If you like the style, then I highly recommend The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd podcast. It has a format and humor level a lot like Rocky and Bullwinkle, with a time travel twist.
From the site:
"This family friendly new twist on "old time radio" features the adventures and exploits of the World's Most Brilliant Scientist, Dr. Floyd as he tries to thwart the plans of his evil arch nemesis, Dr. Steve, all the while learning about the people and events that shaped the history of the Earth."
or maintain "safe" breaking distances (which seem rather arbitrary)
I guess it's arbitrary if you have no knowledge of physics. Safe distance is pretty easy to measure if you know the rate of deceleration of your car. I think the formula would go something like:
That would give you stopping distance for the rate of (negative) acceleration your car\brakes can do in an emergency. If that distance is longer than the distance between you and the car in front of you, you need to back off a bit.
The reason people use the "3 seconds" rule is that it works at any speed and requires only 3-5 seconds to evaluate as you travel along.
my response was something along the lines of "just what I want to hear- more talk radio."
Yep, me too, only without the sarcastic overtones. I'm tired of being stuck with ultra-conservatives as my only sources of good talk radio. NPR is OK, but they are more entertainment and liberal news and I prefer issue-based discussions. Most of the podcasters I listen to seem to be more open and honest and have a down to earth feel, but that's typical with independent broadcasters vs. those who answer to the underwriters. Eventually as the advertisers get involved, that aspect will fade from the popular shows.
Podcasting gives me access to interesting talk radio, without the ultra-conservative bias, and in a format I can easily carry with me. If I wanted to listen to music, I'd just turn on the radio.
Good point, except for the fatal flaw in the system: Every single time I've seen an error with the weight, which is usually about once per trip to the grocery self-checkout, the human manning the guard station monitor just blindly hits the override. This is the same as the end-of-shift cashier exploit, but slightly easier. With one sleepy cashier in charge of four or more scanners in most cases, it would be easy to set up a distraction on one of the other scanners to get their attention away from you and increase the chances of them blindly hitting the override. This becomes difficult with multiple items.
Items too large to put on the scanner (tv's, etc) would work best, since you can tell the machine you can't fit it in the bags and leave it in the cart. The trick would be finding something large enough to bypass the size\weight limit without spending all of your profit away paying for large items. Those $25 microwaves on a $400 DVD player sound like a good work around.
Many bargain hunters print up a page of dozens of bar codes for various items. When watching for a price drop, they can enjoy checking prices on the scanners in store without having to go pick up each product. As long as you have the numbers printed below the bar code you can generate the bars easily. Sometimes fellow bargain hunters post specific bar code numbers in forum messages and others will replicate the code to check the price in their local store.
Strangely I was JUST thinking about this type of scam in a store this afternoon. With most big stores in my area going to the self check-out model, I only see this getting worse.
Haven't you lined the inside of your roof with tinfoil or lead yet?
I've done this of course, but I've gone one step further. When I heard about that Fluoride stuff the government puts in our water, I replaced all of my indoor plumbing with lead pipes to help counter the effects. Nothing's getting into MY mind!
Did you know that they don't even SELL lead pipes for home plumbing anymore? That's how bad this is people!
I thought those were 50gb, but I'm also too lazy to go look it up from the earlier slashdot article.:)
"20 gigs a disc? That might be a good solution. I have a 700Gig RAID "
You consider 35 discs instead of 200 a good solution? Even if I'm right and it's 50gb, that's still 14 discs... not a good solution IMO. A great solution would be 1-5 per backup. By the time we get those discs we'll be talking at least 7TB+, so...:/
In a somewhat unrelated (and more painful) story, using my vast intellect I once attempted to replace a PCI card (of some sort) in a running computer and shocked the shit out of myself. Twice . In less than ten minutes. Apparently I didn't learn that lesson.
- Ben
Did this myself and have a nice wide 1/2" long scar on my hand to prove it. I was doing something inside the case while the computer was on and felt a sharp pain in my hand. I pulled it out to find a bright red bloody gash on the outside part of my hand (opposite side, but where my thumb would be.)
At first I thought I'd scraped against the pointy parts of my sound card and broke the skin. A friend at the time looked at it and told me that I had completed the circuit on some card and the blood between those two points on my hand boiled the skin away almost instantly. I don't know if that's what really happened, but it didn't have the torn look of a scrape, the skin was just gone from that spot. The scar looks about the same as it did a few weeks after and it has been 7 years now.
The manual for my computer said I shouldn't leave the computer in the sun, I shouldn't use water to clean it, I shouldn't make a small fire on top of it and not keep a huge magnet close to it. It said NOTHING about not feeding it with live animals!
Are you sure that's the computer manual and not your Mogwai manual?
I was a Movable Type user, but with my latest ISP change I ditched MT for Geeklog. Geeklog is really cool, and nicely integrates with Gallery which I use for images. Both are Open Source and free, so the decision was easy.
If there are 100k dialup users, and 60% of them are ok with dialup, that's 60k happy people.
If 1/2 of those other 40k who aren't happy with dialup goes to broadband, then the total amount of dialup users becomes only 80k.
If there are 80k dialup users, and 60% of them are ok with dialup, that's 48k happy people. What happened to the other 12k people who previously were happy with their connection?
We are measuring the amount of dialup users here, not the total amount of Internet users. The parent is right, that group is decreasing in number.
Have you ever tried to do this step without the help of another person? I often wonder if the walking through the explaination is what helps, and if just pretending someone is there would work just as well.
If it doesn't work, then the people who come over to see why you are talking to yourself may be able to help.:)
First, I didn't imply that the internet wasn't a better place to shop for music. In fact, except out of curiosity, I never visit music stores. As for my "dubious" music tastes, as a fellow slashdotter pointed out, I never said that I enjoyed the music that you trudged past. We're not so different in our musical tastes, and as I can see from your others posts on slashdot, we both have a soft spot for sarcasm. The difference between the two of us is that I know what the target market of these "megastores" is and am aware that I'm not in it. This is why we have the choice to go elsewhere and support the businesses that carry the products and services that we want.
Would you also complain that Wal-Mart didn't carry quality suits for men? Sure, they have jeans and sweaters, but they are completely devoid of high quality clothing that one would expect from a clothier. Why? Because people don't go to megastores for quality, they go to buy what is popular.
And no, Quincy Jones does not qualify as a popular artist. When speaking of sales of music from a music store, "popular" is defined by what people buy, not the general regard of their music accomplishments. I would prefer to listen to his music over the stuff they sell most often at Virgin, but when it comes to inventory control, they would be foolish to stock equal amounts of each artist. I would rather the employees of any store to know more about the popular items than the items which sell rarely. Otherwise you have store full of "Comic Book Guy" clerks who are clueless about the current line of new products.
I didn't reply to your obnoxious "I prefer to be the hunter, rather than the hunted" comment earlier, but your assertion that I shop at those megastores is quite wrong. Sometimes people who disagree with you aren't as weak and stupid as you might think. Your initial approach may have been wrong-minded, but your following attempts to belittle me say more about your character than mine.
It's not an "article." Journalists write articles.
Let's look at the words, shall we?
Article: 1) Nonfictional prose forming an independent part of a publication
Journalist: 1) one who writes for a newspaper or magazine 2) Someone who keeps a diary or journal.
Welcome back to the new old journalism. When journalism began, it was much like definition 2. Some guy would write a treatise or his opinions of the world or society, and publish it for all to read. Years later this evolved into the traditional mass media, but the editoral page, or editoral minute from video news, remained. It is not enough to just present facts, readers want commentary too.
Generally traditional mass media publications are fact checked better, they check spelling and grammar better, and usually are more sucessful at hiding their [coporate] bias. If you're looking for facts only, taken with a grain of salt, traditional publications are the place to be.
In the last few years we've seen a resurgance of the original form of journalism. No longer is the independent journalist limited by what he can afford to publish or what the company's image will allow him to say. This is usually a rough style, whose facts shouldn't be taken at face value, but some would call it a more pure form of journalism.
If this resurgance of the old style wasn't considered valid journalism, Slashdot would be a lot less popular.
That wasn't "interesting" at all. Basically the parent poster said:
Oh boo hoo. I went to a store and had to search and search through the popular stuff that they sell everyday! I picked the brains of the employees, and *gasp* they weren't music historians, but knew quite a bit about the current offerings. How dare they!
I finally found what I was looking for, twice even, but they didn't have this obscure song by an unpopular artist in stock right away! What do they think they're in business for? To sell popular music to people who like popular music?!
As I passed the posters, t-shirts, books, magazines, and DVD's on my way out of the store, I thought, "If they're not going to sell the music I like, they should just stop pretending to sell music and focus on selling pop culture."
Hey buddy, the term is "target audience" and sorry, but you're not in it.
Kinda OT: "The Colonel's Lady" is still there, in Shelbyville, KY, and is now called "Claudia Sanders Dinner House" in what I guess was an attempt to clarify which lady it belonged to.;)
Ok, so take what you know about KFC and throw it out the window. This place is a very nice, sit-down dinner restaurant with high quality chicken and other country style food. Unlike KFC, you'll need a reservation. It's so choice, I highly reccomend picking one up, if you have the means.
Not according to the Learn More button on that page.
"The Video Commercial is:
Up to 2 MB Up to 30 seconds Full Screen Broadcast quality (564 kbps) - plays up to 8 times faster than broadband video (100 kbps) Completely pre-cached* -- 30 frames per second video that plays perfectly for every consumer, every time"
"The Video Commercial IS NOT:
Streaming video which inevitably results in buffering and freezing even on a broadband connection
Partially pre-loaded or "politely" loaded which does not guarantee consistent playback
The civilian version of There is based around chatting and dressing up your avatar (like a paper doll) and of course, shopping for those clothes. As you can see, the FPS gamer isn't who There is after, but housewives and stay-at-home moms are.
So: 1) Socializing (mainly with women) 2) Fashion 3) Shopping
Does this sound like a place that 12 year old gamers shouldn't emulate?
There uses some open source code, and even released their changes like good GPL users. From what I've heard, the servers are all run on some form of linux, and a bunch of the development of the product is as well.
Linux versions and Mac versions of the client are planned, but There is still a very young product with a ton of features ahead of those clients on the todo list. They have a mailing list for both, so sign up and come back when\if they meet your needs.
Here's the kicker though: You aren't in their target market. There's target market is women and men who like to chat socially online. They've recently partnered with iVilliage to bring more women to There. They will openly tell you that FPS gamers and developers are certainly welcome, but not who they're trying to attract.
There is a business, and until Linux\Mac\Non-IE-based-Windows has even 10% of the market share of There's target customers, don't expect them to make this a priority.
Makes you wonder why There just laid off 40% of their (there?) staff, doesn't it? Maybe USD $3.5M doesn't go as far as it used to...
Actually, we know why. There came out and told their customers (the community of There) why they were doing what they were doing, within 3 days of when the employees were laid off. They said, basically, "when we started the company, we hired a lot of people to do things that we've come to find that the community is doing for free. We're restructuring ourselves to bring our finances in line with what we think our customers need." In fact, a lot of the employees that were laid off are now volunteering to do the same jobs as before.
In other words, it would be like if Slashdot had hired a bunch of moderators and coders when the site started. Then, along the way they realized that the users themselves could do the moderating, and slashcode could be developed by volunteers. Then would it seem such a big deal if/. laid off all of the coders and moderators so that they could afford to hire more, say.. fact checkers and editors?;)
One of the main hurdles for There is that a large part of their target market can't meet the hardware requirements. One of the top new priorities is overcoming that hurdle. FPS gamers aren't the target market, so their customers don't all have the latest graphics card for example. Many of the employees laid off were in customer service.
I hope you don't often use FuckedCompany as your final source of information.
Let me stop you there. None of the buckets (tall column-shaped ones) or tubs (larger box shaped ones) come with 2000 pieces. The largest tubs that have been sold contained 1200 pieces. As for the empty space in the bucket, as another posted, that's for storing your parts that didn't come in the buckets (like parts that come from sets, or in your case, ebay.) I seem to remember that a 1200 piece bulk brick tub had enough space for 3 tubs worth of product.
most of the bits were one or two square size
First, The contents (inventory) of each tub and bucket is printed right on the side of the thing, so you shouldn't have been suprised at what was inside. Second, some of the buckets\tubs have all bricks, and others have bricks, windows, doors, etc in them. If you wanted this second kind and bought the first kind, that's your fault for not checking the inventory. Personally I'd rather have the one you bought than the others, but that's just me.
Lego on ebay costs 10 GBP per kilo.
Because it is used. It could be old, discolored with play doh in the holes, or in many cases, have mold growing inside. (Yuk!) Also, you might get a bunch of tyco, megablox or other off brand toys (which are cheaper than Lego) thrown in with your Lego from ebay because some don't know the difference between the kind of toy and the brand name.
Not that you can't get good deals from ebay, but don't pretend that what you're getting from open sets on ebay is the same as what you can get off the shelf at a toy store. The good stuff on ebay isn't usually sold by the pound (or kilo.)
They come in buckets now. They were called Freestyle sets throughout the 90's, but I'm not sure what the series name is now. Check your local Lego aisle for buckets full of windows, bricks, etc.
If it's individual kinds of parts in bulk you want, shop.lego.com still sells the service packs that they've always sold through the Shop At Home catalog, as well as the rest of their product line.
For single special parts, or any other sort of non-set purchase, BrickLink is a great resource. That's where the resellers break down the sets they buy from stores and sell the parts individually. If you want 300 wigets in blue, bricklink is the best way to find them.
Slashdot Mirror
If P2P grows beyond mp3's
;)
Well, maybe someday, but that's far far into the future.
Because sex offenders can't be cured...I have no problems with GPS monitoring of sex offenders.
Alcoholism can't be cured either. By your logic we should be tagging everyone convicted of DUI.
If you like the style, then I highly recommend The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd podcast. It has a format and humor level a lot like Rocky and Bullwinkle, with a time travel twist.
From the site:
"This family friendly new twist on "old time radio" features the adventures and exploits of the World's Most Brilliant Scientist, Dr. Floyd as he tries to thwart the plans of his evil arch nemesis, Dr. Steve, all the while learning about the people and events that shaped the history of the Earth."
or maintain "safe" breaking distances (which seem rather arbitrary)
I guess it's arbitrary if you have no knowledge of physics. Safe distance is pretty easy to measure if you know the rate of deceleration of your car. I think the formula would go something like:
distance = initial speed * time + ( 1/2 ) * acceleration * time^2
That would give you stopping distance for the rate of (negative) acceleration your car\brakes can do in an emergency. If that distance is longer than the distance between you and the car in front of you, you need to back off a bit.
The reason people use the "3 seconds" rule is that it works at any speed and requires only 3-5 seconds to evaluate as you travel along.
my response was something along the lines of "just what I want to hear- more talk radio."
Yep, me too, only without the sarcastic overtones. I'm tired of being stuck with ultra-conservatives as my only sources of good talk radio. NPR is OK, but they are more entertainment and liberal news and I prefer issue-based discussions. Most of the podcasters I listen to seem to be more open and honest and have a down to earth feel, but that's typical with independent broadcasters vs. those who answer to the underwriters. Eventually as the advertisers get involved, that aspect will fade from the popular shows.
Podcasting gives me access to interesting talk radio, without the ultra-conservative bias, and in a format I can easily carry with me. If I wanted to listen to music, I'd just turn on the radio.
Good point, except for the fatal flaw in the system: Every single time I've seen an error with the weight, which is usually about once per trip to the grocery self-checkout, the human manning the guard station monitor just blindly hits the override. This is the same as the end-of-shift cashier exploit, but slightly easier. With one sleepy cashier in charge of four or more scanners in most cases, it would be easy to set up a distraction on one of the other scanners to get their attention away from you and increase the chances of them blindly hitting the override. This becomes difficult with multiple items.
Items too large to put on the scanner (tv's, etc) would work best, since you can tell the machine you can't fit it in the bags and leave it in the cart. The trick would be finding something large enough to bypass the size\weight limit without spending all of your profit away paying for large items. Those $25 microwaves on a $400 DVD player sound like a good work around.
Yes, it's that simple. There are many programs to print UPC barcodes and many legit reasons to do so.
Here's one I've heard of.
Many bargain hunters print up a page of dozens of bar codes for various items. When watching for a price drop, they can enjoy checking prices on the scanners in store without having to go pick up each product. As long as you have the numbers printed below the bar code you can generate the bars easily. Sometimes fellow bargain hunters post specific bar code numbers in forum messages and others will replicate the code to check the price in their local store.
Strangely I was JUST thinking about this type of scam in a store this afternoon. With most big stores in my area going to the self check-out model, I only see this getting worse.
...does anyone know where this idea came from in the bible...
I did a bit of googling and came up with this page. It gives a few different theories and possible explainations, from seemingly credible sources.
Search for "v16" on the page to find the beginning of the discussion about the mark.
Haven't you lined the inside of your roof with tinfoil or lead yet?
I've done this of course, but I've gone one step further. When I heard about that Fluoride stuff the government puts in our water, I replaced all of my indoor plumbing with lead pipes to help counter the effects. Nothing's getting into MY mind!
Did you know that they don't even SELL lead pipes for home plumbing anymore? That's how bad this is people!
I thought those were 50gb, but I'm also too lazy to go look it up from the earlier slashdot article. :)
:/
"20 gigs a disc? That might be a good solution. I have a 700Gig RAID "
You consider 35 discs instead of 200 a good solution? Even if I'm right and it's 50gb, that's still 14 discs... not a good solution IMO. A great solution would be 1-5 per backup. By the time we get those discs we'll be talking at least 7TB+, so...
In a somewhat unrelated (and more painful) story, using my vast intellect I once attempted to replace a PCI card (of some sort) in a running computer and shocked the shit out of myself. Twice . In less than ten minutes. Apparently I didn't learn that lesson.
- Ben
Did this myself and have a nice wide 1/2" long scar on my hand to prove it. I was doing something inside the case while the computer was on and felt a sharp pain in my hand. I pulled it out to find a bright red bloody gash on the outside part of my hand (opposite side, but where my thumb would be.)
At first I thought I'd scraped against the pointy parts of my sound card and broke the skin. A friend at the time looked at it and told me that I had completed the circuit on some card and the blood between those two points on my hand boiled the skin away almost instantly. I don't know if that's what really happened, but it didn't have the torn look of a scrape, the skin was just gone from that spot. The scar looks about the same as it did a few weeks after and it has been 7 years now.
- Also Ben (coincidence?)
The manual for my computer said I shouldn't leave the computer in the sun, I shouldn't use water to clean it, I shouldn't make a small fire on top of it and not keep a huge magnet close to it. It said NOTHING about not feeding it with live animals!
Are you sure that's the computer manual and not your Mogwai manual?
I was a Movable Type user, but with my latest ISP change I ditched MT for Geeklog. Geeklog is really cool, and nicely integrates with Gallery which I use for images. Both are Open Source and free, so the decision was easy.
He means:
If there are 100k dialup users, and 60% of them are ok with dialup, that's 60k happy people.
If 1/2 of those other 40k who aren't happy with dialup goes to broadband, then the total amount of dialup users becomes only 80k.
If there are 80k dialup users, and 60% of them are ok with dialup, that's 48k happy people. What happened to the other 12k people who previously were happy with their connection?
We are measuring the amount of dialup users here, not the total amount of Internet users. The parent is right, that group is decreasing in number.
Have you ever tried to do this step without the help of another person? I often wonder if the walking through the explaination is what helps, and if just pretending someone is there would work just as well.
:)
If it doesn't work, then the people who come over to see why you are talking to yourself may be able to help.
First, I didn't imply that the internet wasn't a better place to shop for music. In fact, except out of curiosity, I never visit music stores. As for my "dubious" music tastes, as a fellow slashdotter pointed out, I never said that I enjoyed the music that you trudged past. We're not so different in our musical tastes, and as I can see from your others posts on slashdot, we both have a soft spot for sarcasm. The difference between the two of us is that I know what the target market of these "megastores" is and am aware that I'm not in it. This is why we have the choice to go elsewhere and support the businesses that carry the products and services that we want.
Would you also complain that Wal-Mart didn't carry quality suits for men? Sure, they have jeans and sweaters, but they are completely devoid of high quality clothing that one would expect from a clothier. Why? Because people don't go to megastores for quality, they go to buy what is popular.
And no, Quincy Jones does not qualify as a popular artist. When speaking of sales of music from a music store, "popular" is defined by what people buy, not the general regard of their music accomplishments. I would prefer to listen to his music over the stuff they sell most often at Virgin, but when it comes to inventory control, they would be foolish to stock equal amounts of each artist. I would rather the employees of any store to know more about the popular items than the items which sell rarely. Otherwise you have store full of "Comic Book Guy" clerks who are clueless about the current line of new products.
I didn't reply to your obnoxious "I prefer to be the hunter, rather than the hunted" comment earlier, but your assertion that I shop at those megastores is quite wrong. Sometimes people who disagree with you aren't as weak and stupid as you might think. Your initial approach may have been wrong-minded, but your following attempts to belittle me say more about your character than mine.
It's not an "article." Journalists write articles.
Let's look at the words, shall we?
Article: 1) Nonfictional prose forming an independent part of a publication
Journalist: 1) one who writes for a newspaper or magazine 2) Someone who keeps a diary or journal.
Welcome back to the new old journalism. When journalism began, it was much like definition 2. Some guy would write a treatise or his opinions of the world or society, and publish it for all to read. Years later this evolved into the traditional mass media, but the editoral page, or editoral minute from video news, remained. It is not enough to just present facts, readers want commentary too.
Generally traditional mass media publications are fact checked better, they check spelling and grammar better, and usually are more sucessful at hiding their [coporate] bias. If you're looking for facts only, taken with a grain of salt, traditional publications are the place to be.
In the last few years we've seen a resurgance of the original form of journalism. No longer is the independent journalist limited by what he can afford to publish or what the company's image will allow him to say. This is usually a rough style, whose facts shouldn't be taken at face value, but some would call it a more pure form of journalism.
If this resurgance of the old style wasn't considered valid journalism, Slashdot would be a lot less popular.
That wasn't "interesting" at all. Basically the parent poster said:
Oh boo hoo. I went to a store and had to search and search through the popular stuff that they sell everyday! I picked the brains of the employees, and *gasp* they weren't music historians, but knew quite a bit about the current offerings. How dare they!
I finally found what I was looking for, twice even, but they didn't have this obscure song by an unpopular artist in stock right away! What do they think they're in business for? To sell popular music to people who like popular music?!
As I passed the posters, t-shirts, books, magazines, and DVD's on my way out of the store, I thought, "If they're not going to sell the music I like, they should just stop pretending to sell music and focus on selling pop culture."
Hey buddy, the term is "target audience" and sorry, but you're not in it.
Kinda OT: ;)
"The Colonel's Lady" is still there, in Shelbyville, KY, and is now called "Claudia Sanders Dinner House" in what I guess was an attempt to clarify which lady it belonged to.
Ok, so take what you know about KFC and throw it out the window. This place is a very nice, sit-down dinner restaurant with high quality chicken and other country style food. Unlike KFC, you'll need a reservation. It's so choice, I highly reccomend picking one up, if you have the means.
Not according to the Learn More button on that page.
"The Video Commercial is:
Up to 2 MB
Up to 30 seconds
Full Screen
Broadcast quality (564 kbps) - plays up to 8 times faster than broadband video (100 kbps)
Completely pre-cached* -- 30 frames per second video that plays perfectly for every consumer, every time"
"The Video Commercial IS NOT:
Streaming video which inevitably results in buffering and freezing even on a broadband connection
Partially pre-loaded or "politely" loaded which does not guarantee consistent playback
Flash video"
It specifically says it's not flash.
The civilian version of There is based around chatting and dressing up your avatar (like a paper doll) and of course, shopping for those clothes. As you can see, the FPS gamer isn't who There is after, but housewives and stay-at-home moms are.
So:
1) Socializing (mainly with women)
2) Fashion
3) Shopping
Does this sound like a place that 12 year old gamers shouldn't emulate?
There uses some open source code, and even released their changes like good GPL users. From what I've heard, the servers are all run on some form of linux, and a bunch of the development of the product is as well.
Linux versions and Mac versions of the client are planned, but There is still a very young product with a ton of features ahead of those clients on the todo list. They have a mailing list for both, so sign up and come back when\if they meet your needs.
Here's the kicker though: You aren't in their target market. There's target market is women and men who like to chat socially online. They've recently partnered with iVilliage to bring more women to There. They will openly tell you that FPS gamers and developers are certainly welcome, but not who they're trying to attract.
There is a business, and until Linux\Mac\Non-IE-based-Windows has even 10% of the market share of There's target customers, don't expect them to make this a priority.
Makes you wonder why There just laid off 40% of their (there?) staff, doesn't it?
/. laid off all of the coders and moderators so that they could afford to hire more, say.. fact checkers and editors? ;)
Maybe USD $3.5M doesn't go as far as it used to...
Actually, we know why. There came out and told their customers (the community of There) why they were doing what they were doing, within 3 days of when the employees were laid off. They said, basically, "when we started the company, we hired a lot of people to do things that we've come to find that the community is doing for free. We're restructuring ourselves to bring our finances in line with what we think our customers need." In fact, a lot of the employees that were laid off are now volunteering to do the same jobs as before.
In other words, it would be like if Slashdot had hired a bunch of moderators and coders when the site started. Then, along the way they realized that the users themselves could do the moderating, and slashcode could be developed by volunteers. Then would it seem such a big deal if
One of the main hurdles for There is that a large part of their target market can't meet the hardware requirements. One of the top new priorities is overcoming that hurdle. FPS gamers aren't the target market, so their customers don't all have the latest graphics card for example. Many of the employees laid off were in customer service.
I hope you don't often use FuckedCompany as your final source of information.
I bought an giant tub of lego, >2000 bits in it
Let me stop you there. None of the buckets (tall column-shaped ones) or tubs (larger box shaped ones) come with 2000 pieces. The largest tubs that have been sold contained 1200 pieces. As for the empty space in the bucket, as another posted, that's for storing your parts that didn't come in the buckets (like parts that come from sets, or in your case, ebay.) I seem to remember that a 1200 piece bulk brick tub had enough space for 3 tubs worth of product.
most of the bits were one or two square size
First, The contents (inventory) of each tub and bucket is printed right on the side of the thing, so you shouldn't have been suprised at what was inside. Second, some of the buckets\tubs have all bricks, and others have bricks, windows, doors, etc in them. If you wanted this second kind and bought the first kind, that's your fault for not checking the inventory. Personally I'd rather have the one you bought than the others, but that's just me.
Lego on ebay costs 10 GBP per kilo.
Because it is used. It could be old, discolored with play doh in the holes, or in many cases, have mold growing inside. (Yuk!) Also, you might get a bunch of tyco, megablox or other off brand toys (which are cheaper than Lego) thrown in with your Lego from ebay because some don't know the difference between the kind of toy and the brand name.
Not that you can't get good deals from ebay, but don't pretend that what you're getting from open sets on ebay is the same as what you can get off the shelf at a toy store. The good stuff on ebay isn't usually sold by the pound (or kilo.)
They come in buckets now. They were called Freestyle sets throughout the 90's, but I'm not sure what the series name is now. Check your local Lego aisle for buckets full of windows, bricks, etc.
If it's individual kinds of parts in bulk you want, shop.lego.com still sells the service packs that they've always sold through the Shop At Home catalog, as well as the rest of their product line.
For single special parts, or any other sort of non-set purchase, BrickLink is a great resource. That's where the resellers break down the sets they buy from stores and sell the parts individually. If you want 300 wigets in blue, bricklink is the best way to find them.