I'm personally hoping for a non-gimped Android tablet in a smaller form factor.
There are a few around, but they're locked down too tightly, and I'd like to see something of a standard, even if it's just "Oh hey, here's our Android phone without the phone."
Because the one thing that most people (especially fake people like corporations) have a greater amount of hate for than their love of money is taxes.
Government employees are paid mostly through taxes.
This is why they traditionally are paid lower than the private sector. The public sector traditionally appealed to employees for a variety of reasons, among them:
1) Stability. Your job isn't as prone to market upsets as the private sector. 2) Benefits. Because "the government" is a pretty big employer, they can get great returns on the economies of scale. Pensions and health care benefits are usually the result of this.
The "costs" to the employee are various, including: 1) Lower wages than the private sector. If you do a super job, you might get a pat on the back, but bonuses and/or raises are usually not going to happen. 2) Greater job stagnation. If you want more than the standard cost of living pay increases (which for some places hasn't happened in 5 years), you usually have to change jobs. If you want training, you're usually on your own.
Sony did a good job with a "justaphone" they recently released, the Naite. I bought one a few months ago for around $120. No contracts, basic phone, no sliding, good screen, some free games that are good, bluetooth, a decent camera, small form factor, and really good battery life. It even accepts standard microSD cards, if you need it.
The free Sony management software is really pretty good, too. It offers phone backups, you can send/receive text messages through your machine while it's plugged in, and it didn't come with a lot of BS carrier lock-in stuff.
I don't know about the GP, but I also only applied to one school. I put in my application in September or October, had a reply before Christmas, and had a very relaxed Spring semester.
Had I not been accepted, I still had plenty of time to think about "fall back" schools or other options.
Like that one school I saw a flyer for: "Attend Harvey Mudd! Then you tell people where you went to school can say it quickly and make people think you were saying, 'Harvard Med!'"
What exactly was distorted by saying that the plan called for panels of beauracrats who would decide who got treatment and who would not (and therefore die)?
Well, for starters, it was a provision to provide Medicare payments once every 5 years for an optional consultation with a person's doctor to go over end of life issues such as Hospice care, living wills, and other related topics. Here's a quote from Wikipedia because this is Slashdot and not a formal debate:
Palin's death panel remarks were based on the ideas of Betsy McCaughey. During 2009, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin wrote against alleged rationing, referring to what by her interpretation was a "downright evil" "death panel" in current reform legislation known as H.R. 3200 Section 1233. However, Palin supported similar end of life discussion and advance directives for patients in 2008. Defenders of the plan indicated that the proposed legislation H.R. 3200 would allow Medicare for the first time to cover patient-doctor consultations about end-of-life planning, including discussions about drawing up a living will or planning hospice treatment. Patients could seek out such advice on their own, but would not be required to. The provision would limit Medicare coverage to one consultation every five years. Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., who sponsored the H.R. 3200 end of life counseling provision, said the measure would block funds for counseling that presents suicide or assisted suicide as an option, and called references to death panels or euthanasia "mind-numbing". Republican Senator Johnny Isakson, who co-sponsored a 2007 end-of-life counseling provision, called the euthanasia claim "nuts". Analysts who examined the end-of-life provision Palin cited agree that Palin's claim is incorrect. According to TIME and ABC, Palin and Betsy McCaughey made false euthanasia claims.
I removed some citation stuff and bolded that one sentence. Palin was intentionally and in my opinion maliciously misrepresenting a vital service that everyone should be informed about. The worst time to learn about the intricacies of funeral homes, hospice care, living wills, powers of attorney and all of the other things that can crop up when someone's dying is when it's actually happening!
There is an entire industry on informing expectant parents on their upcoming child. There is very little when it comes to options for caring for a family member who is getting older.
Nope, my family went through a rough patch a while back when my grandmother passed away suddenly. My mom had been trying to get her to talk about this kind of stuff, but she never got anywhere.
Don't forget that the right wing mouthpieces had their part in affecting the debates. The whole "death panel" debacle was completely distorted rhetoric on something very sensible and important: end of life planning and counseling. Which was proposed by a Republican and accepted until it became too much of an albatross to carry.
Grocery stores and gas stations both have products that are easy to steal and difficult to catch without video proof.
What is there to steal at a movie theater? The seats? More than your share of the large soda and popcorn?
Sure, there is some risk of someone capturing a "screener" of the movie, but IMO that's not worth the loss of customer goodwill that is already strained with sub-par feature films, expensive ticket prices, even more expensive refreshments, and spotty disciplining of bad behaviour.
I can only hope I remember to remind my kids of this newest loss of privacy when they start dating in a few years.
You didn't even need Fireball. Just hunt around until you get an Apocalypse staff and run around nuking people behind walls. Recharge the staff when you're done.
I was able to kill everyone except for Diablo in D1 without dropping the walls, and even the big guy himself only took a few pops to drop.
What I hated the most about D1 was the fact that if you died in multiplayer, some joker could rush over, gank all your gear, and you're left with nothing.
Those kinds of tricks are fine for Google, where there's a ton of folks who don't care or won't notice (gmail UI changes and the left panel on the search results in particular), but I think it's kind of funny that they're trying it here, in a place that's known for users with strong DIY tendancies, grumpy users, and useless frippery-type changes.
It took me about a minute to get it back the way it should be, but I really wish they'd announce the changes and let us decide to check it out.
This doesn't always work the way you would expect it to.
I have an older, but perfectly functioning Canon USB scanner that I primarily use to deposit checks into my bank account.
When I upgraded to Windows 7 I thought I could get the scanner running with XP Mode. Nope. If Windows 7 doesn't see it, XP Mode can't see it, so even though my scanner works fine in XP, it won't in XP Mode.
I used to work for a State government, and I hadn't seen a bona fide raise since around 2003. The only pay bumps I got were when I changes jobs, the last of which was in 2006. My pay was actually negative because the money I might have gotten as a raise went instead to health insurance. If it weren't for my outside consulting gigs, I would be in some serious financial trouble.
I finally jumped ship into the private sector a few months back, so we'll see how it goes.
If a firefighter had gone in to save those animals and been injured, he would have been just as out of luck as those homeowners were.
Their worker's insurance won't cover them if they're not "on the job," which they're not if they're tromping through a house with no fire protection policy in place.
My wife's a teacher, she has not seen a pay increase in over 4 years. She can't go elsewhere because if she does she'll be at the bottom of the stack and the first to go if (when) there's a budget crunch. She's a consistently good teacher who keeps her students engaged and works within their personal requirements as best she can. Her metrics have shown that she is a good teacher, and she does a ton of extra training every summer.
Her retirement plan will give her around 40% of the average her top 5 years of income if she retires after 30 years (Florida Retirement System [FRS]), and at 8 years of service, pulls in just over half of what your sister does.
Teacher compensation is all over the place because every state and county does things differently.
That and publishers aren't exactly forthcoming about their payments to authors, and most won't easily grant the author audit rights to the books.
So now you've got a content creator who signs away their creation to a company who then markets it, takes all the money, then tells the author "trust us, we won't let you down." If you don't have a lot of market clout (like Stephen King) or market savvy (like Piers Anthony), you're going to have a long row to hoe to get fully and fairly compensated.
It has increased a monoculture of trees in the form of stripped native forests that have been replanted with pulpwood trash pines.
DAGS on the American Chestnut tree to see what can happen to a monoculture.
Sure more trees is better than fewer trees, but a 5 year old slash pine isn't nearly as useful to the environment as a 150 year old oak.
Maybe in the Midwest there's plenty of farmland or pastures available for developing, but in everywhere I've lived in the southern US most new housing development have come at the cost of native forests.
Yes, urban sprawl is much better for humanity and the environment than living in a city.
Why, when I was a kid and went to Jacksonville Beach, I could drive for miles along the coastal highway and not see a house or a condo. Thank goodness the developers were so forward thinking that they plopped huge condo developments and beautiful beach houses all along the highway so that the water can't even be seen any more!
And look at all those nasty forests that have been clearcut to bare earth, razed, paved, and piped so that people could escape the "concrete hell."
There's nothing wrong with city living. There is something wrong with living your entire life in a closed environment. The more people live in the cities, the more area we have to play in when we just have to GTFO of town and relax.
I may sign a petition not because I necessarily agree with what it's advocating, but because I think it's an important enough topic that it should be included in the greater discourse.
My vote in the ballot box is what actually matters. I don't have much of an opinion as to whether or not something is just TALKED ABOUT, but I have a much higher standard for deciding whether or not to support that same thing with my vote.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm personally hoping for a non-gimped Android tablet in a smaller form factor.
There are a few around, but they're locked down too tightly, and I'd like to see something of a standard, even if it's just "Oh hey, here's our Android phone without the phone."
Because the one thing that most people (especially fake people like corporations) have a greater amount of hate for than their love of money is taxes.
Government employees are paid mostly through taxes.
This is why they traditionally are paid lower than the private sector. The public sector traditionally appealed to employees for a variety of reasons, among them:
1) Stability. Your job isn't as prone to market upsets as the private sector.
2) Benefits. Because "the government" is a pretty big employer, they can get great returns on the economies of scale. Pensions and health care benefits are usually the result of this.
The "costs" to the employee are various, including:
1) Lower wages than the private sector. If you do a super job, you might get a pat on the back, but bonuses and/or raises are usually not going to happen.
2) Greater job stagnation. If you want more than the standard cost of living pay increases (which for some places hasn't happened in 5 years), you usually have to change jobs. If you want training, you're usually on your own.
Well, they're not so bad after a run through the autoclave.
Sony did a good job with a "justaphone" they recently released, the Naite.
I bought one a few months ago for around $120. No contracts, basic phone, no sliding, good screen, some free games that are good, bluetooth, a decent camera, small form factor, and really good battery life. It even accepts standard microSD cards, if you need it.
The free Sony management software is really pretty good, too. It offers phone backups, you can send/receive text messages through your machine while it's plugged in, and it didn't come with a lot of BS carrier lock-in stuff.
Check it out, it's been perfect for me.
I don't know about the GP, but I also only applied to one school. I put in my application in September or October, had a reply before Christmas, and had a very relaxed Spring semester.
Had I not been accepted, I still had plenty of time to think about "fall back" schools or other options.
Or that they have a good sense of humor.
Like that one school I saw a flyer for:
"Attend Harvey Mudd! Then you tell people where you went to school can say it quickly and make people think you were saying, 'Harvard Med!'"
What exactly was distorted by saying that the plan called for panels of beauracrats who would decide who got treatment and who would not (and therefore die)?
Well, for starters, it was a provision to provide Medicare payments once every 5 years for an optional consultation with a person's doctor to go over end of life issues such as Hospice care, living wills, and other related topics.
Here's a quote from Wikipedia because this is Slashdot and not a formal debate:
Palin's death panel remarks were based on the ideas of Betsy McCaughey. During 2009, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin wrote against alleged rationing, referring to what by her interpretation was a "downright evil" "death panel" in current reform legislation known as H.R. 3200 Section 1233. However, Palin supported similar end of life discussion and advance directives for patients in 2008. Defenders of the plan indicated that the proposed legislation H.R. 3200 would allow Medicare for the first time to cover patient-doctor consultations about end-of-life planning, including discussions about drawing up a living will or planning hospice treatment. Patients could seek out such advice on their own, but would not be required to. The provision would limit Medicare coverage to one consultation every five years. Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., who sponsored the H.R. 3200 end of life counseling provision, said the measure would block funds for counseling that presents suicide or assisted suicide as an option, and called references to death panels or euthanasia "mind-numbing". Republican Senator Johnny Isakson, who co-sponsored a 2007 end-of-life counseling provision, called the euthanasia claim "nuts". Analysts who examined the end-of-life provision Palin cited agree that Palin's claim is incorrect. According to TIME and ABC, Palin and Betsy McCaughey made false euthanasia claims.
I removed some citation stuff and bolded that one sentence. Palin was intentionally and in my opinion maliciously misrepresenting a vital service that everyone should be informed about. The worst time to learn about the intricacies of funeral homes, hospice care, living wills, powers of attorney and all of the other things that can crop up when someone's dying is when it's actually happening!
There is an entire industry on informing expectant parents on their upcoming child.
There is very little when it comes to options for caring for a family member who is getting older.
Nope, my family went through a rough patch a while back when my grandmother passed away suddenly. My mom had been trying to get her to talk about this kind of stuff, but she never got anywhere.
Don't forget that the right wing mouthpieces had their part in affecting the debates. The whole "death panel" debacle was completely distorted rhetoric on something very sensible and important: end of life planning and counseling. Which was proposed by a Republican and accepted until it became too much of an albatross to carry.
Grocery stores and gas stations both have products that are easy to steal and difficult to catch without video proof.
What is there to steal at a movie theater? The seats? More than your share of the large soda and popcorn?
Sure, there is some risk of someone capturing a "screener" of the movie, but IMO that's not worth the loss of customer goodwill that is already strained with sub-par feature films, expensive ticket prices, even more expensive refreshments, and spotty disciplining of bad behaviour.
I can only hope I remember to remind my kids of this newest loss of privacy when they start dating in a few years.
You didn't even need Fireball. Just hunt around until you get an Apocalypse staff and run around nuking people behind walls. Recharge the staff when you're done.
I was able to kill everyone except for Diablo in D1 without dropping the walls, and even the big guy himself only took a few pops to drop.
What I hated the most about D1 was the fact that if you died in multiplayer, some joker could rush over, gank all your gear, and you're left with nothing.
But he's also considered a villian HERE, because of his actions as shown in the documentaries.
And since it happened long ago in a galaxy far, far away, I think it's not totally inaccurate.
If I'm doing a full backup/data dump of gigs at a time, it's a bit faster to just plug in and go than wait for everything to make it over wifi.
Those kinds of tricks are fine for Google, where there's a ton of folks who don't care or won't notice (gmail UI changes and the left panel on the search results in particular), but I think it's kind of funny that they're trying it here, in a place that's known for users with strong DIY tendancies, grumpy users, and useless frippery-type changes.
It took me about a minute to get it back the way it should be, but I really wish they'd announce the changes and let us decide to check it out.
But it does work after you give up and resort to reading documentation.
Heresy!
I'll give it another look. Thanks for the head's up.
This doesn't always work the way you would expect it to.
I have an older, but perfectly functioning Canon USB scanner that I primarily use to deposit checks into my bank account.
When I upgraded to Windows 7 I thought I could get the scanner running with XP Mode. Nope. If Windows 7 doesn't see it, XP Mode can't see it, so even though my scanner works fine in XP, it won't in XP Mode.
I used to work for a State government, and I hadn't seen a bona fide raise since around 2003. The only pay bumps I got were when I changes jobs, the last of which was in 2006. My pay was actually negative because the money I might have gotten as a raise went instead to health insurance. If it weren't for my outside consulting gigs, I would be in some serious financial trouble.
I finally jumped ship into the private sector a few months back, so we'll see how it goes.
If a firefighter had gone in to save those animals and been injured, he would have been just as out of luck as those homeowners were.
Their worker's insurance won't cover them if they're not "on the job," which they're not if they're tromping through a house with no fire protection policy in place.
My wife's a teacher, she has not seen a pay increase in over 4 years. She can't go elsewhere because if she does she'll be at the bottom of the stack and the first to go if (when) there's a budget crunch. She's a consistently good teacher who keeps her students engaged and works within their personal requirements as best she can. Her metrics have shown that she is a good teacher, and she does a ton of extra training every summer.
Her retirement plan will give her around 40% of the average her top 5 years of income if she retires after 30 years (Florida Retirement System [FRS]), and at 8 years of service, pulls in just over half of what your sister does.
Teacher compensation is all over the place because every state and county does things differently.
Now give up and go to sleep!
That and publishers aren't exactly forthcoming about their payments to authors, and most won't easily grant the author audit rights to the books.
So now you've got a content creator who signs away their creation to a company who then markets it, takes all the money, then tells the author "trust us, we won't let you down." If you don't have a lot of market clout (like Stephen King) or market savvy (like Piers Anthony), you're going to have a long row to hoe to get fully and fairly compensated.
It has increased a monoculture of trees in the form of stripped native forests that have been replanted with pulpwood trash pines.
DAGS on the American Chestnut tree to see what can happen to a monoculture.
Sure more trees is better than fewer trees, but a 5 year old slash pine isn't nearly as useful to the environment as a 150 year old oak.
Maybe in the Midwest there's plenty of farmland or pastures available for developing, but in everywhere I've lived in the southern US most new housing development have come at the cost of native forests.
Yes, urban sprawl is much better for humanity and the environment than living in a city.
Why, when I was a kid and went to Jacksonville Beach, I could drive for miles along the coastal highway and not see a house or a condo. Thank goodness the developers were so forward thinking that they plopped huge condo developments and beautiful beach houses all along the highway so that the water can't even be seen any more!
And look at all those nasty forests that have been clearcut to bare earth, razed, paved, and piped so that people could escape the "concrete hell."
There's nothing wrong with city living. There is something wrong with living your entire life in a closed environment. The more people live in the cities, the more area we have to play in when we just have to GTFO of town and relax.
I may sign a petition not because I necessarily agree with what it's advocating, but because I think it's an important enough topic that it should be included in the greater discourse.
My vote in the ballot box is what actually matters. I don't have much of an opinion as to whether or not something is just TALKED ABOUT, but I have a much higher standard for deciding whether or not to support that same thing with my vote.
There's a Penny Arcade for just about anything: