The rest of the country's students with only grade 12 did just fine. I know because I went to school in Ontario from Nova Scotia with only grade 12. About the only difference is that I did curriculum about a year earlier in some cases, and didn't have an opportunity to get credit/skip some intro courses.
Anyway, I would say for those few students that want to excel, they could take advantage of grade 13, but for most I suspect it was simply a crutch to limp along at a more retarded pace.
In moderation it is probably heaps healthier than margarine. It was developed as livestock feed!
I also listen to CD's, though only occasional, and only in the car.
As for bed warmers... can you even buy those anymore? I would imagine the liability prevents it nowadays. I would be too afraid of immolating myself one night. Though I do remember them being cozy when I was a kid (and getting in trouble for forgetting to turn off).
Sure people can complain about people taking pictures of their oatmeal, cat, or putting whatever mundane status they like. However I don't think that is the point of the article (which I didn't read, so I am kind of guessing). If a particular friend is too annoying I have the option to mute or unfriend them.
I agree with much of your assessment, particularly since I live about 2000km away from my home town, high school, family, etc...
What I do see as the point is Facebook in the beginning was all about what you mention, being a useful tool (with some quirks already mentioned). However now, since the 70 Billion IPO or whatever, and so many users, the quest has been to monetize everything so it can actually make a lot of money (other than the owners making off like bandits with overpriced stock). This means selling your data to whoever (advertisers mostly), ad placement, and anything else that can make a buck. From my own perspective the reality is now for every "tool" I scroll through, I am getting served up ads, and a lot of them. There is a balance between too annoying to be useful, and just enough not to care. In addition, they REALLY need to change it so people cannot make money off page hits. As the whole mess is turning into one great big chain email letter from the 1990's. You will never guess what this dog did, click to find out? My mom said she would kill my bunny unless I get a million likes! Learn this one little trick moms use to burn belly fat... etc...
At a certain point you hit a threshold where the annoyance out weighs the usefulness of the tool, at which point you will start to bleed users. If the progression is anything, it is only going to get worse. This doesn't even look at generational usage, or newer technology, social media trends, etc...
So the great benefactor can watch out for you and keep you safe. You can always apply for a certificate to lower your shade for several minutes. Do you have anything to hide citizen?
I think that is everywhere. It is a management thing (mismanagement). Separate ledgers for salary VS other stuff with zero perspective.
You pay me many tens of thousands of dollars a year, yet make me do big justification for an additional 4 year 50$ lease payment for a 2nd monitor?
You just paid me more than that to write up said justification and submit it to you... (not to mention if it makes me 1% more productive it will pay for itself many times over).
So when the refrigerator was invented, the ice box manufactures union should have lobbied government to create laws making these "electric" refrigerators illegal, protecting the millions of jobs in the whole chain of ice delivery and ice box construction industry, as it is their god given right to sell ice to ice boxes.
No to mention that not only to those people not get bus ride, free food, or (are you kidding me) nap pods, but they also probably get paid a small fraction to do a job that is likely a lot less rewarding and more physically demanding (and many times more than 60h).
Soft and spoiled isn't the word I would use. Privileged entitled asshole is I think more descriptive.
Maybe it is this kind of attitude that gets people all protesty...
Not sure what is being harvested and learned by machines, but I bet it isn't good. At best it will be picking biased news stories about the abused downtrodden computer masses, at worst some sort of arrangement using humans as batteries...
As I said just giving you a bit of a hard time. Given your reasoned response VS immediate insults and flame I can surmise that indeed you are newer to this forum...;) Likewise your story seems rational and believable. I guess I was trolling a bit too wasn't I...
Not sure if they still do it anymore, but while Apple does sell their OS as part of their HW, they also used to sell it by itself. Not only that, it came in one version (not 3+). Not only that, but it cost 30$, not 400$. I know bc at the time I looked into making a hackintosh. They may have nixed the idea now, but for a time, while they may have sold it, they did so in a reasonable fashion.
As someone who used NT at work, I can tell you the number #1 "feature" improvement for 2000 and XP was USB support. At the time everything what coming out with USB versions of stuff. For a couple of years we were forced to by more expensive yet outdated equipment because it was serial, or parallel, or even SCSI (had a special SCSI card for scanner). Much of the hardware had the USB ports, but couldn't use any of them.
Got my dad a new ultra book and hence a by default Windows 8 machine. About the most useful thing I learned was to use ALT-F4 for everything. If there was an alternative way to shutdown applications I could never find it. Trying to teach my dad shortcuts for stuff works as well as you might think. Installed windows shell on it and it works a bit better. Still you should be able to easily configure a choice of UI really. Am I a tablet, am I not a tablet, my computer doesn't really know.
I had an experience with a gym around the same time as that CPA came out in 2002 so it may have predated it slightly. Went to a gym for a 3 month stint as part of a special. Decided not to continue. Found out 9 months later they were still charging me, and had been since my 3 months. Contacted gym who said that I was automatically signed up for, well forever apparently. Said I had to have canceled by sending in a written request (had I even known about it). Did some research, at the time it was the "Prepaid Services Act" that regulated this function. Looking on the BBB, the primary violators at the time were pretty much all scamy gyms. I read up on the act, and had several meetings with gym management and finally owner. They said I had a contract. I asked to see my contract. They delayed. Then said it was lost. I then informed them that they have been illegally removing funds from my account without a contract in contravention of the PSA with fines of 50,000$, and asked to speak with the owner (unavailable). I said I would be in the following week I would expect a check for all the funds, or I would take them to court.
There was an envelope waiting for me when I returned.
Also even after the CPA came out, while the 10 day cooling off period was useful, it still left a lot of scamy companies a lot of leeway. All those energy distribution companies for example. They had to notify you, but they would auto renew you, and it was set that way by default. To stop, they made it very hard to do so, again a written letter via registered mail. Even after that they would try to contact you and get you to change your mind, or even after to sign you up again. To which my response was "REALLY!??!".
In a more recent example are all the new water heater companies. I got suckered into one (sales outright lied, said term was 5 years), however did use the 10 day cooling off period. However the reason I did was that the contract you signed had a term of "for the life of the product" which could be 40 years, and the conditions (i.e. how much you pay) could be amended on notification (which you know would be every year). Again, even with the 10 day language, I had to given a written response via registered letter (also emailed and faxed them to be sure)...
They charged a tax on all storage media regardless of if any music bytes were ever spilled on it. However, I would imagine that the sales of CD/DVD media is quickly drying up, they they are not making their pound of flesh. They still get it from devices, but they don't provide the numbers. It was easy to see 5 years ago that everything would be moving to online content both music and movies, and that physical media is pretty provincial. So now comes the next big fight, trying to force legislate profits from the internet. How? Regulation of course. Nothing new here, give us free money.
as it happens in all governments everywhere. IT work is contracted out to make government look smaller (less salary). They have to follow procurement that awards to lowest bidder. Lowest bidder had exclusions built into contract. Government in general either due to politics or whatever make about a million change orders to the initial project contract. Contractor happily charges government for each change until all the project money is gone. Contractor walks away when money dries up, blames (rightly or not) government for bungled project. Having no other choice government then dumps the steaming pile of garbage on what few overworked underpaid IT staff they have to try fix it (with a budget of exactly zero).
Anyway this has been reality for as long as I have been around.
I guess you were too busy being a mad IT admin and software engineer learning almost 20 programming languages that you were late to the whole slashdot thing and scored yourself a million+ ID? Or was it the sleep tunnels (which presumably you actually did while sleeping not to waste any precious daylight time)?
jk really. Not really trying to bust your cred. Only that I don't remember when I joined, but it was likely after I started working in the field, which wasn't until sometime after 2000, which at most is 14 years ago, and I managed to have a 700,000 ID.
Anyway I have found many IT folks boastful and full of BS on a good day, and on Slashdot it is even more common. Claiming to work in IT for almost 20 years, yet having a million+ account ID, means either you arrived late to the show, or you are exaggerating more than a bit...:)
I can tell you right now what would happen, because it already exists, and has for some time.
This would be no different than if you modify your car. Your insurance will go up. Why? Because they will justify your car becoming more high risk. If you fail to notify them, and they deem your modification significant enough to modify the risk, guess what, you won't be covered should you require it.
Only our corporate lords are allowed to own things (in certain cases political overseers as well, and our usury masters).
It seems the logical (yet highly cynical) conclusion to the wealthy lord, poor peasant relationship. Back in the day, lords owned everything, and peasants payed a rent for the privilege of working a lords lands to eek out an existence and then pay taxes to the same lord. However the bad part about this relationship is that every now and again the peons would get so angry about the situation that some lords would get burned (literally).
Fast forward to our modern society which have a government that peons feel empowered about because they elect them, who they pay taxes to, who enable corporations with taxes and ownership rights, who the peons all work for and pay for. However in this situation the government is elected, and the corporation is more less a nebulous entity, with no one really left to take responsibility for anything (the whole reason to incorporate). Add in government backed corporate lenders etc... Wonderful situation progress has made. At least back in the day the mob knew who to go after when they yoke became too much to take anymore.
This is why I love science fiction. Written in 1969, it describes this sort of "business model" being the most ubiquitous one. Sure it misses on a lot of stuff, and much of it is fantastical, but it is those grains of truth that are interesting.
In the book, the protagonist is in debt, and has to pay for everything by coin slot basically. Everything. Including his front door and toaster.
Slashdot Mirror
The rest of the country's students with only grade 12 did just fine. I know because I went to school in Ontario from Nova Scotia with only grade 12. About the only difference is that I did curriculum about a year earlier in some cases, and didn't have an opportunity to get credit/skip some intro courses.
Anyway, I would say for those few students that want to excel, they could take advantage of grade 13, but for most I suspect it was simply a crutch to limp along at a more retarded pace.
If it is there to gather intelligence, it isn't doing a very good job of it... :p
I eat butter, whats wrong with that?
In moderation it is probably heaps healthier than margarine. It was developed as livestock feed!
I also listen to CD's, though only occasional, and only in the car.
As for bed warmers... can you even buy those anymore? I would imagine the liability prevents it nowadays. I would be too afraid of immolating myself one night. Though I do remember them being cozy when I was a kid (and getting in trouble for forgetting to turn off).
Sure people can complain about people taking pictures of their oatmeal, cat, or putting whatever mundane status they like. However I don't think that is the point of the article (which I didn't read, so I am kind of guessing). If a particular friend is too annoying I have the option to mute or unfriend them.
I agree with much of your assessment, particularly since I live about 2000km away from my home town, high school, family, etc...
What I do see as the point is Facebook in the beginning was all about what you mention, being a useful tool (with some quirks already mentioned). However now, since the 70 Billion IPO or whatever, and so many users, the quest has been to monetize everything so it can actually make a lot of money (other than the owners making off like bandits with overpriced stock). This means selling your data to whoever (advertisers mostly), ad placement, and anything else that can make a buck. From my own perspective the reality is now for every "tool" I scroll through, I am getting served up ads, and a lot of them. There is a balance between too annoying to be useful, and just enough not to care. In addition, they REALLY need to change it so people cannot make money off page hits. As the whole mess is turning into one great big chain email letter from the 1990's. You will never guess what this dog did, click to find out? My mom said she would kill my bunny unless I get a million likes! Learn this one little trick moms use to burn belly fat... etc...
At a certain point you hit a threshold where the annoyance out weighs the usefulness of the tool, at which point you will start to bleed users. If the progression is anything, it is only going to get worse. This doesn't even look at generational usage, or newer technology, social media trends, etc...
So the great benefactor can watch out for you and keep you safe. You can always apply for a certificate to lower your shade for several minutes. Do you have anything to hide citizen?
I think that is everywhere. It is a management thing (mismanagement). Separate ledgers for salary VS other stuff with zero perspective.
You pay me many tens of thousands of dollars a year, yet make me do big justification for an additional 4 year 50$ lease payment for a 2nd monitor?
You just paid me more than that to write up said justification and submit it to you...
(not to mention if it makes me 1% more productive it will pay for itself many times over).
Nice... funny how you can forget something yet with a simple turn of phrase remember..LOL!
I forget, what was that from #BASH or something like that?
I mean really, doesn't Google already own a hollowed out volcano for this sort of thing. If not, what are doing?
Also for protecting their water shuttle from protesters, let me suggest sharks with frickin' lasers attached to their heads...
Do no Evil indeed!
So when the refrigerator was invented, the ice box manufactures union should have lobbied government to create laws making these "electric" refrigerators illegal, protecting the millions of jobs in the whole chain of ice delivery and ice box construction industry, as it is their god given right to sell ice to ice boxes.
You sound like the damn RIAA and MPAA.
No to mention that not only to those people not get bus ride, free food, or (are you kidding me) nap pods, but they also probably get paid a small fraction to do a job that is likely a lot less rewarding and more physically demanding (and many times more than 60h).
Soft and spoiled isn't the word I would use. Privileged entitled asshole is I think more descriptive.
Maybe it is this kind of attitude that gets people all protesty...
a learning computer.
"...automated harvesting and machine learning..."
Not sure what is being harvested and learned by machines, but I bet it isn't good. At best it will be picking biased news stories about the abused downtrodden computer masses, at worst some sort of arrangement using humans as batteries...
As I said just giving you a bit of a hard time. Given your reasoned response VS immediate insults and flame I can surmise that indeed you are newer to this forum... ;) Likewise your story seems rational and believable. I guess I was trolling a bit too wasn't I...
Not sure if they still do it anymore, but while Apple does sell their OS as part of their HW, they also used to sell it by itself. Not only that, it came in one version (not 3+). Not only that, but it cost 30$, not 400$. I know bc at the time I looked into making a hackintosh. They may have nixed the idea now, but for a time, while they may have sold it, they did so in a reasonable fashion.
As someone who used NT at work, I can tell you the number #1 "feature" improvement for 2000 and XP was USB support. At the time everything what coming out with USB versions of stuff. For a couple of years we were forced to by more expensive yet outdated equipment because it was serial, or parallel, or even SCSI (had a special SCSI card for scanner). Much of the hardware had the USB ports, but couldn't use any of them.
Got my dad a new ultra book and hence a by default Windows 8 machine. About the most useful thing I learned was to use ALT-F4 for everything. If there was an alternative way to shutdown applications I could never find it. Trying to teach my dad shortcuts for stuff works as well as you might think. Installed windows shell on it and it works a bit better. Still you should be able to easily configure a choice of UI really. Am I a tablet, am I not a tablet, my computer doesn't really know.
I had an experience with a gym around the same time as that CPA came out in 2002 so it may have predated it slightly. Went to a gym for a 3 month stint as part of a special. Decided not to continue. Found out 9 months later they were still charging me, and had been since my 3 months. Contacted gym who said that I was automatically signed up for, well forever apparently. Said I had to have canceled by sending in a written request (had I even known about it). Did some research, at the time it was the "Prepaid Services Act" that regulated this function. Looking on the BBB, the primary violators at the time were pretty much all scamy gyms. I read up on the act, and had several meetings with gym management and finally owner. They said I had a contract. I asked to see my contract. They delayed. Then said it was lost. I then informed them that they have been illegally removing funds from my account without a contract in contravention of the PSA with fines of 50,000$, and asked to speak with the owner (unavailable). I said I would be in the following week I would expect a check for all the funds, or I would take them to court.
There was an envelope waiting for me when I returned.
Also even after the CPA came out, while the 10 day cooling off period was useful, it still left a lot of scamy companies a lot of leeway. All those energy distribution companies for example. They had to notify you, but they would auto renew you, and it was set that way by default. To stop, they made it very hard to do so, again a written letter via registered mail. Even after that they would try to contact you and get you to change your mind, or even after to sign you up again. To which my response was "REALLY!??!".
In a more recent example are all the new water heater companies. I got suckered into one (sales outright lied, said term was 5 years), however did use the 10 day cooling off period. However the reason I did was that the contract you signed had a term of "for the life of the product" which could be 40 years, and the conditions (i.e. how much you pay) could be amended on notification (which you know would be every year). Again, even with the 10 day language, I had to given a written response via registered letter (also emailed and faxed them to be sure)...
Anyway special place in hell for all those jerks.
Pretty sure getting shot at in trenches originated in Europe...
I can finally buy some cheap CD-ROMS! Now I can really use my DISCMAN!
Gonna turn that BASSBOOST all the way up man! :p
They charged a tax on all storage media regardless of if any music bytes were ever spilled on it. However, I would imagine that the sales of CD/DVD media is quickly drying up, they they are not making their pound of flesh. They still get it from devices, but they don't provide the numbers. It was easy to see 5 years ago that everything would be moving to online content both music and movies, and that physical media is pretty provincial. So now comes the next big fight, trying to force legislate profits from the internet. How? Regulation of course. Nothing new here, give us free money.
as it happens in all governments everywhere. IT work is contracted out to make government look smaller (less salary). They have to follow procurement that awards to lowest bidder. Lowest bidder had exclusions built into contract. Government in general either due to politics or whatever make about a million change orders to the initial project contract. Contractor happily charges government for each change until all the project money is gone. Contractor walks away when money dries up, blames (rightly or not) government for bungled project. Having no other choice government then dumps the steaming pile of garbage on what few overworked underpaid IT staff they have to try fix it (with a budget of exactly zero).
Anyway this has been reality for as long as I have been around.
I guess you were too busy being a mad IT admin and software engineer learning almost 20 programming languages that you were late to the whole slashdot thing and scored yourself a million+ ID? Or was it the sleep tunnels (which presumably you actually did while sleeping not to waste any precious daylight time)?
jk really. Not really trying to bust your cred. Only that I don't remember when I joined, but it was likely after I started working in the field, which wasn't until sometime after 2000, which at most is 14 years ago, and I managed to have a 700,000 ID.
Anyway I have found many IT folks boastful and full of BS on a good day, and on Slashdot it is even more common. Claiming to work in IT for almost 20 years, yet having a million+ account ID, means either you arrived late to the show, or you are exaggerating more than a bit... :)
You can get anywhere you want to go using only left turns. Right turns are a luxury option!
I can tell you right now what would happen, because it already exists, and has for some time.
This would be no different than if you modify your car. Your insurance will go up. Why? Because they will justify your car becoming more high risk. If you fail to notify them, and they deem your modification significant enough to modify the risk, guess what, you won't be covered should you require it.
Only our corporate lords are allowed to own things (in certain cases political overseers as well, and our usury masters).
It seems the logical (yet highly cynical) conclusion to the wealthy lord, poor peasant relationship. Back in the day, lords owned everything, and peasants payed a rent for the privilege of working a lords lands to eek out an existence and then pay taxes to the same lord. However the bad part about this relationship is that every now and again the peons would get so angry about the situation that some lords would get burned (literally).
Fast forward to our modern society which have a government that peons feel empowered about because they elect them, who they pay taxes to, who enable corporations with taxes and ownership rights, who the peons all work for and pay for. However in this situation the government is elected, and the corporation is more less a nebulous entity, with no one really left to take responsibility for anything (the whole reason to incorporate). Add in government backed corporate lenders etc... Wonderful situation progress has made. At least back in the day the mob knew who to go after when they yoke became too much to take anymore.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...
This is why I love science fiction. Written in 1969, it describes this sort of "business model" being the most ubiquitous one. Sure it misses on a lot of stuff, and much of it is fantastical, but it is those grains of truth that are interesting.
In the book, the protagonist is in debt, and has to pay for everything by coin slot basically. Everything. Including his front door and toaster.