I wonder if the dots is an american thing (maybe NTSC colour model works better with this arrangement or something?)
I remember back in grade school back in teh 80's that they were telling us that tv screens had oval pixels while computer monitors had circular pixels. I think it was a Commodore 1701 monitor that they demonstrated this on. And somehow, circular pixels made for better text reading.
For example, when the crew can beam onto the Borg ship, they can blast a few things with phasers, but don't think to bring, say, a five hundred megaton nuke into the center of the ship and set it to detonate as soon as they clear out. Babylon 5? (Spoilers for the end of season three here.) When Sheridan goes to Z'Ha'Dum, he brings nukes with him. Not "quantum torpedoes" or some treknobabble crap that doesn't sound ooh-we're-hippies-nuclear-scary, he brings a fucking nuke. (Well, two, for good measure.)
If you want to talk about fantasy WMDs, I keep arguing with trekkies/ers about why they don't take a Genesis bomb and detonate it inside a Borg ship.
The only half assed answer I ever got was that they wouldn't want a cube shaped planet hanging around. Followed by 'The genesis project was a failure.'
It might have failed to create life in the story but whatever enemy you unleashed it on, I'm sure it'd take a few billion years to develop and evolve back into the threatening life forms they once were.
But yeah, JMS and B5 ruled.
I'm also really beginning to like the Stargate series too. At least with all the references they make to Star Trek being fiction, I'm glad they put a damper on fans who would like to write fan fiction to do cross over stories.
Right, but it will be harder than ever to produce something out of the mainstream when a record exec will look only at the score on HSS and potential effect on the bottom line.
To hell with the mammoth record labels and their use of that piece of software as their sole or one of many tools to determine a hit.
We all know that they're a bunch of smug suits looking to do as little work as possible to maintain their riches. Not embracing electronic distribution, use of this software to determine their next cash cow and raising prices on CDs are but a few examples.
The revolution has started. independents and companies who are on the net selling singles for a fair price. Word of mouth, people who are actively doing or figuring out methods of promotion and distribution that's contrary to the dino-record labels are winning and will take the loyalty of artists and bury the labels that refuse to change.
Artists who are insecure enough and/or only wanting to make money rather than contibute art are aplenty. Those that want to contribute to society are fewer and far between and those that succeed will continue to be a small handfull.
I believe it's a matter of time now before something truly revolutionary and groundbreaking is produced by an independent that totally circumvents the record co's.
But more immediately, perhaps the only change this will effect is an immediate upswing in RIAA member balance sheets. In time, there are enough assaults on their traditional business model that they will either have to change or die away.
We pay corporations to wear the clothes they make in sweat shops so we can display their logos.
We get increases in ticket prices to go see movies which have become chock full of placed products that advertisers pay the studios to put in.
Now, we pay the cell phone companies every time an advertiser sends us an SMS ad?!?!
WTF?!?!
Next time someone sings the praises of the capitalist free world, I'll be sure to shovel all that back to them and remind them how great it is that big business can freely make us pay through our noses!
Kudos to the CBC for reaching out and producing something not for the baby boom white middle to upper class crowd.
Yip, Road to Avonlea and other such wholesome sugary sweet productions is Canadian propaganda to fool the unwitting world into believing that we Canadians are as pure as undriven snow. (cough... gag... er... polluted acid snow, that is)
I'd like to also point out that TVOntario (who's part gov't funded and part PBS funding campaign driven) puts out alot of edgy stuff too that challenges the mind and emotions.
One would think they'd take the good parts of the 600 (namely the radio/phone part) and merely add a higher resolution screen and other small improvements rather than seemingly designing it from the gound up again.
can't talk for the grantparent of course, but the questions put up there are ones that occur to many outside observers with regards to the USA, so I doubt grantparent was trolling
Indeed.
I was at my grandmother's funeral 2 years ago down in NYC. One of my cousin's boyfriend was present at a dinner and is a student at a naturopathy school. For some reason, I assumed and equated that with a pro medicare view.
Boy was I ever wrong and the next few minutes were a bit torturous until the subject changed.
While I don't believe that government should have their hands in a particular industry forever, I'm for the idea that government money/involvement should somehow be involved in the startup of new industries and businesses in existing industries with a set time line to an exit for them.
I'm an on-site computer tech that does freelance work and got my start after getting laid off from one of the telcos in 2001.
I went to file my claim for employment insurance and saw a sign calling for people who want to be their own boss and start their own businesses.
Based on the strength of their ideas and a barrage of interviews, they take in 1/4 who apply and provide a year's worth of mentoring and financial hand holding to get people up and on their feet.
Granted our taxes here are significantly higher and I will freely admit that I do go against the system every now and again with cash under the table jobs. However, I feel that I'd be in a much different boat had it not been for this gov't funded program.
And with regard to healthcare, that cousin mentioned earlier was talking to me earlier this year about how her dad was going in for radiotherapy for a tumour and how there was some concern about the insurance not working well in their favour.
Contrasting this at the same time as my dad was dieing of liver failure due to Hep. B., number of trips to the ER, stays at the hospital and palliative assistance at home, it was nice not to have to worry about financial payouts during that time.
Anyhow, that's just my experience and I guess that this all has to do with what we're used to and the comfort zone that we've grown accustomed to.
Although easier to start a flame war and leave, message boards are also great for getting well thought out answers and viewpoints without too much heated emotional bashing.
Until you finally have yet another government program sucking dollars out of your pocket to buy votes
Corporations may not have your intrest in mind but at least they are an equal opportunity screw
After reading this and seeing similar comments on many different issues over the last year or so, I feel compelled to ask a question.
Let me frame this by stating that I'm Canadian and thus see nothing wrong with government taking initiative to dump money into new industries to at least start it off and have government in control of (i.e. running or heavily regulating) essential services.
The question is this... Why is it that in America, the private sector is placed on such a high pedastal?
I figure that looking to find the least common denominator of methods to provide a service or product for the population amounts to only an "equal opportunity screw" just seems totally cynical, wrong and scary to me.
I was reading someone else's take about the American mentality on health care and saw it summed up as something that individuals feel personally responsible for and would feel intruded if it became the government's domain. A friend from school was telling of a guy she dated from SC who felt that public transit was a government handout for the poor and lazy.
Is this just survival of the fittest in action? And if so, why do people let private industry run to the government for protection from such things like a community based wi-fi network? It might as well be SCO/MS/etc getting legislators to slap a tax on Linux/BSD and all OSS to 'even the playing field.'...
And one backup is not enough a bad batch of discs can still bite you in the butt. My important backups are done on mirrored DVDR of different brands, typically Taiyo Yuden and Mitsubishi Chemical Company. Or one on DVDR and one on a bunch of CDRs.
I hear good things about TY and Mitsubishi, though I haven't had the opportunity to use them.
I do miss the old Kodak Infoguard golds. A utilitiy CD that I made back in '98 for use in my job as a computer janitor is still going strong and a scandisk utility still reports it to be error free.... unlike alot of the POS disks that I've bought since then.
Hundreds of years? Have you seen the fade on photos 50 years ago, 100 years ago?
Standard colour prints are made with organic dyes. Those fade in time.
Black and white photos are silver
Those don't fade but other factors like the underlying paper turning yellow or the underlying film being cellulose nitrate a close relative of nitro cellulose (AKA gun cotton) causes it to disintegrate.
For the chemical holy grail, (and this goes back to my knowledge gained in the 80s and early 90s)you're looking at Kodachrome 64 slide film and cibachrome positive-positive paper.
Both use inorganic dyes and both have withstood a battery of tests and time.
Thinking back to that/. article of the high school project where they put solar collectors in the back of that pickup to generate hydrogen, I'm wondering what the return is on hydrogen generation through electrolysis.
I'd guess that generating hydrogen with nuclear power would be rather expensive and way too many steps from a natural resource to electricity and then to a useable fuel.
But there is hydro electricity, wind and solar that can probably do it cheaply.
Let me ask this...
Rather than going with nuclear and fossil fuel produced electricity plus burning of fosil fuels in cars, what is the cost of and how much would we need of hydro electric dams, wind and solar farms to produce enough electricity to make enough hydrogen and power the current grid?
As a true Star Trek fan, I feel compelled to point out that Dilithium Crystals do not generate power. Rather, they capture the energy released in matter/antimatter annihilation. Thus the correct answer is "antimatter". I suggest that you sweep the issue of *where* the antimatter comes from under the rug.:-)
Ya know... I assume a matter/anti-matter reaction would be similar but produces way more power than nuclear fission. However, physics and chemistry have become ancient history for me now, so I don't know what sorts of waste products and thus problems of disposal you'd possibly get from such a reaction.
That said, if you can actually harness the power of a nuclear explosion the way a flux capacitor should theoretically be able to harness a bolt of lightning, we would probably have enough fuel with all the stockpiles of weapons to make worries about fuel shortages a thing of the past.
But then again, this is all speculation on non-existant technoglogy...
When Trudeau helped bring in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms more than a decade later, near the end of his tenure, he may have been trying to undo some of the damage he caused -- certainly, he seems to have learned from his mistake.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the charter of rights and freedoms was never signed by Quebec. Premiere Duplesis (IIRC) wanted alot more than was offered to them at the time and so Trudeau got the rest of the premieres together and hammered it out while Duplesis was sleeping.
Result. One really ticked off premiere and no Quebec in the charter of rights.
This was covered on a PBS program.... Can't remember the name.
The Russians are doing disposable successfully with the Soyuz and yes indeed, they are cheaper to launch/build and can do far more work for less money.
The one group in the states that insists on reuseable space craft are/were the millitary.
Actually, I think it was the airforce specifically insisting on vehicles that behaved like aircraft in the atmosphere.
I don't recall too much else from the program, but there might have been some mention of opposition to the navy having control of aircraft on their carriers. The impression I got was that the USAF wanted to have their hands at the controls when it came to the future of space warfare and defence rather than some other organization.
However, soon the manufacturing costs in Japan rose and they found they could serve their customer better and make their cars cheaper if they opened auto plants closer to the customer.
The result is that majority of Toyotas sold in the U.S. today are built right here by workers who get paid lower than before.
Same thing might happen in the IT industry.
Doubt it...
It cost time and $$$ to ship raw materials to Japan and it cost more time and $$$ to ship the finished product back. Thus it makes perfect sense to put the plant near the customers.
With IT, your finished product is not as tangible. The cost to ship support or software from a boiler room to North America is the cost of the phone/data lines in between.
Re:Free Speech in Denmark??
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 1
Reference please? Or is this just more Bushwacking in a weak disguise?
The world goes round best when things are balanced.
Too much conservative zealotry and you've got a draconian God fearing, fully censoring police state.
Too much liberal hedonism and everybody does what they wanna do and consideration for others goes out the window.
Back to the point of video games.
Considering the increase in CPU and GPU power allowing for life-like looking games. Video games might as well be a very flexible version of those 80s Choose Your Own Adventure books turned into movies.
Since we're slipping video games into the movie genre, rating and prohibiting access should be applied. But even with that in place, parents who don't do parenting should still get off their asses.
When I worked for an ISP during the bust times of the early 2000s and before we got our layoff packages, a number of us found we had nothing better to do than to spend half to 3/4 of the day playing LAN GTA2.
We pretty much did this steady for a month and a half. We were all in our late 20s, early 30s and for a short while afterwards, most of us at times would have the urge to or actually hit the gas pedal in our real cars thinking we could accelerate quickly, inch by cars infront of us, squeeze through spaces that we really shouldn't.
Fortunately for all of us that shared our stories, we had the good sense to stop before anything actually happened.
Now take that mindset which we got from playing too much GTA2 and overlay it onto a kid who thinks he's invincible...
There ain't no way I'd be convinced that violent video games don't desensitize as well as put your mind into an altered state.
VISA used to charge me a 4.5% discount fee for manual processing. Setting up online processing is difficult and expensive, with monthly charges to boot.
Canadian, eh?
Try calling up Moneris.
Initial setup fee is bit more for online payments but they don't make you hold bonds or large bank accounts with them to do business. Even if it's online. I do IVR phone in transactions once a month. It works for me and funds are deposited in my bank account 2-3 days later. 2.5% + a $10/month fee total (CDN funds).
There is the CertaPay system in Canada, which can be used to transfer money by email between almost all Canadian banks, but it only works in Canada.
$1.50/transaction on the part of the sender. But yes, it is a nice system, which is only nation wide.
For a little guy just starting up, charging small amounts, operating world-wide - PayPal is pretty much the only way to go.
Is it for online stores and auctions that people are using paypal for worldwide operations?
I'm a little guy that does on-site IT support and other small business IT services. I figured that asking my customers to jump through the hoop of having to setup a paypal account, have the $2 ro so charge go through their cards and having to lookup their statement to validate the CC with paypal before they could pay me as being a major PITA that would deter folks from
Do you even know what you're talking about? You can have PayPal cut you a real paper check if you want. They charge for that, a direct wire transfer to your account is free.
Looks like not.
Last time I paypal'ed anything, it was 3 years ago.
From then, it just seemed a little too confined in that both parties had to have accounts and then piggy backing ontop of my credit card.
A year ago, a small business advisor suggested I look into paypal for accepting CC payments to increase business.
Reading paypalsucks.com made me more certain that I'm glad I didn't go there.
I do on site technical consulting as well as some small time virtual hosting. My customers have never mentioned paypal up to this point and my merchant fees are quite low.
I may re-evaluate if/when it hits a far higher market penetration but that'll be much further down the road.
Can someone tell me why it is that a business should end up using paypal for payment services as opposed to getting a merchant account through a bank with Visa/MC/Amex?
They might advertise lower cost but from my e-bay experiences, it's a nuissance to have to open up a paypal account in order to pay somebody online.
Ontop of that, if you sell something and receive payment by paypal, there really wasn't a way to cash out other than to use the money in the paypal account to buy stuff in other auctions.
For all the hassles that I have to deal with service fees in my small business, I'd rather take the money deposited into my bank account route than have to navigate whatever maze that paypal forces one through.
That's just contrary to a free market system where market conditions are what should rightfully dictate to corporations what prices should be.
Bullshit!
Is it me or is it that any time in North America, where busines activities are curtailed by societal interests, the business community comes out swinging with the words of "what are they saying to business?".
As far as I am concerned and I'm a business owner too.... The message to business should be to play fair, don't be greedy and respect the world you're making a living in.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if the dots is an american thing (maybe NTSC colour model works better with this arrangement or something?)
I remember back in grade school back in teh 80's that they were telling us that tv screens had oval pixels while computer monitors had circular pixels. I think it was a Commodore 1701 monitor that they demonstrated this on. And somehow, circular pixels made for better text reading.
How are LCDs done?
For example, when the crew can beam onto the Borg ship, they can blast a few things with phasers, but don't think to bring, say, a five hundred megaton nuke into the center of the ship and set it to detonate as soon as they clear out. Babylon 5? (Spoilers for the end of season three here.) When Sheridan goes to Z'Ha'Dum, he brings nukes with him. Not "quantum torpedoes" or some treknobabble crap that doesn't sound ooh-we're-hippies-nuclear-scary, he brings a fucking nuke. (Well, two, for good measure.)
If you want to talk about fantasy WMDs, I keep arguing with trekkies/ers about why they don't take a Genesis bomb and detonate it inside a Borg ship.
The only half assed answer I ever got was that they wouldn't want a cube shaped planet hanging around. Followed by 'The genesis project was a failure.'
It might have failed to create life in the story but whatever enemy you unleashed it on, I'm sure it'd take a few billion years to develop and evolve back into the threatening life forms they once were.
But yeah, JMS and B5 ruled.
I'm also really beginning to like the Stargate series too. At least with all the references they make to Star Trek being fiction, I'm glad they put a damper on fans who would like to write fan fiction to do cross over stories.
Right, but it will be harder than ever to produce something out of the mainstream when a record exec will look only at the score on HSS and potential effect on the bottom line.
To hell with the mammoth record labels and their use of that piece of software as their sole or one of many tools to determine a hit.
We all know that they're a bunch of smug suits looking to do as little work as possible to maintain their riches. Not embracing electronic distribution, use of this software to determine their next cash cow and raising prices on CDs are but a few examples.
The revolution has started. independents and companies who are on the net selling singles for a fair price. Word of mouth, people who are actively doing or figuring out methods of promotion and distribution that's contrary to the dino-record labels are winning and will take the loyalty of artists and bury the labels that refuse to change.
Artists who are insecure enough and/or only wanting to make money rather than contibute art are aplenty. Those that want to contribute to society are fewer and far between and those that succeed will continue to be a small handfull.
I believe it's a matter of time now before something truly revolutionary and groundbreaking is produced by an independent that totally circumvents the record co's.
But more immediately, perhaps the only change this will effect is an immediate upswing in RIAA member balance sheets. In time, there are enough assaults on their traditional business model that they will either have to change or die away.
Pay to receive?
So cell phone SPAM also incurrs a charge?
Yeesh!
We pay corporations to wear the clothes they make in sweat shops so we can display their logos.
We get increases in ticket prices to go see movies which have become chock full of placed products that advertisers pay the studios to put in.
Now, we pay the cell phone companies every time an advertiser sends us an SMS ad?!?!
WTF?!?!
Next time someone sings the praises of the capitalist free world, I'll be sure to shovel all that back to them and remind them how great it is that big business can freely make us pay through our noses!
Kudos to the CBC for reaching out and producing something not for the baby boom white middle to upper class crowd.
Yip, Road to Avonlea and other such wholesome sugary sweet productions is Canadian propaganda to fool the unwitting world into believing that we Canadians are as pure as undriven snow. (cough... gag... er... polluted acid snow, that is)
I'd like to also point out that TVOntario (who's part gov't funded and part PBS funding campaign driven) puts out alot of edgy stuff too that challenges the mind and emotions.
One would think they'd take the good parts of the 600 (namely the radio/phone part) and merely add a higher resolution screen and other small improvements rather than seemingly designing it from the gound up again.
can't talk for the grantparent of course, but the questions put up there are ones that occur to many outside observers with regards to the USA, so I doubt grantparent was trolling
Indeed.
I was at my grandmother's funeral 2 years ago down in NYC. One of my cousin's boyfriend was present at a dinner and is a student at a naturopathy school. For some reason, I assumed and equated that with a pro medicare view.
Boy was I ever wrong and the next few minutes were a bit torturous until the subject changed.
While I don't believe that government should have their hands in a particular industry forever, I'm for the idea that government money/involvement should somehow be involved in the startup of new industries and businesses in existing industries with a set time line to an exit for them.
I'm an on-site computer tech that does freelance work and got my start after getting laid off from one of the telcos in 2001.
I went to file my claim for employment insurance and saw a sign calling for people who want to be their own boss and start their own businesses.
Based on the strength of their ideas and a barrage of interviews, they take in 1/4 who apply and provide a year's worth of mentoring and financial hand holding to get people up and on their feet.
Granted our taxes here are significantly higher and I will freely admit that I do go against the system every now and again with cash under the table jobs. However, I feel that I'd be in a much different boat had it not been for this gov't funded program.
And with regard to healthcare, that cousin mentioned earlier was talking to me earlier this year about how her dad was going in for radiotherapy for a tumour and how there was some concern about the insurance not working well in their favour.
Contrasting this at the same time as my dad was dieing of liver failure due to Hep. B., number of trips to the ER, stays at the hospital and palliative assistance at home, it was nice not to have to worry about financial payouts during that time.
Anyhow, that's just my experience and I guess that this all has to do with what we're used to and the comfort zone that we've grown accustomed to.
Although easier to start a flame war and leave, message boards are also great for getting well thought out answers and viewpoints without too much heated emotional bashing.
It's not fair that the government provides us free police force and firemen. The private companies can't compete and its killing the economy.
OCP! OCP! OCP!
Until you finally have yet another government program sucking dollars out of your pocket to buy votes
Corporations may not have your intrest in mind but at least they are an equal opportunity screw
After reading this and seeing similar comments on many different issues over the last year or so, I feel compelled to ask a question.
Let me frame this by stating that I'm Canadian and thus see nothing wrong with government taking initiative to dump money into new industries to at least start it off and have government in control of (i.e. running or heavily regulating) essential services.
The question is this... Why is it that in America, the private sector is placed on such a high pedastal?
I figure that looking to find the least common denominator of methods to provide a service or product for the population amounts to only an "equal opportunity screw" just seems totally cynical, wrong and scary to me.
I was reading someone else's take about the American mentality on health care and saw it summed up as something that individuals feel personally responsible for and would feel intruded if it became the government's domain. A friend from school was telling of a guy she dated from SC who felt that public transit was a government handout for the poor and lazy.
Is this just survival of the fittest in action? And if so, why do people let private industry run to the government for protection from such things like a community based wi-fi network? It might as well be SCO/MS/etc getting legislators to slap a tax on Linux/BSD and all OSS to 'even the playing field.'...
And one backup is not enough a bad batch of discs can still bite you in the butt. My important backups are done on mirrored DVDR of different brands, typically Taiyo Yuden and Mitsubishi Chemical Company. Or one on DVDR and one on a bunch of CDRs.
I hear good things about TY and Mitsubishi, though I haven't had the opportunity to use them.
I do miss the old Kodak Infoguard golds. A utilitiy CD that I made back in '98 for use in my job as a computer janitor is still going strong and a scandisk utility still reports it to be error free.... unlike alot of the POS disks that I've bought since then.
Hundreds of years? Have you seen the fade on photos 50 years ago, 100 years ago?
Standard colour prints are made with organic dyes. Those fade in time.
Black and white photos are silver
Those don't fade but other factors like the underlying paper turning yellow or the underlying film being cellulose nitrate a close relative of nitro cellulose (AKA gun cotton) causes it to disintegrate.
For the chemical holy grail, (and this goes back to my knowledge gained in the 80s and early 90s)you're looking at Kodachrome 64 slide film and cibachrome positive-positive paper.
Both use inorganic dyes and both have withstood a battery of tests and time.
Thinking back to that /. article of the high school project where they put solar collectors in the back of that pickup to generate hydrogen, I'm wondering what the return is on hydrogen generation through electrolysis.
I'd guess that generating hydrogen with nuclear power would be rather expensive and way too many steps from a natural resource to electricity and then to a useable fuel.
But there is hydro electricity, wind and solar that can probably do it cheaply.
Let me ask this...
Rather than going with nuclear and fossil fuel produced electricity plus burning of fosil fuels in cars, what is the cost of and how much would we need of hydro electric dams, wind and solar farms to produce enough electricity to make enough hydrogen and power the current grid?
As a true Star Trek fan, I feel compelled to point out that Dilithium Crystals do not generate power. Rather, they capture the energy released in matter/antimatter annihilation. Thus the correct answer is "antimatter". I suggest that you sweep the issue of *where* the antimatter comes from under the rug. :-)
Ya know... I assume a matter/anti-matter reaction would be similar but produces way more power than nuclear fission. However, physics and chemistry have become ancient history for me now, so I don't know what sorts of waste products and thus problems of disposal you'd possibly get from such a reaction.
That said, if you can actually harness the power of a nuclear explosion the way a flux capacitor should theoretically be able to harness a bolt of lightning, we would probably have enough fuel with all the stockpiles of weapons to make worries about fuel shortages a thing of the past.
But then again, this is all speculation on non-existant technoglogy...
Nice to read posts from Americans that are glad that their top politicians aren't living up to the nickname of "land of the litigious".
Now if only those politicians could fix things to make that nickname and the less than stellar reputation of the patent office go away.
When Trudeau helped bring in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms more than a decade later, near the end of his tenure, he may have been trying to undo some of the damage he caused -- certainly, he seems to have learned from his mistake.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the charter of rights and freedoms was never signed by Quebec. Premiere Duplesis (IIRC) wanted alot more than was offered to them at the time and so Trudeau got the rest of the premieres together and hammered it out while Duplesis was sleeping.
Result. One really ticked off premiere and no Quebec in the charter of rights.
This was covered on a PBS program.... Can't remember the name.
The Russians are doing disposable successfully with the Soyuz and yes indeed, they are cheaper to launch/build and can do far more work for less money.
The one group in the states that insists on reuseable space craft are/were the millitary.
Actually, I think it was the airforce specifically insisting on vehicles that behaved like aircraft in the atmosphere.
I don't recall too much else from the program, but there might have been some mention of opposition to the navy having control of aircraft on their carriers. The impression I got was that the USAF wanted to have their hands at the controls when it came to the future of space warfare and defence rather than some other organization.
However, soon the manufacturing costs in Japan rose and they found they could serve their customer better and make their cars cheaper if they opened auto plants closer to the customer.
The result is that majority of Toyotas sold in the U.S. today are built right here by workers who get paid lower than before.
Same thing might happen in the IT industry.
Doubt it...
It cost time and $$$ to ship raw materials to Japan and it cost more time and $$$ to ship the finished product back. Thus it makes perfect sense to put the plant near the customers.
With IT, your finished product is not as tangible. The cost to ship support or software from a boiler room to North America is the cost of the phone/data lines in between.
Reference please? Or is this just more Bushwacking in a weak disguise?
t ml
Here ya go...
http://www.livejournal.com/users/anniesj/331112.h
The world goes round best when things are balanced.
Too much conservative zealotry and you've got a draconian God fearing, fully censoring police state.
Too much liberal hedonism and everybody does what they wanna do and consideration for others goes out the window.
Back to the point of video games.
Considering the increase in CPU and GPU power allowing for life-like looking games. Video games might as well be a very flexible version of those 80s Choose Your Own Adventure books turned into movies.
Since we're slipping video games into the movie genre, rating and prohibiting access should be applied. But even with that in place, parents who don't do parenting should still get off their asses.
http://newvoyages.mine.nu:1701/torrent.html?info_h ash=a8938093524e894b5345adafcbe1700ccbc6a827
When I worked for an ISP during the bust times of the early 2000s and before we got our layoff packages, a number of us found we had nothing better to do than to spend half to 3/4 of the day playing LAN GTA2.
We pretty much did this steady for a month and a half. We were all in our late 20s, early 30s and for a short while afterwards, most of us at times would have the urge to or actually hit the gas pedal in our real cars thinking we could accelerate quickly, inch by cars infront of us, squeeze through spaces that we really shouldn't.
Fortunately for all of us that shared our stories, we had the good sense to stop before anything actually happened.
Now take that mindset which we got from playing too much GTA2 and overlay it onto a kid who thinks he's invincible...
There ain't no way I'd be convinced that violent video games don't desensitize as well as put your mind into an altered state.
VISA used to charge me a 4.5% discount fee for manual processing. Setting up online processing is difficult and expensive, with monthly charges to boot.
Canadian, eh?
Try calling up Moneris.
Initial setup fee is bit more for online payments but they don't make you hold bonds or large bank accounts with them to do business. Even if it's online. I do IVR phone in transactions once a month. It works for me and funds are deposited in my bank account 2-3 days later. 2.5% + a $10/month fee total (CDN funds).
There is the CertaPay system in Canada, which can be used to transfer money by email between almost all Canadian banks, but it only works in Canada.
$1.50/transaction on the part of the sender. But yes, it is a nice system, which is only nation wide.
For a little guy just starting up, charging small amounts, operating world-wide - PayPal is pretty much the only way to go.
Is it for online stores and auctions that people are using paypal for worldwide operations?
I'm a little guy that does on-site IT support and other small business IT services. I figured that asking my customers to jump through the hoop of having to setup a paypal account, have the $2 ro so charge go through their cards and having to lookup their statement to validate the CC with paypal before they could pay me as being a major PITA that would deter folks from
Do you even know what you're talking about? You can have PayPal cut you a real paper check if you want. They charge for that, a direct wire transfer to your account is free.
Looks like not.
Last time I paypal'ed anything, it was 3 years ago.
From then, it just seemed a little too confined in that both parties had to have accounts and then piggy backing ontop of my credit card.
A year ago, a small business advisor suggested I look into paypal for accepting CC payments to increase business.
Reading paypalsucks.com made me more certain that I'm glad I didn't go there.
I do on site technical consulting as well as some small time virtual hosting. My customers have never mentioned paypal up to this point and my merchant fees are quite low.
I may re-evaluate if/when it hits a far higher market penetration but that'll be much further down the road.
Heh.... good one.
Can someone tell me why it is that a business should end up using paypal for payment services as opposed to getting a merchant account through a bank with Visa/MC/Amex?
They might advertise lower cost but from my e-bay experiences, it's a nuissance to have to open up a paypal account in order to pay somebody online.
Ontop of that, if you sell something and receive payment by paypal, there really wasn't a way to cash out other than to use the money in the paypal account to buy stuff in other auctions.
For all the hassles that I have to deal with service fees in my small business, I'd rather take the money deposited into my bank account route than have to navigate whatever maze that paypal forces one through.
I'd like to see this one go to court and then a countersuit for a malicious and frivolous actions on the part of the MPAA launched.
Arrogant litigious bastards need a taste of their own medicine.
Government raiding corporate offices?
Dear or dear, what does that say to business?
That's just contrary to a free market system where market conditions are what should rightfully dictate to corporations what prices should be.
Bullshit!
Is it me or is it that any time in North America, where busines activities are curtailed by societal interests, the business community comes out swinging with the words of "what are they saying to business?".
As far as I am concerned and I'm a business owner too.... The message to business should be to play fair, don't be greedy and respect the world you're making a living in.