I too can relate. When I was in about 5th grade, I fell out of a jungle gym and ripped my arm open on a rusty bolt, the resulting tetanus shot that I had to get made me sicker than I've ever been in my life before or since.
My doctor agreed at the time that it wasn't safe for me to get another one in the future, but even so, when I've had to go to the health department to get shots for overseas travel, they give me the 3rd degree like I'm some sort of wacko anti-vaccine crusader.
Also in the useful category is the wireless oven thermometer. Whoever came up with the list musn't cook much, because if you're trying to cook a roast to a certain temperature, you really don't want to keep opening the oven door and letting all of the heat out just so you can know if your food is done. The wireless oven thermometer helps with energy efficiency because your oven won't have to cycle on as much as if you had to open the door to read the thermometer.
On top of that, people should realize that the "invented the iPod" line was clearly a joke. Of course, people conveniently lose their sense of humor and start taking things at ultra-literal face value when it's a politician talking.
The one thing that can be said for the whole "Al Gore invented the internet" thing was that it didn't start from somebody not being able to tell a joke from a serious comment, and I'd rather take political spin over outright stupidity from the listening audience any day.
As long as there are medications for ADHD, there's going to be a debate about medicating kids who are diagnosed with ADHD. I think that's a good thing, I would hate for us as a society to reach a point where people will just toss a bunch of drugs at kids with no dissenting voices questioning whether that's the right way to go.
I made it through 12 years of schooling, 4 years of college, and wasn't diagnosed with ADD until after I graduated college. If my grades had been bad somebody might have noticed sooner, but since I'm blessed with an excellent memory and the ability to BS my way through topics that I know virtually nothing about while sounding like an expert, I always did well in school despite being easily distracted and doing the bare minimum work. A few months after I graduated college I was kid sitting for some people I knew and for lack of anything else to read I picked up the book they had on ADHD and realized that the book was describing me almost completely.
End result, I decided to give medication a try, mainly because by that point I was tired of trying to adapt my ADD self into a non-ADD world and wanted to see what "normal" was like. Upshot was, after a few months taking Strattera, I reached the conclusion that if that was what "normal" was like than I'd rather not be normal. I'm happier when my brain works the way it was made to work, because my greatest strengths come from things that are "symptoms" of ADD.
I had AOL free for close to a year, being the poor college student that I was free AOL was better than pay anything. When I finally got them to cancel it, it was with me basically telling them "look, I have no intention of ever paying for AOL and I don't want this any more" and basically forcing them to cancel it. It's easier to keep stringing them along for free service than it is to actually get them to cancel it.
Umm, ever tried to use the internet in a major city in India? The fastest internet connection I've ever used was at Delhi internet cafe's. And, last time I checked, India is still supposed to be 3rd world.
Oh, but bullets can easily be defeated by the force, no need to do any lightsaber deflecting at all, if you can lift a plane out of a swamp, controlling a little bits of metal shouldn't be any problem.
We lived just south of Tampa at the time, but unlike every other shuttle launch, where we'd watch it on TV and then run outside, we completely forgot about that one, and didn't discover what happened until my mom turned on the noon news and that was all they were talking about. I remember not wanting to go outside and look at the sky because they said that the exhaust trail was still visible. That was the day that my dream of becoming an astronaut started to die--Challenger traumatized me too much. I'm just glad I didn't see it live, that would have been too much for my 5 1/2 year old space obsessed self, who even at that age understood all too well what had just happened.
If everybody in Germany is paranoid about RFID, then why the heck is it being used in all of the World Cup tickets? Not only did I have to sign my life away to even apply for tickets, I then will be walking all around Germany carrying tickets that have my name, passport number, and address stored in the tag.
It wasn't "religious conservatives" that got offended (I'm a religious conservative), it was Catholics who got offended. There is a difference. Catholics don't like it because you just don't mess with Mary. All it did was remind me of the supposed miracle when an image of Jesus appeared on the wall of a church not far from where I grew up, an image which looked more like the South Park Jesus than anything.
Personally, I think that they've made episodes that were far more offensive to Catholics than that one, but then, being a good Presbyterian, what am I to know? If anybody should have gotten offended by that episode, it should have been Alcoholics Anonymous, that was the real target of the episode.
And this would be why, as a child I saw a grand total of three, maybe four, movies in the theater (one of which being Return of the Jedi). When we were bored with nothing better to do, my parents would take us to the planetarium, which offered a much more affordable family membership and was educational as well. Umm, whoops, I think I just proved why I grew up and turned into a geek, maybe I shouldn't admit that out in the real world...
I'm sure they didn't do their homework, they probably just figured that business owners wouldn't start near riots at the capital building over the tax, like people did the last time they tried to implement an income tax. We're talking about the state that keeps almost running out of money because they aren't making enough money with their 10% sales tax so they keep trying to come up with hairbrained schemes to raise money. I guess they mustn't have gotten enough money from the lottery they voted in as a backdoor taxation method, so I guess they must really be grasping at straws now. But then, I guess that's better than angry mobs throwing rocks.
I wouldn't be suprised if the kid did receive a visit by the FBI, but it would only be because there were other things in his background that triggered a warning. A few years ago, I think it was my senior year in college, one of my professors got a surprise visit by the FBI, who was investigating whether he had any connection with the Phillipine terror group Abu Sayyaf (which has Al Qaeda ties), essentially because a series of coincidences added up to be sufficiently significant that he should at least be looked into (probably because if he turned out to have terror ties and they didn't at least talk to him, somebody's head would have rolled). Basically, what it comes down to is that sometime during the time that she was held captive by Abu Sayyaf, the American missionary Gracia Burnham overheard one of them mention my professor's alma mater, and since that is the sort of thing that ought to be looked into, the feds evidentally went and looked into who from that university wrote doctoral dissertations on topics having to do with the Phillipines, and since my professor had lived there for a number of years doing development work, met and married a Phillipino woman, and then did his doctoral research in the Phillipines, he was the sort of person for whom you could make a very good case that it was in our national security to interview. He probably could have gone to the media and complained, in which case it would end up on Slashdot, but in reality it wasn't a big deal or a violation of anybody's civil liberty.
Fine, stick with what you want, I'd rather believe what meteorologists who spend their entire careers studying these sort of weather events say, and that is that there is no statistically significant evidence that climate change has any correlation with frequency and intensity of storms. I've lived in Florida my entire life, we've been waiting for this upswing to happen for the last 4 or 5 years now because we're actually a bit overdue for the cycle to start up again.
Plus, if you're into semi-illegal things, you'll know that the photo clerks are required by law to turn you into the cops if you try to get prints of scary pictures. I'd much rather the people with said prints do not set foot near photo equipment I run -- if I was in their position.
Or, even things that aren't illegal might run you some trouble. I once had a roll of film take weeks to come back (it was panoramic, so it took a bit longer anyway), the store ended up claiming that they had misplaced the pictures in the back of a box. I really don't believe that story though, I think they got investigated before they made it back to me because I had a bunch of pictures of my family's burned out car, which had caught fire while my mom was driving it down the road one day. I think that the clerks saw the pictures, got suspicious, and forwarded it on to authorities. Or maybe I'm just paranoid and they really did temporarily misplace my pictures.
Ahh, genius at work. The new FEMA head isn't just some "Bush crony" he's the former Miami-Dade emergency management big wig, and I'd rather have someone from there running the show than from 99.99% of the rest of the country. Because, despite all of the jokes about Florida not being able to vote, the one thing we are good at is dealing with natural disasters of the hurricane variety.
To use those cans, make sure you have a mechanical can opener on the assumption of no electricity.
This is extremely important, after hurricane Andrew, there were people who had plenty of food in their cabinets but had nothing to eat because they didn't have can openers.
Another thing to make sure you have is a phone that plugs directly into a phone socket, cordless phones aren't going to do you any good if the power's out, and depending on your cell phone provider your cell phones may not work either (Nextel is particularly bad, in the '04 hurricane season every storm knocked out service to Nextel customers in the storm's path even when everyone else was still able to communicate). Even better, become a HAM radio operator, that way you can communicate even if all of the other channels of communication are down.
You're right, as much as the cops try to scare you by telling you you'll never be able to get a job, if you're a juvie, your record is sealed when you turn 18. The only thing I'd expect it could get unsealed for is if you're trying to get an extremly high security clearance, and I'm not sure about that. All I know is that when I wound up in the juvie system as a teenager due to a bit of political activism that sort of skirted the bounds of legality (trespassing, to be precise, but for a good cause), I was told by those who handled my case that when I applied for jobs, I could quite truthfully say that I had never been convicted of a crime.
The fact of the matter is that most successful men want a hot, attentive young wife. if I'm making $500k/yr, I probably don't care if you have a PhD and make $100k/yr yourself. I'm probably more interested in whether you will be good at raising children, be good in bed, look good, etc.
Ahh, but who says that you'd be the one who's making the $500k and you're wife's the one making $100k. There's a lot of assumptions going on right there, Mr Anonymous Coward. Or are you scared off by women who make more money than you are?
Whenever I read something like this comment, I'm reminded of when my parents dropped my older brother off at college for the first time. My mom was talking to another mother, both my brother and the other woman's daughter were in the honor's program, but the other mother told my mom "my daughter is smart, but I told her not to act too smart because guys won't want to go out with her if she's too smart."
When society is telling women to downplay their intelligence and that being intelligent is ok up to a point but being more intelligent than an man is bad, is there any wonder that we end up with results like these?
The problem is not that the call centers are in India, it's because the companies in question are too cheap to hire people who are actually fluent in English and who have half a clue about what they're doing. Blame Dell, Netgear, and Linksys for being so ridiculously cheap, it's their cheapness, not the location of the call center that's the problem.
Ahh, but not everybody riots at sporting events, just in particularly dumb cities with particularly dumb police who don't know how to do crowd control.
When my hockey team won the Stanley Cup, despite 20,000+ people inside the building and about as many standing outside packed like sardines watching, we succeeded in not rioting. Jumped up and down and screamed and hugged and threw beer, yes, ran around and smashed things, no. Why? Because nobody was stupid enough to start a chain reaction.
Actually, as I was informed by my college Spanish professor who spent several decades living in Columbia, calling the USA "The United States," or "Los Estados Unidos" in Spanish, is not a particularly useful term, because there is more than one "Estados Unidos"--Mexico being Los Estados Unidos de Mexico, or The United States of Mexico, if you prefer.
The other problem, which is probably just as big, is that people will come in with products that the employee in the department knows is fraud, but the person pitches a fit, the store manager is called, and the store manager, who wants to keep customers happy says to return it even though it's obviously a scam.
While some Mennonites drive cars, not all of them do, and not all of them are plain. When my aunt and uncle lived in Cape Coral, Florida, they went to a Mennonite church that you would have no idea was a Mennonite unless they told you it was. They all dressed like everybody else, the music was contemporary, it basically looked like the modern American megachurch. And, even with the plain Mennonites who shun cars and electricity, you can tell them apart from the Amish if you know what to look for, they drive different kinds of buggies, the women wear different prayer caps, and there are several other distinctions.
And, to make things more complicated, you also have to factor in the various Brethren groups, which may be more or less plain (my grandmother grew up plain brethren, I think it was after she married my grandfather that she became lutheran, which is what my dad grew up). Then there was the United Brethren, which was the first American grown denomination and was started by a Mennonite preacher in my great-great-great-great-great uncle's barn in the 1767, and which much of my mom's side of the family belonged to(at least those who didn't marry Mennonites). The best I can gather, at some point in the late 1800s they split, some of them joined up with the Evangelical Brethren to become the Evangelical United Brethren, which later merged with the Methodists to create the United Methodists. And so, in a nutshell, much of American religious history can in some way tie itself back in history to the Amish by way of the Mennonites (which are of course an offshoot of the Amish).
Slashdot Mirror
I too can relate. When I was in about 5th grade, I fell out of a jungle gym and ripped my arm open on a rusty bolt, the resulting tetanus shot that I had to get made me sicker than I've ever been in my life before or since.
My doctor agreed at the time that it wasn't safe for me to get another one in the future, but even so, when I've had to go to the health department to get shots for overseas travel, they give me the 3rd degree like I'm some sort of wacko anti-vaccine crusader.
Also in the useful category is the wireless oven thermometer. Whoever came up with the list musn't cook much, because if you're trying to cook a roast to a certain temperature, you really don't want to keep opening the oven door and letting all of the heat out just so you can know if your food is done. The wireless oven thermometer helps with energy efficiency because your oven won't have to cycle on as much as if you had to open the door to read the thermometer.
On top of that, people should realize that the "invented the iPod" line was clearly a joke. Of course, people conveniently lose their sense of humor and start taking things at ultra-literal face value when it's a politician talking.
The one thing that can be said for the whole "Al Gore invented the internet" thing was that it didn't start from somebody not being able to tell a joke from a serious comment, and I'd rather take political spin over outright stupidity from the listening audience any day.
As long as there are medications for ADHD, there's going to be a debate about medicating kids who are diagnosed with ADHD. I think that's a good thing, I would hate for us as a society to reach a point where people will just toss a bunch of drugs at kids with no dissenting voices questioning whether that's the right way to go.
I made it through 12 years of schooling, 4 years of college, and wasn't diagnosed with ADD until after I graduated college. If my grades had been bad somebody might have noticed sooner, but since I'm blessed with an excellent memory and the ability to BS my way through topics that I know virtually nothing about while sounding like an expert, I always did well in school despite being easily distracted and doing the bare minimum work. A few months after I graduated college I was kid sitting for some people I knew and for lack of anything else to read I picked up the book they had on ADHD and realized that the book was describing me almost completely.
End result, I decided to give medication a try, mainly because by that point I was tired of trying to adapt my ADD self into a non-ADD world and wanted to see what "normal" was like. Upshot was, after a few months taking Strattera, I reached the conclusion that if that was what "normal" was like than I'd rather not be normal. I'm happier when my brain works the way it was made to work, because my greatest strengths come from things that are "symptoms" of ADD.
I had AOL free for close to a year, being the poor college student that I was free AOL was better than pay anything. When I finally got them to cancel it, it was with me basically telling them "look, I have no intention of ever paying for AOL and I don't want this any more" and basically forcing them to cancel it. It's easier to keep stringing them along for free service than it is to actually get them to cancel it.
Umm, ever tried to use the internet in a major city in India? The fastest internet connection I've ever used was at Delhi internet cafe's. And, last time I checked, India is still supposed to be 3rd world.
Oh, but bullets can easily be defeated by the force, no need to do any lightsaber deflecting at all, if you can lift a plane out of a swamp, controlling a little bits of metal shouldn't be any problem.
We lived just south of Tampa at the time, but unlike every other shuttle launch, where we'd watch it on TV and then run outside, we completely forgot about that one, and didn't discover what happened until my mom turned on the noon news and that was all they were talking about. I remember not wanting to go outside and look at the sky because they said that the exhaust trail was still visible. That was the day that my dream of becoming an astronaut started to die--Challenger traumatized me too much. I'm just glad I didn't see it live, that would have been too much for my 5 1/2 year old space obsessed self, who even at that age understood all too well what had just happened.
If everybody in Germany is paranoid about RFID, then why the heck is it being used in all of the World Cup tickets? Not only did I have to sign my life away to even apply for tickets, I then will be walking all around Germany carrying tickets that have my name, passport number, and address stored in the tag.
It wasn't "religious conservatives" that got offended (I'm a religious conservative), it was Catholics who got offended. There is a difference. Catholics don't like it because you just don't mess with Mary. All it did was remind me of the supposed miracle when an image of Jesus appeared on the wall of a church not far from where I grew up, an image which looked more like the South Park Jesus than anything.
Personally, I think that they've made episodes that were far more offensive to Catholics than that one, but then, being a good Presbyterian, what am I to know? If anybody should have gotten offended by that episode, it should have been Alcoholics Anonymous, that was the real target of the episode.
And this would be why, as a child I saw a grand total of three, maybe four, movies in the theater (one of which being Return of the Jedi). When we were bored with nothing better to do, my parents would take us to the planetarium, which offered a much more affordable family membership and was educational as well. Umm, whoops, I think I just proved why I grew up and turned into a geek, maybe I shouldn't admit that out in the real world...
I'm sure they didn't do their homework, they probably just figured that business owners wouldn't start near riots at the capital building over the tax, like people did the last time they tried to implement an income tax. We're talking about the state that keeps almost running out of money because they aren't making enough money with their 10% sales tax so they keep trying to come up with hairbrained schemes to raise money. I guess they mustn't have gotten enough money from the lottery they voted in as a backdoor taxation method, so I guess they must really be grasping at straws now. But then, I guess that's better than angry mobs throwing rocks.
I wouldn't be suprised if the kid did receive a visit by the FBI, but it would only be because there were other things in his background that triggered a warning. A few years ago, I think it was my senior year in college, one of my professors got a surprise visit by the FBI, who was investigating whether he had any connection with the Phillipine terror group Abu Sayyaf (which has Al Qaeda ties), essentially because a series of coincidences added up to be sufficiently significant that he should at least be looked into (probably because if he turned out to have terror ties and they didn't at least talk to him, somebody's head would have rolled). Basically, what it comes down to is that sometime during the time that she was held captive by Abu Sayyaf, the American missionary Gracia Burnham overheard one of them mention my professor's alma mater, and since that is the sort of thing that ought to be looked into, the feds evidentally went and looked into who from that university wrote doctoral dissertations on topics having to do with the Phillipines, and since my professor had lived there for a number of years doing development work, met and married a Phillipino woman, and then did his doctoral research in the Phillipines, he was the sort of person for whom you could make a very good case that it was in our national security to interview. He probably could have gone to the media and complained, in which case it would end up on Slashdot, but in reality it wasn't a big deal or a violation of anybody's civil liberty.
Fine, stick with what you want, I'd rather believe what meteorologists who spend their entire careers studying these sort of weather events say, and that is that there is no statistically significant evidence that climate change has any correlation with frequency and intensity of storms. I've lived in Florida my entire life, we've been waiting for this upswing to happen for the last 4 or 5 years now because we're actually a bit overdue for the cycle to start up again.
Plus, if you're into semi-illegal things, you'll know that the photo clerks are required by law to turn you into the cops if you try to get prints of scary pictures. I'd much rather the people with said prints do not set foot near photo equipment I run -- if I was in their position.
Or, even things that aren't illegal might run you some trouble. I once had a roll of film take weeks to come back (it was panoramic, so it took a bit longer anyway), the store ended up claiming that they had misplaced the pictures in the back of a box. I really don't believe that story though, I think they got investigated before they made it back to me because I had a bunch of pictures of my family's burned out car, which had caught fire while my mom was driving it down the road one day. I think that the clerks saw the pictures, got suspicious, and forwarded it on to authorities. Or maybe I'm just paranoid and they really did temporarily misplace my pictures.
Ahh, genius at work. The new FEMA head isn't just some "Bush crony" he's the former Miami-Dade emergency management big wig, and I'd rather have someone from there running the show than from 99.99% of the rest of the country. Because, despite all of the jokes about Florida not being able to vote, the one thing we are good at is dealing with natural disasters of the hurricane variety.
To use those cans, make sure you have a mechanical can opener on the assumption of no electricity.
This is extremely important, after hurricane Andrew, there were people who had plenty of food in their cabinets but had nothing to eat because they didn't have can openers.
Another thing to make sure you have is a phone that plugs directly into a phone socket, cordless phones aren't going to do you any good if the power's out, and depending on your cell phone provider your cell phones may not work either (Nextel is particularly bad, in the '04 hurricane season every storm knocked out service to Nextel customers in the storm's path even when everyone else was still able to communicate). Even better, become a HAM radio operator, that way you can communicate even if all of the other channels of communication are down.
You're right, as much as the cops try to scare you by telling you you'll never be able to get a job, if you're a juvie, your record is sealed when you turn 18. The only thing I'd expect it could get unsealed for is if you're trying to get an extremly high security clearance, and I'm not sure about that. All I know is that when I wound up in the juvie system as a teenager due to a bit of political activism that sort of skirted the bounds of legality (trespassing, to be precise, but for a good cause), I was told by those who handled my case that when I applied for jobs, I could quite truthfully say that I had never been convicted of a crime.
The fact of the matter is that most successful men want a hot, attentive young wife. if I'm making $500k/yr, I probably don't care if you have a PhD and make $100k/yr yourself. I'm probably more interested in whether you will be good at raising children, be good in bed, look good, etc.
Ahh, but who says that you'd be the one who's making the $500k and you're wife's the one making $100k. There's a lot of assumptions going on right there, Mr Anonymous Coward. Or are you scared off by women who make more money than you are?
Whenever I read something like this comment, I'm reminded of when my parents dropped my older brother off at college for the first time. My mom was talking to another mother, both my brother and the other woman's daughter were in the honor's program, but the other mother told my mom "my daughter is smart, but I told her not to act too smart because guys won't want to go out with her if she's too smart."
When society is telling women to downplay their intelligence and that being intelligent is ok up to a point but being more intelligent than an man is bad, is there any wonder that we end up with results like these?
The problem is not that the call centers are in India, it's because the companies in question are too cheap to hire people who are actually fluent in English and who have half a clue about what they're doing. Blame Dell, Netgear, and Linksys for being so ridiculously cheap, it's their cheapness, not the location of the call center that's the problem.
Ahh, but not everybody riots at sporting events, just in particularly dumb cities with particularly dumb police who don't know how to do crowd control.
When my hockey team won the Stanley Cup, despite 20,000+ people inside the building and about as many standing outside packed like sardines watching, we succeeded in not rioting. Jumped up and down and screamed and hugged and threw beer, yes, ran around and smashed things, no. Why? Because nobody was stupid enough to start a chain reaction.
Actually, as I was informed by my college Spanish professor who spent several decades living in Columbia, calling the USA "The United States," or "Los Estados Unidos" in Spanish, is not a particularly useful term, because there is more than one "Estados Unidos"--Mexico being Los Estados Unidos de Mexico, or The United States of Mexico, if you prefer.
The other problem, which is probably just as big, is that people will come in with products that the employee in the department knows is fraud, but the person pitches a fit, the store manager is called, and the store manager, who wants to keep customers happy says to return it even though it's obviously a scam.
While some Mennonites drive cars, not all of them do, and not all of them are plain. When my aunt and uncle lived in Cape Coral, Florida, they went to a Mennonite church that you would have no idea was a Mennonite unless they told you it was. They all dressed like everybody else, the music was contemporary, it basically looked like the modern American megachurch. And, even with the plain Mennonites who shun cars and electricity, you can tell them apart from the Amish if you know what to look for, they drive different kinds of buggies, the women wear different prayer caps, and there are several other distinctions.
And, to make things more complicated, you also have to factor in the various Brethren groups, which may be more or less plain (my grandmother grew up plain brethren, I think it was after she married my grandfather that she became lutheran, which is what my dad grew up). Then there was the United Brethren, which was the first American grown denomination and was started by a Mennonite preacher in my great-great-great-great-great uncle's barn in the 1767, and which much of my mom's side of the family belonged to(at least those who didn't marry Mennonites). The best I can gather, at some point in the late 1800s they split, some of them joined up with the Evangelical Brethren to become the Evangelical United Brethren, which later merged with the Methodists to create the United Methodists. And so, in a nutshell, much of American religious history can in some way tie itself back in history to the Amish by way of the Mennonites (which are of course an offshoot of the Amish).