From the looks of the local Blockbuster here they are at best about 18 to 24 months from going out of business. At least as a movie rental operation. They appear to be reinventing themselves as a game rental outlet. I doubt it will be enough to save them.
But from what one of the managers said they are about to go out of business. I suspect that Netflix was not the the only reason for Blockbuster to be in decline. I find that buying the DVDs I want to watch is not that bad at the local wholesale club. As such I no longer have a desire to rent DVDs.
I wonder what store will replace the Blockbuster up the street?
We certainly wouldn't to go to the effort and cost of providing decent pay, decent benefits, and treating employees like valued members of the company as a way to improve morale.
Every time upper management starts saying things like "our employees are our most valuable asset" update your resume, there is a layoff in the very near future. Upper management has realized that the salaries paid to their employees are worth more than any other part of the company or the products they deliver to customers. By laying off employees they can save a tremendous amount of money which suddenly makes the bottom line look so much better. And they did not even have to bother selling anything to pesky customers.
As others have pointed out, having fun at work is better than not having fun. Duh! Who thinks its better to make work a horrible place to work?
he only purpose to being alive is work and produce a product. Is that really what you think it's all about?
It's what my boss thinks its all about. And I don't know about most people but what my boss thinks translates at some point into money which generally satisfys the mortgage and puts food on the table.
If they manage to get this defined as an addiction then at some point the lawyers will be able to sue over it and your insurance may end up paying for treatments.
It would be interestng to find out how they treat this addiction. Maybe drop you into the wilderness with a compass and a pocket knife. Once you have settled down and are successfully living off the land you are cured?
New flash! State of Kansas has banned the use of the term Science from all schools and teachers with degrees are being fired. "They just don't seem to want to teach the true faith. So they have to go."
In a possibly related story people from Kansas are so dumb they are unable to figure out how to turn the lights on in their own homes.
Gentlemans agreement with a lawyer? I would not trust a lawyer any further than you could shoot him in the head with a shotgun. Gentlemans agreement, sounds like something the old lawyers tell the young lawyers to get an edge on them.
The lawyers over here are all about winning the case and collecting huge damages. If they don't think they can win and/or if they don't think the pay off will be large enough they won't even take the case. And if someone sent them a document you can bet they would use any part of it including change log info and metadata to try to win the case. From what I can tell most of a lawyers time is spent cutting deals in the back rooms instead of finding out the facts or getting justice for the plantif and defendant.
Oh, that would be good. Play "try and modify the file when we think it is being sent off this system". Yet another kludge with lots of holes. Can you say zip files?
This is just another example of disclosures from the past where change log information was left in documents released to public forums. Very interesting info disclosed in some of those word documents. Must be standard procedure now for lawyers to check the change log info on documents they are sent.
And if people don't fill out the meta data info the fancy new search capabilities won't be as useful so why have them?
The Genesis rocket reminded me of that short lived TV series "Master Blasters". I don't believe they ever had a successful recovery of any of the rockets they launched. And to paraphrase one of the particpants of that show "A successful launch and recovery is cool, a failed launch and/or recovery is spectacular."
The problem is that once Microsoft gets it's hands on Opera and adds that Micrsoft API and ActiveX controls and slaps in a few other Microsoft must haves that browser will not look anything like Opera does today and will be just as buggy and exploit ridden as IE ever was. And once they have added all these "enhancements" to "fix" Opera it won't be able to be run on any other platform but Vista. Of course no one will want to run it on anything else anyway so that is a mute issue.
The damage inflicted is going to be a function of mass and velocity. I have not doubt that the bolt your friend was hit with probably weighed as much as pound ( you were talking about an oil rig right?). Obviously the damage inflicted would depend on the size of the bullet. Obviously the larger the bullet the more damage. A.22 caliber bullet is probably smaller in mass than a penny. The shape will affect the terminal velocity some but at those sizes I don't expect that to make that much difference. A larger caliber bullet like a.45 would have the potential to cause more damage. I also think the tumbling of the bullet will affect it's terminal velocity. Once it hits appogee the bullet will most likely stop spinning which is what normally stablizes it when it is fired from the gun. As such it will start to tumble.
So the experiment would have to determine for different calibers of bullets the terminal velocity of each. Then you would need to determine how much damage each caliber does at it's terminal velocity. It should be taken as given that if enough bullets are fired into the air one of them is likely to hit someone sooner or later. Not real need to test that part of the myth.:)
In the spam you send out to identify the idiots that buy stuff from spammers you include the warrent language in the spam message itself. If you shutdown the people that buy stuff from spammers the spammers would find another job.
Plus barring those people from the Internet would reduce the number of systems that hackers could take over for other things like DOS attacks. Over a relatively short time there would be few if any people left that would leave their systems open to attacks.
It will be interesting to see if it happens but I think the separation between the ISP side and cell phone side of those companies will become blurred and then finally disappear entirely. They will have one service with a number of options all delivered over the same transport. ISP, Phone, TV. That transport will eventually be all wireless and it will be availble anywhere you go.
If they do a bit about spam I hope they setup and test an MTA with grey-listing and spamassassin. But most likely they will play with some version of windows spam tool that is not as effective as grey-listing is.
The falling bullet myth should be very similar to falling penny myth. The only real difference is the mass of the bullet. If the bullet was fired straight up it would eventually lose all momentum imparted by the weapon and reach crtical velocity in the decent. Airodynamics might play a part in this since the bullet would most likely be tumbling down. Of course if was fired straight up I would expect the bullet to land some where West of the firing point due to rotation of the earth so it would not come straight back down.
End result is that a falling bullet would probably hurt and leave a bruise but most likely would not kill you or seriously injure you.
As DVRs become more common in homes the problem of ad supported shows will become critical. Most DVRs allow users to easily skip past commercials, some even provide automatic skipping of commercials. And being able to watch shows you want to watch when you want to watch them without commercials is fantastic.
It really changes the way you entertain your brain.:)
And their software works until we incapsulate VOIP and other traffic in HTTP or some other protocol that is allowed. It is not that hard to do. They are fighting an unwinable war. They may sell a lot of software but it won't be to long before things evolve to remain hidden. Just like P2P networks have evolved and continue to evolve.
As to the FCC regulating the Internet, where regulation is needed is to insure that those that opt for VOIP service are still capable of utilizing 911 emergency services without delays. When a user calls 911 the dispatcher has to be able to get the location information correct and not dispatch a firetruck and paramedics to the ISPs data center that might be in another state. FCC was initially needed because centralized phone service was needed to make sure there would not be multiple phone companies which were unable to pass calls between them. But there are other standards bodies that define how services over the Internet must work together.
The reality is that communications services are rapidly evolving. The benefits of using the Internet as a transport are fairly obvious. As soon as wireless becomes ubiquitous things such as land lines will fade away. Every person will get a phone number at birth or in the first few years which they will use from then on. There won't be any difference between local and long distance services. This is happening now as more people use cell phones and don't have land lines installed. And most cell providers have options for no long distance and no roaming charges so you can take that same number anywhere. And large parts of the country now require 10 digit dialing so including the area code is automatic for many people now. Another 100 years and world wide services like this will be the norm. Possibly sooner but I expect politics to slow it down some.
The recent purchase of AT&T by SBC is a clear indicator. The long distance business which was AT&T's forte (since the big break up many years ago) is slowly dying. Replacing it are service from ISPs and cell phone companies. In the near future don't be surprised to see ISPs and cell phone companies start to merge.
Over the past month or two I have seen a tremendous increase in spam. It looksl like the last major virus attack increased the zombie foot print significantly.
If ISPs and anyone running an MTA want to eliminate the majority of spam it is easy. Setup greylisting and spamassassin on their MTAs. This will identify and block 99%+ of the spam out there today. But as other have pointed out the reason this does not happen is that most ISPs generate huge amounts of money from spammers.
I still believe the best way to reduce and eliminate spamming is to go after the revenue stream directly. Setup a sting operation where you send spam messages out, anyone that actually clicks on the enclosed URL or responds to the spam message is identified, tracked down, computer is confiscated, and they are banned from being on the Internet forever. They are also sterilized so they won't reproduce. Once you interrupt the money stream at the source the spammers will have to find some other means to make a living.
And the government should also go after the business that advertise using spam. Just go in and shut them down. No warrents needed.
a new 12 key keyboard has been introduced into the market. With the wide spread use of text messaging it was just a matter of time for the smallest keyboard to be used directly on computers. This is expected to result in further reduction of weight for laptops which no longer are constrained to much larger keyboards.
In other news, many p33ps r n0 l0ngr abl3 t0 c0mun1ct3 w1th us3rs 0f n3w k3yb0rds.
So the real builders oof the pyramids are nonfrabricators. The Egyptians grew them instead of using slave labor to drag blocks into place or getting help from UFOs.
This has all been done before. There was a company in Britian that had proximity cards that all employees carried. When they walked into their office it would log them into their systems and if they happened to be in a different office the phone system was able to track them down and route their phone calls automatically to the nearest phone.
Here in the states we have something called E-Pass, it is a transponder for your car that takes care of tolls automatically on the toll roads. They are installing recivers for these transponders on other streets so they can track traffic flows. At some point this is suppose to allow people to check routes through town to determine which are congested and if an alternate route would be better. I seriously doubt that this will be used in that way. Very few people will bother to check for alternate routes and once you are in the traffic it is usually to late to get out of it.
We are not to far away from having the ability to embed a cell phone in your body. They will sell this as a benefit since you would never lose your phone, only you would hear the ring tone, vibrate mode would feel really good, free up your hands to drive the car or do other things.
Which bank do you use? High interest bank accounts anymore are those that are giving 1%. Many are less than 1% anymore. Or are you reading interest rates the way you read rulers and claim they say 10 inches.....
So lets get this straight. I drive over these things which is going to cost me more in gasoline (basic conservation of energy laws working here) and then they are going to sell me the same energy to run the lights at my house? Great, now I get to pay for this energy twice, once with expensive gasoline, and again on the power bill which no doubt will have the variable fuel charge applied. To say nothing of the added wear and tear on my vehicle.
Are these guys working on a perpetual motion machine also?
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From the looks of the local Blockbuster here they are at best about 18 to 24 months from going out of business. At least as a movie rental operation. They appear to be reinventing themselves as a game rental outlet. I doubt it will be enough to save them.
But from what one of the managers said they are about to go out of business. I suspect that Netflix was not the the only reason for Blockbuster to be in decline. I find that buying the DVDs I want to watch is not that bad at the local wholesale club. As such I no longer have a desire to rent DVDs.
I wonder what store will replace the Blockbuster up the street?
We certainly wouldn't to go to the effort and cost of providing decent pay, decent benefits, and treating employees like valued members of the company as a way to improve morale.
Every time upper management starts saying things like "our employees are our most valuable asset" update your resume, there is a layoff in the very near future. Upper management has realized that the salaries paid to their employees are worth more than any other part of the company or the products they deliver to customers. By laying off employees they can save a tremendous amount of money which suddenly makes the bottom line look so much better. And they did not even have to bother selling anything to pesky customers.
As others have pointed out, having fun at work is better than not having fun. Duh! Who thinks its better to make work a horrible place to work?
I don't believe in google earth either. I run linux.
he only purpose to being alive is work and produce a product. Is that really what you think it's all about?
It's what my boss thinks its all about. And I don't know about most people but what my boss thinks translates at some point into money which generally satisfys the mortgage and puts food on the table.
If they manage to get this defined as an addiction then at some point the lawyers will be able to sue over it and your insurance may end up paying for treatments.
It would be interestng to find out how they treat this addiction. Maybe drop you into the wilderness with a compass and a pocket knife. Once you have settled down and are successfully living off the land you are cured?
New flash! State of Kansas has banned the use of the term Science from all schools and teachers with degrees are being fired. "They just don't seem to want to teach the true faith. So they have to go."
In a possibly related story people from Kansas are so dumb they are unable to figure out how to turn the lights on in their own homes.
Gentlemans agreement with a lawyer? I would not trust a lawyer any further than you could shoot him in the head with a shotgun. Gentlemans agreement, sounds like something the old lawyers tell the young lawyers to get an edge on them.
The lawyers over here are all about winning the case and collecting huge damages. If they don't think they can win and/or if they don't think the pay off will be large enough they won't even take the case. And if someone sent them a document you can bet they would use any part of it including change log info and metadata to try to win the case. From what I can tell most of a lawyers time is spent cutting deals in the back rooms instead of finding out the facts or getting justice for the plantif and defendant.
Oh, that would be good. Play "try and modify the file when we think it is being sent off this system". Yet another kludge with lots of holes. Can you say zip files?
This is just another example of disclosures from the past where change log information was left in documents released to public forums. Very interesting info disclosed in some of those word documents. Must be standard procedure now for lawyers to check the change log info on documents they are sent.
And if people don't fill out the meta data info the fancy new search capabilities won't be as useful so why have them?
The Genesis rocket reminded me of that short lived TV series "Master Blasters". I don't believe they ever had a successful recovery of any of the rockets they launched. And to paraphrase one of the particpants of that show "A successful launch and recovery is cool, a failed launch and/or recovery is spectacular."
Here's hoping they have a successful mission.
The problem is that once Microsoft gets it's hands on Opera and adds that Micrsoft API and ActiveX controls and slaps in a few other Microsoft must haves that browser will not look anything like Opera does today and will be just as buggy and exploit ridden as IE ever was. And once they have added all these "enhancements" to "fix" Opera it won't be able to be run on any other platform but Vista. Of course no one will want to run it on anything else anyway so that is a mute issue.
The damage inflicted is going to be a function of mass and velocity. I have not doubt that the bolt your friend was hit with probably weighed as much as pound ( you were talking about an oil rig right?). Obviously the damage inflicted would depend on the size of the bullet. Obviously the larger the bullet the more damage. A .22 caliber bullet is probably smaller in mass than a penny. The shape will affect the terminal velocity some but at those sizes I don't expect that to make that much difference. A larger caliber bullet like a .45 would have the potential to cause more damage. I also think the tumbling of the bullet will affect it's terminal velocity. Once it hits appogee the bullet will most likely stop spinning which is what normally stablizes it when it is fired from the gun. As such it will start to tumble.
:)
So the experiment would have to determine for different calibers of bullets the terminal velocity of each. Then you would need to determine how much damage each caliber does at it's terminal velocity. It should be taken as given that if enough bullets are fired into the air one of them is likely to hit someone sooner or later. Not real need to test that part of the myth.
In the spam you send out to identify the idiots that buy stuff from spammers you include the warrent language in the spam message itself. If you shutdown the people that buy stuff from spammers the spammers would find another job.
Plus barring those people from the Internet would reduce the number of systems that hackers could take over for other things like DOS attacks. Over a relatively short time there would be few if any people left that would leave their systems open to attacks.
I did say "near future". :)
It will be interesting to see if it happens but I think the separation between the ISP side and cell phone side of those companies will become blurred and then finally disappear entirely. They will have one service with a number of options all delivered over the same transport. ISP, Phone, TV. That transport will eventually be all wireless and it will be availble anywhere you go.
If they do a bit about spam I hope they setup and test an MTA with grey-listing and spamassassin. But most likely they will play with some version of windows spam tool that is not as effective as grey-listing is.
The falling bullet myth should be very similar to falling penny myth. The only real difference is the mass of the bullet. If the bullet was fired straight up it would eventually lose all momentum imparted by the weapon and reach crtical velocity in the decent. Airodynamics might play a part in this since the bullet would most likely be tumbling down. Of course if was fired straight up I would expect the bullet to land some where West of the firing point due to rotation of the earth so it would not come straight back down.
End result is that a falling bullet would probably hurt and leave a bruise but most likely would not kill you or seriously injure you.
As DVRs become more common in homes the problem of ad supported shows will become critical. Most DVRs allow users to easily skip past commercials, some even provide automatic skipping of commercials. And being able to watch shows you want to watch when you want to watch them without commercials is fantastic.
:)
It really changes the way you entertain your brain.
And their software works until we incapsulate VOIP and other traffic in HTTP or some other protocol that is allowed. It is not that hard to do. They are fighting an unwinable war. They may sell a lot of software but it won't be to long before things evolve to remain hidden. Just like P2P networks have evolved and continue to evolve.
As to the FCC regulating the Internet, where regulation is needed is to insure that those that opt for VOIP service are still capable of utilizing 911 emergency services without delays. When a user calls 911 the dispatcher has to be able to get the location information correct and not dispatch a firetruck and paramedics to the ISPs data center that might be in another state. FCC was initially needed because centralized phone service was needed to make sure there would not be multiple phone companies which were unable to pass calls between them. But there are other standards bodies that define how services over the Internet must work together.
The reality is that communications services are rapidly evolving. The benefits of using the Internet as a transport are fairly obvious. As soon as wireless becomes ubiquitous things such as land lines will fade away. Every person will get a phone number at birth or in the first few years which they will use from then on. There won't be any difference between local and long distance services. This is happening now as more people use cell phones and don't have land lines installed. And most cell providers have options for no long distance and no roaming charges so you can take that same number anywhere. And large parts of the country now require 10 digit dialing so including the area code is automatic for many people now. Another 100 years and world wide services like this will be the norm. Possibly sooner but I expect politics to slow it down some.
The recent purchase of AT&T by SBC is a clear indicator. The long distance business which was AT&T's forte (since the big break up many years ago) is slowly dying. Replacing it are service from ISPs and cell phone companies. In the near future don't be surprised to see ISPs and cell phone companies start to merge.
Over the past month or two I have seen a tremendous increase in spam. It looksl like the last major virus attack increased the zombie foot print significantly.
If ISPs and anyone running an MTA want to eliminate the majority of spam it is easy. Setup greylisting and spamassassin on their MTAs. This will identify and block 99%+ of the spam out there today. But as other have pointed out the reason this does not happen is that most ISPs generate huge amounts of money from spammers.
I still believe the best way to reduce and eliminate spamming is to go after the revenue stream directly. Setup a sting operation where you send spam messages out, anyone that actually clicks on the enclosed URL or responds to the spam message is identified, tracked down, computer is confiscated, and they are banned from being on the Internet forever. They are also sterilized so they won't reproduce. Once you interrupt the money stream at the source the spammers will have to find some other means to make a living.
And the government should also go after the business that advertise using spam. Just go in and shut them down. No warrents needed.
a new 12 key keyboard has been introduced into the market. With the wide spread use of text messaging it was just a matter of time for the smallest keyboard to be used directly on computers. This is expected to result in further reduction of weight for laptops which no longer are constrained to much larger keyboards.
In other news, many p33ps r n0 l0ngr abl3 t0 c0mun1ct3 w1th us3rs 0f n3w k3yb0rds.
Is this another dupe? There are two probes crashed on Mars?
Oh, wait, it is the Beagle 2 probe. Never mind. Have seen so many dupes lately it was not clear....
So the real builders oof the pyramids are nonfrabricators. The Egyptians grew them instead of using slave labor to drag blocks into place or getting help from UFOs.
Nanu Nanu (obligatory Mork and Mindy reference).
One icon is worth a million dupes on /.
This has all been done before. There was a company in Britian that had proximity cards that all employees carried. When they walked into their office it would log them into their systems and if they happened to be in a different office the phone system was able to track them down and route their phone calls automatically to the nearest phone.
Here in the states we have something called E-Pass, it is a transponder for your car that takes care of tolls automatically on the toll roads. They are installing recivers for these transponders on other streets so they can track traffic flows. At some point this is suppose to allow people to check routes through town to determine which are congested and if an alternate route would be better. I seriously doubt that this will be used in that way. Very few people will bother to check for alternate routes and once you are in the traffic it is usually to late to get out of it.
We are not to far away from having the ability to embed a cell phone in your body. They will sell this as a benefit since you would never lose your phone, only you would hear the ring tone, vibrate mode would feel really good, free up your hands to drive the car or do other things.
my high-interest bank account
Which bank do you use? High interest bank accounts anymore are those that are giving 1%. Many are less than 1% anymore. Or are you reading interest rates the way you read rulers and claim they say 10 inches.....
Just tell him to put a book in front of it. That worked in high school.
So lets get this straight. I drive over these things which is going to cost me more in gasoline (basic conservation of energy laws working here) and then they are going to sell me the same energy to run the lights at my house? Great, now I get to pay for this energy twice, once with expensive gasoline, and again on the power bill which no doubt will have the variable fuel charge applied. To say nothing of the added wear and tear on my vehicle.
Are these guys working on a perpetual motion machine also?