I'd prefer Groucho, Chico, or Harpo overlords myself.
Professor Wagstaff: Welcome to the new ICANN, administered by the firm of Flywheel, Overlord, and Flywheel! My assistant will show your place, my dear, which is something I've been meaning to do myself for some time.
Assistant: Honnnk!
Esther Dyson: Professor! Well, I never!
Professor Wagstaff: And you probably never will, either..
Joel, Mary Jo, Josh, Trace, and Frank are putting together a show, called "Cinematic Titanic", that riffs bad B-movies with snappy one-liners and occasional skits.
Mike, Kevin, Bill, and Jim are working on a show, "The Film Crew", that riffs bad B-movies with snappy one-liners and occasional skits.
Mike and Kevin have a side project, rifftrax, that riffs current blockbusters, which have the quality of bad B-movies, with snappy one-liners and possibly the occasional skit.
Yes, they're probably all funny, but when does the Department of Redundancy Department get involved? Can't we all just get along?
..the remnants of the storm move east and bring needed rain to the mountain regions of North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia,..
Hear hear! This is one of the reasons why the southeast is suffering with a miserable drought right now. We were supposed to have at least a few hurricanes make landfall, but no luck.
I'd estimate that the governor in our state (NC) is about 6 weeks away from declaring a state of emergency.
There are only 9 days left to the official hurricane season, and it looks like we'll miss out on some badly needed precipitation. C'mon Mother Nature! Bring it!
(Do I feel bad for folks who build on the coast? Nope. They should know the risks and how to prepare. Tough shit if you're yet another Long Islander building a monster vacation home on the NC Outer Banks.)
Oh, so much karma to burn..
on
Ask Rob Malda
·
· Score: 4, Funny
If you were in Soviet Russia, would a Beowulf cluster of Natalie Portmans and other insensitive clods as our 1337 new goatse overlords (confirmed by Netcraft as dying) have you naked and petrified with hot grits poured down Cowboy Neal's pants (profit!!!) ?
By the way, what reasons are accepted for firing someone?
None.
Employers often circumvent discrimination litigation here by forcing us to sign "at-will' employment agreements before getting hired. The company reserves the right to discharge you at any time for any reason whatsoever.
The only protections are those mandated by federal law. You can't be fired for being female, or black, or Jewish, for example (if you can prove in a court of law that this is in fact what happened, heh heh). But on the other hand, if your manager thinks you smell like moldy cheese, or thinks your name has one Z to many, you can in theory be let go without consequence.
Dr. Goodnight is also the de-facto CEO of Cary, NC, a well-to-do suburb of Raleigh. He attempts to rule the place with a velvet-clad iron fist, much like David Packard tries to dictate terms to Palo Alto, CA. As a result, all the new development in Cary (and there is a lot of it) tends to resemble the set of either "The Stepford Wives" or "The Truman Show". (I know, I lived there for 13 years.) Thus Dr. Jim has the occasional delusion of God-like powers within the town limits.
To his credit, he also started Cary Academy, a boarding school with a very intense math and science curriculum. (I think it's K-12, not sure, but I do know that SAS employees get a break on the tuition.) But I'm convinced his insights are marred by the bias of the student population he's observed there: motivated, intelligent kids with affluent parents.
He only needs to venture a few miles west to Granville County, NC to see what the rest of the student population looks like: neglectful parents who have never known the value of an education, and who are barely scraping by in construction or crappy service jobs. (I know someone who taught there. If you ever want to know where the left-hand side of the bell curve lives, go to Granville.) I don't think any upgrade of classroom tech will transform the young lives there.
So Jim, if you read Slashdot, please heed my advice, and pull your head out of your academy.
Agreed. "Has Been" is an awesome album, thanks to Shatner's partnership with Ben Folds on the project.
It also helps to have some solid backing musicians like (yes, that) Joe Jackson, who provides some great guitar work and backing vocals on the first track.
And the rant between Shatner and Henry Rollins is worth the price of the album. Just buy the damn thing already. Prepare to be amazed.
This very topic came up on Dan Savage's advice column, "Savage Love" (see the Onion's AV club site for more details). The best suggestion I saw was from a guy who was hiding porn mags under his mattress as a teenager. Mom found out, and simply replaced them with copies of Good Housekeeping. Best non-lecture ever imparted, no?
The same writer extended this approach to Web browsing. Basically, chances are Johnny hasn't been deleting his Web browser's history, so a proactive parent can check it, and then try visiting bogus sites that are similarly spelled. For example, if www.hotbabes.com appears in Johnny's history or cache, you visit www.hotbabe_JohnWeKnowYouAreVisitingThis.com .
The next time Johnny types in the URL with auto-complete turned on, he'll know his folks disapprove, and that his surfing is being monitored.
It would also help if Mom talks with Johnny later, but active parenting techniques are beyond the scope of this post.
I can't help but agree with you. I recently left a job because of this very issue. Basically, my former group was in charge of a very technical project (not "just" IT, but R&D in the embedded systems space). The upper level mgmt behaved like cost accountants, assuming that a developers were 100% interchangeable.
You can see where this is leading.
But, there were some interesting side effects. First, the offshore teams (from competing firms no less) were in charge of the project from the beginning, and the experienced locals were brought in to clean up the mess. The end result was that the least experienced people were in charge of the areas that required the most experience: design and architecture.
To be fair, many of the offshore folks (who were rotated to our US lab on a regular basis) were in fact really really good. One guy in particular struck me as an insane genius. But they were the exception, sadly.
Something that bugs me is the number of people, liberal and conservative alike, that really believe that just having wealth proves you're more intelligent than the average person and deserve to be in a position of leadership.
Fortunately, this proposition can be disproven in one word: Britney.
I like the idea of one party controlling the White House and the other controlling Congress. It forces people to work together.
But of course. It's working so well today, after all.
Seriously though, did anyone expect after November 2006 that much of anything would get done? Especially now that Dubya is a lame duck (read: no pressure to accomplish much else)?
This administration has deepened the partisan divide like no other, in both Congress and the nation as a whole. A German shepherd in the Oval Office could have done a better job of uniting Americans. Now you can expect nothing but charges of "obstructionism!" from either side next year along with the run-up to the circus^H^H^H^Hgeneral election.
Don't waste your vote on the GOP next election. Just write in "Rin Tin Tin" for President instead. You'll be glad you did.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow! That joke gets funnier and funnier the 9324850928374059385709th time around.
[ Note to mods: Classify this post as -1; Sarcasm ]
90% of IT professionals will not be eating laminated cardboard for lunch. (The other 10% don't eat lunch.)
That was actually my first choice. Really. But I thought it was a liittle too pedantic.
Wait a minute, this is feckin' Slashdot! What the hell was I thinking!?!?!
Ignore the damn kid throwing up on your lawn. It's just me.
Sincerely,
Jeff Tweedy
I'd prefer Groucho, Chico, or Harpo overlords myself.
Professor Wagstaff: Welcome to the new ICANN, administered by the firm of Flywheel, Overlord, and Flywheel! My assistant will show your place, my dear, which is something I've been meaning to do myself for some time.
Assistant: Honnnk!
Esther Dyson: Professor! Well, I never!
Professor Wagstaff: And you probably never will, either..
Now now, they're not dead. They're "metaphysically challenged".
And I would rather not cop jokes from Larry the Cable Guy. (I'd resort to Bazooka Joe comics first.)
Let me see if I have this straight:
Yes, they're probably all funny, but when does the Department of Redundancy Department get involved? Can't we all just get along?
"I once overclocked a CPU / just to watch it die..."
I guess that I'm now officially paranoid. I misread the title as "NC State Police Create Most Powerful Positron Beam Ever"
So that's where all the fines from my speeding tickets have been going.
Hear hear! This is one of the reasons why the southeast is suffering with a miserable drought right now. We were supposed to have at least a few hurricanes make landfall, but no luck.
I'd estimate that the governor in our state (NC) is about 6 weeks away from declaring a state of emergency.
There are only 9 days left to the official hurricane season, and it looks like we'll miss out on some badly needed precipitation. C'mon Mother Nature! Bring it!
(Do I feel bad for folks who build on the coast? Nope. They should know the risks and how to prepare. Tough shit if you're yet another Long Islander building a monster vacation home on the NC Outer Banks.)
I was worried, until I heard that Monkey-boy wants to buy Web 2.0 companies.
Gotta go, I need to get the business plan for my new start-up, pimentoloaf.com, into shape for the VCs..
At least he didn't mutter "Whaddya need?"
If you were in Soviet Russia, would a Beowulf cluster of Natalie Portmans and other insensitive clods as our 1337 new goatse overlords (confirmed by Netcraft as dying) have you naked and petrified with hot grits poured down Cowboy Neal's pants (profit!!!) ?
By the way, what reasons are accepted for firing someone?
None.
Employers often circumvent discrimination litigation here by forcing us to sign "at-will' employment agreements before getting hired. The company reserves the right to discharge you at any time for any reason whatsoever.
The only protections are those mandated by federal law. You can't be fired for being female, or black, or Jewish, for example (if you can prove in a court of law that this is in fact what happened, heh heh). But on the other hand, if your manager thinks you smell like moldy cheese, or thinks your name has one Z to many, you can in theory be let go without consequence.
Dr. Goodnight is also the de-facto CEO of Cary, NC, a well-to-do suburb of Raleigh. He attempts to rule the place with a velvet-clad iron fist, much like David Packard tries to dictate terms to Palo Alto, CA. As a result, all the new development in Cary (and there is a lot of it) tends to resemble the set of either "The Stepford Wives" or "The Truman Show". (I know, I lived there for 13 years.) Thus Dr. Jim has the occasional delusion of God-like powers within the town limits.
To his credit, he also started Cary Academy, a boarding school with a very intense math and science curriculum. (I think it's K-12, not sure, but I do know that SAS employees get a break on the tuition.) But I'm convinced his insights are marred by the bias of the student population he's observed there: motivated, intelligent kids with affluent parents.
He only needs to venture a few miles west to Granville County, NC to see what the rest of the student population looks like: neglectful parents who have never known the value of an education, and who are barely scraping by in construction or crappy service jobs. (I know someone who taught there. If you ever want to know where the left-hand side of the bell curve lives, go to Granville.) I don't think any upgrade of classroom tech will transform the young lives there.
So Jim, if you read Slashdot, please heed my advice, and pull your head out of your academy.
Agreed. "Has Been" is an awesome album, thanks to Shatner's partnership with Ben Folds on the project.
It also helps to have some solid backing musicians like (yes, that) Joe Jackson, who provides some great guitar work and backing vocals on the first track.
And the rant between Shatner and Henry Rollins is worth the price of the album. Just buy the damn thing already. Prepare to be amazed.
Not quite one or the other. It will be 'free'.
This very topic came up on Dan Savage's advice column, "Savage Love" (see the Onion's AV club site for more details). The best suggestion I saw was from a guy who was hiding porn mags under his mattress as a teenager. Mom found out, and simply replaced them with copies of Good Housekeeping. Best non-lecture ever imparted, no?
The same writer extended this approach to Web browsing. Basically, chances are Johnny hasn't been deleting his Web browser's history, so a proactive parent can check it, and then try visiting bogus sites that are similarly spelled. For example, if www.hotbabes.com appears in Johnny's history or cache, you visit www.hotbabe_JohnWeKnowYouAreVisitingThis.com .
The next time Johnny types in the URL with auto-complete turned on, he'll know his folks disapprove, and that his surfing is being monitored.
It would also help if Mom talks with Johnny later, but active parenting techniques are beyond the scope of this post.
I can't help but agree with you. I recently left a job because of this very issue. Basically, my former group was in charge of a very technical project (not "just" IT, but R&D in the embedded systems space). The upper level mgmt behaved like cost accountants, assuming that a developers were 100% interchangeable.
You can see where this is leading.
But, there were some interesting side effects. First, the offshore teams (from competing firms no less) were in charge of the project from the beginning, and the experienced locals were brought in to clean up the mess. The end result was that the least experienced people were in charge of the areas that required the most experience: design and architecture.
To be fair, many of the offshore folks (who were rotated to our US lab on a regular basis) were in fact really really good. One guy in particular struck me as an insane genius. But they were the exception, sadly.
SPLITTER!!!!!!
Something that bugs me is the number of people, liberal and conservative alike, that really believe that just having wealth proves you're more intelligent than the average person and deserve to be in a position of leadership.
Fortunately, this proposition can be disproven in one word: Britney.
Yeah. Jessica Tandy.
Somebody gets it, thank God.
That is all.
I like the idea of one party controlling the White House and the other controlling Congress. It forces people to work together.
But of course. It's working so well today, after all.
Seriously though, did anyone expect after November 2006 that much of anything would get done? Especially now that Dubya is a lame duck (read: no pressure to accomplish much else)?
This administration has deepened the partisan divide like no other, in both Congress and the nation as a whole. A German shepherd in the Oval Office could have done a better job of uniting Americans. Now you can expect nothing but charges of "obstructionism!" from either side next year along with the run-up to the circus^H^H^H^Hgeneral election.
Don't waste your vote on the GOP next election. Just write in "Rin Tin Tin" for President instead. You'll be glad you did.