Some of those pyramid schemes actually do have products. Amway sells actual things (and their members get audited) and there are others that sell Bell+Howell and other manufacturers' goods.
Mind you, I wouldn't participate in those pyramid schemes as I value my time far too much to go through the hassle and hustle that someone attempting to make a living that way has to, but it's not simply selling the right to sell more rights.
Well, people don't like being told that the best way to control their government is to actually go out and meet local candidates for their school boards, city councils, county boards, and even homeowners associations and to actually listen to what those candidates have to say on issues other than abortion, firearms, religion, and sex. That takes too much work. Unfortunately for all of us, the people that start out in school boards, city councils, county boards, and even homeowners associations are the larval form of what become our representatives, senators, governors, and presidents and their cabinets.
I don't think that owning firearms would stop a government from being tyrannical or from attacking the population. I don't think that a lack of firearms in the population would mean that the population can't rise up. For the former, look at Iraq, which is loaded with weapons and had abuse by the government in Baghdad, and for the latter, look at the fall of the Berlin Wall, where the East German Communists didn't have the stomach for shooting tens of thousands of their own people when they interpreted an off-the-cuff comment about easing border controls as freedom to cross now.
He's still free to take money-orders, or to take personal checks and wait for them to clear before mailing his products to his customers.
Ie, the way it worked back before we had electronic funds transfers.
Come to think of it, he can use actual bank electronic funds transfers independent of a payment processor, but it requires more coordination with banks to do so.
What it comes down to is that no one is required to do business with him, and no one that has done business with his is required to continue to do business with him. If Stripe doesn't feel that it's in their interest, whatever that interest may be or however accurate the assessment is, they're perfectly able to stop doing business within the bounds of agreements signed with him.
Well, it helps that I had some admittedly limited experience with IOS back when Cisco sold DSL routers that used it. I understood the different modes and what had to be done in what mode. It also helps that I've been living in a command-line world since I got my first computer in the late eighties, then going to Linux in the nineties.
...is giving the pilot the full control of the craft (ie, the ability to deploy the tail above rated speed) then they're going to have an interesting balance to strike. I don't honestly know how pilots react to being denied the option of doing something outright, especially if unanticipated circumstances could require out-of-the-box thinking to recover from some unplanned incident.
What is even with the X years of experience with product X? Why would anyone expect that someone with 5 years experience with product X would be any more proficient than someone with 3? After mastering the basics, which normally takes on the orders of magnitude of months, not years, the amount of time that passes is not really related to the number of specifics you learn about that product.
I can actually see times when the extra experience matters. I'm getting into working with Cisco gear in a major way now, and we've got equipment that's fourteen years old and equipment that just arrived from the factory last week. I'm finding differences in command sets and methodologies to be interesting, though thankfully most of the oldest gear is targeted to be swapped out. I'm still having to make six year old equipment play nice with new equipment though, and if I'd had more experience it would have been easier. Plus with Cisco, they require one to renew one's CCNA and CCNP every three years, so it's also a way of demonstrating that one is committed enough to actually bother renewing.
I was greatly amused when the HR department at my company was looking for "Pearl" developers.
I lost out on a job because I didn't have experience with Windows XP Server.
Honestly, it works best when HR passes on the bulk of the applications to the department that needs the staff member, and lets that director and supervisor(s) weed through them for candidates. They can even go with redacted versions that don't show the name or the alma mater of the applicant, and are limited to the last couple of disclosed jobs. It still requires a lot of labor-hours to go through that and to go through a good interview process though, and technical people that work for the company and will probably work with the new hire must be free to ask freestyle questions in addition to the HR-mandated set, to actually learn the technical capabilities of the interviewee.
It was late 2001. Just before the September 11th attacks happened. The "dotcom" bubble included a hell of a lot of companies that weren't dotcoms; I worked for a telecommunications company that had been in business for 20 years handing paging, but realized that paging was a dead-end and was working on unified messaging (ie, carrier-side of all of that data stuff that your cell phone uses) and had gone to a venture capitalist to get funding for the protracted development period. Even though we had paying customers (Cingular/AT&T among them) and the product was just about set to leave Beta for Release, the venture capitalist decided to stop supporting it and the whole thing fell apart in a matter of weeks.
The company was ever-so-close to profitability. They had to sell something like two systems a year to be in the black, and had sold the one already, and this was back when there really wasn't anything connecting voicemail, e-mail, TNPP, TAP, fax, and the like to each other. They had features working that I've only seen in phones produced in the last couple of years, and they had some features (like decent speech-to-text and text-to-speech) that still haven't been widely implemented. Plus back then the cell phone and paging markets were so fragmented that there were lots and lots of potential customers pre-consolidation, they really could have made it work with just another six months' funding.
The problem is that no one wants to do a touch technique that also integrates a chip-and-pin setup. They want either mag-stripe (ie, US-style) or radio chip and pin (Europe, probably elsewhere).
If it's any consolation I'm a little bummed about the use of RFID in so many things that really should be secure, like passports. Fortunately I got mine issued in those last couple of months before they went RFID, but my wife's renewal is RFID-equipped so we had to get a faraday cage sleeve for it. Mine will expire soon enough that I'll probably also have to get a faraday cage sleeve soon.
I'd love to get one of those stainless-steel woven wallets, but I expect they're a pain in the ass to travel with, as they'll probably be searched every time they go through the X-ray machine.
Are you certain of that? It's likely that any operations in Europe are their own legal entities, as most companies' operations in foreign countries are separately set-up.
And even if there were some oversight by the EU, if I were the Washington Post or the original author, I would argue that this isn't a case where someone was thrust into the limelight involuntarily, like the victim of a crime, or even a situation where this is far in someone's past and they're no longer working in the field in which they were mentioned, this is the field in which the individual still works, was an intentionally public spectacle, and was recent enough of an event that it's still relevant.
There are people that I would definitely agree that deserve the right to be forgotten. Crime victims, those convicted and later acquitted due to being innocent and another person being found to have committed the crime, even possibly those who've been convicted of a felony but later, through good behavior and rehabilitation, had their felony convictions voided and replaced with misdemeanor convictions instead would qualify without a lot of fuss. For just about everyone else though, the burden to be forgotten needs to be awfully damn high, and this particular circumstance does not qualify in my opinion.
Seriously, the tail was designed to function with a certain amount of pressure applied to it. That pressure happens to be that which is seen at a certain altitude at a particular range of vehicle speeds. For that to function at a lower altitude with higher ambient air pressure, the speed must be reduced. Try it when the speed is too high and this happens.
Ask any ethnic group that's been excluded from being considered mainstream how well that works. Go on, you can choose between the Italians, the Irish, the Puerto Ricans, the Mexicans, the Native Americans, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Polynesians, the Africans, the Arabs, the Persians, and can even name your own if you'd like.
Columbus' financial motive was trade. The transport of materials or goods for profit. For that to happen fairly wide markets are necessary, and he was attempting to meet the interests or demands for things from East Asia.
Branson's motive is unclear to me. It doesn't seem like a winning move to market to individuals solely for the sake of a luxury experience, one would think that the customer base would be too small to be viable, especially when the product is an experience, not some kind of durable good that will provide continued return over time, like luxury items such as sports cars will.
But, given that Branson's plans were initially kicked-off through the X-Prize, and the X-Prize's goal was to get as many parties all developing tech, it still may work to society's benefit. Remember, there are other companies besides Virgin Galactic working on this, and there were many different ideas being researched. That other research might go somewhere even if Branson's doesn't, all because they were initially competing for $10,000,000, far less than any of them would get in return for the achievement.
A cultural-shift that would shame particularly outlandish ideas would probably help too, but that's unlikely when so many cling to things. Risking the flamewar that this might generate, the second amendment of the Constitution of the United States, even if one interprets it in the most liberal-as-in-permissive fashion, was written before the industrial revolution turned firearms into inexpensive commodities and before pistols were practical for anything more than honor duels. Hell, the long-guns generally weren't even rifles, they were smoothbore, muzzle-loading muskets, and only suitable for mass-volley. Each weapon was individually produced by a gunsmithing shop, and all parts had to be custom worked to make the weapon function. As a consequence, each weapon was very, very expensive and require service that was itself expensive.
The US Constitution was not written with the intent that firearms would cost less than a week's salary, would contain multiple rounds that would either self-chamber or be quickly chambered by the user, could be easily concealed under fairly immodest clothing, could accurately target at fairly considerable distances, and could function for hundreds of rounds with little more than regular cleaning. Even your average low-end pistol from companies like Jimenez Firearms will meet all of these conditions for around $125. So, contrast with what would have been thousands of dollars in today's money for slow, hard to reload, inaccurate, temperamental, and custom made, to today's $125 pistol or $200 rifle at the bottom end, through hundreds of dollars (and usually not thousands!) for higher end models.
A household of old might have owned more than one firearm, but it's exceedingly unlikely that a household would have had more than two firearms per capable man, and just about all would have been long-guns. By contrast, gun culture in the United States seems to encourage the ownership of as many firearms as possible and for as many people as possible to own firearms, particularly pistols. That has led to a significant amount of firearms violence, yet that firearms culture insists that there isn't a problem. Unfortunately, their "good guy with a firearm can stop a bad guy with a firearm" generally means that the bad guy has already used his firearm at least once and has made for at least one victim, and doesn't account for when the good guy with the firearm becomes the bad guy with the firearm. We're all the good guy until we decide to offend and become the bad guy.
And all of this is centered around a very small amount of ambiguous text that appears to cover more than one concept in a document whose authors are no longer alive to consult for their meaning. Hence my thoughts on a cultural shift to shame people. It's not that all guns are bad, but with the sheer number of firearms in the wild it's become possible for guns to be universally possessed by everyone regardless of intent, even if they have to technically be illegally obtained in order to get, as that sheer number of weapons makes for opportunity to illegally obtain. Since the law is apparently powerless to stop it, societal shame is the only thing that might be able to make a dent.
I suspect that such a mentality helped establish why the British Isles were part of Oceania, not Eurasia, in 1984. Right now, the UK (and I think Ireland too) are not part of the same passport zone as the rest of the EU, the UK doesn't use the Euro either. Given their island nature, the UK appears to really not be part of Europe and seems to like maintaining its independence. After all, that independence has helped it several times, with the last successful invasion being almost a thousand years ago.
I hear a lot of complaining about daylight savings time, but I really don't hear much in the way of support in favor of it. That inclines me to believe that people really don't support it, but because it's not completely horrible the movement to abolish it hasn't managed to gain that much traction.
I don't live where DST is used, so I can't really say either way how I feel about it.
There's an idea to shift PST regions to MST (as they are when operating on PDT) and to shift either Central to Eastern, or Eastern to Central, basically putting the Continental United States on to two timezones, either one or two hours apart.
I like the idea of this. Given that TV schedules in Eastern and Central are often marketed as "Eight, Seven Central", it looks like Central time is already operating as Eastern time anyway. May as well just formalize it.
Yet, in the grand scheme of these things, the Soviets and subsequent Russians didn't really use these firsts to build on each other in most of the later cases.
The Russians haven't had long-term scientific exploration rovers on other planets with multiyear missions. The Russians haven't expanded their human presence in space beyond a token few individuals. At this point, Russia doesn't even have its own launch facilities within its borders- it relies on Kazakhstan. The Americans and Europeans are unlocking Mars' secrets with numerous successful scientific missions, and even India is getting in on the act.
Fact of the matter is, Russia has its strengths and weaknesses, just as everyone else does. Russia's initial space overtures were helped by their challenges in building small nuclear weapons, as the launch vehicles for ICBMs had to be bigger, directly leading to more payload and being able to repurpose that technology for space. Americans built smaller nukes, and had to play catch-up when it came to space, but as the event on July 20, 1969 showed, Americans were very good at achieving results when they felt they needed to.
And America is headed there again, in the form of private ventures like SpaceX, that are attempting to recreate the capabilities of the Saturn rockets but with significantly less cost. I fully expect that they will succeed.
Then you build a huge flywheel and a series of compressed air/water/other tanks, pump up those tanks during the day and spin that flywheel up during the day, and at night you release pressure to keep the flywheel spinning.
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Same thing can be observed with urban gangs too. A dozen people can terrify a neighborhood of thousands.
Some of those pyramid schemes actually do have products. Amway sells actual things (and their members get audited) and there are others that sell Bell+Howell and other manufacturers' goods.
Mind you, I wouldn't participate in those pyramid schemes as I value my time far too much to go through the hassle and hustle that someone attempting to make a living that way has to, but it's not simply selling the right to sell more rights.
Well, people don't like being told that the best way to control their government is to actually go out and meet local candidates for their school boards, city councils, county boards, and even homeowners associations and to actually listen to what those candidates have to say on issues other than abortion, firearms, religion, and sex. That takes too much work. Unfortunately for all of us, the people that start out in school boards, city councils, county boards, and even homeowners associations are the larval form of what become our representatives, senators, governors, and presidents and their cabinets.
I don't think that owning firearms would stop a government from being tyrannical or from attacking the population. I don't think that a lack of firearms in the population would mean that the population can't rise up. For the former, look at Iraq, which is loaded with weapons and had abuse by the government in Baghdad, and for the latter, look at the fall of the Berlin Wall, where the East German Communists didn't have the stomach for shooting tens of thousands of their own people when they interpreted an off-the-cuff comment about easing border controls as freedom to cross now.
And this is different from the IRS threatening audits for those that participate in multilevel marketing pyramid schemes how?
He's still free to take money-orders, or to take personal checks and wait for them to clear before mailing his products to his customers.
Ie, the way it worked back before we had electronic funds transfers.
Come to think of it, he can use actual bank electronic funds transfers independent of a payment processor, but it requires more coordination with banks to do so.
What it comes down to is that no one is required to do business with him, and no one that has done business with his is required to continue to do business with him. If Stripe doesn't feel that it's in their interest, whatever that interest may be or however accurate the assessment is, they're perfectly able to stop doing business within the bounds of agreements signed with him.
Well, it helps that I had some admittedly limited experience with IOS back when Cisco sold DSL routers that used it. I understood the different modes and what had to be done in what mode. It also helps that I've been living in a command-line world since I got my first computer in the late eighties, then going to Linux in the nineties.
...is giving the pilot the full control of the craft (ie, the ability to deploy the tail above rated speed) then they're going to have an interesting balance to strike. I don't honestly know how pilots react to being denied the option of doing something outright, especially if unanticipated circumstances could require out-of-the-box thinking to recover from some unplanned incident.
I can actually see times when the extra experience matters. I'm getting into working with Cisco gear in a major way now, and we've got equipment that's fourteen years old and equipment that just arrived from the factory last week. I'm finding differences in command sets and methodologies to be interesting, though thankfully most of the oldest gear is targeted to be swapped out. I'm still having to make six year old equipment play nice with new equipment though, and if I'd had more experience it would have been easier. Plus with Cisco, they require one to renew one's CCNA and CCNP every three years, so it's also a way of demonstrating that one is committed enough to actually bother renewing.
Or maybe they make musical instruments like drums and guitars...
I lost out on a job because I didn't have experience with Windows XP Server.
Honestly, it works best when HR passes on the bulk of the applications to the department that needs the staff member, and lets that director and supervisor(s) weed through them for candidates. They can even go with redacted versions that don't show the name or the alma mater of the applicant, and are limited to the last couple of disclosed jobs. It still requires a lot of labor-hours to go through that and to go through a good interview process though, and technical people that work for the company and will probably work with the new hire must be free to ask freestyle questions in addition to the HR-mandated set, to actually learn the technical capabilities of the interviewee.
It was late 2001. Just before the September 11th attacks happened. The "dotcom" bubble included a hell of a lot of companies that weren't dotcoms; I worked for a telecommunications company that had been in business for 20 years handing paging, but realized that paging was a dead-end and was working on unified messaging (ie, carrier-side of all of that data stuff that your cell phone uses) and had gone to a venture capitalist to get funding for the protracted development period. Even though we had paying customers (Cingular/AT&T among them) and the product was just about set to leave Beta for Release, the venture capitalist decided to stop supporting it and the whole thing fell apart in a matter of weeks.
The company was ever-so-close to profitability. They had to sell something like two systems a year to be in the black, and had sold the one already, and this was back when there really wasn't anything connecting voicemail, e-mail, TNPP, TAP, fax, and the like to each other. They had features working that I've only seen in phones produced in the last couple of years, and they had some features (like decent speech-to-text and text-to-speech) that still haven't been widely implemented. Plus back then the cell phone and paging markets were so fragmented that there were lots and lots of potential customers pre-consolidation, they really could have made it work with just another six months' funding.
And politics shouldn't be treated as a spectator sport like football, where "our team" means anything and winning must come at all costs.
The problem is that no one wants to do a touch technique that also integrates a chip-and-pin setup. They want either mag-stripe (ie, US-style) or radio chip and pin (Europe, probably elsewhere).
If it's any consolation I'm a little bummed about the use of RFID in so many things that really should be secure, like passports. Fortunately I got mine issued in those last couple of months before they went RFID, but my wife's renewal is RFID-equipped so we had to get a faraday cage sleeve for it. Mine will expire soon enough that I'll probably also have to get a faraday cage sleeve soon.
I'd love to get one of those stainless-steel woven wallets, but I expect they're a pain in the ass to travel with, as they'll probably be searched every time they go through the X-ray machine.
Last time I was subjected to a new round of their peace and prosperity, I had to look for a new job.
Okay, so I messed up. I meant STP. It's morning and I haven't had my coffee yet.
Are you certain of that? It's likely that any operations in Europe are their own legal entities, as most companies' operations in foreign countries are separately set-up.
And even if there were some oversight by the EU, if I were the Washington Post or the original author, I would argue that this isn't a case where someone was thrust into the limelight involuntarily, like the victim of a crime, or even a situation where this is far in someone's past and they're no longer working in the field in which they were mentioned, this is the field in which the individual still works, was an intentionally public spectacle, and was recent enough of an event that it's still relevant.
There are people that I would definitely agree that deserve the right to be forgotten. Crime victims, those convicted and later acquitted due to being innocent and another person being found to have committed the crime, even possibly those who've been convicted of a felony but later, through good behavior and rehabilitation, had their felony convictions voided and replaced with misdemeanor convictions instead would qualify without a lot of fuss. For just about everyone else though, the burden to be forgotten needs to be awfully damn high, and this particular circumstance does not qualify in my opinion.
Stoichiometry bitches!
Seriously, the tail was designed to function with a certain amount of pressure applied to it. That pressure happens to be that which is seen at a certain altitude at a particular range of vehicle speeds. For that to function at a lower altitude with higher ambient air pressure, the speed must be reduced. Try it when the speed is too high and this happens.
Ask any ethnic group that's been excluded from being considered mainstream how well that works. Go on, you can choose between the Italians, the Irish, the Puerto Ricans, the Mexicans, the Native Americans, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Polynesians, the Africans, the Arabs, the Persians, and can even name your own if you'd like.
Columbus' financial motive was trade. The transport of materials or goods for profit. For that to happen fairly wide markets are necessary, and he was attempting to meet the interests or demands for things from East Asia.
Branson's motive is unclear to me. It doesn't seem like a winning move to market to individuals solely for the sake of a luxury experience, one would think that the customer base would be too small to be viable, especially when the product is an experience, not some kind of durable good that will provide continued return over time, like luxury items such as sports cars will.
But, given that Branson's plans were initially kicked-off through the X-Prize, and the X-Prize's goal was to get as many parties all developing tech, it still may work to society's benefit. Remember, there are other companies besides Virgin Galactic working on this, and there were many different ideas being researched. That other research might go somewhere even if Branson's doesn't, all because they were initially competing for $10,000,000, far less than any of them would get in return for the achievement.
A cultural-shift that would shame particularly outlandish ideas would probably help too, but that's unlikely when so many cling to things. Risking the flamewar that this might generate, the second amendment of the Constitution of the United States, even if one interprets it in the most liberal-as-in-permissive fashion, was written before the industrial revolution turned firearms into inexpensive commodities and before pistols were practical for anything more than honor duels. Hell, the long-guns generally weren't even rifles, they were smoothbore, muzzle-loading muskets, and only suitable for mass-volley. Each weapon was individually produced by a gunsmithing shop, and all parts had to be custom worked to make the weapon function. As a consequence, each weapon was very, very expensive and require service that was itself expensive.
The US Constitution was not written with the intent that firearms would cost less than a week's salary, would contain multiple rounds that would either self-chamber or be quickly chambered by the user, could be easily concealed under fairly immodest clothing, could accurately target at fairly considerable distances, and could function for hundreds of rounds with little more than regular cleaning. Even your average low-end pistol from companies like Jimenez Firearms will meet all of these conditions for around $125. So, contrast with what would have been thousands of dollars in today's money for slow, hard to reload, inaccurate, temperamental, and custom made, to today's $125 pistol or $200 rifle at the bottom end, through hundreds of dollars (and usually not thousands!) for higher end models.
A household of old might have owned more than one firearm, but it's exceedingly unlikely that a household would have had more than two firearms per capable man, and just about all would have been long-guns. By contrast, gun culture in the United States seems to encourage the ownership of as many firearms as possible and for as many people as possible to own firearms, particularly pistols. That has led to a significant amount of firearms violence, yet that firearms culture insists that there isn't a problem. Unfortunately, their "good guy with a firearm can stop a bad guy with a firearm" generally means that the bad guy has already used his firearm at least once and has made for at least one victim, and doesn't account for when the good guy with the firearm becomes the bad guy with the firearm. We're all the good guy until we decide to offend and become the bad guy.
And all of this is centered around a very small amount of ambiguous text that appears to cover more than one concept in a document whose authors are no longer alive to consult for their meaning. Hence my thoughts on a cultural shift to shame people. It's not that all guns are bad, but with the sheer number of firearms in the wild it's become possible for guns to be universally possessed by everyone regardless of intent, even if they have to technically be illegally obtained in order to get, as that sheer number of weapons makes for opportunity to illegally obtain. Since the law is apparently powerless to stop it, societal shame is the only thing that might be able to make a dent.
I suspect that such a mentality helped establish why the British Isles were part of Oceania, not Eurasia, in 1984. Right now, the UK (and I think Ireland too) are not part of the same passport zone as the rest of the EU, the UK doesn't use the Euro either. Given their island nature, the UK appears to really not be part of Europe and seems to like maintaining its independence. After all, that independence has helped it several times, with the last successful invasion being almost a thousand years ago.
I hear a lot of complaining about daylight savings time, but I really don't hear much in the way of support in favor of it. That inclines me to believe that people really don't support it, but because it's not completely horrible the movement to abolish it hasn't managed to gain that much traction.
I don't live where DST is used, so I can't really say either way how I feel about it.
There's an idea to shift PST regions to MST (as they are when operating on PDT) and to shift either Central to Eastern, or Eastern to Central, basically putting the Continental United States on to two timezones, either one or two hours apart.
I like the idea of this. Given that TV schedules in Eastern and Central are often marketed as "Eight, Seven Central", it looks like Central time is already operating as Eastern time anyway. May as well just formalize it.
Yet, in the grand scheme of these things, the Soviets and subsequent Russians didn't really use these firsts to build on each other in most of the later cases.
The Russians haven't had long-term scientific exploration rovers on other planets with multiyear missions. The Russians haven't expanded their human presence in space beyond a token few individuals. At this point, Russia doesn't even have its own launch facilities within its borders- it relies on Kazakhstan. The Americans and Europeans are unlocking Mars' secrets with numerous successful scientific missions, and even India is getting in on the act.
Fact of the matter is, Russia has its strengths and weaknesses, just as everyone else does. Russia's initial space overtures were helped by their challenges in building small nuclear weapons, as the launch vehicles for ICBMs had to be bigger, directly leading to more payload and being able to repurpose that technology for space. Americans built smaller nukes, and had to play catch-up when it came to space, but as the event on July 20, 1969 showed, Americans were very good at achieving results when they felt they needed to.
And America is headed there again, in the form of private ventures like SpaceX, that are attempting to recreate the capabilities of the Saturn rockets but with significantly less cost. I fully expect that they will succeed.
Then you build a huge flywheel and a series of compressed air/water/other tanks, pump up those tanks during the day and spin that flywheel up during the day, and at night you release pressure to keep the flywheel spinning.