Derek Hanway, Burbank financial services director, said the city was motivated to act for fear of funding for things like police services drying up. Last year, Burbank collected $3.7 million in utilities taxes on phone calls, half of which went to pay for emergency services.
Funny how they always mention funding for police services, or the fire department, and never their own salary or the rest of the other unpopular half. For instance, the Burbank budget (pdf) for the next year forecasts
$32,606,324 Police
$24,418,541 Fire
$14,230,311 Park, Rec & Comm Svcs,
$5,969,207 Community Development
$5,675,216 General Administration
$5,043,634 Library
$4,175,351 Management Services
$3,645,424 Information Technology
$2,956,435 Financial Services
$2,405,510 Non-Departmental
But they need a VoIP tax to pay for their police services. Right.
While Best Buy has pulled the plug on their relationships with some of the more well known bargain sites, Dell is using those same sites to run their promotions and clear out inventory with insane coupon deals.
Michael Dell started out assembling and selling PC clones in his college dorm room. It shows in the way his business is run: he knows that what people want is a great price on a great product. Dell's job is to be more efficient than the competition, not try to squeeze every penny out of the customer.
Dell's beginnings have led it to embrace change, I think, and that includes a huge shift from the old call-center-centric order process to being Internet-based. Best Buy hasn't gotten away from the brick-and-mortar paradigm, and so they're caught between Wal-Mart and Dell.
Despite all of that, I'm not a big Dell fan ("This is Srijivhara. May I be taking your name now?"). But if Best Buy doesn't refocus on pleasing the customer, Dell will eat their lunch, and then go looking for Wal-Mart's, too.
The Guardian miscalculated the (U.S. of) American feelings of patriotism, xenophobia, parochialism, isolationism, desire for independence, distrust of Europe, and the resentment that would be rekindled by even a single letter like the one you sent. There's a sizable segment of our population which doesn't even want the U.S. to be a U.N. member.
No matter how well you stated your case, the fact that it was a non-American saying it would cause most people here to summarily dismiss it. The fact that it was an organized campaign turned that dismissal into an angry backlash.
I'm not saying that led to President Bush being reelected, but it certainly didn't help Senator Kerry.
Don't bother to respond about the evils U.S. interventionism; I'm just explaining our reaction.
I'll assume you know the absurdity of trying to attack the Evil Countries with a meteor the size of, say, Alaska, and that your post was intended to be as funny as it was.
But it does make the problem a bit easier that it's not just three-dimensional. "All" that's needed is to accelerate the Alaska-sized chunk of frozen metallic rock in some direction so that it doesn't cross the path of the Earth at the same time Earth does.
With any luck, there would be another planet, the Sun, or if all else failed the Moon, to use in some way.
The Red Hat Department of Redundancy Department regretfully announces that the morons in charge of the moronic naming of Fedora Core Release 3 have been released, erm, sacked.
Do they mean 802.11a, b, or g? Certainly not 'a', I hope not just 'b'.
I bet they're struggling with heat dissipation and power consumption.
Probably they see that 'g' is commoditized and ripe for inclusion on the motherboard, and that the practical concerns over heat and power will be solved..
In the old days (pre 1970) they made some hard drives on rotating drums with an array of fixed heads, maybe 128 of them. As the areal density increased, it became impractical to construct that many heads, so they switched to moving heads. Ever since then the research has focused on improving the moving head assembly.
I've been wondering about a fixed array of hundreds of heads, conceptually one per track, hardwired and switched electronically rather than moved mechanically. The cost of a head assembly is not the GMR head itself, but mounting the thing in the right place on the floating heads.
Everything would be improved over current designs, from power consumption and reliability to a dramatic speed increase. I think in the long run the price would drop considerably, since the spinning disk itself would be the only moving part.
In terms of the speed, consider the average seek time. With average seek time would be the time it would take for half a revolution of the disk, or 1/20000 of a second (.05 ms), and even less with caching, but that's hard math.
Currently the HD-3000 is NOT supported in Windows 98, Windows 2000 or Windows XP however Windows drivers are include for those wishing to experiment with the card in Microsoft Windows.
That last line is a remarkable reversal from the usual state of affairs. Normally announcements don't mention Linux compatibility (but it's available at your own risk if you snag some source from their web site).
The parties may try to adopt the trappings of openness without really implementing the internal changes, but I don't think that will be successful. The point is not that Open Source is cool and popular, because most voters don't give a hoot about it. Those that do care about openness in their software don't expect it in politics... yet.
The point is that Open Politics is being thrust on the powers that be, and there's nothing that will stop it. They will either adapt to politics in the Internet Age or they will lose.
But the average person has no way of knowing what works politically other than introspectively, and studies have shown that these intuitions are often flat wrong. Hardcore supporters tend to end up "preaching to the choir," presenting arguments that only those who already agreed with them would accept.
I think you're subconciously overgeneralizing from the results of the recent election. Most people are "average" in many ways, but there is no average person. Most of the time, your opinion will be matched pretty well to those of a lot of other people. A keenly developed habit of listening to "trolls" can help break one of preaching to the choir.
An Open Source project is more than just the developers; it's also the beta testers, the funders, and not least the users. Not everyone needs to be a coder in order to contribute. Not all coders have the same skill level or commitment. It's not necessary for someone to be able to come up with a shiny new algorithm before they can trace a bug in the implementation of an old one.
Similarly, it's not necessary for everyone to know how to take a poll, or organize a focus group, or even put together a cogent argument. In politics, as in almost no other area, there's a slot for everyone.
Consider the effect that Groklaw has had on The SCO Group's attempt to steal Linux. A community of people, led by a core team, blends skills and does amazing work. Ordinary people with neither legal nor technical training contribute to the discussion in ways I personally find inspiring.
So take a look at these parallels:
Front Man : Candidate
Core Team : Advisors, strategists, organizers
Donated CVS Host : contributor
power user : local activist
user : voter
poll : quiet beta test
election : trumpeted release
I'm just wondering if the people in the FOSS movement will dominate Open Source Politics or if the mechanics of it will. That is, will the current FOSS people become active politically or will the politicians learn to apply Open Politics principles for themselves?
The Open Source model is the future of politics. In the next few election cycles, I think we'll see a Cathedral/Bazaar phenomenon take place. Whether that phenomenon supplants the current right/left paradigm or not remains to be seen. A lot depends on whether the Democrats pick up the mantle of "Open Politics" or not.
Open Politics is, in many ways, what grass roots politics is supposed to be. In the current system I think it has turned into the national parties manipulating the local people, though I speak only for my own locale.
The Republicans are just coming to terms with the notion that their base is comprised, to quote one Republican polster, of "theocrats" - people who believe not that a theocracy is desirable, but that the separation of Church and State has been overemphasized to the nation's detriment. That's who won the 2004 election, and it will be very hard to deny that movement. Democrats should not make the mistake of dismissing the theocrats or ignoring the intellectual and numeric strength of the movement.
The Democrats need new intellectual vigor, and tapping in to the Open Politics movement seems like a natural for them.
If the Republicans embrace Open Politics, I don't know what effect that will have. If neither major party embraces it, then a huge vacuum is opened up for one of the minor parties to fill.
My father-in-law gave me his old HP Pavilion 6683, since Windows 98 was hosed on it and he'd upgraded. I plugged it in, and Zzzzt, smell of ozone.
Opening up the case, I found that just to see how much RAM was installed I had to remove the motherboard from the case!
I installed a new power supply and installed Linux for my daughter. She's happy, but I'm not looking forward to the next time I have to open up that POS.
Ah, I see. You could have a harbor full of underwater drones, like antibodies. They cruise around looking for stuff and send up warning signals.
You wouldn't want them to do anything on their own, to minimize the damage of a false positive. Blowing up a boat full of Cuban refugees might not be politically viable.
"You stay down by day, but at night you can move around. The H-K's use infra-red so you still have to watch out. But they're not too bright. John taught us ways to dust them. That's when the infiltrators started to appear...."
How long before those are the tactics the Havenots need to combat the Haves?
Those were pretty pictures of cars and keyboards. Troll mode off, but who cares about subtle gradations of color in a telephone? I'd rather know about:
How much memory do they have for images?
How long do the batteries last?
Do they have a firewire port, or just lame USB 1.0?
Who wouldn't laugh at 'All your base are belong to us' or 'In Soviet Russia, the game laughs at you'.
Oh, I see what you mean.
Games should be fun
on
Humor in Games?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
... so why does humor seem like a distraction? Maybe it's because the game designers aren't comedians, they're geeks? Geeks can be funny, as seen on these very pages, but to step out and design a game that tries to be funny is way too risky. What if someone buys the game and doesn't laugh? Bad news.
Comedy takes a certain mindset. You have to program the user with a setup, then redirect them to the punch line. That's a different plot than blowing up an alien mother ship or whatever.
Comedy is usually only funny once. By the time the designer has seen it for the six hundredth time, it's not funny to them any more. By the time the user has seen the gag a few times, they're bored with it. By contrast, I still pull out Doom 2 now and then.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny how they always mention funding for police services, or the fire department, and never their own salary or the rest of the other unpopular half. For instance, the Burbank budget (pdf) for the next year forecasts
But they need a VoIP tax to pay for their police services. Right.
Oh, by the way, they're hiring.
Michael Dell started out assembling and selling PC clones in his college dorm room. It shows in the way his business is run: he knows that what people want is a great price on a great product. Dell's job is to be more efficient than the competition, not try to squeeze every penny out of the customer.
Dell's beginnings have led it to embrace change, I think, and that includes a huge shift from the old call-center-centric order process to being Internet-based. Best Buy hasn't gotten away from the brick-and-mortar paradigm, and so they're caught between Wal-Mart and Dell.
Despite all of that, I'm not a big Dell fan ("This is Srijivhara. May I be taking your name now?"). But if Best Buy doesn't refocus on pleasing the customer, Dell will eat their lunch, and then go looking for Wal-Mart's, too.
The Guardian miscalculated the (U.S. of) American feelings of patriotism, xenophobia, parochialism, isolationism, desire for independence, distrust of Europe, and the resentment that would be rekindled by even a single letter like the one you sent. There's a sizable segment of our population which doesn't even want the U.S. to be a U.N. member.
No matter how well you stated your case, the fact that it was a non-American saying it would cause most people here to summarily dismiss it. The fact that it was an organized campaign turned that dismissal into an angry backlash.
I'm not saying that led to President Bush being reelected, but it certainly didn't help Senator Kerry.
Don't bother to respond about the evils U.S. interventionism; I'm just explaining our reaction.
I'll assume you know the absurdity of trying to attack the Evil Countries with a meteor the size of, say, Alaska, and that your post was intended to be as funny as it was.
But it does make the problem a bit easier that it's not just three-dimensional. "All" that's needed is to accelerate the Alaska-sized chunk of frozen metallic rock in some direction so that it doesn't cross the path of the Earth at the same time Earth does.
With any luck, there would be another planet, the Sun, or if all else failed the Moon, to use in some way.
The Red Hat Department of Redundancy Department regretfully announces that the morons in charge of the moronic naming of Fedora Core Release 3 have been released, erm, sacked.
>Isn't 802.11n on its way as well?
Yes, but it's not commoditized and flatline stable yet. They don't want anything in their chipset that might change or have security problems.
Do they mean 802.11a, b, or g? Certainly not 'a', I hope not just 'b'.
I bet they're struggling with heat dissipation and power consumption.
Probably they see that 'g' is commoditized and ripe for inclusion on the motherboard, and that the practical concerns over heat and power will be solved..
In the old days (pre 1970) they made some hard drives on rotating drums with an array of fixed heads, maybe 128 of them. As the areal density increased, it became impractical to construct that many heads, so they switched to moving heads. Ever since then the research has focused on improving the moving head assembly.
I've been wondering about a fixed array of hundreds of heads, conceptually one per track, hardwired and switched electronically rather than moved mechanically. The cost of a head assembly is not the GMR head itself, but mounting the thing in the right place on the floating heads.
Everything would be improved over current designs, from power consumption and reliability to a dramatic speed increase. I think in the long run the price would drop considerably, since the spinning disk itself would be the only moving part.
In terms of the speed, consider the average seek time. With average seek time would be the time it would take for half a revolution of the disk, or 1/20000 of a second (.05 ms), and even less with caching, but that's hard math.
It's just a joke.
If you aren't happy with the level of humor, you can have your money back.
Whenever I read that an Open Source package has been "released", I think, "Wasn't it already Free?"
That last line is a remarkable reversal from the usual state of affairs. Normally announcements don't mention Linux compatibility (but it's available at your own risk if you snag some source from their web site).
That alone makes me want one.
The parties may try to adopt the trappings of openness without really implementing the internal changes, but I don't think that will be successful. The point is not that Open Source is cool and popular, because most voters don't give a hoot about it. Those that do care about openness in their software don't expect it in politics ... yet.
The point is that Open Politics is being thrust on the powers that be, and there's nothing that will stop it. They will either adapt to politics in the Internet Age or they will lose.
I think you're subconciously overgeneralizing from the results of the recent election. Most people are "average" in many ways, but there is no average person. Most of the time, your opinion will be matched pretty well to those of a lot of other people. A keenly developed habit of listening to "trolls" can help break one of preaching to the choir.
An Open Source project is more than just the developers; it's also the beta testers, the funders, and not least the users. Not everyone needs to be a coder in order to contribute. Not all coders have the same skill level or commitment. It's not necessary for someone to be able to come up with a shiny new algorithm before they can trace a bug in the implementation of an old one.
Similarly, it's not necessary for everyone to know how to take a poll, or organize a focus group, or even put together a cogent argument. In politics, as in almost no other area, there's a slot for everyone.
Consider the effect that Groklaw has had on The SCO Group's attempt to steal Linux. A community of people, led by a core team, blends skills and does amazing work. Ordinary people with neither legal nor technical training contribute to the discussion in ways I personally find inspiring.
So take a look at these parallels:
I'm just wondering if the people in the FOSS movement will dominate Open Source Politics or if the mechanics of it will. That is, will the current FOSS people become active politically or will the politicians learn to apply Open Politics principles for themselves?
I suspect, somewhat grimly, the latter.
The Open Source model is the future of politics. In the next few election cycles, I think we'll see a Cathedral/Bazaar phenomenon take place. Whether that phenomenon supplants the current right/left paradigm or not remains to be seen. A lot depends on whether the Democrats pick up the mantle of "Open Politics" or not.
Open Politics is, in many ways, what grass roots politics is supposed to be. In the current system I think it has turned into the national parties manipulating the local people, though I speak only for my own locale.
The Republicans are just coming to terms with the notion that their base is comprised, to quote one Republican polster, of "theocrats" - people who believe not that a theocracy is desirable, but that the separation of Church and State has been overemphasized to the nation's detriment. That's who won the 2004 election, and it will be very hard to deny that movement. Democrats should not make the mistake of dismissing the theocrats or ignoring the intellectual and numeric strength of the movement.
The Democrats need new intellectual vigor, and tapping in to the Open Politics movement seems like a natural for them.
If the Republicans embrace Open Politics, I don't know what effect that will have. If neither major party embraces it, then a huge vacuum is opened up for one of the minor parties to fill.
That's comedy gold!
In an apparent first for /. today, mo mention of robots, either.
This is OT, but I never noticed it before - the following HTML works here:
My father-in-law gave me his old HP Pavilion 6683, since Windows 98 was hosed on it and he'd upgraded. I plugged it in, and Zzzzt, smell of ozone.
Opening up the case, I found that just to see how much RAM was installed I had to remove the motherboard from the case!
I installed a new power supply and installed Linux for my daughter. She's happy, but I'm not looking forward to the next time I have to open up that POS.
[sound of light bulb lighting]
Ah, I see. You could have a harbor full of underwater drones, like antibodies. They cruise around looking for stuff and send up warning signals.
You wouldn't want them to do anything on their own, to minimize the damage of a false positive. Blowing up a boat full of Cuban refugees might not be politically viable.
If there were hundreds of them, how would you know which ones were dangerous and which were decoys?
Since they don't need to surface, they could hug the bottom of the ocean floor, coming to land somewhere convenient to detonate a payload.
Or they could attach themselves to the sides of ships and wait to stop moving (probably close to a harbor).
...before the terrorists learn about them.
Oops, too late.
Coming soon to a hastily evacuated seaport near you.
"You stay down by day, but at night you can move around. The H-K's use infra-red so you still have to watch out. But they're not too bright. John taught us ways to dust them. That's when the infiltrators started to appear...."
How long before those are the tactics the Havenots need to combat the Haves?
and most importantly
Geeks are only funny to each other?
Who wouldn't laugh at 'All your base are belong to us' or 'In Soviet Russia, the game laughs at you'.
Oh, I see what you mean.
... so why does humor seem like a distraction? Maybe it's because the game designers aren't comedians, they're geeks? Geeks can be funny, as seen on these very pages, but to step out and design a game that tries to be funny is way too risky. What if someone buys the game and doesn't laugh? Bad news.
Comedy takes a certain mindset. You have to program the user with a setup, then redirect them to the punch line. That's a different plot than blowing up an alien mother ship or whatever.
Comedy is usually only funny once. By the time the designer has seen it for the six hundredth time, it's not funny to them any more. By the time the user has seen the gag a few times, they're bored with it. By contrast, I still pull out Doom 2 now and then.
The link works. Just a browser fart. Never mind.