Let us hope that the scammers actually are from Nigeria and spend their money in their local economies
There was a 60 Minutes peice on a country in South Africa, I think it was Mozambique, but I don't remember.
The news story was about how Exon went to the country, and told their King (the country had a monarchy), they told the King they found oil and wanted to set up Exon refineries and the such. The King, knowing his own people did not have the skill to extract the oil, agreed to sell the oil for $0.02 on the dollar. In one way Exxon was ripping off this country big time. But when one saw the amount of money in the aggregate, one thinks maybe some new roads, hospitals, and schools could be built with this money because this nation was dirt poor, and the people have nothing.
What did the King do? He learned to speak French and purchased a $10,000,000 condo in the Riviera, in the south of France, and another one in Paris. He own dozens of sports cars, including porches. And he will buy 20 suits at once, $10,000 suits, some of which he will never wear. He buys them on impulse.
And what about his country? His brother complained in the newspapers about needing a new school for the capital, for the children. His brother was sentanced to 7 years in prision. Others were executed.
60 minutes went to Exxon to ask them about buying the oil for $.02 on the dollar, about the poltical climate in this African country, and Exxon refused to comment.
Oh, I remember what 60 minutes wanted to ask Exxon. It seems that Exxon has paid for some helicopters to be used in the area, and when there was an uprising, Exxon let the King use those helicopters, sending gunners up in Exxon helicopters to shoot at protestors. Why was Exxon helping the King kill his own people, to protect a contract which was making Exxon executives very rich?
Anyways, the whole point of this post is about greed and self love. Exxon did it, finding an idiot to exploit. The King in return did it to his own people. The only ones who made any money was Exxon and some very overpriced French tailors. It is sad, because the people are the ones who lost out on their resources. The natural resources in the area did not belong to the King, but to ALL the people who lived in that area. And they are the worse off for it.
But what is the correct punishment?? Knowing it is africa, these people are probably looking at sub-human treatment in a prision. Then again, if they are connected with the local judges, it could be a mock trial where they get a slap on the hands and keep most of the money.
In some ways, I kinda laugh when I think people in Nigeria can scam people in the USA out of money. You would not think some spear chucker could outsmart an American. I guess that is where stereotypes distort our image of the world. In my mind, there are three kinds of Africans. The whites in South Africa that are more wealthy than the avarage American. The tribal blacks, aka "spear chuckers" who go hunting for food, and the blacks who live in the cities who I know little about outside of the movie Roots. Too bad for me, if only there were some good books on South Africa. At least Ice Cube gave us Dangerous Ground. Props to him.
And I also think, if I was poor and had nothing, and could trick a rich wealthy fat elephant into giving me money, based on the elephants own greed, it would be a source of pride to do so. A kind of "fuck you" of sorts. What is the saying, about giving a person just enough rope...
That is how I used to think, until one day I saw some papers about money to be released to my mother, from a lawyer in Africa. She said all she needed to do, to collect her international lottery prize was send $20,000 for lawyer fees, to settle releasing the claim to someone from out of the country. Hmmm. She never entered any international lottery. "Shhh..." she told me, "They don't know that".
I got a flashback from a drunken night in high school, where I came home the next morning at noon to find an envolope which said Ed McMahon selected me as a $1,000,000 winner. I smoked so much weed the night before, that is my defense to believing it. I think I blew $120 on subscriptions to 8 different magazines that day.
Anyways, it turned out to be a scam. Luckily, my mother did not send any money. My mother is poor, and it would be horrible to see one poor person rip off another poor person. It takes the Robin Hood out of the story. However, if it was a millionair who lost $20,000 I would say tough shit.
Seriously, in a world where any and every position has, is or will eventually be outsourced, the entire concept of "bribing" an employee is anachronistic.
Actually, if all employees were given stock options, and not just 1 share or some token, I bet there would be less outsourcing, or if there was, it would be less painful.
If I had 4000 shares of Walmart stock, and I worked for them as a programmer, I would feel much more incentive to work harder, because the better my company does, the better the stock does, and the more I make.
And if the day came where I could make more in the stock, if I was outsourced, than having the stock price fall and keeping the job, I would probably say outsource away. I would still have something to show for the sucess of the company.
Plus, if the workers are shareholders in a company, they have a say in how the company is managed. They can stop large lay offs, like what HP did today. Imagine if every employee of GM was a shareholder, and the total workforce had 30% of the stock. They could have stopped the 25,000 lay offs, they could have stopped factories from moving to mexico.
This article is asking how to have a productive employee. But all the mindfuck tricks a corporation can do, as soon as the employee believes they are expendible, and they have no security, no amount of any tricks can make a person work.
I'll give one example. There was a company I worked for 10 years ago. They went out of their way to provide very good free lunches in the cafeteria. They figured, people who ate at work would not go out, maybe they would work through lunch in their cubicles, and that a good nutritious lunch will inspire more afternoon productivity than an unhealthy lunch from mcdonalds. They were right. People grabbed lunch from the cafeteria and went back to the cubicles and worked during their lunch time.
But then the company laid off a few people.
People still ate the cafeteria food, but this time stopped working during lunch and started talking to each other. Everyone was worried, would they be laid off next.
Then the company said they did not have enough for a free lunch, but would offer it at a low price- $5. This is about the same time they said they were changing the health insurance, and that employees would have to contribute more. People said fuck it, and started going out. Now, you had people comming back from lunch 5-10 minutes late, and management was pissed off. Finding parking is a bitch.
Everything deteriorated.
One day, my manager came into my cublicle and introduced me to a consultant. He told me not to worry, my job was secure, but the consultant needed to learn what I was doing. 2 weeks later I got laid off.
And the only thing I showed the consultant is where the cafeteria is. I left him there as I went out to lunch with my other co-workers. I hope my ex-managers felt good paying the consultant $300 an hour to learn where the cafe was.
Creativity can't be shoehorned between the hours of nine and five. The Muses don't always show up on time for appointments.
How true this is. I know, for myself, if you want me to work at 9am, you will not get the same productivity as if you let me work at 9pm. I was a night owl in highschool, a night owl in college, and I still am one today.
I have had some jobs, where I did nothing more than veg out at 9am, waiting for the coffee to kick in. It was a waste of time. The company paid me for those hours of morning work, and got very little back in return.
But just after lunch, I would have much more energy. The brain would start working. I was very productive. And what sucked about it was, by the time 4:30pm came, quitting time, I was deep in thought and work, and I did not want to leave. I was pumping out great results. If I was working on a database, it would be around this time that everything was comming together in my head, that I was able to play with lots of ideas at one time, to visualize what I was doing. Those hours from noon to 4:30pm flew by too fast! Contrast to the hours of 9am, which every second felt like an hour.
If only the managment would have asked me, when is work the best for you. I would have told them, let me start at noon and stay late. But they did not want to pay overtime, they had fucked up rules about who could stay on company property after a certain hour, so everyone had to go home.
What made it all worse, is the government told all the families if they sued or disagreed with the distributation of funds, they would be denied any government victims money. So what is a poor family to do? They can't hire a lawyer and fight. A few of the ultra rich families decided to sue anyways, they must have felt that getting 10 times as much as everyone else was not enough for their "loss".
How can any country justify having CEO's that make $10,000,000+ a year, and having janitors who make $5.75 an hour?
It may not be fair, but it is just. It's equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome. It's that the janitor can become the CEO - instead of being janitor for life. America's system rewards those who take initiative and live life to the fullest and is cruel to those who just want to get by on the backs of others.
If only this was true!
When I was in highschool, I was on the chess team. I was lucky enough to travel to many different schools. Most of the chess games were held in science classrooms, since most of the chess advisors were science teachers during the day. Sometimes the games were held in the library.
There is a HUGE difference in quality from the schools in richer suburbs and those in poorer ones. You can tell from the equipment in the science labs. Actually, I am going out on a limb and say the lab equipment is not as important. I could tell how good a school was by how many displays the teacher had up. The richer schools, the science rooms were filled with all sorts of creative things the teacher thought up to teach his subjects. The poor schools almost never had the variety of teacher made displays or student projects hanging on the walls.
Then again, the teachers in the richer suburbs were making twice as much as the ones in the poorer suburbs, and the teachers in the richer suburbs did not have classes with twice the number of students. If a teacher has to grade twice as many papers, had to discipline twice as many students, I guess that teacher is too tired to think of making teaching aids to explain difficult concepts.
Is there equality of oppertunity? How about taking two identical monozygotic twins. Put one in a school system where his highschool science class has 40 students, and a teacher that makes $29,000 a year. Take the other student and put him in a highschool with a science class of 20 and a teacher that makes $55,000 a year. Who will have the better grades, the better test scores? Was the oppertunity the same?
That is just schooling, the teachers.
How about the community where the child lives?
It is not always about money, but equality of oppertunity requires the same quality education.
And there are expectations. Who is suprised or grief strucken if a student from a poor neighborhood does not graduate. Is that even an option for the rich? A rich father will pull his kid out of that school before his kid drops out and send him to a private school. What option do poor parents have? Sign up for sports? Learn to run from the police, sell drugs?
And there is another example of the inequality. A rich child will have more chances to fail, and not have those failures end any chance for a good life. For example, say a rich kid gets pushed by his family to become an engineer. They send him to a school, and enroll the kid in chemistry and physics and calculus, and the kid gets 2 d's and an f. The father takes the kid, gets him tutoring that summer, and then applies him to a new school, never mentioning the past one. A poor kid, if he fails at one, there will be the financial aid record to show the new college he was a previous student. The poor kid can not lie and say I took a year to explore Europe. But rich people are always re-inventing themseleves.
I knew one girl in highschool. She was as dumb as a rock. But her father graduated from an ivy league school. This girl was admitted to a top notch school. How did that happen? Why? There were other more deserving people. Is that equality of oppertunity, or is the game fixed in favor of the wealthy? She ended up deffering her admission for one year, while she "went to europe". Last I heard, she is making $95,000 a year. And if she was not lucky enough to have been born into her family, this woman would be working in a McDonalds for $6 an hour.
Socialism scares me. The direction of America scares me. Patton said ``America loves a winner. America will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise a coward. Americans play to win. That's why America has never lost a war, for the very thought of losing is hateful to an American.'' I wonder if now this is no longer true; Americans love losers and cannot tolerate a winner. And it's sad, really, because Americans have the opportunity to become winners. We're just choosing to bring everyone down to the loser level, making sure nobody gets ahead, so that nobody will be left behind.
I agree, in the pre-1990 era, America did love a winner. So did I. When a freind of the family succeeded and got a great job, or got accepeted to medical school, or did something really good, everyone was happy. People would celebrate, there would be large meals, everyone felt good.
What has changed?
Enron
Motorola lays off 11,000
GM lays off 25,000
Martha Stewart gets insider information
CEO fo Motorola gets million dollar bonus, lays off more people
Arthur Anderson looks the other way
Families need both parents working, nobody is left at home with the kids, fast food replaces home cooking, eating in front of the TV replaces family dinners and discussions
Jerry Sinfield racks up 100+ parking tickets in NYC for parking in handicapped or fire zones. He publicly says "I have enough money to pay those tickets, it is the price of parking where I want. And if I am toed, I have someone else who can bring me another porche"
Tuition at schools rises faster than inflation
For many, school is not an option, and the US Army is recruiting in highschools (since when is being a mercenary a requirement for an education)
Gas prices double, nearly triple the past decade
Places require credit checks and personality tests for hiring
And workers are looked at as a commodity, like an ox pulling a wagon, not as people
Those are a few reasons why America no longer loves a winner. The avarage American is not greedy. We want a nice house, a yard for the kids to play in, a car, food in the fridge, money for a vacation, and a retirement fund. The problem is, that lifestyle is not middle class anymore, it is becomming upper class.
Is it any suprise that parents are threatening teachers, that if their kids don't get "A"'s in all their classes, get accepted to the best schools, that parents will sue teachers, or get a gun and kill a teacher. I think in Texas some mom killed another cheerleader so her daughter could get on the team and have less competition. In the papers, at a youth baseball game a father beat up an umpire for calling a third strike on his son, when the father thought it was a ball.
Think about this very carefully. People are scared there will be no future. They are fighting like 10 wild hyinas over a found carcus. We are loosing our humanity when we degrade ourseleves to fight for a basic survival.
An employees "usefulness" ranges from damn near useless to damn near indispensable.
The "indispensible" ones usually have the attribute of time urgency to get things done... and getting another job is now on their list.
The "useless" ones lounge around.
This is a troll post.
So, you know who is useless? You are an idiot.
We need a new law, if a company lays off employees, they can no longer get visas or outsource any jobs. And we should arrest the CEOs as traitors, they are destabalizing the USA. If people don't have jobs, crime goes up. These CEOs are fucking greedy idiots, they are worthless as humans. Their kids should get the shit beat out of them in school. Not that the father would care, he would be too busy counting his money, and trying to hide his mistress from his wife.
People are exactly the same, no matter who or where. The guy who is homeless in India is no different from the CEO of GE, who is no different than a warlord in Afghanastan. It is human nature. It is why countries need to go after the Martha Stewarts and keep greed in check, it is why we need higher taxes for the top 10%, and why we need a 100% estate tax for anything over $1,000,000.
The pie is shrinking, and a very few number of people are stealing and cheating larger portions for themseleves. When they do this, the majority is left with crumbs.
If we are going to outsource jobs to India or Mexico, why not at least pay them the same wage? Why pay them so much less? There is only one reason, so the CEO can get a larger bonus check.
Good business plans dont require sacrifice, bad ones do. HP isnt in the shitter because 15,000 employees decided to slack off - management FUCKED UP. But they are in charge, so there is no way they're going to be held responsible.
I don't know what happened to HP the past 15 years. When I was a kid, there was only one King of laser printers, and that was HP. Nobody made better laser printers in the world.
3 or 4 years ago, a friend purchased a HP computer, it had windows ME on it. She was in college, and she called me a few times while she was writing papers and got the blue screen of death. There was nothing that could be done to save the paper. Hours of work went down the drain. I know... I told her "save your work more often". But that computer was a horrific peice of crap. I did a clean install with the CD's thinking that might help things, but it took me a while to realize that Windows ME did not work well with that HP computer.
It is too bad HP merged with Compaq, at least Compaq made good computers.
It seems like there is a pattern. Merge two large companies into a super large company, then fire people and give managers bonuses.
HP is planning to layoff 15000 employees... but employees are not expected to be immediately notified of their status, the source said, noting such a practice is common in corporate America.
This all started with Bush Sr, and his NAFTA, to export jobs to Mexico. I remember the lies, how it would stregnthen the American workforce.
Now the current Bush is exporting jobs to India.
Anyone see a pattern of what the republicans are doing? They got the idea, they no longer need American workers. So they started transfering jobs outside of the USA.
How many more decades do we have before the USA is on par with Mexico in terms of wealth. We will have the likes of Ted Turner owning 2 million acres of land. We will become a nation where 4% of the population lives in gated and gaurded communities, and everyone else will live in an apartment, in places filled with violence, and we will be called sub-human.
Remember, it was not that long ago when families only needed one person to work, to pay the bills, to feed the family. The past 10 years, most families have both parents working. And in the next 10 years, we will see both parents working multiple jobs. But it is okay, I am sure Sony will have the next generation playstation by then.
How can any country justify having CEO's that make $10,000,000+ a year, and having janitors who make $5.75 an hour? It is like what happened with the World Trade Center, when the government was cutting checks to families of survivors. The valuable lives got checks in the millions of dollars, the janitors families got 1/10th of that. It is like Baseball, I remember being a kid when it was a big deal for a player to sign a 1 million dollar deal. Tickets were cheap. Hot dogs were cheap. Heck, the ballpark was a cheap evening, and you would get fed. Now players demand $100 million contracts, and there is advertising in every corner of the ballpark and hot dogs cost $4.50, parking is $15, tickets are over $40. Normal blue collar families no longer go to the ballpark, but that does not matter because teams found they can make more money selling the best seats to corporations. I guess it is a nice benifit for salespeople and executives, to go somewhere they believe is popular, even though they know little about the game or players.
I hope my kids don't have the future I think they will. A small studio, with advertising inside the apartment that can't be turned off. Working 6 days a week, 10 hours a day, and still not having enough to eat good food. And having a police that exists not to protect people, but to keep the poor out of the rich neighborhoods.
Money is evil. It makes people do horrible things.
Honestly what on earth is with this 'blogging' craze? I refuse to even acknowledge 'blog' as a legitimate term.
I agree. What is the difference between a blog and a service like livejournal? Places where people write down their thoughts.
I don't waste time on blogs. I have never found anything that interesting to read in them. Most are ramblings by people. It is too much work going through them until a good one is found. Then, with my luck, that person shuts it down and moves on. One of my favroites was fancyrobot, he sold his website to some chick and the quality of the writing has gone way down. Funny thing is I found his "blog" not because I was searching for blogs, but because I was searching for information on the cast of French In Action, what happened to them all. The blond in that show had the best titties of any woman I have ever seen, they would poke right through her puffy sweater. There was one scene, where they wanted to teach how to say "sorry" and they had robert spill some water on the blonds dress. The water must have been very, very cold, because I have never seen two nipples stick out that quickly in my life. And I wondered if the creater of the series is still alive, what he is doing, along with the younger sister and robert, the american.
The ones that post about news, I'd rather watch the big 3 network news programs. I can't believe some guy in his basement will get better insight into what's happening in the world than ABC, NBC, or CBS news. I like solid news, not spinning. Plus, who has the better contacts in government?? Could a blog have gotten deepthroat, or some high ranking FBI official to spill the beans. Reporters are prepared to go to jail to protect thier sources, they have great legal teams. What protection does the blogger offer?
The other reason I dislike blogs is because they are pointless. The person might write about food and recipies today, and about his walk in the park tomorrow. There is no real subject. I guess some could say it is like fiction, the linear life of a person, but most people don't live lives worth writing about. Well, there is one, Richard Marcinko. If someone lives a life like him, by all means, write it down and put it on the web.;)
It seems to me, there are more websites now with the intention of making money than with the intention of fostering a community.
The strategy has changed. 10 years ago, if someone wanted to talk about tv shows, they might have started a website called TvTome, and let members contribute, and it was a real community. You would not believe how many knowlegable star trek fans are out there, same goes for quantum leap. These people wrote some great insightful episode summaries, which had great attention to the shows history, philosophical meanings, and excitement. While I did not see them all, I bet there was a nice battlestar gallactica section. Those posts are gone.
Then someone got the idea to start advertising, and nothing has been the same since.
Now websites have a plan, get members to contribute for free, and take those contributations and make money. Isn't that crooked? There is no "thanks", no respect.
In the case of TvTome, cnet came and purchased them for a cool $5 million dollars. The owner of TvTome did not care about his community anymore, he wanted the money. And all the posts, everything the community contributed was lost. How many people want to put the effort into rebuilding what they already made?
I'll give another example. AVS forums is a place where people talk high end projectors and plasma televisions and the such. The owner sells projectors, and made a new rule, only MSRP prices can be quoted. Yet, if it was not for the 100 or so very insightful members who offer great advice, his forum would be nothing, meaningless. People go to his forum because there is a smart community there that is willing to offer good advice. Meanwhile, the owner capitalizes off this and makes a profit. Seems to me, the people who should be making a profit are the ones giving their free advice and building the community.
And then there is one DVD website where the admins went bezerk. They lost their minds. They started banning people left and right, people whos posts are still there and posts that are valuable. Why were these people banned? Your guess is as good as mine, I think one admin said he banned a guy because he had a link to amazon, and did not use the forums link to amazon which generates some money for the forum.
I love the idea of a community, where people exchange their knowledge and friendship. I hate the idea of 1 person owning these communities and getting rich off the free work and contributations of the members.
They say in our life, it comes down to a handful of people as to how we turn out.
Two or Three good people throught childhood, and we can be anything. One or two bad teachers who tell us we are dumb, and we learn to be.
I believe humans can be anything, and what stopps us from achieving great things is the crippling adults force on us. Maybe it was the bully who for two or three years terrorized the weaker kid. Maybe it was the teacher who had no faith and treated a student like an idiot- "Here are 50 math problems to bore you, and if you don't finish them all I will punish you like you are stupid".
Or maybe it was a teacher who treated all his students kindly, let them read and chase their curiousity. It reminds me of my 2nd grade teacher. We had a science fair, and I made the solar system... you have seen it 100s of times, the foam balls, the yellow one in the middle is the sun and so on. My teacher ripped me a new asshole, that the sizes of the balls were all the same, this and that. I felt dumb and humiliated in front of my class. My 4th grade teacher had a science fair again, and I figured screw it, I'll do the same thing over. But this time, he did not critisize anything, he just leaned in and listened to everything- the names of moons and planets. This teacher was so interested, like it was the first time he ever saw a model of the solar system. Well, he had a few question, which made me get more interested and caused me to visit the local library to read a book or two. It is amazing what kindness can do, compared to the bitch I had in the second grade.
I trully believe life comes down to who we meet and who we know. If we have caring friends, we will live well.
And I agree with the others, that is one of the best posts I have read on Slashdot. It makes me want to do something nice for someone else.
If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker
And maybe we'd all be speaking German and drinking Schnapps. Or sake. Einstein did not have a monopoly on brilliance.
It would not be that bad, to be German.
Think about it for a second. A 35 hour work week, no forced overtime. Everyone gets 5 weeks of paid vacation time. Schooling is free. Everyone has health insurance. Government cares about the homeless and the less fortunate, they have places to sleep and food to eat, and not some crappy shelter. For a middle class family, which is what 75% of the USA is, life would be better under Germanys system of living. The only ones who would not like Germanys social system are the top 10% richest Americans, because Germany controls greed (Has Germany had an Enron which destroyed thousands of employees pensions? No).
The only hard part of being German is learning their language, it is one of the hardest in the world. Unlike French or Spanish, or romance languages, German is filled with odd idioms and rules with more exceptions than the case. Mandarin is much more simple than German, except for the 4 tones.
But hey, we could learn the language while drinking some really good beer and flirting with a german Geschlechtsymbol. Those brunettes are so sexy!
And we would all drive BMW's and Mercedes Benz. Not a bad life at all.
So we pump up the rhetoric to prevent others from acquiring these weapons. Remember, we do not destroy our own. By the way, is it true that the most deadly nuclear weapons are actually produced by Russia?
There was a news program on TV, maybe nightline, which went to Russia to ask how much of their nuclear program has been dismantled. The anwser was not much. It is expensive to take apart nuclear missiles and store the rods. Plus, it is an attractive target for thieves. It can get good money on the black market. Look at Osama, he is worth how much money? 100 million dollars. I am sure he would buy nuclear material if he could. How tempting is that for someone who works for Russia, you get your boss, maybe a security gaurd and another worker together, and split 60 million dollars 3 ways. Could someone who sold a nuclear rod, with 20+ million dollars dissapear off the face of the earth, to some carribian resort to live out their lives sipping mixed drinks while suntanning?
I don't think the USA will destroy their nukes in our times. But I think the USA nukes will become a problem. How are they controlled?? It takes an order from the president to launch an attack, but how is that order communicated? If someone figures that out, could there be an accidental launch? What if at a silo, a crazy Air Force colonel decides to take his silo into lockdown, no communication in or out. He then conveys a presidential order to launch. Can he get away with it? And what about nukes that are on air force jets, how are they launched? Could the pilot decide to launch his nuke? Or on a submarine. We have many of them with nukes. Remember the movie where the one sub gets its communications broken, but the skipper believes he is ordered to launch a nuke? Could that happen?
For every nuclear bomb the USA has, it must be very expensive maintaining that nuclear bomb and keeping it secure.
Lehr said it is unfortunate the bombs were used for war.
Seriously, whenever someone tries to justify something truely horrific, it always comes out as the most asinine comment one could make, under those circumstances.
This is a question that I have wondered for some time, as I have read his books.
It seems that many of the people who helped build the atomic bomb were later pushed out of any talk about how the bomb was to be used. Oppenheimer lost his top secret clerance and was labled a communist by the FBI. Some in government wanted to jail or kill him, they were worried he would defect to the Soviet Union in the 1960's. I think Senator McCarthy had public statements about wanting to see Oppenheimer jailed.
If there is a team of 3 or 4 that is 90% responsible for building the worlds worst weapon, should they have a say if it is used? Or do they lose that right when the finish making it? Without them, the bomb could never have been made. It seems like a huge burden to have for life, knowing your creation killed so many people.
And why did the USA need to drop 2 bombs on Japan? Didn't the first one do enough to scare the crap out of them? How far was Truman ready to go? Kill every Japanese person on the earth.
And didn't the USA during WWII jail every American citizen that looked Japanese by force, even if they never broke any laws?
For thoes people who are interested in building their own, here is a primer
I am suprised the government has not taken down that website. Is showing how to build a nuclear bomb a national secret? Didn't people get locked up in jail for longer times for taking home laptops from National Labs? What was the name of that chinese scientist who got sent to jail??
Or are we at the point now where the information on how to build a bomb is useless because there is no more uranium left?
I remember reading that most of the Uranium in the world was in Africa, and the USA mined almost all of it. I wonder if new pockets can be found by nations, or if the USA has all mineral rights to that continent? I would not be suprised to see a war over it, or at the least, paying off the tribal government for the USA to take it.
Then there is the issue of refining it, like they are doing in Iran. How difficult is this to detect? Why don't they do it underground, why does Iran do this in a place the world can see?
Whenever any civilization completes the Manhatten project, the game pretty much sucks. Everyone wants to nuke everyone else. It becomes hard to build a nation when every city must hault production on whatever it was doing to build a Star Wars Defense system.
I wonder what will happen in the next 50 years, as most countries should have nukes by then. It will not matter how wealthy a country is, their diplomats will smile and say "Defended by Nuclear Weapons". We are already there with North Korea, all that is missing for them is long range missles to deliver those Nukes to far away places.
Imagine smaller nations nuking each other. Does anyone think that Iran and Iraq would not have nuked each other in the 1980's when they had a decade long war? Or what about Israel, how many different nations want to nuke them?? And how would foriegn policy of Israel be different if the palestinians had Nukes? Would the Israeli government treat them any better?
And I can see former soviet union states getting Nukes. It could get to be messy. What country keeps setting off bombs in Moscow? Uzbekestan or is it Checkizstan. The Chenyans I think. I am too lazy to look it up at the moment, but I believe they are the ones who took a theater filled with people hostage and then killed a bunch of them, and the same people who took a school of 1000+ hostage and killed half the elementary school kids. They held a bunch of 6 to 11 year olds for 4 or 5 days without water or food. If someone can torture another human like that, setting off a nuke probably would make them loose sleep.
Will there be no wars in the future if everyone has nukes, because everyone will be scared of starting a major conflict? Or will it be like the game Civilization where as soon as everyone has nukes, they use them?? At least our leaders have deep bunkers. In 20 years when the radiation clears, they can come out of the bunkers and start the game all over.
Someone made a joke about calling it SmallTug. I laughed and thought "well, at least it is not called TugJobs", which got me thinking in my usual demented manner...
Ox might have a copywrite lawsuit. Or maybe they would settle for Ox advertising on the side of the spaceship "Brought to you by BangBro's".
Come to think of it, I am suprised Nasa has not sold naming rights yet. If Comisky Park can get 30 million to change their name to US Cellular Field, how much could NASA get to change the name of their space shuttle from Challanger to the Anhiser Bush Space Shuttle. Maybe they could even get a 30 second advertising clip of the astronauts floating in space drinking a cold refersing budwieser. Nike could be next in line, having an exclusive contract to provide all NASA shoes. It could be like what Nike did 10 years ago in college basketball when they paid 7 or 8 of the best college program universities millions of dollars to force their athletes to wear nikes as part of the uniform. When the final 4 came, all 4 universities were in contracts with Nike, and all the basketball players were wearing Nikes. Every 3 hour basketball game was free advertising for Nike, as every basketball player was wearing their shoes. Well, in space, there is only one team, and it would be lots of free advertising when they are interviewed. Maybe Kennith Cole could pay a couple million to help design the artistic look of the new space suits.
With all the different industries that could contribute money for advertising, I wonder how much NASA could get per year? 100 million dollars? 250 million dollars? If you were IBM and you were smart and wanted to keep OS/2 alive, what better advertising could you have then to have your OS used on the space shuttle, to have advertising?
Just imagine every chemist, biologist, mathematician and physicist in the USA, dressed in Nike Moonwalkers, wearing Kennith Cole Space Pleather jackets, with their IBM laptops running OS/2, and drinking a coca-cola before thier big exam or buisness meeting because it is what the astronauts drink before a critical mission.
I believe the cheapness is related to the fact that there are no fuel costs once earth orbit has been reached. Solar power gets the craft the rest of the way for free- but very slowly.
in space, there is no reduction of speed, the inertia will carry the object forward at the same speed. so, in addition to the solar panels, why not have some small and inexpensive fuel source for the start of the trip that gives a speed boost. the increase in speed will last the whole trip, unlike a car where it only lasts as long as your foot is on the gas pedal.
could a small inexpensive rocket at the start significantly cut the time of the trip?
the reason i ask, is because i am thinking this kind of tech will become valuable one day, when humans have science bases on different plantes, like mars, or even the moon. we will need supplies in a timely manner, food and such. if it takes half the time to get supplies there, that is better, isn't it?
i hope in my lifetime, ordinary people will be able to go live on colonies on far away planets. it will be like the wild west 200 years ago. it would be rough going at the start, but if a food source could be cultivated, power plants built, an atmosphere created in a controlled environment or bubble, it could be exciting. it would keep the mind busy and occupied with all sorts of challanges. i have always dreamed of living on a planet like pluto, at the last planet, having a gateway stop for explorations to far away places.
And I hope a terrorists gets in and blows up tons of people. You will deserve it.
Even if Disney deserves it - do those people deserve it?
No, the people don't deserve getting hurt. The employees don't deserve getting hurt. Nobody does, not anywhere, not in the USA or anywhere. It is just so frustrating watching the America I love turn into a country where human rights and civil liberties no longer mean very much. It was frustrating being called unpatriotic for not supporting the war, like I am less of an American because I don't blindly follow, and question statements government makes, for example "we were fighting for WMD" then "No, it was never about WMD, it was about removing a dictator". Does anyone remember the presentation Powell gave at the UN showing drawings of mobile WMD factories on wheels driving around Iraq. Did my mind make that up? Do people remember any of it, or do they not care??
The government is supposed to protect all the people, to value democoracy, to gaurentee individual liberty so people can read whatever they want, work anywhere, and be free. Instead, there are libraries that require fingerprints, Disney World scanning fingerprints. It follows logic, as the price of these fingerprint machines goes down, more stores will be buying them. What will it be like, when in order to pump gas you first have to scan your fingerprints, to make sure you don't drive off. Then Hotels decide they like the idea of fingerprints scans, no more keys to rooms. Then the airplains and trains decide that in order to ride, they want a fingerprint. Then the stores in poorer neighborhoods want them, for fear of being robbed. Soon, it will be hard to find places that don't want your fingerprint.
And you know what is waiting in the shadows. Some large corporation that will buy this data and put it in some uber-large database. Your whole life will be in a computer somewhere. Your habits, where you shop, what you buy, how much you make, what you read, if you preffer coke to pepsi.
What if one day there is a government that wants a coup, to overthrow the democracy we have. Would it be easier if these people had large databases, to know exactly who to go after, the troublemakers who would make noise?
Now, take that information with what employeers are doing. Large companies convinced the USA to pass NAFTA, the companies promised it would be good for American workers. Instead, these same companies are building factories in Mexico, and firing people in the USA. Jobs that people need, that familes relied on. Watch Roger and Me, it is a good example of what can happen when a large factory closes its doors, how a community can turn from upscale into a poverty stricken ghost town. And don't get me wrong, if these companies paid the same wage to mexicans as they did to americans, I would not be complaining, but they are paying the mexicans an unlivable wage. It is slave labor, when people have to work their hearts out to make just enough to eat.
And employers are getting worse. A local computer store now requires applicants to take a drug test, then come back and take a personality test which they never tell you the results to, then the last step is agreeing for a credit check. This is for a $9.50 an hour job working the floor stocking hard drives, video cards, and anwsering customer questions. And after they hire the person, they still never tell them the results to those tests, or what they did with them. If they don't hire, you have no way of knowing if those tests were the reason they did not hire you.
What scares me is what I see comming down the pike. An America with limited jobs, most low paying, and all requiring going through databases to see everything about your life. Unlike in the 60's when anyone could get a job anywhere making good money, today it is hard to find a good job. Companies like Motorola lay off 11,000 people over three years, and then give their CEO a million dollar bonus. Sun Microsystems asked the government for permission
Actually it's an imminent threat. Eminent has an entirely different meaning.
What's scary is that people who can't even figure out the difference are voting.
And are you the one who will protect the liberties of those who can not spell? Or is spelling a requirement of freedom?
Seems to me the people in the middle east don't need to know how to spell, just how to wear a bomb. Same thing in london (hey, fuck them, they never did anything for me, why should i support them, when their enimies are people the british attacked. what is my interest, outside of seeing the big bad brits take one in the eye).
I think this has some potential for abuse - I hope they secure their data well.
Secure it?? They will sell it. Or government will force them to release ie.
Do you remember the airlines after 9/11. They were forced to send all their passengers data to the government. The airlines denied it. Then it came out as true. Then the airlines admitied it.
Can anyone imagine seeing a mom, pushing her 6 year old daughter and saying "honey, scan your hand so we can see Mickey".
Did anyone see the slashdot story a month ago about the Naperville library that requires fingerprints to use their library?
Or what about Boston and the thousands of cameras they put up? Then Chicago and the 3,000 cameras they put up?
When will everyone admit this is a police state? When you are not allowed to quit your job? When you are told you must work and have no overtime. When you have no health insurance. When the courts take away your rights, that your grandparents had? WHEN? WHEN!!!
I heard Bush say, to every citizen in the USA the reason we are going to war is because there was an EMINENT threat. EMINENT means NOW, it means that if something is not done right away, we will be attacked. And then a year later he said there were not weapons of mass destruction, and we did not go to war over that issue, but because we wanted to liberate a people.
Who knows what the fuck Disney is using with these scans. Maybe right now all the software does is hand geometry, but who know what other data is being sent elsewhere.
When I was a kid, the police came to my 2nd grade classroom, without parents knowing. They had fingerprint kits, and they showed a movie about a kid that was lost. They said, without fingerprints, they could not help the kid. The police then fingerprinted the whole classroom. When I got home and told my mom, she did not worry, thinking since the school did it, it was okay. But the next day at school, there were 2 parents who wanted their kids fingerprints back, and the police refused to give them back.
PEOPLE, we are being enslaved. What is the #1 question a judges used when determining bail? Does the person have a job? Is that person making someone else a profit? What the fuck does that have to do with if a person is guilty?
The USA is worse than all of Al Queda and Nazi germany put together. We are enslaving the world to "western values". I hope a nuke goes off in NYC, or should I say NYX.
Disneyworld is now requiring all visitors to have their index and middle fingers scanned to gain entrance to the park
My kids will never see Disney World.
No fingerprints.
No blood sample.
No DNA.
No nothing, just the overpriced tickets.
Fuck you, Disney. You will never see my family in your park again. And I hope a terrorists gets in and blows up tons of people. You will deserve it. You want to destroy freedom, more than the terrorists. You want to force people to get down on all fours to get their anal probe. You want to have a database of who's who in the consumer world.
This is evil. It is so unfuckingbelievable. They want people to give fingerprints, and you know the data will be sold. Start with the kids, that is what Hitler did.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a 60 Minutes peice on a country in South Africa, I think it was Mozambique, but I don't remember.
The news story was about how Exon went to the country, and told their King (the country had a monarchy), they told the King they found oil and wanted to set up Exon refineries and the such. The King, knowing his own people did not have the skill to extract the oil, agreed to sell the oil for $0.02 on the dollar. In one way Exxon was ripping off this country big time. But when one saw the amount of money in the aggregate, one thinks maybe some new roads, hospitals, and schools could be built with this money because this nation was dirt poor, and the people have nothing.
What did the King do? He learned to speak French and purchased a $10,000,000 condo in the Riviera, in the south of France, and another one in Paris. He own dozens of sports cars, including porches. And he will buy 20 suits at once, $10,000 suits, some of which he will never wear. He buys them on impulse.
And what about his country? His brother complained in the newspapers about needing a new school for the capital, for the children. His brother was sentanced to 7 years in prision. Others were executed.
60 minutes went to Exxon to ask them about buying the oil for $.02 on the dollar, about the poltical climate in this African country, and Exxon refused to comment.
Oh, I remember what 60 minutes wanted to ask Exxon. It seems that Exxon has paid for some helicopters to be used in the area, and when there was an uprising, Exxon let the King use those helicopters, sending gunners up in Exxon helicopters to shoot at protestors. Why was Exxon helping the King kill his own people, to protect a contract which was making Exxon executives very rich?
Anyways, the whole point of this post is about greed and self love. Exxon did it, finding an idiot to exploit. The King in return did it to his own people. The only ones who made any money was Exxon and some very overpriced French tailors. It is sad, because the people are the ones who lost out on their resources. The natural resources in the area did not belong to the King, but to ALL the people who lived in that area. And they are the worse off for it.
In some ways, I kinda laugh when I think people in Nigeria can scam people in the USA out of money. You would not think some spear chucker could outsmart an American. I guess that is where stereotypes distort our image of the world. In my mind, there are three kinds of Africans. The whites in South Africa that are more wealthy than the avarage American. The tribal blacks, aka "spear chuckers" who go hunting for food, and the blacks who live in the cities who I know little about outside of the movie Roots. Too bad for me, if only there were some good books on South Africa. At least Ice Cube gave us Dangerous Ground. Props to him.
And I also think, if I was poor and had nothing, and could trick a rich wealthy fat elephant into giving me money, based on the elephants own greed, it would be a source of pride to do so. A kind of "fuck you" of sorts. What is the saying, about giving a person just enough rope...
That is how I used to think, until one day I saw some papers about money to be released to my mother, from a lawyer in Africa. She said all she needed to do, to collect her international lottery prize was send $20,000 for lawyer fees, to settle releasing the claim to someone from out of the country. Hmmm. She never entered any international lottery. "Shhh..." she told me, "They don't know that".
I got a flashback from a drunken night in high school, where I came home the next morning at noon to find an envolope which said Ed McMahon selected me as a $1,000,000 winner. I smoked so much weed the night before, that is my defense to believing it. I think I blew $120 on subscriptions to 8 different magazines that day.
Anyways, it turned out to be a scam. Luckily, my mother did not send any money. My mother is poor, and it would be horrible to see one poor person rip off another poor person. It takes the Robin Hood out of the story. However, if it was a millionair who lost $20,000 I would say tough shit.
Actually, if all employees were given stock options, and not just 1 share or some token, I bet there would be less outsourcing, or if there was, it would be less painful.
If I had 4000 shares of Walmart stock, and I worked for them as a programmer, I would feel much more incentive to work harder, because the better my company does, the better the stock does, and the more I make.
And if the day came where I could make more in the stock, if I was outsourced, than having the stock price fall and keeping the job, I would probably say outsource away. I would still have something to show for the sucess of the company.
Plus, if the workers are shareholders in a company, they have a say in how the company is managed. They can stop large lay offs, like what HP did today. Imagine if every employee of GM was a shareholder, and the total workforce had 30% of the stock. They could have stopped the 25,000 lay offs, they could have stopped factories from moving to mexico.
This article is asking how to have a productive employee. But all the mindfuck tricks a corporation can do, as soon as the employee believes they are expendible, and they have no security, no amount of any tricks can make a person work.
I'll give one example. There was a company I worked for 10 years ago. They went out of their way to provide very good free lunches in the cafeteria. They figured, people who ate at work would not go out, maybe they would work through lunch in their cubicles, and that a good nutritious lunch will inspire more afternoon productivity than an unhealthy lunch from mcdonalds. They were right. People grabbed lunch from the cafeteria and went back to the cubicles and worked during their lunch time.
But then the company laid off a few people.
People still ate the cafeteria food, but this time stopped working during lunch and started talking to each other. Everyone was worried, would they be laid off next.
Then the company said they did not have enough for a free lunch, but would offer it at a low price- $5. This is about the same time they said they were changing the health insurance, and that employees would have to contribute more. People said fuck it, and started going out. Now, you had people comming back from lunch 5-10 minutes late, and management was pissed off. Finding parking is a bitch.
Everything deteriorated.
One day, my manager came into my cublicle and introduced me to a consultant. He told me not to worry, my job was secure, but the consultant needed to learn what I was doing. 2 weeks later I got laid off.
And the only thing I showed the consultant is where the cafeteria is. I left him there as I went out to lunch with my other co-workers. I hope my ex-managers felt good paying the consultant $300 an hour to learn where the cafe was.
How true this is. I know, for myself, if you want me to work at 9am, you will not get the same productivity as if you let me work at 9pm. I was a night owl in highschool, a night owl in college, and I still am one today.
I have had some jobs, where I did nothing more than veg out at 9am, waiting for the coffee to kick in. It was a waste of time. The company paid me for those hours of morning work, and got very little back in return.
But just after lunch, I would have much more energy. The brain would start working. I was very productive. And what sucked about it was, by the time 4:30pm came, quitting time, I was deep in thought and work, and I did not want to leave. I was pumping out great results. If I was working on a database, it would be around this time that everything was comming together in my head, that I was able to play with lots of ideas at one time, to visualize what I was doing. Those hours from noon to 4:30pm flew by too fast! Contrast to the hours of 9am, which every second felt like an hour.
If only the managment would have asked me, when is work the best for you. I would have told them, let me start at noon and stay late. But they did not want to pay overtime, they had fucked up rules about who could stay on company property after a certain hour, so everyone had to go home.
Do you have any evidence of this, like a link to support your claim? Didn't think so.
The 9/11 victims fund had enough money to pay each family 1.6 million dollars, if it was split evenly.
Instead, they used a formula based on how much income a persom was making.
It is possible for the family of a janitor to get $300,000, and a stock brokers family to get 4.35 million dollars.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0104/p11s1-coop.html
What made it all worse, is the government told all the families if they sued or disagreed with the distributation of funds, they would be denied any government victims money. So what is a poor family to do? They can't hire a lawyer and fight. A few of the ultra rich families decided to sue anyways, they must have felt that getting 10 times as much as everyone else was not enough for their "loss".
It may not be fair, but it is just. It's equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome. It's that the janitor can become the CEO - instead of being janitor for life. America's system rewards those who take initiative and live life to the fullest and is cruel to those who just want to get by on the backs of others.
If only this was true!
When I was in highschool, I was on the chess team. I was lucky enough to travel to many different schools. Most of the chess games were held in science classrooms, since most of the chess advisors were science teachers during the day. Sometimes the games were held in the library.
There is a HUGE difference in quality from the schools in richer suburbs and those in poorer ones. You can tell from the equipment in the science labs. Actually, I am going out on a limb and say the lab equipment is not as important. I could tell how good a school was by how many displays the teacher had up. The richer schools, the science rooms were filled with all sorts of creative things the teacher thought up to teach his subjects. The poor schools almost never had the variety of teacher made displays or student projects hanging on the walls.
Then again, the teachers in the richer suburbs were making twice as much as the ones in the poorer suburbs, and the teachers in the richer suburbs did not have classes with twice the number of students. If a teacher has to grade twice as many papers, had to discipline twice as many students, I guess that teacher is too tired to think of making teaching aids to explain difficult concepts.
Is there equality of oppertunity? How about taking two identical monozygotic twins. Put one in a school system where his highschool science class has 40 students, and a teacher that makes $29,000 a year. Take the other student and put him in a highschool with a science class of 20 and a teacher that makes $55,000 a year. Who will have the better grades, the better test scores? Was the oppertunity the same?
That is just schooling, the teachers.
How about the community where the child lives?
It is not always about money, but equality of oppertunity requires the same quality education.
And there are expectations. Who is suprised or grief strucken if a student from a poor neighborhood does not graduate. Is that even an option for the rich? A rich father will pull his kid out of that school before his kid drops out and send him to a private school. What option do poor parents have? Sign up for sports? Learn to run from the police, sell drugs?
And there is another example of the inequality. A rich child will have more chances to fail, and not have those failures end any chance for a good life. For example, say a rich kid gets pushed by his family to become an engineer. They send him to a school, and enroll the kid in chemistry and physics and calculus, and the kid gets 2 d's and an f. The father takes the kid, gets him tutoring that summer, and then applies him to a new school, never mentioning the past one. A poor kid, if he fails at one, there will be the financial aid record to show the new college he was a previous student. The poor kid can not lie and say I took a year to explore Europe. But rich people are always re-inventing themseleves.
I knew one girl in highschool. She was as dumb as a rock. But her father graduated from an ivy league school. This girl was admitted to a top notch school. How did that happen? Why? There were other more deserving people. Is that equality of oppertunity, or is the game fixed in favor of the wealthy? She ended up deffering her admission for one year, while she "went to europe". Last I heard, she is making $95,000 a year. And if she was not lucky enough to have been born into her family, this woman would be working in a McDonalds for $6 an hour.
Socialism scares me. The direction of America scares me. Patton said ``America loves a winner. America will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise a coward. Americans play to win. That's why America has never lost a war, for the very thought of losing is hateful to an American.'' I wonder if now this is no longer true; Americans love losers and cannot tolerate a winner. And it's sad, really, because Americans have the opportunity to become winners. We're just choosing to bring everyone down to the loser level, making sure nobody gets ahead, so that nobody will be left behind.
I agree, in the pre-1990 era, America did love a winner. So did I. When a freind of the family succeeded and got a great job, or got accepeted to medical school, or did something really good, everyone was happy. People would celebrate, there would be large meals, everyone felt good.
What has changed?
Those are a few reasons why America no longer loves a winner. The avarage American is not greedy. We want a nice house, a yard for the kids to play in, a car, food in the fridge, money for a vacation, and a retirement fund. The problem is, that lifestyle is not middle class anymore, it is becomming upper class.
Is it any suprise that parents are threatening teachers, that if their kids don't get "A"'s in all their classes, get accepted to the best schools, that parents will sue teachers, or get a gun and kill a teacher. I think in Texas some mom killed another cheerleader so her daughter could get on the team and have less competition. In the papers, at a youth baseball game a father beat up an umpire for calling a third strike on his son, when the father thought it was a ball.
Think about this very carefully. People are scared there will be no future. They are fighting like 10 wild hyinas over a found carcus. We are loosing our humanity when we degrade ourseleves to fight for a basic survival.
The "indispensible" ones usually have the attribute of time urgency to get things done... and getting another job is now on their list.
The "useless" ones lounge around.
This is a troll post.
So, you know who is useless? You are an idiot.
We need a new law, if a company lays off employees, they can no longer get visas or outsource any jobs. And we should arrest the CEOs as traitors, they are destabalizing the USA. If people don't have jobs, crime goes up. These CEOs are fucking greedy idiots, they are worthless as humans. Their kids should get the shit beat out of them in school. Not that the father would care, he would be too busy counting his money, and trying to hide his mistress from his wife.
People are exactly the same, no matter who or where. The guy who is homeless in India is no different from the CEO of GE, who is no different than a warlord in Afghanastan. It is human nature. It is why countries need to go after the Martha Stewarts and keep greed in check, it is why we need higher taxes for the top 10%, and why we need a 100% estate tax for anything over $1,000,000.
The pie is shrinking, and a very few number of people are stealing and cheating larger portions for themseleves. When they do this, the majority is left with crumbs.
If we are going to outsource jobs to India or Mexico, why not at least pay them the same wage? Why pay them so much less? There is only one reason, so the CEO can get a larger bonus check.
I don't know what happened to HP the past 15 years. When I was a kid, there was only one King of laser printers, and that was HP. Nobody made better laser printers in the world.
3 or 4 years ago, a friend purchased a HP computer, it had windows ME on it. She was in college, and she called me a few times while she was writing papers and got the blue screen of death. There was nothing that could be done to save the paper. Hours of work went down the drain. I know... I told her "save your work more often". But that computer was a horrific peice of crap. I did a clean install with the CD's thinking that might help things, but it took me a while to realize that Windows ME did not work well with that HP computer.
It is too bad HP merged with Compaq, at least Compaq made good computers.
It seems like there is a pattern. Merge two large companies into a super large company, then fire people and give managers bonuses.
This all started with Bush Sr, and his NAFTA, to export jobs to Mexico. I remember the lies, how it would stregnthen the American workforce.
Now the current Bush is exporting jobs to India.
Anyone see a pattern of what the republicans are doing? They got the idea, they no longer need American workers. So they started transfering jobs outside of the USA.
How many more decades do we have before the USA is on par with Mexico in terms of wealth. We will have the likes of Ted Turner owning 2 million acres of land. We will become a nation where 4% of the population lives in gated and gaurded communities, and everyone else will live in an apartment, in places filled with violence, and we will be called sub-human.
Remember, it was not that long ago when families only needed one person to work, to pay the bills, to feed the family. The past 10 years, most families have both parents working. And in the next 10 years, we will see both parents working multiple jobs. But it is okay, I am sure Sony will have the next generation playstation by then.
How can any country justify having CEO's that make $10,000,000+ a year, and having janitors who make $5.75 an hour? It is like what happened with the World Trade Center, when the government was cutting checks to families of survivors. The valuable lives got checks in the millions of dollars, the janitors families got 1/10th of that. It is like Baseball, I remember being a kid when it was a big deal for a player to sign a 1 million dollar deal. Tickets were cheap. Hot dogs were cheap. Heck, the ballpark was a cheap evening, and you would get fed. Now players demand $100 million contracts, and there is advertising in every corner of the ballpark and hot dogs cost $4.50, parking is $15, tickets are over $40. Normal blue collar families no longer go to the ballpark, but that does not matter because teams found they can make more money selling the best seats to corporations. I guess it is a nice benifit for salespeople and executives, to go somewhere they believe is popular, even though they know little about the game or players.
I hope my kids don't have the future I think they will. A small studio, with advertising inside the apartment that can't be turned off. Working 6 days a week, 10 hours a day, and still not having enough to eat good food. And having a police that exists not to protect people, but to keep the poor out of the rich neighborhoods.
Money is evil. It makes people do horrible things.
I agree. What is the difference between a blog and a service like livejournal? Places where people write down their thoughts.
I don't waste time on blogs. I have never found anything that interesting to read in them. Most are ramblings by people. It is too much work going through them until a good one is found. Then, with my luck, that person shuts it down and moves on. One of my favroites was fancyrobot, he sold his website to some chick and the quality of the writing has gone way down. Funny thing is I found his "blog" not because I was searching for blogs, but because I was searching for information on the cast of French In Action, what happened to them all. The blond in that show had the best titties of any woman I have ever seen, they would poke right through her puffy sweater. There was one scene, where they wanted to teach how to say "sorry" and they had robert spill some water on the blonds dress. The water must have been very, very cold, because I have never seen two nipples stick out that quickly in my life. And I wondered if the creater of the series is still alive, what he is doing, along with the younger sister and robert, the american.
The ones that post about news, I'd rather watch the big 3 network news programs. I can't believe some guy in his basement will get better insight into what's happening in the world than ABC, NBC, or CBS news. I like solid news, not spinning. Plus, who has the better contacts in government?? Could a blog have gotten deepthroat, or some high ranking FBI official to spill the beans. Reporters are prepared to go to jail to protect thier sources, they have great legal teams. What protection does the blogger offer?
The other reason I dislike blogs is because they are pointless. The person might write about food and recipies today, and about his walk in the park tomorrow. There is no real subject. I guess some could say it is like fiction, the linear life of a person, but most people don't live lives worth writing about. Well, there is one, Richard Marcinko. If someone lives a life like him, by all means, write it down and put it on the web. ;)
The strategy has changed. 10 years ago, if someone wanted to talk about tv shows, they might have started a website called TvTome, and let members contribute, and it was a real community. You would not believe how many knowlegable star trek fans are out there, same goes for quantum leap. These people wrote some great insightful episode summaries, which had great attention to the shows history, philosophical meanings, and excitement. While I did not see them all, I bet there was a nice battlestar gallactica section. Those posts are gone.
Then someone got the idea to start advertising, and nothing has been the same since.
Now websites have a plan, get members to contribute for free, and take those contributations and make money. Isn't that crooked? There is no "thanks", no respect.
In the case of TvTome, cnet came and purchased them for a cool $5 million dollars. The owner of TvTome did not care about his community anymore, he wanted the money. And all the posts, everything the community contributed was lost. How many people want to put the effort into rebuilding what they already made?
I'll give another example. AVS forums is a place where people talk high end projectors and plasma televisions and the such. The owner sells projectors, and made a new rule, only MSRP prices can be quoted. Yet, if it was not for the 100 or so very insightful members who offer great advice, his forum would be nothing, meaningless. People go to his forum because there is a smart community there that is willing to offer good advice. Meanwhile, the owner capitalizes off this and makes a profit. Seems to me, the people who should be making a profit are the ones giving their free advice and building the community.
And then there is one DVD website where the admins went bezerk. They lost their minds. They started banning people left and right, people whos posts are still there and posts that are valuable. Why were these people banned? Your guess is as good as mine, I think one admin said he banned a guy because he had a link to amazon, and did not use the forums link to amazon which generates some money for the forum.
I love the idea of a community, where people exchange their knowledge and friendship. I hate the idea of 1 person owning these communities and getting rich off the free work and contributations of the members.
Two or Three good people throught childhood, and we can be anything. One or two bad teachers who tell us we are dumb, and we learn to be.
I believe humans can be anything, and what stopps us from achieving great things is the crippling adults force on us. Maybe it was the bully who for two or three years terrorized the weaker kid. Maybe it was the teacher who had no faith and treated a student like an idiot- "Here are 50 math problems to bore you, and if you don't finish them all I will punish you like you are stupid".
Or maybe it was a teacher who treated all his students kindly, let them read and chase their curiousity. It reminds me of my 2nd grade teacher. We had a science fair, and I made the solar system... you have seen it 100s of times, the foam balls, the yellow one in the middle is the sun and so on. My teacher ripped me a new asshole, that the sizes of the balls were all the same, this and that. I felt dumb and humiliated in front of my class. My 4th grade teacher had a science fair again, and I figured screw it, I'll do the same thing over. But this time, he did not critisize anything, he just leaned in and listened to everything- the names of moons and planets. This teacher was so interested, like it was the first time he ever saw a model of the solar system. Well, he had a few question, which made me get more interested and caused me to visit the local library to read a book or two. It is amazing what kindness can do, compared to the bitch I had in the second grade.
I trully believe life comes down to who we meet and who we know. If we have caring friends, we will live well.
And I agree with the others, that is one of the best posts I have read on Slashdot. It makes me want to do something nice for someone else.
And maybe we'd all be speaking German and drinking Schnapps. Or sake. Einstein did not have a monopoly on brilliance.
It would not be that bad, to be German.
Think about it for a second. A 35 hour work week, no forced overtime. Everyone gets 5 weeks of paid vacation time. Schooling is free. Everyone has health insurance. Government cares about the homeless and the less fortunate, they have places to sleep and food to eat, and not some crappy shelter. For a middle class family, which is what 75% of the USA is, life would be better under Germanys system of living. The only ones who would not like Germanys social system are the top 10% richest Americans, because Germany controls greed (Has Germany had an Enron which destroyed thousands of employees pensions? No).
The only hard part of being German is learning their language, it is one of the hardest in the world. Unlike French or Spanish, or romance languages, German is filled with odd idioms and rules with more exceptions than the case. Mandarin is much more simple than German, except for the 4 tones.
But hey, we could learn the language while drinking some really good beer and flirting with a german Geschlechtsymbol. Those brunettes are so sexy!
And we would all drive BMW's and Mercedes Benz. Not a bad life at all.
There was a news program on TV, maybe nightline, which went to Russia to ask how much of their nuclear program has been dismantled. The anwser was not much. It is expensive to take apart nuclear missiles and store the rods. Plus, it is an attractive target for thieves. It can get good money on the black market. Look at Osama, he is worth how much money? 100 million dollars. I am sure he would buy nuclear material if he could. How tempting is that for someone who works for Russia, you get your boss, maybe a security gaurd and another worker together, and split 60 million dollars 3 ways. Could someone who sold a nuclear rod, with 20+ million dollars dissapear off the face of the earth, to some carribian resort to live out their lives sipping mixed drinks while suntanning?
I don't think the USA will destroy their nukes in our times. But I think the USA nukes will become a problem. How are they controlled?? It takes an order from the president to launch an attack, but how is that order communicated? If someone figures that out, could there be an accidental launch? What if at a silo, a crazy Air Force colonel decides to take his silo into lockdown, no communication in or out. He then conveys a presidential order to launch. Can he get away with it? And what about nukes that are on air force jets, how are they launched? Could the pilot decide to launch his nuke? Or on a submarine. We have many of them with nukes. Remember the movie where the one sub gets its communications broken, but the skipper believes he is ordered to launch a nuke? Could that happen?
For every nuclear bomb the USA has, it must be very expensive maintaining that nuclear bomb and keeping it secure.
Seriously, whenever someone tries to justify something truely horrific, it always comes out as the most asinine comment one could make, under those circumstances.
This is a question that I have wondered for some time, as I have read his books.
It seems that many of the people who helped build the atomic bomb were later pushed out of any talk about how the bomb was to be used. Oppenheimer lost his top secret clerance and was labled a communist by the FBI. Some in government wanted to jail or kill him, they were worried he would defect to the Soviet Union in the 1960's. I think Senator McCarthy had public statements about wanting to see Oppenheimer jailed.
If there is a team of 3 or 4 that is 90% responsible for building the worlds worst weapon, should they have a say if it is used? Or do they lose that right when the finish making it? Without them, the bomb could never have been made. It seems like a huge burden to have for life, knowing your creation killed so many people.
And why did the USA need to drop 2 bombs on Japan? Didn't the first one do enough to scare the crap out of them? How far was Truman ready to go? Kill every Japanese person on the earth.
And didn't the USA during WWII jail every American citizen that looked Japanese by force, even if they never broke any laws?
I am suprised the government has not taken down that website. Is showing how to build a nuclear bomb a national secret? Didn't people get locked up in jail for longer times for taking home laptops from National Labs? What was the name of that chinese scientist who got sent to jail??
Or are we at the point now where the information on how to build a bomb is useless because there is no more uranium left?
I remember reading that most of the Uranium in the world was in Africa, and the USA mined almost all of it. I wonder if new pockets can be found by nations, or if the USA has all mineral rights to that continent? I would not be suprised to see a war over it, or at the least, paying off the tribal government for the USA to take it.
Then there is the issue of refining it, like they are doing in Iran. How difficult is this to detect? Why don't they do it underground, why does Iran do this in a place the world can see?
I wonder what will happen in the next 50 years, as most countries should have nukes by then. It will not matter how wealthy a country is, their diplomats will smile and say "Defended by Nuclear Weapons". We are already there with North Korea, all that is missing for them is long range missles to deliver those Nukes to far away places.
Imagine smaller nations nuking each other. Does anyone think that Iran and Iraq would not have nuked each other in the 1980's when they had a decade long war? Or what about Israel, how many different nations want to nuke them?? And how would foriegn policy of Israel be different if the palestinians had Nukes? Would the Israeli government treat them any better?
And I can see former soviet union states getting Nukes. It could get to be messy. What country keeps setting off bombs in Moscow? Uzbekestan or is it Checkizstan. The Chenyans I think. I am too lazy to look it up at the moment, but I believe they are the ones who took a theater filled with people hostage and then killed a bunch of them, and the same people who took a school of 1000+ hostage and killed half the elementary school kids. They held a bunch of 6 to 11 year olds for 4 or 5 days without water or food. If someone can torture another human like that, setting off a nuke probably would make them loose sleep.
Will there be no wars in the future if everyone has nukes, because everyone will be scared of starting a major conflict? Or will it be like the game Civilization where as soon as everyone has nukes, they use them?? At least our leaders have deep bunkers. In 20 years when the radiation clears, they can come out of the bunkers and start the game all over.
Ox might have a copywrite lawsuit. Or maybe they would settle for Ox advertising on the side of the spaceship "Brought to you by BangBro's".
Come to think of it, I am suprised Nasa has not sold naming rights yet. If Comisky Park can get 30 million to change their name to US Cellular Field, how much could NASA get to change the name of their space shuttle from Challanger to the Anhiser Bush Space Shuttle. Maybe they could even get a 30 second advertising clip of the astronauts floating in space drinking a cold refersing budwieser. Nike could be next in line, having an exclusive contract to provide all NASA shoes. It could be like what Nike did 10 years ago in college basketball when they paid 7 or 8 of the best college program universities millions of dollars to force their athletes to wear nikes as part of the uniform. When the final 4 came, all 4 universities were in contracts with Nike, and all the basketball players were wearing Nikes. Every 3 hour basketball game was free advertising for Nike, as every basketball player was wearing their shoes. Well, in space, there is only one team, and it would be lots of free advertising when they are interviewed. Maybe Kennith Cole could pay a couple million to help design the artistic look of the new space suits.
With all the different industries that could contribute money for advertising, I wonder how much NASA could get per year? 100 million dollars? 250 million dollars? If you were IBM and you were smart and wanted to keep OS/2 alive, what better advertising could you have then to have your OS used on the space shuttle, to have advertising?
Just imagine every chemist, biologist, mathematician and physicist in the USA, dressed in Nike Moonwalkers, wearing Kennith Cole Space Pleather jackets, with their IBM laptops running OS/2, and drinking a coca-cola before thier big exam or buisness meeting because it is what the astronauts drink before a critical mission.
in space, there is no reduction of speed, the inertia will carry the object forward at the same speed. so, in addition to the solar panels, why not have some small and inexpensive fuel source for the start of the trip that gives a speed boost. the increase in speed will last the whole trip, unlike a car where it only lasts as long as your foot is on the gas pedal.
could a small inexpensive rocket at the start significantly cut the time of the trip?
the reason i ask, is because i am thinking this kind of tech will become valuable one day, when humans have science bases on different plantes, like mars, or even the moon. we will need supplies in a timely manner, food and such. if it takes half the time to get supplies there, that is better, isn't it?
i hope in my lifetime, ordinary people will be able to go live on colonies on far away planets. it will be like the wild west 200 years ago. it would be rough going at the start, but if a food source could be cultivated, power plants built, an atmosphere created in a controlled environment or bubble, it could be exciting. it would keep the mind busy and occupied with all sorts of challanges. i have always dreamed of living on a planet like pluto, at the last planet, having a gateway stop for explorations to far away places.
Even if Disney deserves it - do those people deserve it?
No, the people don't deserve getting hurt. The employees don't deserve getting hurt. Nobody does, not anywhere, not in the USA or anywhere. It is just so frustrating watching the America I love turn into a country where human rights and civil liberties no longer mean very much. It was frustrating being called unpatriotic for not supporting the war, like I am less of an American because I don't blindly follow, and question statements government makes, for example "we were fighting for WMD" then "No, it was never about WMD, it was about removing a dictator". Does anyone remember the presentation Powell gave at the UN showing drawings of mobile WMD factories on wheels driving around Iraq. Did my mind make that up? Do people remember any of it, or do they not care??
The government is supposed to protect all the people, to value democoracy, to gaurentee individual liberty so people can read whatever they want, work anywhere, and be free. Instead, there are libraries that require fingerprints, Disney World scanning fingerprints. It follows logic, as the price of these fingerprint machines goes down, more stores will be buying them. What will it be like, when in order to pump gas you first have to scan your fingerprints, to make sure you don't drive off. Then Hotels decide they like the idea of fingerprints scans, no more keys to rooms. Then the airplains and trains decide that in order to ride, they want a fingerprint. Then the stores in poorer neighborhoods want them, for fear of being robbed. Soon, it will be hard to find places that don't want your fingerprint.
And you know what is waiting in the shadows. Some large corporation that will buy this data and put it in some uber-large database. Your whole life will be in a computer somewhere. Your habits, where you shop, what you buy, how much you make, what you read, if you preffer coke to pepsi.
What if one day there is a government that wants a coup, to overthrow the democracy we have. Would it be easier if these people had large databases, to know exactly who to go after, the troublemakers who would make noise?
Now, take that information with what employeers are doing. Large companies convinced the USA to pass NAFTA, the companies promised it would be good for American workers. Instead, these same companies are building factories in Mexico, and firing people in the USA. Jobs that people need, that familes relied on. Watch Roger and Me, it is a good example of what can happen when a large factory closes its doors, how a community can turn from upscale into a poverty stricken ghost town. And don't get me wrong, if these companies paid the same wage to mexicans as they did to americans, I would not be complaining, but they are paying the mexicans an unlivable wage. It is slave labor, when people have to work their hearts out to make just enough to eat.
And employers are getting worse. A local computer store now requires applicants to take a drug test, then come back and take a personality test which they never tell you the results to, then the last step is agreeing for a credit check. This is for a $9.50 an hour job working the floor stocking hard drives, video cards, and anwsering customer questions. And after they hire the person, they still never tell them the results to those tests, or what they did with them. If they don't hire, you have no way of knowing if those tests were the reason they did not hire you.
What scares me is what I see comming down the pike. An America with limited jobs, most low paying, and all requiring going through databases to see everything about your life. Unlike in the 60's when anyone could get a job anywhere making good money, today it is hard to find a good job. Companies like Motorola lay off 11,000 people over three years, and then give their CEO a million dollar bonus. Sun Microsystems asked the government for permission
What's scary is that people who can't even figure out the difference are voting.
And are you the one who will protect the liberties of those who can not spell? Or is spelling a requirement of freedom?
Seems to me the people in the middle east don't need to know how to spell, just how to wear a bomb. Same thing in london (hey, fuck them, they never did anything for me, why should i support them, when their enimies are people the british attacked. what is my interest, outside of seeing the big bad brits take one in the eye).
Secure it?? They will sell it. Or government will force them to release ie.
Do you remember the airlines after 9/11. They were forced to send all their passengers data to the government. The airlines denied it. Then it came out as true. Then the airlines admitied it.
Can anyone imagine seeing a mom, pushing her 6 year old daughter and saying "honey, scan your hand so we can see Mickey".
Did anyone see the slashdot story a month ago about the Naperville library that requires fingerprints to use their library?
Or what about Boston and the thousands of cameras they put up? Then Chicago and the 3,000 cameras they put up?
When will everyone admit this is a police state? When you are not allowed to quit your job? When you are told you must work and have no overtime. When you have no health insurance. When the courts take away your rights, that your grandparents had? WHEN? WHEN!!!
I CARE!!!!
I heard Bush say, to every citizen in the USA the reason we are going to war is because there was an EMINENT threat. EMINENT means NOW, it means that if something is not done right away, we will be attacked. And then a year later he said there were not weapons of mass destruction, and we did not go to war over that issue, but because we wanted to liberate a people.
Who knows what the fuck Disney is using with these scans. Maybe right now all the software does is hand geometry, but who know what other data is being sent elsewhere.
When I was a kid, the police came to my 2nd grade classroom, without parents knowing. They had fingerprint kits, and they showed a movie about a kid that was lost. They said, without fingerprints, they could not help the kid. The police then fingerprinted the whole classroom. When I got home and told my mom, she did not worry, thinking since the school did it, it was okay. But the next day at school, there were 2 parents who wanted their kids fingerprints back, and the police refused to give them back.
PEOPLE, we are being enslaved. What is the #1 question a judges used when determining bail? Does the person have a job? Is that person making someone else a profit? What the fuck does that have to do with if a person is guilty?
The USA is worse than all of Al Queda and Nazi germany put together. We are enslaving the world to "western values". I hope a nuke goes off in NYC, or should I say NYX.
My kids will never see Disney World.
No fingerprints.
No blood sample.
No DNA.
No nothing, just the overpriced tickets.
Fuck you, Disney. You will never see my family in your park again. And I hope a terrorists gets in and blows up tons of people. You will deserve it. You want to destroy freedom, more than the terrorists. You want to force people to get down on all fours to get their anal probe. You want to have a database of who's who in the consumer world.
This is evil. It is so unfuckingbelievable. They want people to give fingerprints, and you know the data will be sold. Start with the kids, that is what Hitler did.