Did anyone else notice about a dozen freaking user-tracking cookies were installed by the news website? Several cookies for every damned advertisement, plus more.
Fortunately, I use Opera. It alerts me and lets me block 'em.:-)
It's not like the crystals, unseen and unharmed by the public, are doing anything remotely useful.
Other than generating "feel good vibes," preserving the crystals does no good whatsoever. And damaging the cave system isn't likely to be a big consideration, given that it's a *mining* company. Destroying rocks is what they do best.
I can appreciate, understand and give in to the sloppy sentimentality that's being displayed by so many Slashdotters -- but, on the other hand, I'm also pragmatic enough to admit that if the crystals aren't viewed by tourists, they might as well be chopped up and sold.
I don't suppose they could, say, run the plow with GIS-tracking turned on, during a visible-road day, eh?
I daresay that's the best thing to do, anyway: drive the actual road and record the actual data. Then there can be *no* errors, by curvature, user error, math typos or other.
--
Re:Unions were needed because of the work monopoly
on
The Jungle
·
· Score: 2
You're absolutely right. Were that we lived in Utopia.
In reality, however, many people still don't have a viable choice: they can't afford downtime between jobs, or they can't afford to move to a better job, or they can't afford to upgrade their skills, or et cetera.
And even for those people who are professionals and could leave, often can't: they love their jobs and have commitments to their clients. It's just that their employer is an ass. [I'm thinking specifically of government services, here; certainly our BC government has an appalling employer history with regards to teachers, health providers and such.]
Your points re: the downsides of unionization are pretty much on the mark. I just don't think the employment picture is as rosy as you paint.
All that has happened is that they're having their hands slapped for being so *stupid* as to design the site so that the "This Page Best Viewed Using MSIE" warning had to be used.
If they'd stuck to the damn *standards*, they'd never have encountered this problem.
Now that they're forced to be smart, the web pages will be viewable not only by disabled-friendly browsers (browsers that provide 500x zoom for the visually impaired; browsers that will read the content to the blind; browsers that will send output to a braille interface), but the pages will also be viewable to people using Palm Pilots, Netscape, Lynx and any other browser.
So what's it gonna take? Not a whole helluva lot: get rid of browser-specific tagging. Get rid of frames. Add ALT text to all images. Provide text descriptions of any animations/Flash/videos.
In other words, they have to do all the things they *SHOULD* have been doing, right from day one.
--
Your Friendly Neighbourhood Monopoly
on
DSL Woes
·
· Score: 2
Tis undoubtedly far too late to post this and receive any sort of decent response, but what the hell:
What's needed is recognition of the advantages of a controlled monopoly. Monopolies have the advantage of scale; and if they're controlled by consumer advocacy, they're the perfect method of delivering "essential services."
Up here in Canada, we had monopoly telephone service. Part of the consumer-dictated mandate was that (a) every damn corner of the country would have phone service; (b) when equipment was upgraded, it would be replaced with *new* equipment, not left-overs from someone other community's upgrade; (c) price controls; (d) service guarantees.
Long-distance competition was opened up. Per-minute costs dropped, but the monthly service fees doubled and tripled, you have to pay for installation and repairs now, and the quality of service has declined.
It's a bummer.
Anyway, this is all a round-about way of saying that perhaps a monopoly ISP would be just peachy. It would have to be controlled, of course: you can't let wild monopolies loose, or you get the kind of shit we have with Microsoft. Gotta keep 'em tame, let them have reasonable profits, but also demand price controls, service guarantees and so on.
Okay, so this is nearly incoherent. It's far too late for me to be up writing this, so it's probably a good thing that no one will be reading it...
--
Re:Get used to it. We're in for a wild ride.
on
Spidergoats
·
· Score: 2
What's this "forty miles north of the border" about? They're growing great fields of hemp in Grand Forks, BC. You can spit from Grand Fork's main street to the Cda-US border... and the hemp fields are south of the town.
--
Re:Yes, but what about the goats?
on
Spidergoats
·
· Score: 1
Hell with dairy cattle. Think of the chickens, man! What's done to them is disgusting.
Sorry, I just can't imagine it. Sounds about as fun as watching someone play a videogame. Or watching someone write a book.
As an aside, I doubt music can be brought into this on any rational footing. The brains reaction to music is pretty unlike its reaction to watching somebody do something.
Dunno about reading, but I suspect it, too, stimulates the brain completely differently than watching a sporting event.
[The guy with the mirror cells comment might have something, though...]
Face facts: Microsoft has chosen to fully support the Hebrew language. Other OS and applications companies have not. Microsoft wins this round, fair and square: you can hardly decry them for being open-minded enough to realize that a global OS/global application needs to support global languages.
There's no end to the bad things that can be said about Microsoft.
But that's my point: instead of being a passive spectator, become an active participator. Don't watch football: get out and ______, where ______ could be "go for a walk," "have sex," "bungy jump," "play tiddlywinks," "play football," or whatever *active* sport/game/action turns your crank.
Sitting on the couch watching *other* people having fun, getting exercise and *participating* in life? -- my god, what a waste.
(But, then, I suppose the same can be said about the cows that watch soap operas, idiots that watch Survivor, and other morons who suck down enough television to raise the nation average to something on the order of six hours a day of passive entertainment... chrissakes, what a waste of oxygen!)
(erm. He says this, posting to Slashdot, of all places. Mea culpa!)
But your example is, at least, a participatory one. The person playing Quake3 is, at least somewhat crudely, participating in a social game. The person slobbing on the couch isn't participating in anything more than his girthline growth.
The nearest example I can think of is watching a movie. That's not participatory. But there's a story, at least, and the brain can enter fantasyland for a while.
With football... do people actually become absorbed in the game, fantasize themselves as the players, become emotionally involved, etc?
I say, turn off the tube, get your buddies, and head down to the pool hall...
The NAFTA agreement makes it pretty clear that we're fucked. We started supplying the assholes with electricity, so we *have* to continue supplying it.
We no longer have control of who we sell to, at what price and when.
Unless you're a crippled geek laid up in bed and desparate for something to watch on the boobtube, why would you *watch* football (or any other sport, for that matter) instead of *play* football (or any other sport, for that matter)?
I completely fail to grok the attraction of televised sport. Except for women's beach volleyball, which is always, um, bouncy.
When you look at an eclipse, you burn your eyes out not because there's more UV than normal, but because your eyes are fully dilated, letting in a lot more light.
I'm not sure I follow you all the way here. Wouldn't Kiyosaki stand to gain a lot more by selling ten times more games by reducing the price to a quarter of its present cost?
I mean, Mattel and the other game companies have the price point down to a fine art: they're maximizing their profits by balancing price against number of sales.
If the price is $200 because Kiyosaki is greedy, then he's only hurting himself: he's not making as much money as he could be... which would make him a dumb man.
I don't think he's a dumb man, although I do find his books nearly unreadable.
I'm pretty sure that he figures he might as well not waste people's time. The people that will really put the ideas into use are the same people who are going to ante up the bucks for the game (and video and cassettes and books and all the other stuff that the game comes with).
Personally, I'd rather see it priced at about $50. Even if people don't actively start managing their money to maximize their cashflow, I'm pretty sure that there'll be some amount of change in their lives. Perhaps they'd finally clue in that they could pay off their credit cards and bring their spending under control...
A generic followup to several of the posts asking for details:
Yes, it is The Good Capitalist. There are opportunities to give to charity, but, no, you're not going to find much in the way of subsidized healthcare and education in the game. It's a game about making money without working: indeed, about making enough money that you don't need to work.
Regarding price: yes, it's bloody expensive. It's expensive for good reason: the first step toward learning how to invest is to realize that you're going to have to spend money on learning.
Is it worth $200? Sure--if you've got six friends who'll kick in twenty-five bucks each to play it. And play it, you will: in six months, I've played upwards of three dozen times. Hell, we have a coffeehouse games night, now... anyone who wants to drop in and play, can play. Great fun.
That said, here's the general game play:
There's a large playing board. There are two loops on the board: one for the rat race, and one for the fast track. I'll describe the rat race: it's where by far most of your learning will take place.
The fast track is about three dozen "spaces." There are three each of 'paycheque,' 'doodad,' and 'market' spaces; one each of 'baby,' 'charity,' and 'downsize.' The remainder are 'opportunity' spaces.
Your game card contains income, expense and investment sections. You have a paycheque, from your 9-to-5 job; and expenses of a mortgage, various loans/credit cards, and living expenses. There's an additional expense for children, should you land on the 'baby' space.
Your income, less your expenses, is your cashflow. The money that you can save, and that you can invest.
When you pass or land on a 'paycheque,' you get the cashflow amount. When you land on a 'doodad,' it's an unexpected expense that comes out of your savings. When you land on 'charity,' you can donate and gain the use of a second die for three rolls, which gets you past paycheques more quickly (giving = getting, is the philosophy here). When you land on 'baby,' you add a kid to your expenses. And when you get downsized, you pay up your expenses en masse, from your savings, once, and then miss a few turns.
The real action is on the 'opportunity' and 'market' spaces. Opportunities come in two sizes: below $6K, and above $6K. They consist of opportunties to buy and sell one of four stocks and two bonds; to buy rental properties, from small condos to entire apartment complexes, with varying rates of return; to purchase land, gold or other property that has no immediate return; and to start up or purchase businesses.
It's up to you to figure out if the opportunity is worthwhile, whether you can afford it, whether you should carry a loan if you don't have the cash at hand, and whether it's time to sell it.
Selling properties and businesses (not stocks; stocks are sold in the oppoortunities deck of cards) happens with the 'market' cards. Some investments are good to keep as income; some are better off sold, to generate immediate cash that can be used for investing for better returns. Again, it's up to you to decide.
There are rules for handling bankruptcy, should you overextend yourself. Bankruptcy is stressful, but it doesn't necessarily take you out of the game. And it generally only happens if you play high-risk... which is a learning opportunity itself: sometimes, high-risk results in high payoffs, beyond one's expectations and hopes.
There's math involved. You have to get good at doing adding and subtracting, because your income and expense numbers are going to be changing, which will impact your bottom-line cashflow.
You get to learn about the value of bank loans, which can be used to invest in opportunities that pay so well that the interest costs for the loan are dwarfed by the cashflow the investment generates. You learn about investing in the stock market, and the kind of payoffs that can happen there. You learn about buying properties that are remarkably low-priced that you'd think are fucked-up, but turn out to pay off... and about rental property, some of the costs involved, and some of the risks involved (interest rate increases; tenant damage; etc).
All in all, it's a very stimulating game. If you're not currently investing in the stock market , rental properties and businesses, then it's worth getting the game: it'll let you learn and experiment, without actually risking tens of thousands of dollars.
"Cashflow," from Robert Kiyosaki. It's a simulation of real life, intended to shift one's thinking about handling money. The objective: to get out of the rat race of daily 9-to-5 employee life, and onto the fast track of business ownership.
There's no competition, really, once you understand the game. It's all about making decisions for oneself, investing wisely and generating enough passive income (income that you don't have to work for someone else to earn: i.e. stocks and bonds, rental properties, etc.) to outpace your fixed living expenses.
The best part is that it's fairly true-to-life (at least if you live in the USA; the rental property thing isn't nearly as profitable in, say, Canada), and gives you a chance to experiment with risk without actually putting one's hard-earned cash up for grabs.
(putting one's cash into investing takes place eventually, mind you: you'll sooner or later learn that to make money, you're gonna have to spend it...)
Slashdot Mirror
Did anyone else notice about a dozen freaking user-tracking cookies were installed by the news website? Several cookies for every damned advertisement, plus more.
:-)
Fortunately, I use Opera. It alerts me and lets me block 'em.
--
Why? Why would they need to shut down the cave?
It's not like the crystals, unseen and unharmed by the public, are doing anything remotely useful.
Other than generating "feel good vibes," preserving the crystals does no good whatsoever. And damaging the cave system isn't likely to be a big consideration, given that it's a *mining* company. Destroying rocks is what they do best.
I can appreciate, understand and give in to the sloppy sentimentality that's being displayed by so many Slashdotters -- but, on the other hand, I'm also pragmatic enough to admit that if the crystals aren't viewed by tourists, they might as well be chopped up and sold.
--
"it may be more destructive than it sounds"
...and yet you continue to assist in the destruction of cave environments, by actively spelunking.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
--
I don't suppose they could, say, run the plow with GIS-tracking turned on, during a visible-road day, eh?
I daresay that's the best thing to do, anyway: drive the actual road and record the actual data. Then there can be *no* errors, by curvature, user error, math typos or other.
--
You're absolutely right. Were that we lived in Utopia.
In reality, however, many people still don't have a viable choice: they can't afford downtime between jobs, or they can't afford to move to a better job, or they can't afford to upgrade their skills, or et cetera.
And even for those people who are professionals and could leave, often can't: they love their jobs and have commitments to their clients. It's just that their employer is an ass. [I'm thinking specifically of government services, here; certainly our BC government has an appalling employer history with regards to teachers, health providers and such.]
Your points re: the downsides of unionization are pretty much on the mark. I just don't think the employment picture is as rosy as you paint.
--
Oh, baloney.
All that has happened is that they're having their hands slapped for being so *stupid* as to design the site so that the "This Page Best Viewed Using MSIE" warning had to be used.
If they'd stuck to the damn *standards*, they'd never have encountered this problem.
Now that they're forced to be smart, the web pages will be viewable not only by disabled-friendly browsers (browsers that provide 500x zoom for the visually impaired; browsers that will read the content to the blind; browsers that will send output to a braille interface), but the pages will also be viewable to people using Palm Pilots, Netscape, Lynx and any other browser.
So what's it gonna take? Not a whole helluva lot: get rid of browser-specific tagging. Get rid of frames. Add ALT text to all images. Provide text descriptions of any animations/Flash/videos.
In other words, they have to do all the things they *SHOULD* have been doing, right from day one.
--
Tis undoubtedly far too late to post this and receive any sort of decent response, but what the hell:
What's needed is recognition of the advantages of a controlled monopoly. Monopolies have the advantage of scale; and if they're controlled by consumer advocacy, they're the perfect method of delivering "essential services."
Up here in Canada, we had monopoly telephone service. Part of the consumer-dictated mandate was that (a) every damn corner of the country would have phone service; (b) when equipment was upgraded, it would be replaced with *new* equipment, not left-overs from someone other community's upgrade; (c) price controls; (d) service guarantees.
Long-distance competition was opened up. Per-minute costs dropped, but the monthly service fees doubled and tripled, you have to pay for installation and repairs now, and the quality of service has declined.
It's a bummer.
Anyway, this is all a round-about way of saying that perhaps a monopoly ISP would be just peachy. It would have to be controlled, of course: you can't let wild monopolies loose, or you get the kind of shit we have with Microsoft. Gotta keep 'em tame, let them have reasonable profits, but also demand price controls, service guarantees and so on.
Okay, so this is nearly incoherent. It's far too late for me to be up writing this, so it's probably a good thing that no one will be reading it...
--
What's this "forty miles north of the border" about? They're growing great fields of hemp in Grand Forks, BC. You can spit from Grand Fork's main street to the Cda-US border... and the hemp fields are south of the town.
--
Hell with dairy cattle. Think of the chickens, man! What's done to them is disgusting.
--
"Student informing...is an irrational, anti-democratic practice"
Puh-lease!
Are you educated, Katz, or do you just play a liberal arts major on Slashdot?
--
Oh, go on. It was hyperbole: obviously, *SOME* OS and apps companies have supported non-English languages.
--
Sorry, I just can't imagine it. Sounds about as fun as watching someone play a videogame. Or watching someone write a book.
As an aside, I doubt music can be brought into this on any rational footing. The brains reaction to music is pretty unlike its reaction to watching somebody do something.
Dunno about reading, but I suspect it, too, stimulates the brain completely differently than watching a sporting event.
[The guy with the mirror cells comment might have something, though...]
--
How very, very cool, Cabbey. Sorta fills one with hope: at least one megacompany *gets it*.
--
Face facts: Microsoft has chosen to fully support the Hebrew language. Other OS and applications companies have not. Microsoft wins this round, fair and square: you can hardly decry them for being open-minded enough to realize that a global OS/global application needs to support global languages.
There's no end to the bad things that can be said about Microsoft.
Poor internationalization isn't one of them.
--
But that's my point: instead of being a passive spectator, become an active participator. Don't watch football: get out and ______, where ______ could be "go for a walk," "have sex," "bungy jump," "play tiddlywinks," "play football," or whatever *active* sport/game/action turns your crank.
Sitting on the couch watching *other* people having fun, getting exercise and *participating* in life? -- my god, what a waste.
(But, then, I suppose the same can be said about the cows that watch soap operas, idiots that watch Survivor, and other morons who suck down enough television to raise the nation average to something on the order of six hours a day of passive entertainment... chrissakes, what a waste of oxygen!)
(erm. He says this, posting to Slashdot, of all places. Mea culpa!)
--
But your example is, at least, a participatory one. The person playing Quake3 is, at least somewhat crudely, participating in a social game. The person slobbing on the couch isn't participating in anything more than his girthline growth.
The nearest example I can think of is watching a movie. That's not participatory. But there's a story, at least, and the brain can enter fantasyland for a while.
With football... do people actually become absorbed in the game, fantasize themselves as the players, become emotionally involved, etc?
I say, turn off the tube, get your buddies, and head down to the pool hall...
--
You (and I) wish.
The NAFTA agreement makes it pretty clear that we're fucked. We started supplying the assholes with electricity, so we *have* to continue supplying it.
We no longer have control of who we sell to, at what price and when.
--
IIRC, the engineers (or the aggies) also put up "sculpture" all over the campus over a period of months.
It was ooohed and ahhhed over by the arts students. Fine art sculpture on campus!
Then the pranksters spent one fine spring morning razing the sculptures.
The artsies, and university, freaked. Most amusing.
IIRC, they also did something with signposts on campus.
--
Unless you're a crippled geek laid up in bed and desparate for something to watch on the boobtube, why would you *watch* football (or any other sport, for that matter) instead of *play* football (or any other sport, for that matter)?
I completely fail to grok the attraction of televised sport. Except for women's beach volleyball, which is always, um, bouncy.
--
Why would there be the normal level of UV? I don't think that's possible.
--
When you look at an eclipse, you burn your eyes out not because there's more UV than normal, but because your eyes are fully dilated, letting in a lot more light.
--
More likely, 2xATA-33 and 2xATA-100.
--
I'm not sure I follow you all the way here. Wouldn't Kiyosaki stand to gain a lot more by selling ten times more games by reducing the price to a quarter of its present cost?
I mean, Mattel and the other game companies have the price point down to a fine art: they're maximizing their profits by balancing price against number of sales.
If the price is $200 because Kiyosaki is greedy, then he's only hurting himself: he's not making as much money as he could be... which would make him a dumb man.
I don't think he's a dumb man, although I do find his books nearly unreadable.
I'm pretty sure that he figures he might as well not waste people's time. The people that will really put the ideas into use are the same people who are going to ante up the bucks for the game (and video and cassettes and books and all the other stuff that the game comes with).
Personally, I'd rather see it priced at about $50. Even if people don't actively start managing their money to maximize their cashflow, I'm pretty sure that there'll be some amount of change in their lives. Perhaps they'd finally clue in that they could pay off their credit cards and bring their spending under control...
--
A generic followup to several of the posts asking for details:
Yes, it is The Good Capitalist. There are opportunities to give to charity, but, no, you're not going to find much in the way of subsidized healthcare and education in the game. It's a game about making money without working: indeed, about making enough money that you don't need to work.
Regarding price: yes, it's bloody expensive. It's expensive for good reason: the first step toward learning how to invest is to realize that you're going to have to spend money on learning.
Is it worth $200? Sure--if you've got six friends who'll kick in twenty-five bucks each to play it. And play it, you will: in six months, I've played upwards of three dozen times. Hell, we have a coffeehouse games night, now... anyone who wants to drop in and play, can play. Great fun.
That said, here's the general game play:
There's a large playing board. There are two loops on the board: one for the rat race, and one for the fast track. I'll describe the rat race: it's where by far most of your learning will take place.
The fast track is about three dozen "spaces." There are three each of 'paycheque,' 'doodad,' and 'market' spaces; one each of 'baby,' 'charity,' and 'downsize.' The remainder are 'opportunity' spaces.
Your game card contains income, expense and investment sections. You have a paycheque, from your 9-to-5 job; and expenses of a mortgage, various loans/credit cards, and living expenses. There's an additional expense for children, should you land on the 'baby' space.
Your income, less your expenses, is your cashflow. The money that you can save, and that you can invest.
When you pass or land on a 'paycheque,' you get the cashflow amount. When you land on a 'doodad,' it's an unexpected expense that comes out of your savings. When you land on 'charity,' you can donate and gain the use of a second die for three rolls, which gets you past paycheques more quickly (giving = getting, is the philosophy here). When you land on 'baby,' you add a kid to your expenses. And when you get downsized, you pay up your expenses en masse, from your savings, once, and then miss a few turns.
The real action is on the 'opportunity' and 'market' spaces. Opportunities come in two sizes: below $6K, and above $6K. They consist of opportunties to buy and sell one of four stocks and two bonds; to buy rental properties, from small condos to entire apartment complexes, with varying rates of return; to purchase land, gold or other property that has no immediate return; and to start up or purchase businesses.
It's up to you to figure out if the opportunity is worthwhile, whether you can afford it, whether you should carry a loan if you don't have the cash at hand, and whether it's time to sell it.
Selling properties and businesses (not stocks; stocks are sold in the oppoortunities deck of cards) happens with the 'market' cards. Some investments are good to keep as income; some are better off sold, to generate immediate cash that can be used for investing for better returns. Again, it's up to you to decide.
There are rules for handling bankruptcy, should you overextend yourself. Bankruptcy is stressful, but it doesn't necessarily take you out of the game. And it generally only happens if you play high-risk... which is a learning opportunity itself: sometimes, high-risk results in high payoffs, beyond one's expectations and hopes.
There's math involved. You have to get good at doing adding and subtracting, because your income and expense numbers are going to be changing, which will impact your bottom-line cashflow.
You get to learn about the value of bank loans, which can be used to invest in opportunities that pay so well that the interest costs for the loan are dwarfed by the cashflow the investment generates. You learn about investing in the stock market, and the kind of payoffs that can happen there. You learn about buying properties that are remarkably low-priced that you'd think are fucked-up, but turn out to pay off... and about rental property, some of the costs involved, and some of the risks involved (interest rate increases; tenant damage; etc).
All in all, it's a very stimulating game. If you're not currently investing in the stock market , rental properties and businesses, then it's worth getting the game: it'll let you learn and experiment, without actually risking tens of thousands of dollars.
--
"Cashflow," from Robert Kiyosaki. It's a simulation of real life, intended to shift one's thinking about handling money. The objective: to get out of the rat race of daily 9-to-5 employee life, and onto the fast track of business ownership.
There's no competition, really, once you understand the game. It's all about making decisions for oneself, investing wisely and generating enough passive income (income that you don't have to work for someone else to earn: i.e. stocks and bonds, rental properties, etc.) to outpace your fixed living expenses.
The best part is that it's fairly true-to-life (at least if you live in the USA; the rental property thing isn't nearly as profitable in, say, Canada), and gives you a chance to experiment with risk without actually putting one's hard-earned cash up for grabs.
(putting one's cash into investing takes place eventually, mind you: you'll sooner or later learn that to make money, you're gonna have to spend it...)
--