It was ok, but they could have left out the silly sound effects. There were a lot of string plucks and boings that belong on a Spike Jones record than a sci-fi comedy.
I can picture Bush's moronic cronies sitting around watching 24 going "wait a minute. ..Nuculur power plants actually have computers. ..everyone hates the U.S.. ..a thought is coming to me. ..wait for it. ..terrorists might try to destroy the U.S. using computers. ..at the nuculur power plants." We need to do something about this.
First, I know I misspelled Nuclear, but Bush isn't smart enough to pronounce it correctly. Since he doesn't like being told he's wrong about anything, I'm sure that everyone around him just starts mispronouncing it to so they don't get fired.
Second, as soon as bits started flowing to/from a power plant and the internet, this should have been considered (and was, I'm sure), but the current administration will take credit by saying "see? We ain't asleep at the switch like that Michael Moore feller said we wuz."
I've commented before about the incompetence and paranoia at my former employer, and having a side job was another touchy subject around the office. Before I was a full-fledged Software Engineer, I was an Associate Software Engineer (no degree), and therefore wasn't earning my full potential. A friend owned a very small company and occasionally had more programming work than he could handle. He asked me to take on a fairly simple job that I completed over a weekend.
The following week, I was called into HR and reminded that I had signed a non-compete clause and that anything that I created was technically the property of . First, I asked who complained (she wasn't at liberty to say, but I knew who), and I said that my work had absolutely nothing to do with the product we manufactured. She said that it didn't matter and I had to sign a piece of paper explaining that if it happened again, I would be fired. However, on this form, there was a comments area that I filled out and explained exactly what the product did, who it was for, and the days that the work was performed on. After reading it, she realized how stupid the whole thing was and tore up the form in front of me to avoid future embarrassment.
I worked for a company that had never even considered doing peer review before an Indian (not the Native American type) was overheard bragging about how for the last two years, he had written all of his variable names in Hindi and that they wouldn't dare fire him now. He was half right. They didn't fire him at that point, but for the next six months, he had to go to daily meetings with his three tiers of bosses to show the work he had done in translating the variable names back to English.
Problem solved, right? Not really. While he was translating some files to English, he was also busy translating others to Hindi. Right before he was put back on a project, his new "work" had been discovered because, again, he was overheard bragging about how they would never fire him. This time they cut his pay by $20 an hour for the duration of the repairs, locked him out of the version control software to prevent any more damage, and the day after he finished, there was a total peer review of every file he had ever worked on. Once the day long meeting was over, he was asked to stand up in front of everyone and told by the VP of engineering that he was fired.
The bad thing is that the company still doesn't believe in peer reviews, but it's a good company to work for because it is almost impossible to get fired.
I found this card on the verizon wireless website. It's an Audiovox PC 5220 and according to them it has the following throughput:
- Typical download speeds of 300-500 kbps with bursts up to 2 Mbps
- Qualcomm MSM5500, data speeds up to 2 Mbps
I can't prove or disprove their claims, but since Verizon is owned by Vodafone (the company mentioned in the original posting), I can imagine that it will be at least as good.
P.S. have you checked out the pricing of data services?
$79.99
Unlimited NationalAccess & BroadbandAccess for wireless data
They also have per-megabyte plans for a little less.
Here in Florida, we get storms that are huge and come out of nowhere. As one of these thick storm clouds moves across the path of your digital satellite dish, the signal goes kaput. There is nothing you can do but wait for the storm to pass. This is the one thing that is keeping me tethered to Bright House networks (Time Warner).
Now, my question to DirectTV and Dish Network (or anyone in the know) is what are you doing to overcome this? Higher satellite power is the obvious answer, but a difficult solution.
She was a real tight-a$$. She seemed like the type of woman that considered sex to be a dirty, filthy thing that you were only supposed to do to make babies (and you weren't allowed to enjoy it). Other than that, very bangable.
After I was (honorably) discharged from the Army, I was working for a computer dealer until I could get a better job. They kept promising me a promotion if I would just stay with them. I kept hearing "give us a couple more weeks". In addition, my supervisor would come in every day and complain about how her husband doesn't want to have sex with her, she would berate me because I was "religously undecided", the owners would insult me because I was 23 years old and had graduated college yet, the technicians didn't like me because I knew more than they did about fixing computers, etc. It paid the bills, but I could only take so much, and after about 10 months I decided that it was a waste of my time to even show up there, so I quit.
The day after I finally left, I called the software piracy hotline and told them about the following things that they flagrantly did:
1) Whenever someone ordered a piece of software through them, no matter what it was, they would break the shrinkwrap and make an ISO image of the disc(s) in the box. If someone asked what happened to the shrinkwrap, they would just say that they were testing it to make sure it worked. After all, any computer savvy person would order online or go to CompUSA.
2) They purchased a single user version of some server software, then the two owners (who had PhD's in computer science) unlocked it for unlimited users.
3) They owned one copy of Windows, M$ office, etc., but installed it on 20 or so computers. While this is common, it's still a flagrant violation of the license.
4) They ordered a trial version of a fax/pbx system (PCI expansion cards). After the trial period was up, they claimed the $10,000 worth of software and hardware had been hit by lightning, unlocked the trial period block, and ended up with a free fax and PBX system.
About a month after I left, they were raided by the police, the owners arrested, and all of their equipment was sold at auction for pennies on the dollar.
Why should the radio stations be worried about M$ duplicating their playlists? They have the same playlists at every single clear channel radio station across the country.
The music industry is its own worst enemy. Commercial radio homogenizes everything so you hear the same 8 songs 4-6 times a day no matter what market you are in. They take payola (for lack of a better term) from the record companies to focus on the acts that they think have the most potential because they signed outragous contracts with them. Meanwhile CD prices continue to climb.
If they had any brains they would sign a lot of acts with reasonable contracts (more $$$ on the back end instead of up front) as opposed to throwing tons of money to the same cookie cutter hip-hop act that will never be heard from after their first album drops. This will reduce the cost to the record company, theoretically allowing CD prices to drop, theoretically reducing the need for P2P piracy, while encouraging creativity in the artists. After all, change is often a good thing.
Some trojans use the zombie's address book as a source for spoofed names. For example, let's say you e-mail George W. Bush a lot and president@whitehouse.gov is in your address book. You pick up a trojan somehow and it will find that address and use it as the "From" address when sending out the spam/virus. Bounce messages will go to president@whitehouse.gov.
Back in 2002, Miami-Dade had an election using touch-screen voting. In some circumstances there were more votes than registered voters, and in at least one instance an entire day's votes in one machine were "accidentally" erased. No paper backup means the votes were lost in the ether.
Since each state is responsible for operating the voting process, you'd think that Jeb Bush (the Governor) and former Orlando Mayor and now Secretary of State Glenda Hood would have been outraged. Jeb's reply was "why can't Democrats learn how to vote?". Glenda Hood's response was "that doesn't mean that we need to have a paper trail." She has this big bug up her ass that printed receipts would cause a repeat of the 2000 debacle when in reality the 2000 debacle was 100% caused by the old punch cards being difficult to scan. A paper printout would simply be a way to recount votes that aren't up to speculation by the person doing the recount (i.e. they know exactly which votes are cast.)
Does the ban on Tobacco advertising on television and radio cover video games as well? Since NASCAR and other sports series are trying to avoid the potential millions of dollars in tobacco advertising money, how long will it be before Duke Nukem stops his bloodfest to enjoy the fresh taste of a cool Laramie cigarette?
Before anyone comments on it, I know that one of the reasons NASCAR switched from Winston to Nextel partially because the poor, poor tobacco companies lost so much money to the swine lawyers in one of the biggest tort cases in history. Combined with the restrictions that the U.S. (not to mention the European Union) put on tobacco advertising on television, many sports have been forced to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
The rocket pack holds enough fuel for about 1 minute (or less) of flight. He had to keep enough fuel to land with. THAT's why we see this military technology at air shows and not being shot at over Baghdad.
I didn't want to single out the UK, but I lived there for almost 2 years and paid a butt-load of taxes (almost 50%) thanks to an accounting screw-up by KPMG. However, even without the screw-up, I was paying around 35% in addition to a cost of living that was at least 100% of what I am used to here in Florida.
Actually there is an easy fix for the IRS
on
No EZ Fix For The IRS
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Get rid of it. One third of all of the individual tax returns gets spent on the IRS' budget. If we were to scrap the IRS and create a federal sales tax (two have been proposed in congress), then the individual burden would be reduced because people with illegal incomes (they usually don't file tax returns) and tourists would all be paying into the federal pile just by buying things. Sticking your money in an offshore bank account wouldn't do any good. The more you spend the more taxes you pay.
If this were to happen, however, we would have to make sure we don't do something stupid like keep the income tax AND incorporate a federal sales tax. If your country already does that, no offense intended.
Actually, Marconi owes it all to Nikola Tesla. Without Tesla's invention of wireless transmission (which he holds the patent for), Marconi would have never been able to market "his" invention.
Actually the (non-adult) movie industry takes that idea too. An example was made in the media about the movie Chicago that costs around $20 and includes the soundtrack. The soundtrack from the music industry cost around $18. Why copy movies when they are so (relatively cheap).
However, "a friend" tells me that adult movies are more expensive. They are shorter and average around $30-$60. Less "bang" for the buck, as it were.
Ok, let's say the deal actually goes through. You save 99 cents on a download while you ingest some of the least healthy crap in the world that you paid 5 bucks for.
CNN is a division of Time-Warner. ..Time-Warner also owns Warner Music. ..Warner Music wants people to stop sharing their songs. ..
I can imagine the board meeting now
"Let's get someone from CNN in here to do a report on how people are deleting songs. Since I know exactly what everyone is thinking, I feel that if people read that, they might do the same. ..even though threatening to sue people, shutting down napster, ignoring digital downloads as a source of income, putting out crappy music that gets played ad-nauseum, and bribing congressmen to get the DMCA passed didn't work. I'm just not sure why people say we're out of touch."
About ten years ago, mobile phones were "only for people that make money by talking with people any time, any place". Eventually (in the U.S.) at least, the pager was replaced by the mobile phone. Now, mobile phones are so cheap and convenient, people are using them to replace their land-lines. With the popularity of the internet, broadband rollout also had to occur so people didn't have to dial-in.
That being said, the VoIP business is slowly gaining acceptance. John Dvorak from PC Magazine wrote an article about how his Vonage service manages to find him wherever he is, as long as he takes his Cisco phone adapter to a hotel that has broadband. So, once again, we see a potential market driven by frequent travelers that will weed out less stable companies, while strengthening stronger companies to make a market affordable for casual users.
Wired Magazine had an article that talked about how Russian "designed" viruses are making their way into western medicine to help fight off strains of anti-bacterial resistant bugs. They are very adaptive as opposed to our common medicine that just kills everything, even good bacteria.
I think the Carbon Rod would have won that competition. Fox news is nothing more than a video version of the New York Post: It's only news if someone is being explotied. Of course CNN, MSNBC, and almost every single local channel is guilty of the same problem. Leading up to the attacks on 9/11, we in central Florida experienced dozens of news crews from around the world to cover, what was perceived to be, a rash of shark attacks in the dangerous waters in the Daytona Beach area. The reality was, there were actually fewer shark attacks that year than in most years. News corporations on par with Fox News had nothing else to report on, so down they came. I then realized that the reported news wasn't interesting enough to bother watching.
Since parody is perfectly legal under the freedom of speech amendment in the constitution, The Simpson's writers (as did Al Franken) had every right to point out the absurdity of the way news corporations grandstand small stories report on ridiculously boring crap.
All hail the inanimate carbon rod!!!
I totally agree! The multiple Discovery networks do a good job of providing a variety of scientific information. The Science Channel has recently been showing a lot of Astronomical shows similar to Cosmos. The only thing that is kind of off-putting is the rosy "man will soon be travelling to distant planets" future that they present. Maybe it's because my definition of "soon" means "within my lifetime" and theirs is based on the fact that out of the history of humanity, 500 years is just around the corner. That being said, I still like to watch the shows because I am an optimisit when it comes to humanity eventually overcoming the petty problems we try to deal with today and look at the "big picture": We will eventually run out of enough resources to sustain a single-planet population.
Hopefully the new science channel will take the place of one of the many horrible music video channels (Such as MTV Jams) and give people something constructive to watch.
Slashdot Mirror
It was ok, but they could have left out the silly sound effects. There were a lot of string plucks and boings that belong on a Spike Jones record than a sci-fi comedy.
I can picture Bush's moronic cronies sitting around watching 24 going "wait a minute. . .Nuculur power plants actually have computers. . .everyone hates the U.S.. . .a thought is coming to me. . .wait for it. . .terrorists might try to destroy the U.S. using computers. . .at the nuculur power plants." We need to do something about this.
First, I know I misspelled Nuclear, but Bush isn't smart enough to pronounce it correctly. Since he doesn't like being told he's wrong about anything, I'm sure that everyone around him just starts mispronouncing it to so they don't get fired.
Second, as soon as bits started flowing to/from a power plant and the internet, this should have been considered (and was, I'm sure), but the current administration will take credit by saying "see? We ain't asleep at the switch like that Michael Moore feller said we wuz."
1. I wonder if they taste like chicken
2. I, for one, welcome our new mutant leader. All Hail Chimera!!
I've commented before about the incompetence and paranoia at my former employer, and having a side job was another touchy subject around the office. Before I was a full-fledged Software Engineer, I was an Associate Software Engineer (no degree), and therefore wasn't earning my full potential. A friend owned a very small company and occasionally had more programming work than he could handle. He asked me to take on a fairly simple job that I completed over a weekend.
The following week, I was called into HR and reminded that I had signed a non-compete clause and that anything that I created was technically the property of . First, I asked who complained (she wasn't at liberty to say, but I knew who), and I said that my work had absolutely nothing to do with the product we manufactured. She said that it didn't matter and I had to sign a piece of paper explaining that if it happened again, I would be fired. However, on this form, there was a comments area that I filled out and explained exactly what the product did, who it was for, and the days that the work was performed on. After reading it, she realized how stupid the whole thing was and tore up the form in front of me to avoid future embarrassment.
I worked for a company that had never even considered doing peer review before an Indian (not the Native American type) was overheard bragging about how for the last two years, he had written all of his variable names in Hindi and that they wouldn't dare fire him now. He was half right. They didn't fire him at that point, but for the next six months, he had to go to daily meetings with his three tiers of bosses to show the work he had done in translating the variable names back to English.
Problem solved, right? Not really. While he was translating some files to English, he was also busy translating others to Hindi. Right before he was put back on a project, his new "work" had been discovered because, again, he was overheard bragging about how they would never fire him. This time they cut his pay by $20 an hour for the duration of the repairs, locked him out of the version control software to prevent any more damage, and the day after he finished, there was a total peer review of every file he had ever worked on. Once the day long meeting was over, he was asked to stand up in front of everyone and told by the VP of engineering that he was fired.
The bad thing is that the company still doesn't believe in peer reviews, but it's a good company to work for because it is almost impossible to get fired.
- Typical download speeds of 300-500 kbps with bursts up to 2 Mbps
- Qualcomm MSM5500, data speeds up to 2 Mbps
I can't prove or disprove their claims, but since Verizon is owned by Vodafone (the company mentioned in the original posting), I can imagine that it will be at least as good.
P.S. have you checked out the pricing of data services?
$79.99
Unlimited NationalAccess & BroadbandAccess for wireless data
They also have per-megabyte plans for a little less.
Here in Florida, we get storms that are huge and come out of nowhere. As one of these thick storm clouds moves across the path of your digital satellite dish, the signal goes kaput. There is nothing you can do but wait for the storm to pass. This is the one thing that is keeping me tethered to Bright House networks (Time Warner).
Now, my question to DirectTV and Dish Network (or anyone in the know) is what are you doing to overcome this? Higher satellite power is the obvious answer, but a difficult solution.
She was a real tight-a$$. She seemed like the type of woman that considered sex to be a dirty, filthy thing that you were only supposed to do to make babies (and you weren't allowed to enjoy it). Other than that, very bangable.
After I was (honorably) discharged from the Army, I was working for a computer dealer until I could get a better job. They kept promising me a promotion if I would just stay with them. I kept hearing "give us a couple more weeks". In addition, my supervisor would come in every day and complain about how her husband doesn't want to have sex with her, she would berate me because I was "religously undecided", the owners would insult me because I was 23 years old and had graduated college yet, the technicians didn't like me because I knew more than they did about fixing computers, etc. It paid the bills, but I could only take so much, and after about 10 months I decided that it was a waste of my time to even show up there, so I quit.
The day after I finally left, I called the software piracy hotline and told them about the following things that they flagrantly did:
1) Whenever someone ordered a piece of software through them, no matter what it was, they would break the shrinkwrap and make an ISO image of the disc(s) in the box. If someone asked what happened to the shrinkwrap, they would just say that they were testing it to make sure it worked. After all, any computer savvy person would order online or go to CompUSA.
2) They purchased a single user version of some server software, then the two owners (who had PhD's in computer science) unlocked it for unlimited users.
3) They owned one copy of Windows, M$ office, etc., but installed it on 20 or so computers. While this is common, it's still a flagrant violation of the license.
4) They ordered a trial version of a fax/pbx system (PCI expansion cards). After the trial period was up, they claimed the $10,000 worth of software and hardware had been hit by lightning, unlocked the trial period block, and ended up with a free fax and PBX system.
About a month after I left, they were raided by the police, the owners arrested, and all of their equipment was sold at auction for pennies on the dollar.
Why should the radio stations be worried about M$ duplicating their playlists? They have the same playlists at every single clear channel radio station across the country.
The music industry is its own worst enemy. Commercial radio homogenizes everything so you hear the same 8 songs 4-6 times a day no matter what market you are in. They take payola (for lack of a better term) from the record companies to focus on the acts that they think have the most potential because they signed outragous contracts with them. Meanwhile CD prices continue to climb.
If they had any brains they would sign a lot of acts with reasonable contracts (more $$$ on the back end instead of up front) as opposed to throwing tons of money to the same cookie cutter hip-hop act that will never be heard from after their first album drops. This will reduce the cost to the record company, theoretically allowing CD prices to drop, theoretically reducing the need for P2P piracy, while encouraging creativity in the artists. After all, change is often a good thing.
But what do I know?
Some trojans use the zombie's address book as a source for spoofed names. For example, let's say you e-mail George W. Bush a lot and president@whitehouse.gov is in your address book. You pick up a trojan somehow and it will find that address and use it as the "From" address when sending out the spam/virus. Bounce messages will go to president@whitehouse.gov.
Are you feeling zombified?
Back in 2002, Miami-Dade had an election using touch-screen voting. In some circumstances there were more votes than registered voters, and in at least one instance an entire day's votes in one machine were "accidentally" erased. No paper backup means the votes were lost in the ether.
Since each state is responsible for operating the voting process, you'd think that Jeb Bush (the Governor) and former Orlando Mayor and now Secretary of State Glenda Hood would have been outraged. Jeb's reply was "why can't Democrats learn how to vote?". Glenda Hood's response was "that doesn't mean that we need to have a paper trail." She has this big bug up her ass that printed receipts would cause a repeat of the 2000 debacle when in reality the 2000 debacle was 100% caused by the old punch cards being difficult to scan. A paper printout would simply be a way to recount votes that aren't up to speculation by the person doing the recount (i.e. they know exactly which votes are cast.)
P.S. Diebold Sucks!
Does the ban on Tobacco advertising on television and radio cover video games as well? Since NASCAR and other sports series are trying to avoid the potential millions of dollars in tobacco advertising money, how long will it be before Duke Nukem stops his bloodfest to enjoy the fresh taste of a cool Laramie cigarette?
Before anyone comments on it, I know that one of the reasons NASCAR switched from Winston to Nextel partially because the poor, poor tobacco companies lost so much money to the swine lawyers in one of the biggest tort cases in history. Combined with the restrictions that the U.S. (not to mention the European Union) put on tobacco advertising on television, many sports have been forced to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
Oops. Didn't know that. The site had been /.ed and I didn't get to read the particulars
The rocket pack holds enough fuel for about 1 minute (or less) of flight. He had to keep enough fuel to land with. THAT's why we see this military technology at air shows and not being shot at over Baghdad.
I didn't want to single out the UK, but I lived there for almost 2 years and paid a butt-load of taxes (almost 50%) thanks to an accounting screw-up by KPMG. However, even without the screw-up, I was paying around 35% in addition to a cost of living that was at least 100% of what I am used to here in Florida.
Get rid of it. One third of all of the individual tax returns gets spent on the IRS' budget. If we were to scrap the IRS and create a federal sales tax (two have been proposed in congress), then the individual burden would be reduced because people with illegal incomes (they usually don't file tax returns) and tourists would all be paying into the federal pile just by buying things. Sticking your money in an offshore bank account wouldn't do any good. The more you spend the more taxes you pay. If this were to happen, however, we would have to make sure we don't do something stupid like keep the income tax AND incorporate a federal sales tax. If your country already does that, no offense intended.
Actually, Marconi owes it all to Nikola Tesla. Without Tesla's invention of wireless transmission (which he holds the patent for), Marconi would have never been able to market "his" invention.
Actually the (non-adult) movie industry takes that idea too. An example was made in the media about the movie Chicago that costs around $20 and includes the soundtrack. The soundtrack from the music industry cost around $18. Why copy movies when they are so (relatively cheap). However, "a friend" tells me that adult movies are more expensive. They are shorter and average around $30-$60. Less "bang" for the buck, as it were.
Where do I sign up?
I can imagine the board meeting now
About ten years ago, mobile phones were "only for people that make money by talking with people any time, any place". Eventually (in the U.S.) at least, the pager was replaced by the mobile phone. Now, mobile phones are so cheap and convenient, people are using them to replace their land-lines. With the popularity of the internet, broadband rollout also had to occur so people didn't have to dial-in. That being said, the VoIP business is slowly gaining acceptance. John Dvorak from PC Magazine wrote an article about how his Vonage service manages to find him wherever he is, as long as he takes his Cisco phone adapter to a hotel that has broadband. So, once again, we see a potential market driven by frequent travelers that will weed out less stable companies, while strengthening stronger companies to make a market affordable for casual users.
Wired Magazine had an article that talked about how Russian "designed" viruses are making their way into western medicine to help fight off strains of anti-bacterial resistant bugs. They are very adaptive as opposed to our common medicine that just kills everything, even good bacteria.
I think the Carbon Rod would have won that competition. Fox news is nothing more than a video version of the New York Post: It's only news if someone is being explotied. Of course CNN, MSNBC, and almost every single local channel is guilty of the same problem. Leading up to the attacks on 9/11, we in central Florida experienced dozens of news crews from around the world to cover, what was perceived to be, a rash of shark attacks in the dangerous waters in the Daytona Beach area. The reality was, there were actually fewer shark attacks that year than in most years. News corporations on par with Fox News had nothing else to report on, so down they came. I then realized that the reported news wasn't interesting enough to bother watching. Since parody is perfectly legal under the freedom of speech amendment in the constitution, The Simpson's writers (as did Al Franken) had every right to point out the absurdity of the way news corporations grandstand small stories report on ridiculously boring crap. All hail the inanimate carbon rod!!!
I totally agree! The multiple Discovery networks do a good job of providing a variety of scientific information. The Science Channel has recently been showing a lot of Astronomical shows similar to Cosmos. The only thing that is kind of off-putting is the rosy "man will soon be travelling to distant planets" future that they present. Maybe it's because my definition of "soon" means "within my lifetime" and theirs is based on the fact that out of the history of humanity, 500 years is just around the corner. That being said, I still like to watch the shows because I am an optimisit when it comes to humanity eventually overcoming the petty problems we try to deal with today and look at the "big picture": We will eventually run out of enough resources to sustain a single-planet population.
Hopefully the new science channel will take the place of one of the many horrible music video channels (Such as MTV Jams) and give people something constructive to watch.
I'll step off my soapbox now. . .