My last job was like that, but it was a small company. They only cared that the work got done on time, and what you did between the assigning of the work and the turning in of the work was immaterial.
Plus, they also encouraged gaming breaks once a day as stress relief, about a half hour.
That was the most productive company I've worked in, both personally and as a whole.
I've heard it quite a bit (though not from any sources I'd consider extremely reliable) that the French and Germans are owed a lot of money by Hussein's government. If so, that would explain much of their anxiety over a war with Iraq. I wonder if we guarenteed that those debts would be repaid if they would be more willing to go along.
NOBODY in the UN ever acts out of humanitarian purposes or noble idealism, so we just need to understand the motivations of France and Germany and maybe an agreement can be reached.
As for Hussein and "proof", the last resolution laid the burden of proof on Hussein, not the international community. It was odd to require him to prove a negative, which just speaks all the more as to the fact that war was inevitable from the start.
BUT, as I heard one person say: when Hussein kicked the UN inspectors out in 1998, it was known he had "weapons of mass destruction"; do you believe he kicked out the inspectors and THEN destroyed his weapons?
Anyways, I don't doubt for a second he has these weapons. I also suspect that if the US had just left him alone, he'd never use them outside of his own country - he does, after all, have to "pacify" the kurds and shiites...:-(
Anyways, I don't care much myself for how the whole affair has been presented by Bush. There are some compelling issues (to me) that Bush seems to avoid, and instead he uses arguments that are quite weak.
But then, there still some things about the WTC attacks and the subsequent Afghan invasion that I've never been convinced about. Again, there were a number of compelling issues, but they were largely ignored by Bush in favor of much weaker ones.
It's interesting to note that many of those 20+ countries supporting us are from eastern europe. Probably trying to score brownie points with the USA:-)
But then, who really cares about French opposition? I mean, they didn't bother to go to the UN or the international community themselves before intervening in the Ivory Coast, they just unilateraly sent troops there to protect their interests. Nobody is criticizing the French over this, or pointing out the blatant hypocrisy of it vis-a-vis their opposition to US action in Iraq. "Do as I say, not as I do." Whatever.
I'm quite divided on the Iraq war myself - on the one hand it does seem fairly obvious Bush is pushing it as a matter of family honor.
But on the other hand, Hussein *HAS* been in violation of every single UN resolution against him for the past 12 years, and what good is the UN if it won't enforce its own resolutions? Bush is merely trying to make the UN actually relevent and is entirely within bounds to pursue the matter.
Hmm....
Anyways, I agree that since we are going to war at this point, we should do what we can to take out the enemy C3 infrastructure, and if we can do any amount of it by "hacking", so much the better.
First of all, if you follow the whole thread you'd realize that isn't free medical care for everybody, but just the poor.
Second, if "free" medical care is so great in other "civilized" countries, why is it many people living outside the US who have enough money will come to the US for any serious medical care?
And since the advent of "free" (i.e. socialized) medical care in these countries, how much of the world's medical advances have come from these same countries, vs. from the US?
As some people here like to say, "If you think medical care is expensive now, wait til you see how much it costs when it's free!"
The US government has a history of mismanaging just about everything it does, so why would it do a stunningly good job of running medical care?
The problem is... At one point I was trying to recycle a bunch of old hardware and did some research. I recall reading at one point (I forget exactly where, unfortunately) that many of the companies that recycle old hardware don't.
What they do do is put it on a slow boat to China where it is dumped into the rivers. Rivers that locals rely upon for drinking water. And then, to supplement their income, some of the chinese people will take the hardware and pick out the copper and other metals to sell. But they don't wear any appropriate protective gear, not even gloves.
So, basically, "recycling" is just a long process by which we make it someone else's environmental problem:-/
Not all recycling companies do this, but many do. If you want to go this route, be sure you research the companies thoroughly. I ended up not recycling (yet), but found some buyers who had a use for the old hardware.
BTW, the reason for the tax breaks on owning a house, according to one specific tax law professor: it is because people tend to take good care of their house, but are less concerned about the condition of an apartment they may live in. So, buying a house is something that the government wants to encourage, and it does so by giving home owners tax breaks.
Fair? I don't know, but that's what I've been told as to why it exists.
There are issues of infrastructure support that are legitimate, for example, "post roads" is one of the things for which congress actually has a constitutional mandate.
But many of the social services today.... Leftists will say it is because historically people were NOT giving enough to charity, but that still doesn't make it the governments responsibility to help the poor.
They might say the constitution grants it authority under Article I, section 8 "...provide for the common Defence and general welfare of the United States", but the section then goes on to enumerate specific things the government is allowed to do, and social security, medicare and medicaid aren't among them (to name just a few). I would further trump such a line of thought with the 10th amendment - if individual states want to do such welfare programs that's fine, but that is a state level decision, not a federal one.
Anyways, my original point was never addressed by the person I had responded to - if 50% of the income earners pay 96% of the income tax, is that "enough", or should they pay even more? Should the bottom 50% of income earners pay *any* tax at all? Would that equitible? NOT! And yes, there are still "payroll taxes" like medicare, but the Democractic politicians have already voiced the idea that poor people shouldn't have to pay those taxes either. Free medical care! What a deal! Plus, they want it such that if a person has tax credits that reduces their tax liability below zero, they should be paid the difference. Pure, unadulterated income redistribution. Free money! What a deal!
Of course, these things are NOT free, *somebody* is paying for them. How much of a burden can you impose upon those people before they revolt?
As for minimum wage, can it be a living wage? In fact, it never can be, because each time you raise the minimum wage, it will either result in lay offs of those people at that wage level, making their situation even worse, or it will result in a rise in prices to cover the increased payroll expenses, which still does not improve the sitution. Some forms of labor are simply not worth very much, and artificially inflating the value of that labor is a Bad Thing (tm).
Consider the difficulty of living at such wages to be an incentive to try to earn more, either by getting new and better skills, or by working multiple jobs, or even starting your own business! There are tons and tons of resources out there presently, and I'd rather see the low income earners take advantage of existing resources to improve their situation rather then simply forcing employers to pay them more. I realize this concept of individual responsibility can be tough for many leftists, but there you have it.
OMFG, I'm so sick and tired of hearing how the rich don't pay enough (I'm not rich yet, but I'm working on it:-)
Go over to the IRS website (irs.gov), find the link to the newsrooms, then facts and figures, and read up on the IRS's own data.
In summary, the highest 1% of income earners earn about 17% of the wealth. They pay about 39% of the total income taxes collected. The top 50% of income earners pay 96% of the income tax collected!! How much is "enough"? Good grief already.
What people like you really want isn't so much an income tax as a wealth tax. Huge bloody difference.
Actually, I think it's rather a cool idea. Metaphysically speaking, it would imply some greater purpose to the universe then mere existence. If some being exists outside the universe and is using it to some greater purpose (i.e. for computing power), it makes the creation of the universe trivially explainable. It's like Douglas Adams (the earth as a computer), but on a much bigger scale!
I'm with you on this one - I prefer the turn based over the RTS. I'm just as frustrated that there is often no way to know in advance except to just ask someone who has already played the game. Sometimes even the game's box itself isn't enough to tell! *boggle*
Anyways, the best way to find out would be to visit yer local usenet group in the comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.* heirarchy.
Uh, what world are you living in? The average game has a typical budget of a few hundred thousand (at MOST), and a small handful of programmers and artists. A big project for a game dev house might run up to a million dollars (at the high end), have a dozen artists, a half dozen programmers, and a designer or two.
The big game companies like EA and Microsoft are the exceptions in the game industry. Next time you go to your local computer game store, take a look at how many hundreds (possibly thousands if you consider consoles) of games there are. Most of them are written by third party development houses on shoestring budgets, not by mega corporations with multimillion dollar budgets. Yes, many of the most popular games are written by the biggies, but that's a tiny fraction of the total games out there.
Most of the games are *published* by the big guys, but the actual coding and artwork is done externally.
There are already a ton of awards in the game industry as it is. They're all politically hacked back-scratching non-sense (to put it kindly) and this one won't be any different. Game geeks turned CEOs can be quite petty and vicious...
First of all, I'd like to start with a great quote I've heard a few times: "Guns cause violence like flies cause garbage."
Next: The Vietnamese army did not kick the butt of the US army - quite the opposite. In fact, I do believe the US military never lose a battle in Vietnam. The war was lost for other reasons.
The reason the US won the revolution was because Britain was too busy fighting the French in EUROPE. French troops in North America were not decisive, or even numerous. Also, if the American militias were so bad, why did the British move the war from the north to the south? Because they weren't winning in the north and they had more support in the south. Well, guess what, the south was mostly irrelevant to the war effort and the British were forced to drag themselves back north. The French NAVY helped only in so far as they prevented more british reinforcements from arriving. Good thing (for us Americans:) the revolution was over before Napoleon took charge of France and got the French fleet sunk...
Now, unorganized, poorly lead, poorly trained, poorly equipped peasants HAVE been able to win modern wars. Examples:
Russia in 1917 - the White Army had all the international support, as well as that of the monied interested within Russia (i.e. the nobles), but still lost to the Red Army.
China from 1911 to 1949 - The Nationalists had the backing of the US and others, and all that goes along with it (especially post-WWII), but still they lost to the communists.
There were no arrests, but make no mistake that those FBI documents were improperly obtained. Do a google search on "Clinton FBI files" and you'll see a zillion hits, including many major news sources (like cnn, pbs, aclu, newsmax, the washinton post, abcnews, etc. etc.). Clinton made the affair go away by saying it was all just a simple mix up and nothing improper was intended. Yeah right. People always seemed so desparate to believe anything Clinton said, they just couldn't find enough excuses for the man no matter what he did. Makes me sick.
You people need to be cynical about *ALL* politicans, not just the ones you don't like.
Historically, in the US, the Republicans have favored strong federal government and democrats favored states' rights at the expense of the federal government. Hopefully it should not be too big a leap to see how that extends from the more traditional left wing/right wing paradigm that evolved in France right before The Revolution, so I leave that as an exercise to the reader:-)
Of course, there doesn't seem to be any politicians left on either side who strongly favor states' rights over a strong federal government. They all seem hell bent on seeing who can create the biggest, most powerful federal authority and completely destroy the 10th amendment. Bleh.
It's a shame the majority people absolutely refuse to vote for third party candidates. Reminds me of the Simpsons Halloween special from '96 where Homer is taken up by aliens who run for President. One disguises himself as Bob Dole, the other as Clinton. Homer exposes both as aliens, but being a two party system, Americans have to vote for one of the aliens (Kodos or Kang). Kang wins the election and forces humanity into slavery. Marge complains about being forced into slavery and Homer says "Don't blame me; I voted for Kodos".
Well, because in Da Vinci's day, there weren't exactly a lot of "engineers" running around to analyze this stuff. Most people in his day who would have attempted to build his things were probably not sophisticated enough to recognize even basic design flaws.
Today you'd have to be more careful, but centuries ago?
I used to work for a small computer game company, and the owner's attitudes was that piracy was actually good! It meant people actually liked your product enough to want to pirate it. It's almost like free advertising. Plus, many of those people were never going to buy in the first place - if they couldn't get it for free, they'd just do without. So it doesn't really count as lost sales regardless.
I know myself when I wanted to buy the lastest version of Microsoft Office, discovering it ran $600 (!!!!) I decided to pass. It's just not worth that much to me. *If* I were to acquire a pirated copy of Office XP, it isn't lost revenue for Microsoft since I would never buy for $600 anyways, I just can't afford to pay that much. If you listen to the SPA, they would count it as lost sales, which is why their numbers are worthless. In fact, I recall reading one interview of an SPA person who actually outright said they just "make up" dollar figures for the cost of piracy. *rolls eyes*
As I heard on a radio talkshow yesterday, someone was saying about the people in Iraq that people don't always want to be "liberated", even if it truly would work to their own benefit.
Oh well, they'll come around eventually, they're just not ready for it yet. (Oops - do I mean Iraqis? Windows users? does it matter?:-)
Well, if you're in the US and the US government gets it way with tax refunds, you may very well get refunds for stuff you never paid for in the first place...
"Let's see, you have $500 more in tax credits then you have tax liabilities, so that means you must be owed a $500 refund!" *boggle*
It's not enough to bounce them when they try to connect:-)
---- "NO! Then they'll call you back when the problem recurs. Your job is to make them FEAR calling you. How can you work when people are calling? So, you make them pay for calling in the first place. What would you do?"
"Delete their files?"
"Yeah, it's a start, but then they may call back when they get new files. You want them NEVER to call back. What could you do?"
"Swear at them?"
"No. I can see we'll have to demonstrate. Have you got a metal ballpoint?"
"Yes"
"See that wallsocket over there. Take the refill out of the pen and poke in into the wallsocket."
One of my co-workers at my last job had this suggestion:
Just as race car drivers wear patches from their various sponsers, so should politicians!
Fantastic idea, but then it'd be impossible for the politicans to hide from the masses the fact that our "two party system" is really just one party - the corporate party!:p
Slashdot Mirror
My last job was like that, but it was a small company. They only cared that the work got done on time, and what you did between the assigning of the work and the turning in of the work was immaterial.
Plus, they also encouraged gaming breaks once a day as stress relief, about a half hour.
That was the most productive company I've worked in, both personally and as a whole.
I've heard it quite a bit (though not from any sources I'd consider extremely reliable) that the French and Germans are owed a lot of money by Hussein's government. If so, that would explain much of their anxiety over a war with Iraq. I wonder if we guarenteed that those debts would be repaid if they would be more willing to go along.
:-(
NOBODY in the UN ever acts out of humanitarian purposes or noble idealism, so we just need to understand the motivations of France and Germany and maybe an agreement can be reached.
As for Hussein and "proof", the last resolution laid the burden of proof on Hussein, not the international community. It was odd to require him to prove a negative, which just speaks all the more as to the fact that war was inevitable from the start.
BUT, as I heard one person say: when Hussein kicked the UN inspectors out in 1998, it was known he had "weapons of mass destruction"; do you believe he kicked out the inspectors and THEN destroyed his weapons?
Anyways, I don't doubt for a second he has these weapons. I also suspect that if the US had just left him alone, he'd never use them outside of his own country - he does, after all, have to "pacify" the kurds and shiites...
Anyways, I don't care much myself for how the whole affair has been presented by Bush. There are some compelling issues (to me) that Bush seems to avoid, and instead he uses arguments that are quite weak.
But then, there still some things about the WTC attacks and the subsequent Afghan invasion that I've never been convinced about. Again, there were a number of compelling issues, but they were largely ignored by Bush in favor of much weaker ones.
*sigh*
It's interesting to note that many of those 20+ countries supporting us are from eastern europe. Probably trying to score brownie points with the USA :-)
But then, who really cares about French opposition? I mean, they didn't bother to go to the UN or the international community themselves before intervening in the Ivory Coast, they just unilateraly sent troops there to protect their interests. Nobody is criticizing the French over this, or pointing out the blatant hypocrisy of it vis-a-vis their opposition to US action in Iraq. "Do as I say, not as I do." Whatever.
I'm quite divided on the Iraq war myself - on the one hand it does seem fairly obvious Bush is pushing it as a matter of family honor.
But on the other hand, Hussein *HAS* been in violation of every single UN resolution against him for the past 12 years, and what good is the UN if it won't enforce its own resolutions? Bush is merely trying to make the UN actually relevent and is entirely within bounds to pursue the matter.
Hmm....
Anyways, I agree that since we are going to war at this point, we should do what we can to take out the enemy C3 infrastructure, and if we can do any amount of it by "hacking", so much the better.
First of all, if you follow the whole thread you'd realize that isn't free medical care for everybody, but just the poor.
Second, if "free" medical care is so great in other "civilized" countries, why is it many people living outside the US who have enough money will come to the US for any serious medical care?
And since the advent of "free" (i.e. socialized) medical care in these countries, how much of the world's medical advances have come from these same countries, vs. from the US?
As some people here like to say, "If you think medical care is expensive now, wait til you see how much it costs when it's free!"
The US government has a history of mismanaging just about everything it does, so why would it do a stunningly good job of running medical care?
The problem is... At one point I was trying to recycle a bunch of old hardware and did some research. I recall reading at one point (I forget exactly where, unfortunately) that many of the companies that recycle old hardware don't.
:-/
What they do do is put it on a slow boat to China where it is dumped into the rivers. Rivers that locals rely upon for drinking water. And then, to supplement their income, some of the chinese people will take the hardware and pick out the copper and other metals to sell. But they don't wear any appropriate protective gear, not even gloves.
So, basically, "recycling" is just a long process by which we make it someone else's environmental problem
Not all recycling companies do this, but many do. If you want to go this route, be sure you research the companies thoroughly. I ended up not recycling (yet), but found some buyers who had a use for the old hardware.
BTW, the reason for the tax breaks on owning a house, according to one specific tax law professor: it is because people tend to take good care of their house, but are less concerned about the condition of an apartment they may live in. So, buying a house is something that the government wants to encourage, and it does so by giving home owners tax breaks.
Fair? I don't know, but that's what I've been told as to why it exists.
There are issues of infrastructure support that are legitimate, for example, "post roads" is one of the things for which congress actually has a constitutional mandate.
But many of the social services today.... Leftists will say it is because historically people were NOT giving enough to charity, but that still doesn't make it the governments responsibility to help the poor.
They might say the constitution grants it authority under Article I, section 8 "...provide for the common Defence and general welfare of the United States", but the section then goes on to enumerate specific things the government is allowed to do, and social security, medicare and medicaid aren't among them (to name just a few). I would further trump such a line of thought with the 10th amendment - if individual states want to do such welfare programs that's fine, but that is a state level decision, not a federal one.
Anyways, my original point was never addressed by the person I had responded to - if 50% of the income earners pay 96% of the income tax, is that "enough", or should they pay even more? Should the bottom 50% of income earners pay *any* tax at all? Would that equitible? NOT! And yes, there are still "payroll taxes" like medicare, but the Democractic politicians have already voiced the idea that poor people shouldn't have to pay those taxes either. Free medical care! What a deal! Plus, they want it such that if a person has tax credits that reduces their tax liability below zero, they should be paid the difference. Pure, unadulterated income redistribution. Free money! What a deal!
Of course, these things are NOT free, *somebody* is paying for them. How much of a burden can you impose upon those people before they revolt?
As for minimum wage, can it be a living wage? In fact, it never can be, because each time you raise the minimum wage, it will either result in lay offs of those people at that wage level, making their situation even worse, or it will result in a rise in prices to cover the increased payroll expenses, which still does not improve the sitution. Some forms of labor are simply not worth very much, and artificially inflating the value of that labor is a Bad Thing (tm).
Consider the difficulty of living at such wages to be an incentive to try to earn more, either by getting new and better skills, or by working multiple jobs, or even starting your own business! There are tons and tons of resources out there presently, and I'd rather see the low income earners take advantage of existing resources to improve their situation rather then simply forcing employers to pay them more. I realize this concept of individual responsibility can be tough for many leftists, but there you have it.
OMFG, I'm so sick and tired of hearing how the rich don't pay enough (I'm not rich yet, but I'm working on it :-)
Go over to the IRS website (irs.gov), find the link to the newsrooms, then facts and figures, and read up on the IRS's own data.
In summary, the highest 1% of income earners earn about 17% of the wealth. They pay about 39% of the total income taxes collected. The top 50% of income earners pay 96% of the income tax collected!! How much is "enough"? Good grief already.
What people like you really want isn't so much an income tax as a wealth tax. Huge bloody difference.
Actually, I think it's rather a cool idea. Metaphysically speaking, it would imply some greater purpose to the universe then mere existence. If some being exists outside the universe and is using it to some greater purpose (i.e. for computing power), it makes the creation of the universe trivially explainable. It's like Douglas Adams (the earth as a computer), but on a much bigger scale!
I'm with you on this one - I prefer the turn based over the RTS. I'm just as frustrated that there is often no way to know in advance except to just ask someone who has already played the game. Sometimes even the game's box itself isn't enough to tell! *boggle*
Anyways, the best way to find out would be to visit yer local usenet group in the comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.* heirarchy.
Uh, what world are you living in? The average game has a typical budget of a few hundred thousand (at MOST), and a small handful of programmers and artists. A big project for a game dev house might run up to a million dollars (at the high end), have a dozen artists, a half dozen programmers, and a designer or two.
The big game companies like EA and Microsoft are the exceptions in the game industry. Next time you go to your local computer game store, take a look at how many hundreds (possibly thousands if you consider consoles) of games there are. Most of them are written by third party development houses on shoestring budgets, not by mega corporations with multimillion dollar budgets.
Yes, many of the most popular games are written by the biggies, but that's a tiny fraction of the total games out there.
Most of the games are *published* by the big guys, but the actual coding and artwork is done externally.
There are already a ton of awards in the game industry as it is. They're all politically hacked back-scratching non-sense (to put it kindly) and this one won't be any different. Game geeks turned CEOs can be quite petty and vicious...
First of all, I'd like to start with a great quote I've heard a few times:
:) the revolution was over before Napoleon took charge of France and got the French fleet sunk...
"Guns cause violence like flies cause garbage."
Next: The Vietnamese army did not kick the butt of the US army - quite the opposite. In fact, I do believe the US military never lose a battle in Vietnam. The war was lost for other reasons.
The reason the US won the revolution was because Britain was too busy fighting the French in EUROPE. French troops in North America were not decisive, or even numerous. Also, if the American militias were so bad, why did the British move the war from the north to the south? Because they weren't winning in the north and they had more support in the south. Well, guess what, the south was mostly irrelevant to the war effort and the British were forced to drag themselves back north. The French NAVY helped only in so far as they prevented more british reinforcements from arriving. Good thing (for us Americans
Now, unorganized, poorly lead, poorly trained, poorly equipped peasants HAVE been able to win modern wars. Examples:
Russia in 1917 - the White Army had all the international support, as well as that of the monied interested within Russia (i.e. the nobles), but still lost to the Red Army.
China from 1911 to 1949 - The Nationalists had the backing of the US and others, and all that goes along with it (especially post-WWII), but still they lost to the communists.
There were no arrests, but make no mistake that those FBI documents were improperly obtained. Do a google search on "Clinton FBI files" and you'll see a zillion hits, including many major news sources (like cnn, pbs, aclu, newsmax, the washinton post, abcnews, etc. etc.). Clinton made the affair go away by saying it was all just a simple mix up and nothing improper was intended. Yeah right. People always seemed so desparate to believe anything Clinton said, they just couldn't find enough excuses for the man no matter what he did. Makes me sick.
You people need to be cynical about *ALL* politicans, not just the ones you don't like.
Historically, in the US, the Republicans have favored strong federal government and democrats favored states' rights at the expense of the federal government. Hopefully it should not be too big a leap to see how that extends from the more traditional left wing/right wing paradigm that evolved in France right before The Revolution, so I leave that as an exercise to the reader :-)
Of course, there doesn't seem to be any politicians left on either side who strongly favor states' rights over a strong federal government. They all seem hell bent on seeing who can create the biggest, most powerful federal authority and completely destroy the 10th amendment. Bleh.
It's a shame the majority people absolutely refuse to vote for third party candidates. Reminds me of the Simpsons Halloween special from '96 where Homer is taken up by aliens who run for President. One disguises himself as Bob Dole, the other as Clinton. Homer exposes both as aliens, but being a two party system, Americans have to vote for one of the aliens (Kodos or Kang). Kang wins the election and forces humanity into slavery. Marge complains about being forced into slavery and Homer says "Don't blame me; I voted for Kodos".
Well, because in Da Vinci's day, there weren't exactly a lot of "engineers" running around to analyze this stuff. Most people in his day who would have attempted to build his things were probably not sophisticated enough to recognize even basic design flaws.
Today you'd have to be more careful, but centuries ago?
I used to work for a small computer game company, and the owner's attitudes was that piracy was actually good! It meant people actually liked your product enough to want to pirate it. It's almost like free advertising. Plus, many of those people were never going to buy in the first place - if they couldn't get it for free, they'd just do without. So it doesn't really count as lost sales regardless.
I know myself when I wanted to buy the lastest version of Microsoft Office, discovering it ran $600 (!!!!) I decided to pass. It's just not worth that much to me. *If* I were to acquire a pirated copy of Office XP, it isn't lost revenue for Microsoft since I would never buy for $600 anyways, I just can't afford to pay that much. If you listen to the SPA, they would count it as lost sales, which is why their numbers are worthless. In fact, I recall reading one interview of an SPA person who actually outright said they just "make up" dollar figures for the cost of piracy. *rolls eyes*
As I heard on a radio talkshow yesterday, someone was saying about the people in Iraq that people don't always want to be "liberated", even if it truly would work to their own benefit.
:-)
Oh well, they'll come around eventually, they're just not ready for it yet. (Oops - do I mean Iraqis? Windows users? does it matter?
Well, if you're in the US and the US government gets it way with tax refunds, you may very well get refunds for stuff you never paid for in the first place...
"Let's see, you have $500 more in tax credits then you have tax liabilities, so that means you must be owed a $500 refund!"
*boggle*
Humans are so good at pattern detection that then can detect patterns where no exist.
:-P
Anyways, why would we want intelligent computers (or software), give the general level of "intelligence" displayed by most humans?
It's not enough to bounce them when they try to connect :-)
----
"NO! Then they'll call you back when the problem recurs. Your job is to make them FEAR calling you. How can you work when people are calling? So, you make them pay for calling in the first place. What would you do?"
"Delete their files?"
"Yeah, it's a start, but then they may call back when they get new files. You want them NEVER to call back. What could you do?"
"Swear at them?"
"No. I can see we'll have to demonstrate. Have you got a metal ballpoint?"
"Yes"
"See that wallsocket over there. Take the refill out of the pen and poke in into the wallsocket."
"But it's live!"
"Would I really make you do it if it were live?"
"Oh" >fiddlefiddleBZZZZZZZEEEEERT!THUD!
Of course I would.
Except that when al Qaida and Saddam are just faint memories, we'll still have TIA lying around looking for a purpose.
Minority Report?
One of my co-workers at my last job had this
:p
suggestion:
Just as race car drivers wear patches from their
various sponsers, so should politicians!
Fantastic idea, but then it'd be impossible for
the politicans to hide from the masses the fact
that our "two party system" is really just one
party - the corporate party!