connection between a police officer's ability to ask for an ID under the law and owning a sidearm. What are you gonna do? Pull it on the cop because he asked you to produce your license??! This is the kind of bullshit thats polluted our system of government away from rational thinking to knee jerk political grandstanding.
The motto in most call centers is: "The customer is always lying", and truthfully..having worked in Tech support for 3 years before getting a full time sysadmin job, I can honestly say that motto is more accurate than the typical mouthbreathers sitting in the queue will ever admit to themselves.
You'd be amazed how many people will call up and blatantly lie about what happened to the equipment even though you KNOW, through experience, what the cause and the fix is. People will complain just for the sake of complaining, or even worse, complain because they know some idiot manager is going to give them a free month of service. Its all a crock of shit.
I will admit though, that the quality of people that they hire nowadays is quite a bit lower than when I first got in the game late last century. Its once again the McDonalds conundrum rearing its ugly head: The pay is 8 bucks an hour if you're lucky. You expect top notch service, yet you wouldn't take that job for that price, so how do we fix the problem? Answer: There is no fix.
The old Superstar II's..I'm not pop and locking in those ugly ass moon shoes ;-p...
Frankly dude, you have nothing to complain about. You're making 150K a year (more than most human beings, college educated or not, will see yearly in a lifetime), you're married and you've probably got a whole lotta respect for what you do.
I'm one of those kids thats half your age, but I failed out of school and immediately went to work during the boom years. After sitting, and learning, in a call center (In Suburban Florida, no less...thats Florida USA! Whodathunkit..;) ) for a couple of years surrounded by ex IBM engineers, millitary guys and various assortments of geeks I managed to work my way up (after moving a 1000 miles north for better pay scales) to a very comfortable position with respect from my peers and superiors. I can honestly say I wouldn't be this far along had I taken a second shot at school and sunk more of my precious time studying theory rather than using practical application..and that brings me to my next point...I'm also not in debt up to my eyeballs, as many people who went to college are, but thats another conversation entirely.
No offense dude, but your little jibe about being a 'fake' IT guy is quite frankly insulting to me and probably every other IT person thats out there who can 'become' the computer. You don't learn this shit in school. You don't learn it by reading books or listening to some PHD drone on about the particulars of database linking. You become it through immersion. The elitist attitude pushed by colleges around the country making it seem like their way is the only way is bunk. If you want to learn a database, learn it...there's no information out there that can be taught in a classroom that can't be found just lying around waiting to be read. Why waste the money and the time away from your kids? So you can get a couple more letters by your name?
Try harder..
What I don't understand is..why doesn't SCO just ask for a quarter or something per copy. I know I know, that requires a checking of personal greed, but when you think about it, thats all they really deserve. They aren't the ones actually doing the improvement on the code base, or finding new and innovative ways to implement it, thats what the open source community does. With a proper tracking system (or at least one that could estimate properly, like ASCAP or BMI licensing if I remember correctly..(please someone explain this if i'm wrong), this could be feasible.
Sco simply doesn't deserve to get paid exhorbinantly for what others have innovated, even if they created it in the first place. Its like saying "Well, yeah you had the idea on how to use it properly, but I would have had that idea eventually too..pay me!"..BS..total BS.. I do hope the courts look at it like this and new law is drafted to address it.
Although I believe the lititgation will fall flat on its face
I'm in a sorta same position as you. I work for a government institution (higher education) and they do the same thing. State mandates a 35 hour week (gotta love government). If I only work 32 hours, I'll have to use some personal time to even it out, but I can work over 40 and they can deny OT (which they usually do). There has got to be a law about this somewhere, especially in the case of Government employment.
I have to say though, i really don't mind putting in overtime without pay because this environment is so typically union that all the productivity gains I make (on my own initiative) for the school by streamlining the system means that they leave me to my own devices 95 percent of the time (excluding the mandatory mountain of, mostly useless, paperwork thats customary with Civil Service.). I also don't put in 60 hour weeks very often, my timeclocks usually ending up in the 43-45 hour range. I feel for ya though, if you're doing 60+ regularly. I used to do that when I worked in corporate and I hated it dearly.
This man makes very good points (even though in an RIAA conversation, none of this should have ever come up). African dictators have killed literally MILLIONS of their countrymen. Thats pretty daunting, and yet we did (and do) nothing about it. Same thing goes for Southeast asia during the time of the khmer rouge. Pol Pot and his cronies (under the name of democracy no less!) killed over 1.5 million Cambodians over the course of a decade and we never said squat...
America is a selective liberator, and no one should aruge with that. The problem with this is, the government can't come right out and say why we attacked Iraq in the first place because humanitarians and the general mouthbreathing "accept what you see on TV" populace would freak.
I don't understand why someone made this flamebait, it was very informative.
..Someone mod this up..
Being an on again off again import tuner enthusiast, I had an idea about cast vs. forged rims, but I never knew aluminum's properties behaved like that under the stresses that you mentioned. I find that kind of ironic considering all the idiot teenagers driving pimped out 3 series bimwahs all over the suburb I call home.
I was agreeing with you from the beginning. Its often not a good idea to allow one's ideology to override one's ability to read ;)
Where do the jobs come from in this? Quite simply: They dont. Look at a city like Detroit and other rust belt towns. They're gutted and burned out. They used to be big time producers of product for the American market. Yeah, the products were aimed at Americans but we were paying Americans to construct said products. Now, we're targeting Americans to buy producs but we're paying someone else, so instead of the money just getting sloshed back and forth in house we now are paying an outside entity and trying to sell to the inside, even though the only reason the inside could afford it before was because we were paying themn to build it in the first place..The object of the game, in my simple opionion, would seem to be to earn foreign monies and have them converted into dollars from the outside..because the money system, other than the govt. issuing new bills, is finite..
Ugh, there really isn't any rosey ending at the end of the tunnel for this. Grim indeed..
You ask some mighty important and mighty scary questions. The only straight answer that I've gotten on the whole subject of offshoring and outsourcing is pretty much either (and I'm taking this from Fast company, a couple issues back):
In the Case of Pro: "These countries love American products, they will buy American products when their economy progresses enough"
OR
In the case of Con: "We're giving the keys to our own kingdom away. These countries are not going to give back to us once we give them a good leg to stand on, nor are they going to respect the IP rights that OUR laws (which have been used, frequently, to hurt THEM in the past) afford us.
Now I'm all for being an endless optimist (me being a pretty sappy idealist at heart) but the fact is, humans are a vindictive spiteful bunch that will look to fuck over anyone they can to get ahead. I'm much more inclined to agree with the Con side of things when it comes to predicting whats going to happen. When we were locked in the cold war and even afterwards into the 90's, we've pretty much made an artform out of screwing the little guy over. We touted to the world about how much we have, and how great we are and guess what...the rest of the world now hates us, not for the simple fact that we've achieved, but that (figuratively) we're sitting up in our big house in the gated community thumbing our noses at the rest of the town.. We're like that spoiled little rich bitch that got everything. Is that spoiled little bitch useful? Sure..Can that spoiled little bitch earn when he/she wants to? Hellz yeah, but the perception of the matter is we're a bunch of thankless fatasses that gorge ourselves on everything with little care for anything in this life but ourselves. Well, comeuppance is a bitch and your enemies WILL give it to you when they finally get the means..
And we are giving them those means as we speak...
I know that comes off as fear fueled ranting, but I took a long hard look at what I'd do if I was someone in India or some other quasi third world country, and the only solution I could come to was "Fuck em, I want to get paid"..
The next 20 years should be mighty interesting..
I always find it laughable when people believe that we can go around acting like the villian, give the people we used to fist up the ass all the technology they ever wanted, then NOT expect those same previously-fisted little people to find any way they possibly can to screw us over.. It seriously makes me laugh my ass off..
Whats going to happen is simple: Once these people have a flourishing growing economy like we had decades ago, they're pretty much going to give us the finger and do it all in house, then all we'll get is another situation where india can produce it 100 times cheaper and sell to their own populace with us left out in the cold. If you don't think these countries are going to do this to us, I sincerely hope you take those blinders off your frickin' head.