Are not submarines, aircraft, tanks, and aircraft carriers vehicles rather than weapons? So the 2nd amendment will theoretically permit you to own torpedoes, Sidewinders, and depleted uranium rounds, but you may not be permitted the vehicles to put them in... ?
Renting a car is fine if you're flying somewhere where such is available.
When I used to fly little Cessna 152s around the place we would often land at "airfields" that were little more than converted sheep paddocks with a gas pump off to the side. The nearest rental car place would have been 100 miles in any direction you cared to choose.
For that kind of flying, something like this would be practically nirvana. For flying between international airports, yes stick with the rental Chrysler or something...
Removable wings assume you are leaving from the airport you landed at - since you would, presumably, be removing the wings and storing them at the airport otherwise there's no real advantage.
At least with foldable wings you can land at one airport, take a bit of a tourist trip in your car, and depart from another one without having to backtrack.
Overhead = salaries, IT costs for keeping the computers in the office running, air conditioning charges for the building, rent, rates, paper for the photocopier, coffee for the cafeteria, cleaning the carpet etc etc.
Basically they're saying the music company spends $x million a year on general sort of office related stuff, they sell y million CDs so x/y = $2.91. This is just a normal allocation of a fixed cost over a variable production. It's nothing new, and it's not shonky.
Isn't the total $15.98 the retail cost? So obviously it's going to include the retailer's overhead (same deal - Walmart spends $x million on salaries etc, and sells y million products. x/y = retail overhead per product).
Initially they'd be talking about related industries. eg the people who manufacture CDs, advertising copywriters, distribution workers, truck drivers, retail store employees, shopfitters etc.
Then they'd start expanding their theory - if those truck drivers aren't making any money then that means they aren't buying as many burgers on the road, which means the burger joints downsize their checkout staff, so there's a few jobs there. If the advertising execs aren't making as much money, then there will be less Porsches sold, and fewer poodles having their monthly fur shampoo.
So - if you want to keep the poodle cleaners in business, buy Lindsay Lohan's next CD.
There are only two major providers of television news in New Zealand -- one state-owned (TV1) and another private (TV3, owned by CanWest). Neither actually invests in quality journalism any more.
Having lived in NZ for 35 years now I can say with some certainty that they never did. The TVNZ news used to be better in the sense that it used more material from overseas sources. The real problem is that as NZ has grown bigger, and certain parts of its community (especially the politicians) have become rather too obsessed with refuting the old cultural cringe and showing the world that NZ is important, there has become less reliance upon overseas sources and more reliance upon NZ's own "journalists". The problem being that NZ is far too small to supply and support a decent number of journalists and none of them even know what "investigative journalism" actually means.
So what we end up with is the score of some rugby match headlining the news, followed by some not even thinly veiled Maori Party advertisement (Tini Molyneaux, TV1), a couple of "our policitians are lazy wankers" snippets showing the latest trivial mud-slinging nosense to be taking up parliamentary time, some fluff about Oscar the death-predicting cat, and a badly edited 20 second collection of pieces from "around the world" (ie whatever they could get off the satellite feed that had burning buildings in it). All that comes to 30 minutes, less advertising breaks. Then there's half an hour of sport "news".
This is all about the same investment as they ever made - since the NZ journalists were always limited to this kind of nonsense anyway. It's just that there's less of the real, imported, stuff to fit around it.
A gaming PC with dueling graphics cards can line up 12 projectors in as little as 5 minutes
What if I don't want my graphics cards fighting it out to see who survives? Will it take only 2 minutes if they join forces instead of trying to kill each other?
Here in the USA, the standard is "200kbps in at least one direction".
Here in New Zealand, the definition of "broadband" is essentially "anything that isn't a dial-up modem". Hence the telecoms monopoly gets aways with a 128kbps ADSL link being referred to as "broadband" and although I've never actually seen it as such I'm sure there will be those who consider a 64kbps ISDN line "broadband".
Note for the geographically challenged : NZ isn't part of Australia (yet... give it time) but we like to whine with the best of them...
29 billion assuming nobody dies over that 1000 years...
One assumes our alien overlords aren't immortal but yes I'll freely admit I was pulling numbers out of my ass somewhat.
If we assume a fairly normal kind of human span - say we round it up to 100 years to allow for better medical technology - then after 1,000 years your 10,000 hardy colonists becomes a bit under a tenth (2.2billion) of the linear 29 billion. Now that's a fairly rough and ready working based on killing off the population count at the turn of the previous century every hundred years. ie at year 100 we have 44,000 colonists but 10,000 of them (the original crew) die, leaving 34,000. At year 1,000 we have 2.9billion colonists but the 660million around at year 900 die off leaving 2.2billion.
That's not factoring in reproduction age ranges (are our aliens reproductive from age 5 to 95, or 12 to 50?) but that's getting too messy for probably little more accuracy.
Now fair enough, 10,000 of out 2.2billion is fairly small so I'll concede the first part. But a whole planet with 2.9 billion is unlikely to be pushing too hard for colonisation.
No - since Microsoft will doubtless be charging for the "new" features as they are unlocked. As such Microsoft will be recognising the income for the new features at the time they're sold (ie when the user unlocks them and pays ia their credit card over the tubes).
Apple's issue was that they determined they couldn't unlock extra functionality for free. Microsoft has no intention of upgrading a downloaded user at no charge.
The only question about its feasibility is whether we start using energy sources of the appropriate magnitude or not. All the rest is just engineering.
There's also an implied fecundity assumption in there, as well as an assumption that mass colonisation (as against merely spreading the gene pool a little further) is desirable.
After all, if you're sending out colony ships a thousand years after a planet is newly colonised then you're assuming a certain population growth sufficient that:
(a) there's enough of a population to remain effective and sustainable after the colony ship (containing what would necessarily be a reasonable chunk of that population) leaves; and
(b) there's enough of a population - or other demand - to create the impetus to send out a colony ship.
To some extent, (b) rather assumes there's a desire to colonise for the sake of colonisation, which isn't necessarily a bad assumption (they're aliens - who knows what their desires are...) but is an assumption nonetheless.
Now if only someone would make a movie/tv series based on Snow Crash, my life will be complete!
Snow Crash would make for an awful movie. There's far too much expositionary material regarding namshubs and so forth that would be interminable on the screen and couldn't be cut without rendering much of the story incomprehensible. It (largely) works in book form, but its density would make it impossible to bring to the screen.
Zodiac, whilst perhaps not as good a novel, would make for a far better screen translation than Snow Crash.
For IS/IT people, what have you really done? It's a larger scale equivalent of breaking a window. You've caused trouble for other people, but there is no benefit to you.
Depending what your "IS/IT people" have access to there's no reason they can't also manage to steal millions over time.
Theoretically the finance department will pick up on variances material enough to worry about, but if your IT staff (eg finance software DBA) are "tweaking" payment records and data files they could be quite happily siphoning off thousands of dollars a week in a medium sized enterprise.
If you hand me $5 on the street for no other reason than you feel like handing me that money then it is a gift and non-taxable (since it's well below the gift tax limits).
If you hand me $5 on the street in return for me shining your shoes, then it becomes taxable income in my hands.
During an intercontinental flight? I've got a 2nd gen nano that hardly goes out of juice after the 20+ hours. Are there flights which last longer than that?
Auckland to Heathrow = approx 25 hours, depending where they refill the plane's tanks.
Of course you might be able to recharge the Nano while you're waiting the couple of hours in the transit lounge, depending on the lounge.
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand is not a bank, as such. It's not like you waltz down to the Reserve Bank to make a deposit of your weekly wage cheque.
I believe it's more like the Federal Reserve in the States, though the RBNZ is 100% government owned.
So basically this guy decided to do some "security analysis" of a governmental body, not some penny-ante savings & loan branch in the backwoods. So yes, the police are going to be on to it pretty damn quick.
vlookup or any other excel lookup function blows! Proper sorting required and missing data just returns the next closest match. If you rely on lookup in your spreadhseet then your spreadsheet has errors.
If you don't want next closest match returns from your vlookups then put in a,FALSE at the end and it'll force a match - eg VLOOKUP("cde",fullrange,2,FALSE) returns "#N/A", not 300.
Still requires sorting though. Personally I'd use SUMIFs for numeric totals since SUMIF returns a zero if there's no match. SUMIF(Lot,"cde",Data) = 0
For the record, Grant Thornton is actually an international firm of accountants, and not just "one person" at his kitchen table with a pocket calculator and a combover. The "without audit" disclaimer is merely the standard one used in order to avoid any legal responsibility on the part of the accountants in question. ie they were not paid for, and therefore did not undertake, an audit of the data supplied. It's pretty standard stuff.
Not that that necessarily invalidates the rest of your post, or validates the numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
Are not submarines, aircraft, tanks, and aircraft carriers vehicles rather than weapons? So the 2nd amendment will theoretically permit you to own torpedoes, Sidewinders, and depleted uranium rounds, but you may not be permitted the vehicles to put them in... ?
The only remaining explanation is there might, in fact, be a third type of bacon... i.e. a cow bacon or chicken bacon.
Chicken bacon's been around for years.
The search continues for cow bacon, however.
Renting a car is fine if you're flying somewhere where such is available.
When I used to fly little Cessna 152s around the place we would often land at "airfields" that were little more than converted sheep paddocks with a gas pump off to the side. The nearest rental car place would have been 100 miles in any direction you cared to choose.
For that kind of flying, something like this would be practically nirvana. For flying between international airports, yes stick with the rental Chrysler or something...
Removable wings assume you are leaving from the airport you landed at - since you would, presumably, be removing the wings and storing them at the airport otherwise there's no real advantage.
At least with foldable wings you can land at one airport, take a bit of a tourist trip in your car, and depart from another one without having to backtrack.
Overhead = salaries, IT costs for keeping the computers in the office running, air conditioning charges for the building, rent, rates, paper for the photocopier, coffee for the cafeteria, cleaning the carpet etc etc.
Basically they're saying the music company spends $x million a year on general sort of office related stuff, they sell y million CDs so x/y = $2.91. This is just a normal allocation of a fixed cost over a variable production. It's nothing new, and it's not shonky.
Isn't the total $15.98 the retail cost? So obviously it's going to include the retailer's overhead (same deal - Walmart spends $x million on salaries etc, and sells y million products. x/y = retail overhead per product).
Odama?
Though I seem to recall the reviews being somewhat inconsistent with regard to the voice commands actually working.
Initially they'd be talking about related industries. eg the people who manufacture CDs, advertising copywriters, distribution workers, truck drivers, retail store employees, shopfitters etc.
Then they'd start expanding their theory - if those truck drivers aren't making any money then that means they aren't buying as many burgers on the road, which means the burger joints downsize their checkout staff, so there's a few jobs there. If the advertising execs aren't making as much money, then there will be less Porsches sold, and fewer poodles having their monthly fur shampoo.
So - if you want to keep the poodle cleaners in business, buy Lindsay Lohan's next CD.
Having lived in NZ for 35 years now I can say with some certainty that they never did. The TVNZ news used to be better in the sense that it used more material from overseas sources. The real problem is that as NZ has grown bigger, and certain parts of its community (especially the politicians) have become rather too obsessed with refuting the old cultural cringe and showing the world that NZ is important, there has become less reliance upon overseas sources and more reliance upon NZ's own "journalists". The problem being that NZ is far too small to supply and support a decent number of journalists and none of them even know what "investigative journalism" actually means.
So what we end up with is the score of some rugby match headlining the news, followed by some not even thinly veiled Maori Party advertisement (Tini Molyneaux, TV1), a couple of "our policitians are lazy wankers" snippets showing the latest trivial mud-slinging nosense to be taking up parliamentary time, some fluff about Oscar the death-predicting cat, and a badly edited 20 second collection of pieces from "around the world" (ie whatever they could get off the satellite feed that had burning buildings in it). All that comes to 30 minutes, less advertising breaks. Then there's half an hour of sport "news".
This is all about the same investment as they ever made - since the NZ journalists were always limited to this kind of nonsense anyway. It's just that there's less of the real, imported, stuff to fit around it.
Good lord, this is very old news.
The local TV stations have already said they'll ignore it and certain politicians have already been backing down from their high horse.
It is unlikely this "law" will have any actual effect on the satirisation, ridicule, or other general highlighting of how usless our MPs actually are.
FTFA :
A gaming PC with dueling graphics cards can line up 12 projectors in as little as 5 minutesWhat if I don't want my graphics cards fighting it out to see who survives? Will it take only 2 minutes if they join forces instead of trying to kill each other?
Here in New Zealand, the definition of "broadband" is essentially "anything that isn't a dial-up modem". Hence the telecoms monopoly gets aways with a 128kbps ADSL link being referred to as "broadband" and although I've never actually seen it as such I'm sure there will be those who consider a 64kbps ISDN line "broadband".
Note for the geographically challenged : NZ isn't part of Australia (yet ... give it time) but we like to whine with the best of them...
Welcome to the 1980s. It's MSX all over again...
Actually, there are some fairly obvious fundamental flaws in my post, on retrospect.
I blame lack of coffee and general stupidity....
29 billion assuming nobody dies over that 1000 years...
One assumes our alien overlords aren't immortal but yes I'll freely admit I was pulling numbers out of my ass somewhat.
If we assume a fairly normal kind of human span - say we round it up to 100 years to allow for better medical technology - then after 1,000 years your 10,000 hardy colonists becomes a bit under a tenth (2.2billion) of the linear 29 billion. Now that's a fairly rough and ready working based on killing off the population count at the turn of the previous century every hundred years. ie at year 100 we have 44,000 colonists but 10,000 of them (the original crew) die, leaving 34,000. At year 1,000 we have 2.9billion colonists but the 660million around at year 900 die off leaving 2.2billion.
That's not factoring in reproduction age ranges (are our aliens reproductive from age 5 to 95, or 12 to 50?) but that's getting too messy for probably little more accuracy.
Now fair enough, 10,000 of out 2.2billion is fairly small so I'll concede the first part. But a whole planet with 2.9 billion is unlikely to be pushing too hard for colonisation.
Assuming human-like motivations, of course.
No - since Microsoft will doubtless be charging for the "new" features as they are unlocked. As such Microsoft will be recognising the income for the new features at the time they're sold (ie when the user unlocks them and pays ia their credit card over the tubes).
Apple's issue was that they determined they couldn't unlock extra functionality for free. Microsoft has no intention of upgrading a downloaded user at no charge.
There's also an implied fecundity assumption in there, as well as an assumption that mass colonisation (as against merely spreading the gene pool a little further) is desirable.
After all, if you're sending out colony ships a thousand years after a planet is newly colonised then you're assuming a certain population growth sufficient that :
(a) there's enough of a population to remain effective and sustainable after the colony ship (containing what would necessarily be a reasonable chunk of that population) leaves; and
(b) there's enough of a population - or other demand - to create the impetus to send out a colony ship.
To some extent, (b) rather assumes there's a desire to colonise for the sake of colonisation, which isn't necessarily a bad assumption (they're aliens - who knows what their desires are...) but is an assumption nonetheless.
Snow Crash would make for an awful movie. There's far too much expositionary material regarding namshubs and so forth that would be interminable on the screen and couldn't be cut without rendering much of the story incomprehensible. It (largely) works in book form, but its density would make it impossible to bring to the screen.
Zodiac, whilst perhaps not as good a novel, would make for a far better screen translation than Snow Crash.
For IS/IT people, what have you really done? It's a larger scale equivalent of breaking a window. You've caused trouble for other people, but there is no benefit to you.
Depending what your "IS/IT people" have access to there's no reason they can't also manage to steal millions over time.
Theoretically the finance department will pick up on variances material enough to worry about, but if your IT staff (eg finance software DBA) are "tweaking" payment records and data files they could be quite happily siphoning off thousands of dollars a week in a medium sized enterprise.
If you hand me $5 on the street for no other reason than you feel like handing me that money then it is a gift and non-taxable (since it's well below the gift tax limits).
If you hand me $5 on the street in return for me shining your shoes, then it becomes taxable income in my hands.
Auckland to Heathrow = approx 25 hours, depending where they refill the plane's tanks.
Of course you might be able to recharge the Nano while you're waiting the couple of hours in the transit lounge, depending on the lounge.
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand is not a bank, as such. It's not like you waltz down to the Reserve Bank to make a deposit of your weekly wage cheque.
I believe it's more like the Federal Reserve in the States, though the RBNZ is 100% government owned.
So basically this guy decided to do some "security analysis" of a governmental body, not some penny-ante savings & loan branch in the backwoods. So yes, the police are going to be on to it pretty damn quick.
Because the Apocalypse is coming in 2012?
Depends what you believe.
Was the other one "Redneck Rampage"? I love that game. LOL
If we're not talking just FPS games then there's all the Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing collections as well...
vlookup or any other excel lookup function blows! Proper sorting required and missing data just returns the next closest match. If you rely on lookup in your spreadhseet then your spreadsheet has errors.
If you don't want next closest match returns from your vlookups then put in a ,FALSE at the end and it'll force a match - eg VLOOKUP("cde",fullrange,2,FALSE) returns "#N/A", not 300.
Still requires sorting though. Personally I'd use SUMIFs for numeric totals since SUMIF returns a zero if there's no match. SUMIF(Lot,"cde",Data) = 0
For the record, Grant Thornton is actually an international firm of accountants, and not just "one person" at his kitchen table with a pocket calculator and a combover. The "without audit" disclaimer is merely the standard one used in order to avoid any legal responsibility on the part of the accountants in question. ie they were not paid for, and therefore did not undertake, an audit of the data supplied. It's pretty standard stuff.
Not that that necessarily invalidates the rest of your post, or validates the numbers.