I'd be tempted to have legal send them a letter indicating that all future communications will be directed to the legal department, and an invoice reflecting the cost of reviewing their letters will be mailed out. To respond to the notification is an indication of acceptance (and also billable).
Send it registered mail, sit back, and relax as you never hear from them again.
I dunno, I prefer, "Kill someone while drunk driving? Go to jail for manslaughter." Oh, and a side order of, "Get caught drunk driving? Go to jail for attempted manslaughter."
I had to get some Microsoft certifications to break into the IT world - yet I never bothered with my A+, Novell, additional MS certifications, etc. Instead, I picked up a few very specific certs here and there and specialized. Yeah, I'm useless outside my field, but I (was) a star within it. The only guy in the world doing what I did, in fact.
You know what? When I changed jobs, the new employer didn't see my inappropriate certs, they saw my star status within my specialty and assumed I could adapt to a new one and perform just as well... and now I'm getting new very specific certs in a slightly different area.
Nothing specific you learn in IT is going to matter in two years anyway, never mind ten, and the general stuff is amazingly applicable across moderate ranges of differing IT work.
I'll remind you that Canada, while supporting the US in Afghanistan, wasn't so keen on Iraq. As a nation, we've chosen to underfund our military, and we usually put our troops into a 'peacekeeper' role instead of that of an invader. I've lived in Canada my entire LIFE, and we're not as warlike as the Americans.
Yes, Canadians can be blowhards while abroad. More often it's Americans. We have a smaller percentage (and of course smaller absolute numbers) of our tourists who are loud and brash. Loud and brash isn't necessarily evil, but it can come off as arrogant.
Many Canadians do have resentment against the most recent waves of immigrants - especially if they form their own little closely-knit communities, don't learn English, and bitch about Canada not bending over backwards for them. OTOH, we also don't seem to have as much trouble with long term integration of different cultures as in the States. Given that our official policy is multiculturalism and the American policy is the melting pot, I don't find that surprising at all. Protectionism and isolationism have more to do with trade and how we feel about other countries in general.
I've travelled, mostly throughout the Commonwealth, but also to Mexcio and Central America. Mostly, people assumed I was a 'Yank' based on my central Canadian accent until I corrected them. In Australia, they then next assumed I was from Vancouver. Canada doesn't have a huge presence in the world given that we're right next to a nation with vaguely similar culture and the same language.
I suggest you shove your self-righteous attitude up *your* ass. I'm not anti-American, but the tone of your post has definitely inclined me to be anti-you.
They ALSO uncovered letters where he stated he was prepared for jihad and was seeking guidance, plus he'd gone so far as to spec and price out his weaponry.
He wasn't just some curious chemist who happened to have an arabic-sounding name.
There is more to it than that; we're more socialist, and less warlike. We have a smaller percentage of visible blowhards among our citizens travelling the world as tourists. We don't have isolationism or protectionism as a political philosophy. We don't (and honestly, couldn't if we wanted to) support puppet dictatorships to further our own ends.
Of course, the USA is a big place. So is Canada. Both countries have a wide variety of cultures within them, and I'm speaking only of the 'international persona' of the two nations.
Also, 'Eh' went out of style a long time ago. And we have milk in bags.
The Romans would like a word with you, as they designed waterproof concrete some time ago.
Modern concrete cracks because it's exposed to the elements which often includes freeze/thaw cycles, and because it contains iron. Small amounts of moisture make it to the iron, which then rusts, expands, and basically blows the concrete apart from the inside out.
Use the right concrete mix, don't expose it to freezing, and don't use rebar. For a two-story house wrapped in insulation and siding, that shouldn't be a huge deal. There's a reason that (once it settled) the floor in my basement hasn't had a new crack in 20 years, but the 12" of exposed foundation around the outside needs patching once in a while.
To be fair, the article says mods to install plumbing and wiring are possible. I don't see why not, either. Actually, as concrete can be made waterproof, you could just design the sewer pipes as part of the structure, only the inbound pressurized pipes would need to be something else.
I can also see this being programmed to produce mounting points for exterior insulation - put the insulation panels on the outside then add your siding to cover it up. This would make the concrete part of the thermal mass of the house, helping keep the temperature steady.
You'd also add similar interior points for hanging drywall, no stud walls necessary. That's IF you feel the need. Why not design the walls with channels for central air and wiring, and just paint directly on the concrete?
It's a potential game changer if you can get an architect to embrace it and produce something useful, desirable, and for less than a traditional home.
While some people just can't catch a break, or have suffered from lack of opportunity... people who are poor long term often have related poor decision making skills. Whether that's genetic or due to poor parents teaching them the wrong things, I'll leave to the social scientists.
You'll see a surprising number of fairly wealthy people play the lottery - one ticket here and there. You'll see an equally surprising number of poor people play the lottery, dozens of tickets at a time. You'll also see them maxing out credit cards and going to paycheque cashing stores, seemingly without realizing that if they'd just hold off for ONE paycheque, they'd have 10-20% more money to spend. I know a guy with a bottom-end job who is very modest in his purchases, and keeps socking most of his money away. 20 years later, he's a freakin' LANDLORD to some of his former coworkers, and he built it all on a minimum wage job. It can be done.
Seeing a poor person get taking isn't surprising, but when they're fleecing themselves and the person profiting *isn't* trying to take advantage of them, what do you do? Give up on the adults and hope for the best for the kids.
I say this as someone whose extended family has both middle and lower income families in it.
There's already a method for generating fuel from Martian atmosphere that's been tested with a practical model here on Earth. You have to carry a bit of catalyst with you, I believe, and a source of energy if you're not patient enough to wait for the weak solar available on Mars.
It's still likely easier than remote drilling, recovery, and refining.
Am I the only one who noticed that the 'funniest joke' wasn't all that funny... then read the rest of the article and wondered what they'd cut out to get the 102-word joke down to less than 80?
Just what could be in those 20-something words to make the joke so much funnier?
I'm willing to bet that almost any jurisdiction in the United States would find someone getting fired to prevent the vesting of shares would be an act of fraud on the part of the employer.
The contract is: work for us, don't quit or get fired for cause, and if we are a success you'll have shares and maybe get rich. Their 'cause' is 'we might have to pay up'. FRAUD!
The smarter employees should be starting a class action lawsuit right now, and burn that company to the ground and pillage the corpse for whatever they can get.
I'm old enough to remember when Usenet became useless every September. Old enough to remember when it was USEFUL after the freshmen calmed down and grew up.
Also, after UUDecoding my jpeg pr0n, it took 10-15 seconds to decode a still image on my computer. Bah!
Personally, I'm mostly anti-abortion. I think that except in unusual circumstances (pregnancy started by rape, screening shows significant birth defects, pregnancy's going to kill the mother, and probably a few other situations I haven't thought of) a woman who has the emotional ability to have an abortion has something wrong with her. I'm NOT going to condemn a woman because of that belief, or even try to prevent her from getting an abortion.
The problem is that abortions are usually performed long before the brain is up and running. Hell, a full term newborn doesn't have much going on mentally compared to, say, a cat. Every day, fully grown adult animals with far more mental capacity than a 12 week old fetus are slaughtered to put fresh meat on my plate. How could I possibly be against abortion when I'm OK with that?
And I would say that calling someone a hypocrite because they take conflicting stands on two different subjects is perfectly valid. Calling the person who points that out an 'asshole' is not exactly a persuasive argument...
Realistically, solar is the only 100% inexhaustible energy source available to us... if you limit the definition of 'inexhaustible' to 'lasting at least as long as the remaining lifetime of the Earth'.
Maybe fusion, if we ever figure it out, but everything else will run out on a long enough time scale... and so far as I'm aware those timescales are all shorter than the remaining lifetime of the planet. Just because some fuels are expected to last 10x longer than human civilization has so far existed doesn't mean they're unlimited.
Peter Sellers had more than a couple of mental issues. I think his opinion of the Pink Panther movies is irrelevant - they were brilliant within their genre, and that fact is only accentuated by how poor the non-Sellers sequel was back in the day, and how abysmally awful the Steve Martin remake turned out to be.
Rockets perform better when their frames are low in stress. Having someone blow the vehicle before launch reduces the chance the rocket will go off prematurely, or fail completely.
I like that, but I submit that it would be appropriate to have it be some kind of pay-per-view. Police cruisers don't have endless supplies of bandwidth, and what they do have costs money.
Most in-car video is DVR'd then downloaded upon return to the garage. You want live, you're going to do it over a secondary (and unnecessary) connection so as not to interfere with the police computers in the cars used for things like directing a cop to an incident and letting him know what he's getting into, as well as running various computer checks.
Also, there'd have to be some kind of system for a supervisor to shut down the live feed for some events - you don't need the bad guy getting a play-by-play of what the cops are doing to catch him.
FTL travel requires bypassing the energy required to move a mass through normal space.
The moment you have FTL, you have a method for adding infinite energy to the universe... say by using FTL to boost a mass out of the middle of a solar system, then letting it fall back in via traditional Newtonian methods from the outer edges of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be tempted to have legal send them a letter indicating that all future communications will be directed to the legal department, and an invoice reflecting the cost of reviewing their letters will be mailed out. To respond to the notification is an indication of acceptance (and also billable).
Send it registered mail, sit back, and relax as you never hear from them again.
Wow. What's that, $40k/year?
Why would you bother being a turbine jockey when you could be a tower jockey and get paid a hell of a lot more to fix radio antennas?
I dunno, I prefer, "Kill someone while drunk driving? Go to jail for manslaughter." Oh, and a side order of, "Get caught drunk driving? Go to jail for attempted manslaughter."
I had to get some Microsoft certifications to break into the IT world - yet I never bothered with my A+, Novell, additional MS certifications, etc. Instead, I picked up a few very specific certs here and there and specialized. Yeah, I'm useless outside my field, but I (was) a star within it. The only guy in the world doing what I did, in fact.
You know what? When I changed jobs, the new employer didn't see my inappropriate certs, they saw my star status within my specialty and assumed I could adapt to a new one and perform just as well... and now I'm getting new very specific certs in a slightly different area.
Nothing specific you learn in IT is going to matter in two years anyway, never mind ten, and the general stuff is amazingly applicable across moderate ranges of differing IT work.
Or, you know, pay for the song's use.
Shouldn't legislators follow the rules they love so dearly that they're campaigning to make more of them?
I was going to say, "Look at my ID#", then I realized I'm a bit newer than '5733'. Tell me, what was primordial Earth like? :)
I'll remind you that Canada, while supporting the US in Afghanistan, wasn't so keen on Iraq. As a nation, we've chosen to underfund our military, and we usually put our troops into a 'peacekeeper' role instead of that of an invader. I've lived in Canada my entire LIFE, and we're not as warlike as the Americans.
Yes, Canadians can be blowhards while abroad. More often it's Americans. We have a smaller percentage (and of course smaller absolute numbers) of our tourists who are loud and brash. Loud and brash isn't necessarily evil, but it can come off as arrogant.
Many Canadians do have resentment against the most recent waves of immigrants - especially if they form their own little closely-knit communities, don't learn English, and bitch about Canada not bending over backwards for them. OTOH, we also don't seem to have as much trouble with long term integration of different cultures as in the States. Given that our official policy is multiculturalism and the American policy is the melting pot, I don't find that surprising at all. Protectionism and isolationism have more to do with trade and how we feel about other countries in general.
I've travelled, mostly throughout the Commonwealth, but also to Mexcio and Central America. Mostly, people assumed I was a 'Yank' based on my central Canadian accent until I corrected them. In Australia, they then next assumed I was from Vancouver. Canada doesn't have a huge presence in the world given that we're right next to a nation with vaguely similar culture and the same language.
I suggest you shove your self-righteous attitude up *your* ass. I'm not anti-American, but the tone of your post has definitely inclined me to be anti-you.
They ALSO uncovered letters where he stated he was prepared for jihad and was seeking guidance, plus he'd gone so far as to spec and price out his weaponry.
He wasn't just some curious chemist who happened to have an arabic-sounding name.
There is more to it than that; we're more socialist, and less warlike. We have a smaller percentage of visible blowhards among our citizens travelling the world as tourists. We don't have isolationism or protectionism as a political philosophy. We don't (and honestly, couldn't if we wanted to) support puppet dictatorships to further our own ends.
Of course, the USA is a big place. So is Canada. Both countries have a wide variety of cultures within them, and I'm speaking only of the 'international persona' of the two nations.
Also, 'Eh' went out of style a long time ago. And we have milk in bags.
The Romans would like a word with you, as they designed waterproof concrete some time ago.
Modern concrete cracks because it's exposed to the elements which often includes freeze/thaw cycles, and because it contains iron. Small amounts of moisture make it to the iron, which then rusts, expands, and basically blows the concrete apart from the inside out.
Use the right concrete mix, don't expose it to freezing, and don't use rebar. For a two-story house wrapped in insulation and siding, that shouldn't be a huge deal. There's a reason that (once it settled) the floor in my basement hasn't had a new crack in 20 years, but the 12" of exposed foundation around the outside needs patching once in a while.
To be fair, the article says mods to install plumbing and wiring are possible. I don't see why not, either. Actually, as concrete can be made waterproof, you could just design the sewer pipes as part of the structure, only the inbound pressurized pipes would need to be something else.
I can also see this being programmed to produce mounting points for exterior insulation - put the insulation panels on the outside then add your siding to cover it up. This would make the concrete part of the thermal mass of the house, helping keep the temperature steady.
You'd also add similar interior points for hanging drywall, no stud walls necessary. That's IF you feel the need. Why not design the walls with channels for central air and wiring, and just paint directly on the concrete?
It's a potential game changer if you can get an architect to embrace it and produce something useful, desirable, and for less than a traditional home.
While some people just can't catch a break, or have suffered from lack of opportunity... people who are poor long term often have related poor decision making skills. Whether that's genetic or due to poor parents teaching them the wrong things, I'll leave to the social scientists.
You'll see a surprising number of fairly wealthy people play the lottery - one ticket here and there. You'll see an equally surprising number of poor people play the lottery, dozens of tickets at a time. You'll also see them maxing out credit cards and going to paycheque cashing stores, seemingly without realizing that if they'd just hold off for ONE paycheque, they'd have 10-20% more money to spend. I know a guy with a bottom-end job who is very modest in his purchases, and keeps socking most of his money away. 20 years later, he's a freakin' LANDLORD to some of his former coworkers, and he built it all on a minimum wage job. It can be done.
Seeing a poor person get taking isn't surprising, but when they're fleecing themselves and the person profiting *isn't* trying to take advantage of them, what do you do? Give up on the adults and hope for the best for the kids.
I say this as someone whose extended family has both middle and lower income families in it.
I don't think we have the technology to make a profit on bringing a metal-rich rock to Earth, even if it is in orbit just a light second or two away.
How were you planning on bringing it down without risking a huge impact crater where we don't want one?
There's already a method for generating fuel from Martian atmosphere that's been tested with a practical model here on Earth. You have to carry a bit of catalyst with you, I believe, and a source of energy if you're not patient enough to wait for the weak solar available on Mars.
It's still likely easier than remote drilling, recovery, and refining.
Am I the only one who noticed that the 'funniest joke' wasn't all that funny... then read the rest of the article and wondered what they'd cut out to get the 102-word joke down to less than 80?
Just what could be in those 20-something words to make the joke so much funnier?
I'm willing to bet that almost any jurisdiction in the United States would find someone getting fired to prevent the vesting of shares would be an act of fraud on the part of the employer.
The contract is: work for us, don't quit or get fired for cause, and if we are a success you'll have shares and maybe get rich. Their 'cause' is 'we might have to pay up'. FRAUD!
The smarter employees should be starting a class action lawsuit right now, and burn that company to the ground and pillage the corpse for whatever they can get.
I'm old enough to remember when Usenet became useless every September. Old enough to remember when it was USEFUL after the freshmen calmed down and grew up.
Also, after UUDecoding my jpeg pr0n, it took 10-15 seconds to decode a still image on my computer. Bah!
If you had an ideal incompressible solid, you might very well have created the first immovable object.
If in can't have a compression wave, it can't move.
Personally, I'm mostly anti-abortion. I think that except in unusual circumstances (pregnancy started by rape, screening shows significant birth defects, pregnancy's going to kill the mother, and probably a few other situations I haven't thought of) a woman who has the emotional ability to have an abortion has something wrong with her. I'm NOT going to condemn a woman because of that belief, or even try to prevent her from getting an abortion.
The problem is that abortions are usually performed long before the brain is up and running. Hell, a full term newborn doesn't have much going on mentally compared to, say, a cat. Every day, fully grown adult animals with far more mental capacity than a 12 week old fetus are slaughtered to put fresh meat on my plate. How could I possibly be against abortion when I'm OK with that?
And I would say that calling someone a hypocrite because they take conflicting stands on two different subjects is perfectly valid. Calling the person who points that out an 'asshole' is not exactly a persuasive argument...
Wives are devilspawn.
FTFY.
Realistically, solar is the only 100% inexhaustible energy source available to us... if you limit the definition of 'inexhaustible' to 'lasting at least as long as the remaining lifetime of the Earth'.
Maybe fusion, if we ever figure it out, but everything else will run out on a long enough time scale... and so far as I'm aware those timescales are all shorter than the remaining lifetime of the planet. Just because some fuels are expected to last 10x longer than human civilization has so far existed doesn't mean they're unlimited.
Peter Sellers had more than a couple of mental issues. I think his opinion of the Pink Panther movies is irrelevant - they were brilliant within their genre, and that fact is only accentuated by how poor the non-Sellers sequel was back in the day, and how abysmally awful the Steve Martin remake turned out to be.
Rockets perform better when their frames are low in stress. Having someone blow the vehicle before launch reduces the chance the rocket will go off prematurely, or fail completely.
I like that, but I submit that it would be appropriate to have it be some kind of pay-per-view. Police cruisers don't have endless supplies of bandwidth, and what they do have costs money.
Most in-car video is DVR'd then downloaded upon return to the garage. You want live, you're going to do it over a secondary (and unnecessary) connection so as not to interfere with the police computers in the cars used for things like directing a cop to an incident and letting him know what he's getting into, as well as running various computer checks.
Also, there'd have to be some kind of system for a supervisor to shut down the live feed for some events - you don't need the bad guy getting a play-by-play of what the cops are doing to catch him.
FTL travel requires bypassing the energy required to move a mass through normal space.
The moment you have FTL, you have a method for adding infinite energy to the universe... say by using FTL to boost a mass out of the middle of a solar system, then letting it fall back in via traditional Newtonian methods from the outer edges of it.
I'm pretty sure the universe doesn't like that.