"the Volunteer Fire Departments in my area of the country don't take any kind of Oath. "
What do you call a firefighter that doesn't fight fires?
A firefighter died and went to hell where he finds a wall of clocks. After seeing all these clocks on a wall, with his friends names under them, he asked the devil, what the clocks mean? "That's easy, each time one of your friends mess up on earth, their clock speeds up one hour." says the devil. "I don't see the Chiefs clock anywhere?" the fireman says. The devil replied, "Oh him, we have his down in the basement, we're using it for a fan."
"should've made him sign an agreement to pay the true cost of showing up and putting out the fire."
Doesn't work either, because if they show up to find a small fire the homeowner already put out then what's the cost?
I think there should be a huge minimum just to arrive to discourage people from not paying, something in the neighborhood of 20 years worth of fire service payments, that way even if they only have a fire every 10 years the fire department is still coming out on top.
"You've essentially described one of the fundamental problems with public goods -- if it's provided for the benefit of all, how do you avoid free-riders?"
What about the guy that burns his house down every 3 years? Or the guy that burns his house down because he was a smoker and dropped a cigarette? Should I pay the same $75 as the guy being neglectful? If I don't smoke or don't have a fire in 10+ yrs or have a newer up-to-code house or have a alarm system that automatically calls the police shouldn't I get a discount? Homeowner's insurance gives discounts on all of those things, so why is the fee the same?
This $75 thing is just a huge can of worms.
Also why didn't the home owner's insurance pay the $75 a year? After all they're the ones getting screwed here, not the guy. They should have automatically paid the $75 and just added it to his insurance policy just like mortgage companies will often pay the personal property tax (even if they're not escrowed) if the homeowner doesn't and add it to the monthly payment.
"Pay your service fees if you wish to receive your service. It's a win-win."
Are you nuts? What if all of government did this? Want police? Pay up front. Want to call 911? That's $5 a minute. Want to drive on the road? Charged by the mile via GPS. Want your kids to go to school? All schools charge, public schools don't exist. Want to walk on the sidewalk? Toll sidewalks every 100 yards.
Of course this would have no impact on your taxes, your taxes would be just as high. Yes, the homeowner says he pays taxes so he's not getting a huge break here, sounds like he's just getting screwed with no fire department.
They should have done what hospitals do when a ambulance shows up: you get a bill in the mail, thousands of dollars for the ambulance ride.
"Why not put out the fire and then bill him for the $75?"
I was thinking he should get a fine, like parking meters, it's only 50 cents an hour to park YMMV and no one's watching too closely and you could park and not pay, but if you're caught it's a $50+ fine.
But to just stand there and watch it burn? That should be criminal, what if people died? I think the firefighters should go to jail. What has his world come to when the people sworn to serve and protect decide not to? Sounds like anarchy.
"I think a lot of people would trade being a good person for a massive pile of cash. A clear conscience and five bucks will buy you a cup of coffee."
We're not dividing a dollar 10 ways: Facebook is worth over 100 billion dollars and there were only a handful of people instrumental with it's creation that Zuckerberg screwed over. There's enough billions to go around, but because Zuckerberg screwed them over and continues to deny them a dime for the rest of his life he's going to be known as a liar and a cheat.
" Did he steal any other “property”? Absolutely not—the code for Facebook was his, and the “idea” of a social network is not a patent."
Zuckerberg sure has a twisted way of thinking of property! If I work for Microsoft and wrote part of Office 2010, do I get to walk out of Microsoft and claim that code is mine and sell it? Of course not! That's what Zuckerberg did, they paid him to create something, he created it and then said it was his because he wrote the code.
"(Zuckerberg) built-up Facebook by being mean, cut-throat, and ruthless"
That's exactly right, and now we give him all of our personal information and expect him to be honest. We're all idiots, Mark Zuckerberg has tricked us all.
Almost makes me want to go back to Myspace...... almost.....
A price to be a douche bag? Why would you pay someone to be a douche bag?
All Zuckerberg had to do was work with the people that paid him and they'd all be multi-billionaires. Instead he screwed them all, from the three Havard seniors that gave him the entire idea to the guy that gave him $15,000 to continue developing it and pay hosting costs.
Now we give him everything there is to know about our personal lives and expect him to be honest.
"In health care at least, good luck finding any specialty application suite that would run natively in Linux."
And speaking from an IT support background, good luck finding anyone that has as much experience with OSS as they do Windows OS apps. Even if you can find them, I hate to see how much more $$$ they could demand over your regular Windows support team. And even if you "train" them on a OS they have little to no experience on, no amount of training could possibly equal 15+ yrs of using Windows on a daily basis. Paying $100+ for a license vs $0 for a OSS license is nothing compared to the $15+ per hour for one tech support personal. That $100+ you saved per PC running Linux OS would gone the first week having to pay special Linux tech support and the additional time they would spend walking users thru an OS they're unfamiliar with.
The summary is completely backwards: Minnesota did the right thing and saved taxpayers millions of dollars by not going open source. I had to check the calender to make sure it wasn't April Fools.
"Or instead, the people helping the millions of people who suffer brain damage from accidents and strokes could be, maybe, the millions of people who suffer brain damage from accidents and strokes, thereby obviating the need for a fucking expensive and pointless war entirely."
You would think millions of people would be enough, but according to the article it wasn't, they were "inspired by the traumatic brain injuries suffered by ground troops in Afghanistan and Iraq"
Their words not mine, but it just proves that war isn't all bad
"Don't like it? Create your own directory of legal download video projects and lock big content out unless they embrace the download format."
I was thinking the same thing. I'm not impressed with the direction IMDB has been going in recent years, more and more paywalls, I think it's about time someone create an alternative to IMDB and I think it's rather scary that one website has wielded so much power over a movie database for as long as IMDB has.
Like Field of Dreams said "If you build it they will come". Judging by the torrent movies I've seen there's quite a few that would love a site where they might get better exposure than buried under Avatar and Iron Man
WAR! HUH! WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR... medical technolog
on
Rewiring a Damaged Brain
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I know everyone hated the Iraq war, but I found it fascinating when the article said "Their work is inspired by the traumatic brain injuries suffered by ground troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite improvements in helmets and armor, brain trauma continues to be the signature injury of these wars."
Of course if we hadn't had soliders in the war there wouldn't be any brain trauma to repair, but those soliders sacrifice in Iraq might end up helping millions of people who suffer brain damage from accidents and strokes
Guy's wasting his money, even if he wins he loses because no one will ever be able to find his product online, and "Video Pod" is a horrible name for a video projector. He claims "it took us years to go from prototype to funded" and now he's wasting that funding on fighting Apple? If I was one of his investors I'd pull my funding immediately because he's wasting money.... unless he's doing all of this to get publicity and he's planning on backing out the last minute. I did that ten years ago, chose a similar name to a famous existing product and was sued. I even had a story that ended up on slashdot and sales shot through the roof.
It is. I'm on/. and I was a tech geek in the military, MOS 74B
I don't think he understands that civilians enlisting for those positions were techies before they joined the military. Just because I can type like the wind and work my way around a linux distro doesn't mean I can't shoot a M16A2 or M4
"5. Those who do think they got the shaft may sue. And because this is an antitrust finding, the settlement will allow anyone who wins in federal court to "recover three times the damages the person has suffered." Say goodbye to whatever measly amounts the companies saved through these agreements. Dumb."
I don't think you read the article. No one got "shafted", they had "special agreements not to solicit" and "instructed employees not to directly cold-call Google's employees." This has nothing to do with employees who applied and were turned away like the previous article suggested, they simply agreed not to stalk and actively harass each other's employees attempting to steal them.
Imagine you were dating a woman... I know,/., it's a stretch, but pretend... actually, let's say you were dating a Elven Princess on WoW, that's closer to probably closer to reality. Your buddy is dating a... um... Elven Sorceress (sure why not). Your buddy starts harassing your princess trying to get her to be with him. You tell your buddy to lay off or you're going to go after his sorceress. You both agree not to harass each other's WoW girlfriends. That's what happened here, they agreed not to harass each other's employees. That's probably a good thing, both for your WoW dates and for you and your buddy. Course now the WoW masters said you're not allowed to do that, so if you want to harass each other's dates or anyone else you're permitted. See how the DOJ just mucked this all up?
Enjoy being stalked by Apple, Intel, Adobe, Intuit and Pixar then. Next time you get one of those robotic telemarketer calls you might actually want to hear what they have to say because it's probably a job offer.
"Google is probably in the worst position for this to come out because it's yet another example of how bad that company has become."
How bad? Pledging not to cold call is a bad thing?
Last slashdot story made it sound like they were flat out refusing to hire each other's employees, now it comes out that they were agreeing not to stalk each other's employees. While sure the employees are still probably losing something here it's clear they're not losing much at all, I can see now that every Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe, Intuit and Pixar employee is going to be making $200k+ because they're going to just keep stealing each other's employees instead of finding talent from the rest of the world so really this hurts everyone looking for a job right now and the only people that win are those already working for Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe, Intuit and Pixar.
Thanks DOJ for screwing everyone looking for a job right now!
Slashdot Mirror
"Where would that money that is collected actually go if it weren't being used by these services that are provided a-la-cart? "
Where it always goes... not sure where, but politicians always figure out a good use for excess money. Maybe they'll just give themselves $800,000 salaries and 12% yearly raises.
"Take that money and push it back into developing a modern travel infrastructure. Awesome."
Whoa! Where did you get the idea they'd use it for a modern travel infrastructure!?
"Sell the house and rent."
I did, but then the landlord didn't pay the $75 and the apartment building burnt down, killing 11
I asked them to put out the fire and save the people but they said that wouldn't be fair
Wonderful administration we're living under, isn't it? Wish Obama would chime in here like he usually does on popular news events.
"the Volunteer Fire Departments in my area of the country don't take any kind of Oath. "
What do you call a firefighter that doesn't fight fires?
A firefighter died and went to hell where he finds a wall of clocks. After seeing all these clocks on a wall, with his friends names under them, he asked the devil, what the clocks mean? "That's easy, each time one of your friends mess up on earth, their clock speeds up one hour." says the devil. "I don't see the Chiefs clock anywhere?" the fireman says. The devil replied, "Oh him, we have his down in the basement, we're using it for a fan."
"should've made him sign an agreement to pay the true cost of showing up and putting out the fire."
Doesn't work either, because if they show up to find a small fire the homeowner already put out then what's the cost?
I think there should be a huge minimum just to arrive to discourage people from not paying, something in the neighborhood of 20 years worth of fire service payments, that way even if they only have a fire every 10 years the fire department is still coming out on top.
"You've essentially described one of the fundamental problems with public goods -- if it's provided for the benefit of all, how do you avoid free-riders?"
What about the guy that burns his house down every 3 years? Or the guy that burns his house down because he was a smoker and dropped a cigarette? Should I pay the same $75 as the guy being neglectful? If I don't smoke or don't have a fire in 10+ yrs or have a newer up-to-code house or have a alarm system that automatically calls the police shouldn't I get a discount? Homeowner's insurance gives discounts on all of those things, so why is the fee the same?
This $75 thing is just a huge can of worms.
Also why didn't the home owner's insurance pay the $75 a year? After all they're the ones getting screwed here, not the guy. They should have automatically paid the $75 and just added it to his insurance policy just like mortgage companies will often pay the personal property tax (even if they're not escrowed) if the homeowner doesn't and add it to the monthly payment.
"Pay your service fees if you wish to receive your service. It's a win-win."
Are you nuts? What if all of government did this? Want police? Pay up front. Want to call 911? That's $5 a minute. Want to drive on the road? Charged by the mile via GPS. Want your kids to go to school? All schools charge, public schools don't exist. Want to walk on the sidewalk? Toll sidewalks every 100 yards.
No food stamps, no welfare, no Medicaid, no WIC for low-income pregnant women, no Section 8, no child or adult care programs, no free school lunches for children of low-income families, etc.
Of course this would have no impact on your taxes, your taxes would be just as high. Yes, the homeowner says he pays taxes so he's not getting a huge break here, sounds like he's just getting screwed with no fire department.
They should have done what hospitals do when a ambulance shows up: you get a bill in the mail, thousands of dollars for the ambulance ride.
"Why not put out the fire and then bill him for the $75?"
I was thinking he should get a fine, like parking meters, it's only 50 cents an hour to park YMMV and no one's watching too closely and you could park and not pay, but if you're caught it's a $50+ fine.
I say put out the fire and bill him $7500+. If he don't pay put a lien on the house and take the house.
But to just stand there and watch it burn? That should be criminal, what if people died? I think the firefighters should go to jail. What has his world come to when the people sworn to serve and protect decide not to? Sounds like anarchy.
"When I left the movie, I had the impression that Zunkenberg was portrayed as a thieving, condescending, misogynistic, little twerp."
That's the movie I want to see! Are we talking about the same movie?
"I think a lot of people would trade being a good person for a massive pile of cash. A clear conscience and five bucks will buy you a cup of coffee."
We're not dividing a dollar 10 ways: Facebook is worth over 100 billion dollars and there were only a handful of people instrumental with it's creation that Zuckerberg screwed over. There's enough billions to go around, but because Zuckerberg screwed them over and continues to deny them a dime for the rest of his life he's going to be known as a liar and a cheat.
" Did he steal any other “property”? Absolutely not—the code for Facebook was his, and the “idea” of a social network is not a patent."
Zuckerberg sure has a twisted way of thinking of property! If I work for Microsoft and wrote part of Office 2010, do I get to walk out of Microsoft and claim that code is mine and sell it? Of course not! That's what Zuckerberg did, they paid him to create something, he created it and then said it was his because he wrote the code.
"(Zuckerberg) built-up Facebook by being mean, cut-throat, and ruthless"
That's exactly right, and now we give him all of our personal information and expect him to be honest. We're all idiots, Mark Zuckerberg has tricked us all.
Almost makes me want to go back to Myspace...... almost.....
"Well, everyone has a price. What's yours?"
A price to be a douche bag? Why would you pay someone to be a douche bag?
All Zuckerberg had to do was work with the people that paid him and they'd all be multi-billionaires. Instead he screwed them all, from the three Havard seniors that gave him the entire idea to the guy that gave him $15,000 to continue developing it and pay hosting costs.
Now we give him everything there is to know about our personal lives and expect him to be honest.
"Not to mention that for the same performance, you need three times the hardware to run Windows 7 vs Linux or BSD."
You're probably a OSS shill, but if you haven't noticed 6 core processors were less than $200 six months ago and Windows 7 will run wonderfully on a third of that.
"In health care at least, good luck finding any specialty application suite that would run natively in Linux."
And speaking from an IT support background, good luck finding anyone that has as much experience with OSS as they do Windows OS apps. Even if you can find them, I hate to see how much more $$$ they could demand over your regular Windows support team. And even if you "train" them on a OS they have little to no experience on, no amount of training could possibly equal 15+ yrs of using Windows on a daily basis. Paying $100+ for a license vs $0 for a OSS license is nothing compared to the $15+ per hour for one tech support personal. That $100+ you saved per PC running Linux OS would gone the first week having to pay special Linux tech support and the additional time they would spend walking users thru an OS they're unfamiliar with.
The summary is completely backwards: Minnesota did the right thing and saved taxpayers millions of dollars by not going open source. I had to check the calender to make sure it wasn't April Fools.
Maybe he watched 2 iPhones 1 iPod and really liked it and decided to do it at home
Finally someone is paying attention to me: "series hybrids means we can finally use turbines: gas turbines are the most efficient engine. [wikipedia.org] While a gasoline engine is only 20-30% efficient, [wikipedia.org] a gas turbine is over 80% efficient. [wikipedia.org] In 1999 GM made a EV1 Series hybrid using a turbine generator. The vehicle achieved up to 100mpg while charging the battery [wikipedia.org] using 90s technology and a 220 lbs turbine (modern turbines are much smaller [wikipedia.org]) "
Now I really am +5, Interesting
"Or instead, the people helping the millions of people who suffer brain damage from accidents and strokes could be, maybe, the millions of people who suffer brain damage from accidents and strokes, thereby obviating the need for a fucking expensive and pointless war entirely."
You would think millions of people would be enough, but according to the article it wasn't, they were "inspired by the traumatic brain injuries suffered by ground troops in Afghanistan and Iraq"
Their words not mine, but it just proves that war isn't all bad
"Don't like it? Create your own directory of legal download video projects and lock big content out unless they embrace the download format."
I was thinking the same thing. I'm not impressed with the direction IMDB has been going in recent years, more and more paywalls, I think it's about time someone create an alternative to IMDB and I think it's rather scary that one website has wielded so much power over a movie database for as long as IMDB has.
Like Field of Dreams said "If you build it they will come". Judging by the torrent movies I've seen there's quite a few that would love a site where they might get better exposure than buried under Avatar and Iron Man
I know everyone hated the Iraq war, but I found it fascinating when the article said "Their work is inspired by the traumatic brain injuries suffered by ground troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite improvements in helmets and armor, brain trauma continues to be the signature injury of these wars."
Of course if we hadn't had soliders in the war there wouldn't be any brain trauma to repair, but those soliders sacrifice in Iraq might end up helping millions of people who suffer brain damage from accidents and strokes
I'm throwing away all my moderations to post this but no one said it: why would anyone want to call their device the Video Pod? Google Video Pod and all you get is iPod Video and Video Podcast references, how difficult would it be to knock all those links out of google?
Guy's wasting his money, even if he wins he loses because no one will ever be able to find his product online, and "Video Pod" is a horrible name for a video projector. He claims "it took us years to go from prototype to funded" and now he's wasting that funding on fighting Apple? If I was one of his investors I'd pull my funding immediately because he's wasting money.... unless he's doing all of this to get publicity and he's planning on backing out the last minute. I did that ten years ago, chose a similar name to a famous existing product and was sued. I even had a story that ended up on slashdot and sales shot through the roof.
It is. I'm on /. and I was a tech geek in the military, MOS 74B
I don't think he understands that civilians enlisting for those positions were techies before they joined the military. Just because I can type like the wind and work my way around a linux distro doesn't mean I can't shoot a M16A2 or M4
"5. Those who do think they got the shaft may sue. And because this is an antitrust finding, the settlement will allow anyone who wins in federal court to "recover three times the damages the person has suffered." Say goodbye to whatever measly amounts the companies saved through these agreements. Dumb."
/., it's a stretch, but pretend... actually, let's say you were dating a Elven Princess on WoW, that's closer to probably closer to reality. Your buddy is dating a... um... Elven Sorceress (sure why not). Your buddy starts harassing your princess trying to get her to be with him. You tell your buddy to lay off or you're going to go after his sorceress. You both agree not to harass each other's WoW girlfriends. That's what happened here, they agreed not to harass each other's employees. That's probably a good thing, both for your WoW dates and for you and your buddy. Course now the WoW masters said you're not allowed to do that, so if you want to harass each other's dates or anyone else you're permitted. See how the DOJ just mucked this all up?
I don't think you read the article. No one got "shafted", they had "special agreements not to solicit" and "instructed employees not to directly cold-call Google's employees." This has nothing to do with employees who applied and were turned away like the previous article suggested, they simply agreed not to stalk and actively harass each other's employees attempting to steal them.
Imagine you were dating a woman... I know,
"Not a problem. Just mention on your LinkedIn/Facebook/whatever profile that you work for one of those companies. "
;) you must work for
You're an Evil genius
"I work for Google."
Enjoy being stalked by Apple, Intel, Adobe, Intuit and Pixar then. Next time you get one of those robotic telemarketer calls you might actually want to hear what they have to say because it's probably a job offer.
"Google is probably in the worst position for this to come out because it's yet another example of how bad that company has become."
How bad? Pledging not to cold call is a bad thing?
Last slashdot story made it sound like they were flat out refusing to hire each other's employees, now it comes out that they were agreeing not to stalk each other's employees. While sure the employees are still probably losing something here it's clear they're not losing much at all, I can see now that every Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe, Intuit and Pixar employee is going to be making $200k+ because they're going to just keep stealing each other's employees instead of finding talent from the rest of the world so really this hurts everyone looking for a job right now and the only people that win are those already working for Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe, Intuit and Pixar.
Thanks DOJ for screwing everyone looking for a job right now!