Of the last four books I ordered through Amazon, I got... one. The rest mysteriously disappeared.
I was buying second-hand books, from various resellers (two in the US and two in the UK), and they didn't give me a tracking number, so who knows if the books were even dispatched at all, or where they got lost. I ended up buying the same book three times - the last time from Bol.com, which actually managed to get it delivered.
It's clear that ordering second hand books from Amazon is just not a winning proposition. And yes, I got my money back, but a success rate of 25% is just not acceptable.
As for where they disappeared... These were the first three packages to disappear since I lost some DVDs (also from the UK), around 15 years ago, so I'm inclined to think the postal service in this country is generally ok. Then again, almost every package has a tracking number these days, meaning they can actually figure out the specific individual responsible for the loss if you make a fuss. Untraced packages, on the other hand, may very well be fair game now.
Of the 'traditional freedoms', I find one missing: the right to a political opinion. But I think we all know where this is going to end: it will be open season on those who voted Trump, for example.
For example, C++ pre and post namespace breaks fstreams in programs, but compilers provide flags to override that
Dude, that was in 1990, back before there even was a standard C++. And I very much doubt those flags still exist today.
program COBOL or RPG on punch cards and let me know about that curly brace issue you're having
You seem to have forgotten how that really worked in your old age though. Punch cards had columns with specific functions assigned to them, so yes, of course you would have to skip certain columns on occasion. That was not indentation, though. You didn't have indentation; moving your holes by one position or one column meant the machine would interpret your instruction as something else entirely.
What people call this topic is a great indicator of how well they understand two things: the topic itself, and marketing.
People who have actual technical chops in the field tend to call it Computer Security, IT Security, or Information Security.
The clueless, and the people marketing to the clueless, call it Cyber Security.
Similarly, arrogant, elitist assholes also refer to cyberpunk as "information punk", cybernetics as "IT netics", and cybersex as... well, I guess they don't need a word for that.
Also, they are slavering at the mouth for a chance to play the upcoming game, "Computer punk 2077".
If you lose all the time, are you also banned from playing (for your own protection, of course)? A quick bit of googling suggests the answer to that is 'no', so I don't think the casino's should be allowed to ban winners either.
Ok, let's have a slightly more serious posting then. I don't speak Russian, but I can read Cyrillic. You can learn too - it takes about an hour to learn the 33 characters (less if you already know Greek). Armed with this knowledge I have visited Russia three times, and found to my delight that I can make sense of a substantial amount of text that I see out on the street, with a great many words similar to Dutch or English words. Note that this is not standard for a Slavic language; Polish or Czech are written with the Latin alphabet, but contain almost no recognizable words.
I also found that Russians are just normal people. Sure. I've only visited the large tourist destinations of St. Petersburg and Moscow, but in both places I found the same kind of people you'll find everywhere around the world, basically going about their business and leading their own lives. From what I can tell they enjoy eating ice cream in the sun. They like visiting parks. They like shopping. They love great food. They are inspired by beauty. Just normal people.
Putin-paraphernalia are sold everywhere, and while I cannot be sure, I don't believe this is done at gunpoint. The Russians really seem to appreciate what he does for them.
Are there some dangerous people in power? No doubt. But people in power are dangerous everywhere; this is not something that is unique to Russia. At this point in time I'm (much) more worried about who is in power in the US than who is in power in Russia - and no, I don't even mean Trump, but rather the mostly unelected people that constantly increase chaos and sorrow in the world, for their own personal benefit, and at the cost of everybody else. People to whom countries are things you break, throwing millions into misery, just to make a quick buck.
Anyway, by all means visit Russia. It's a unique place, with plenty of interesting sights.
And here I was thinking it was due to utter cluelessness in our own society. But noooo, all those idiots anti-vaccers, through no fault of their own, were just misled by zee eevil Russians!
Given their total mind control and inevitable world conquest, I think the only thing left for us defenseless sheeple is to just join the wave of the future and learn Russian. I mean, I have _some_ defense against them in the form of an adblocker, but how long can I hold out when they control my every move? Hell, even this very message is just more evidence of their all-powerful control. I don't actually want to write it, but my masters in the Kremlin have manipulated me so I have no other choice.
I use a single halogen lamp to light my living room. I tried replacing it by an LED lamp with a stated lumen rating that was the same as the halogen, but found my room darkened to the point where I found it hard to even read a book. In my estimation the LED only gave off around a quarter of the light of the halogen.
I'm all in favor of saving energy. Having said that, I'm not going to spend the rest of my life like a f*cking medieval peasant, sitting in the dark.
You don't really need that, with current-day levels of ISO performance, you can literally take hand-held pictures of stars at night with a F3.5 lens, and little degradation of the quality.
To take a halfway decent image of the milky way, you need something like ISO3200 (which is fairly noisy on most camera's, if they even support it at all), and keep your shutter open for something like 20-30 seconds at f3.5.
Does this also apply to laptops? Mine (and all the others in the office) is in the dock constantly, so can I look forward to it exploding in the future?
Depends. Did you send them information using a system that automatically filled out a database to mailmerge from? It won't surprise you at all that pretty much every company that uses a proper electronic system will actually respond to you when you didn't get the job. Good story if you're applying with a multinational. Most companies out there don't have a mailmerge source to play with.
It's been a while since I applied for a job, but yes, it was through an electronic system, and yes, they made it very clear that silence meant you weren't selected.
If that's what you got from my post then you have a serious reading comprehension problem. But to simplify it for you: You are applying a different standard to the company.
You also wrote the phrase "that's hardly an excuse to go maximum arsehole on others". I would suggest you apply your own standards here, and don't treat others as if they are somehow lacking in mental capacity for the mere act of disagreeing with you.
What, do you think the company cannot afford to anger the share holders by spending all of thirty seconds to mailmerge an email stating "thanks for your interest, but we are currently not interested in offering you a position"?
Companies have set the standard for communication between potential employers and employees. Now it turns out they don't like their own standard.
When you sent in a resume and didn't even receive a reply telling you that you weren't selected. If you hear nothing, we weren't interested. Must be painful to find the shoe's on the other foot now...
If it really works like you describe it's a pretty far-fetched attack method though: the site must already be compromised, but not in a way that allows the attacker to simply read the messages to begin with. The likelyhood of that set of circumstances is about zero.
So you are from New Zealand, one of the most paranoid countries in the world when it comes to invasive species. Where having a blade of grass under your shoe when you enter the country is grounds for a heavy fine. Where, you'd think, people at least understand what a non-native invader can do in a new ecosystem where it lacks predators of any kind. That New Zealand?
"Europe's Heatwave is Forcing Coal Power Plants To Shut Down" is just as valid for the title, but nuclear is so much more click-baity...
And the reason they are being shut down is to avoid pumping too much waste heat into the environment, since that would be bad for the ecosystem. It's not some kind of generator failure we should all lose sleep over.
Don't worry. liberal arts and humanities majors, you are _also_ important and valuable members of society. Ok, so maybe you are not as smart as the engineering majors, but that's ok. You are _emotionally_ intelligent, and that is also a valuable trait. And true, your deep understanding of the human condition has not prevented you from going down a path that pretty much guarantees you will never be able to buy a house, but you can compensate for that by finding a line of work where your mastery of human interaction will in fact be appreciated.
And yes, I would like some fries with that, thank you for asking!
Am I the only remaining person on the internet who thinks that the word 'wrong', on a line by itself, as the opening salvo in a war of absolute moral superiority, is just painfully rude?
It's at times like this when I remember my Amiga 500 booting to desktop, and being just as functional as your Linux desktop, in 512KB. That's "kilobyte", and there was plenty space left over to run applications.
Ok, technically that's cheating: the Amiga had much of its operating system, including the desktop, in a 256KB ROM. So we should be counting that as well, then...
Let's google a bit. According to Google, the most affordable place to live in the UK is Hull. According to Google, rental prices in Hull start at around £400/month, so that's £4800/year. That leaves £3200/year, or £270/month, or around £9/day, for things like food, water, heating, and all the other necessities of life. And remember, that's for the most affordable city in the UK.
In other words, your math works because your UBI doesn't provide nearly enough income to actually live on.
Your 80% fewer bureaucrats will be gainfully employed by the tax authority, who now needs to decide who gets to keep the UBI money and who has to give it back. You haven't simplified anything; you've just moved the problem from one point to another. And shuffling the money through people's personal accounts adds an additional attack vector for fraud as well.
Yes, a 'guaranteed job' pretty much means 'YOU better find a job you like, or we will find one you DONT' Its just renamed 'work for your unemployment benefit', which it most definitely a stick, not a carrot.
That sounds lovely, until you realize that all the free money was actually taken from other people. Your noble request for people to get money without contributing some of their time, also means others _must_ work and have their money taken without any kind of compensation or benefit.
And, almost as importantly, it REPLACES most of the other parts. It replaces benefit for unemployment, sickness (but not necessarily medical), old age, education, and many many more, thus removing the HUGE beuraucracy that is wrapped around operating and policing those.
There is no "huge" bureaucracy. The amount of money that goes into all those benefits outweighs the salary cost of the few civil servants involved by such a wide margin that they might as well not exist.
I also disagree that it is a more fair system. Someone who is sick and unable to work has much greater need than someone who has a good job. Why would they receive the same sum?
Why do those in power hate it?
Presumably because they are able to do basic arithmetic, and thus know it cannot possibly work.
Since someone is bound to disagree, let me ask some questions of my own:
- How much money is needed to live? - How many people are there? - What do you get when you multiply those numbers? - How does that number compare to the GDP of your country? - How do you expect to pay for it, given that it is much larger than your current GDP, and given that your GDP also covers costs that will still be there in a UBI world?
Slashdot Mirror
Of the last four books I ordered through Amazon, I got... one. The rest mysteriously disappeared.
I was buying second-hand books, from various resellers (two in the US and two in the UK), and they didn't give me a tracking number, so who knows if the books were even dispatched at all, or where they got lost. I ended up buying the same book three times - the last time from Bol.com, which actually managed to get it delivered.
It's clear that ordering second hand books from Amazon is just not a winning proposition. And yes, I got my money back, but a success rate of 25% is just not acceptable.
As for where they disappeared... These were the first three packages to disappear since I lost some DVDs (also from the UK), around 15 years ago, so I'm inclined to think the postal service in this country is generally ok. Then again, almost every package has a tracking number these days, meaning they can actually figure out the specific individual responsible for the loss if you make a fuss. Untraced packages, on the other hand, may very well be fair game now.
Of the 'traditional freedoms', I find one missing: the right to a political opinion. But I think we all know where this is going to end: it will be open season on those who voted Trump, for example.
For example, C++ pre and post namespace breaks fstreams in programs, but compilers provide flags to override that
Dude, that was in 1990, back before there even was a standard C++. And I very much doubt those flags still exist today.
program COBOL or RPG on punch cards and let me know about that curly brace issue you're having
You seem to have forgotten how that really worked in your old age though. Punch cards had columns with specific functions assigned to them, so yes, of course you would have to skip certain columns on occasion. That was not indentation, though. You didn't have indentation; moving your holes by one position or one column meant the machine would interpret your instruction as something else entirely.
"Oh look at me, I'm so great, I know the _proper words_ for things! Unlike those idiot proles! I'm so good!"
That's you.
What people call this topic is a great indicator of how well they understand two things: the topic itself, and marketing.
People who have actual technical chops in the field tend to call it Computer Security, IT Security, or Information Security.
The clueless, and the people marketing to the clueless, call it Cyber Security.
Similarly, arrogant, elitist assholes also refer to cyberpunk as "information punk", cybernetics as "IT netics", and cybersex as... well, I guess they don't need a word for that.
Also, they are slavering at the mouth for a chance to play the upcoming game, "Computer punk 2077".
If you lose all the time, are you also banned from playing (for your own protection, of course)? A quick bit of googling suggests the answer to that is 'no', so I don't think the casino's should be allowed to ban winners either.
Ok, let's have a slightly more serious posting then. I don't speak Russian, but I can read Cyrillic. You can learn too - it takes about an hour to learn the 33 characters (less if you already know Greek). Armed with this knowledge I have visited Russia three times, and found to my delight that I can make sense of a substantial amount of text that I see out on the street, with a great many words similar to Dutch or English words. Note that this is not standard for a Slavic language; Polish or Czech are written with the Latin alphabet, but contain almost no recognizable words.
I also found that Russians are just normal people. Sure. I've only visited the large tourist destinations of St. Petersburg and Moscow, but in both places I found the same kind of people you'll find everywhere around the world, basically going about their business and leading their own lives. From what I can tell they enjoy eating ice cream in the sun. They like visiting parks. They like shopping. They love great food. They are inspired by beauty. Just normal people.
Putin-paraphernalia are sold everywhere, and while I cannot be sure, I don't believe this is done at gunpoint. The Russians really seem to appreciate what he does for them.
Are there some dangerous people in power? No doubt. But people in power are dangerous everywhere; this is not something that is unique to Russia. At this point in time I'm (much) more worried about who is in power in the US than who is in power in Russia - and no, I don't even mean Trump, but rather the mostly unelected people that constantly increase chaos and sorrow in the world, for their own personal benefit, and at the cost of everybody else. People to whom countries are things you break, throwing millions into misery, just to make a quick buck.
Anyway, by all means visit Russia. It's a unique place, with plenty of interesting sights.
And here I was thinking it was due to utter cluelessness in our own society. But noooo, all those idiots anti-vaccers, through no fault of their own, were just misled by zee eevil Russians!
Given their total mind control and inevitable world conquest, I think the only thing left for us defenseless sheeple is to just join the wave of the future and learn Russian. I mean, I have _some_ defense against them in the form of an adblocker, but how long can I hold out when they control my every move? Hell, even this very message is just more evidence of their all-powerful control. I don't actually want to write it, but my masters in the Kremlin have manipulated me so I have no other choice.
I use a single halogen lamp to light my living room. I tried replacing it by an LED lamp with a stated lumen rating that was the same as the halogen, but found my room darkened to the point where I found it hard to even read a book. In my estimation the LED only gave off around a quarter of the light of the halogen.
I'm all in favor of saving energy. Having said that, I'm not going to spend the rest of my life like a f*cking medieval peasant, sitting in the dark.
You don't really need that, with current-day levels of ISO performance, you can literally take hand-held pictures of stars at night with a F3.5 lens, and little degradation of the quality.
To take a halfway decent image of the milky way, you need something like ISO3200 (which is fairly noisy on most camera's, if they even support it at all), and keep your shutter open for something like 20-30 seconds at f3.5.
Does this also apply to laptops? Mine (and all the others in the office) is in the dock constantly, so can I look forward to it exploding in the future?
to mailmerge an email
Depends. Did you send them information using a system that automatically filled out a database to mailmerge from? It won't surprise you at all that pretty much every company that uses a proper electronic system will actually respond to you when you didn't get the job. Good story if you're applying with a multinational. Most companies out there don't have a mailmerge source to play with.
It's been a while since I applied for a job, but yes, it was through an electronic system, and yes, they made it very clear that silence meant you weren't selected.
If that's what you got from my post then you have a serious reading comprehension problem. But to simplify it for you: You are applying a different standard to the company.
You also wrote the phrase "that's hardly an excuse to go maximum arsehole on others". I would suggest you apply your own standards here, and don't treat others as if they are somehow lacking in mental capacity for the mere act of disagreeing with you.
What, do you think the company cannot afford to anger the share holders by spending all of thirty seconds to mailmerge an email stating "thanks for your interest, but we are currently not interested in offering you a position"?
Companies have set the standard for communication between potential employers and employees. Now it turns out they don't like their own standard.
When you sent in a resume and didn't even receive a reply telling you that you weren't selected. If you hear nothing, we weren't interested. Must be painful to find the shoe's on the other foot now...
If it really works like you describe it's a pretty far-fetched attack method though: the site must already be compromised, but not in a way that allows the attacker to simply read the messages to begin with. The likelyhood of that set of circumstances is about zero.
So you are from New Zealand, one of the most paranoid countries in the world when it comes to invasive species. Where having a blade of grass under your shoe when you enter the country is grounds for a heavy fine. Where, you'd think, people at least understand what a non-native invader can do in a new ecosystem where it lacks predators of any kind. That New Zealand?
"Europe's Heatwave is Forcing Coal Power Plants To Shut Down" is just as valid for the title, but nuclear is so much more click-baity...
And the reason they are being shut down is to avoid pumping too much waste heat into the environment, since that would be bad for the ecosystem. It's not some kind of generator failure we should all lose sleep over.
Don't worry. liberal arts and humanities majors, you are _also_ important and valuable members of society. Ok, so maybe you are not as smart as the engineering majors, but that's ok. You are _emotionally_ intelligent, and that is also a valuable trait. And true, your deep understanding of the human condition has not prevented you from going down a path that pretty much guarantees you will never be able to buy a house, but you can compensate for that by finding a line of work where your mastery of human interaction will in fact be appreciated.
And yes, I would like some fries with that, thank you for asking!
Am I the only remaining person on the internet who thinks that the word 'wrong', on a line by itself, as the opening salvo in a war of absolute moral superiority, is just painfully rude?
Correct.
Who the hell thought a language which is ambiguous when printed out was a good idea?
Probably people who managed to move out of the eighties and stopped printing all their shit.
Boot to desktop and its using 68M only.
It's at times like this when I remember my Amiga 500 booting to desktop, and being just as functional as your Linux desktop, in 512KB. That's "kilobyte", and there was plenty space left over to run applications.
Ok, technically that's cheating: the Amiga had much of its operating system, including the desktop, in a 256KB ROM. So we should be counting that as well, then...
Now get off my lawn.
After all, nobody can think of anything good to add to the browser, and yuo have to do _something_ to keep busy...
Let's google a bit. According to Google, the most affordable place to live in the UK is Hull. According to Google, rental prices in Hull start at around £400/month, so that's £4800/year. That leaves £3200/year, or £270/month, or around £9/day, for things like food, water, heating, and all the other necessities of life. And remember, that's for the most affordable city in the UK.
In other words, your math works because your UBI doesn't provide nearly enough income to actually live on.
Your 80% fewer bureaucrats will be gainfully employed by the tax authority, who now needs to decide who gets to keep the UBI money and who has to give it back. You haven't simplified anything; you've just moved the problem from one point to another. And shuffling the money through people's personal accounts adds an additional attack vector for fraud as well.
Yes, a 'guaranteed job' pretty much means 'YOU better find a job you like, or we will find one you DONT'
Its just renamed 'work for your unemployment benefit', which it most definitely a stick, not a carrot.
That sounds lovely, until you realize that all the free money was actually taken from other people. Your noble request for people to get money without contributing some of their time, also means others _must_ work and have their money taken without any kind of compensation or benefit.
And, almost as importantly, it REPLACES most of the other parts.
It replaces benefit for unemployment, sickness (but not necessarily medical), old age, education, and many many more, thus removing the HUGE beuraucracy that is wrapped around operating and policing those.
There is no "huge" bureaucracy. The amount of money that goes into all those benefits outweighs the salary cost of the few civil servants involved by such a wide margin that they might as well not exist.
I also disagree that it is a more fair system. Someone who is sick and unable to work has much greater need than someone who has a good job. Why would they receive the same sum?
Why do those in power hate it?
Presumably because they are able to do basic arithmetic, and thus know it cannot possibly work.
Since someone is bound to disagree, let me ask some questions of my own:
- How much money is needed to live?
- How many people are there?
- What do you get when you multiply those numbers?
- How does that number compare to the GDP of your country?
- How do you expect to pay for it, given that it is much larger than your current GDP, and given that your GDP also covers costs that will still be there in a UBI world?