Americans come north of the border to get treatment they can't afford to get in the USA because their health insurance system is systematically screwing them out of coverage.
Sure, it'll cost a bit more in taxes up here, but you pay bugger all for extended health, workers' comp, unemployment insurance and all that. All told, you come out about even-stevens.
To say nothing of the difference in quality of society.
The only country that may have a chance of trumping Canada is Australia, and only because they're more laid-back.
I mean, who *wouldn't* want to ride a train to Siberia?
Actually, thinking a bit more, it may be a good idea. Rail transport is surely cheaper than freighter. And there are a pile of Chinese folk just starting to get their shit together to become the biggest consumer market in the world. Might be nice to transport stuff to them cheaply.
On the other hand, I don't recall there being many rail lines from North America to South America, or a (productively working) rail line from Europe to India, the second-largest mass o' peeples. Or perhaps our media doesn't like reporting on it.
Except for the Aussies, the major landmasses would all be interconnected by road/rail. That'd be interesting. And what with global warming and all, maybe Siberia ain't such a bad spot to visit after all.:-)
How about giving away 10% of your precious post-tax income?
Spending an evening in the soup kitchen at the end of the month?
Hugging your kids?
Doing something small every day to make the world a more human place to live?
Sorry, Perhaps I'm feeling just a little cynical, as we mark the beginning of another year of ethnic cleansing, starvation, homeless children and corrupt government.
It looks like you've fallen victim to the media propaganda, friend.
Truth of the matter is, universal healthcare can be *less* expensive than private healthcare. For instance, Canada's healthcare system costs the country about 40% less of its national income than the US healthcare system.
The problem with private healthcare is that its interest *must* be in maximizing profits, *not* maximizing health. If everyone in the USA were to suddenly become healthy, the private healthcare industry would collapse.
It's the same problem with private healthcare insurance. Its interest must, once again, be in maximizing profit. Ergo, it *must* rid itself of coverage of expensive illnesses.
The biggest problem with the American system is, inevitably, its absolute insistence on private corporate profits over public good. The second biggest problem is the brainwashing that those corporations are doing, to ensure that the mass public doesn't think things through.
This is going to sound harsh, but *give your head a shake!* Dare to challenge your own assumptions, habits and beliefs. You just might discover that you've been shammed.
For what it's worth, the [Washington Monthly] has an eye-opening article that begins to chip away at the media/corporate bullshit.
It appears that for the bulk of your test subjects, it took about ten hours to achieve half the speed and twice the error rate.
With that amount of retraining, one might as well learn a new layout -- one that is optimal, which would increase speed and decrease the error rate.
From the article: "Half-QWERTY is based on the principle that the human brain controls typing movements according to the finger used, rather than the spatial position of the key."
It's well worth noting that in playing piano, the human brain *does* *not* rely on using the same finger on the key each time. A beginner can pick up a surprising amount of skill in ten hours of piano lesson.
The research would be far more meaningful if you'd included tests for optimal keyboards. Would a user pick up the skills just as quickly for a completely new layout? I'll wager that at the end of the ten hours, they'd be both faster and more accurate than the QWERT users.
I understand that the QWERT layout might appear to be easier to market. But the people choosing your keyboard are deeply self-interested: they're looking for a specialized solution to a particular problem. They're willing to put up with the hassles and time commitment to learn the new tool -- why shouldn't they be interested in an optimized solution?
Why on *earth* is it a QWERT layout (looks like the Y got whacked by a function key)?!
I should think that when cutting the number of keys to a minimum, it would be imperative to put the most-used keys at the easiest-to-access level. Q and Z could be submerged three levels deep and no one is likely to much miss them... but bury "i" beneath a function-shift, and we're talking a major PITA.
It sure looks to me like the user is going to have to relearn to type, what with having to do everything with one hand -- so why not have them learn something efficient?
What's missing in soundcards is quality 3D sound. The best was Aureal A3D, but that's vapour now that Creative succeeded in bankrupting them.
Creative offers EAX, which is predefined reverb effects. That's fine for ambient sound, but it doesn't provide good three-dimensional sound location.
QSound, Sensura and A3D all provide some form of 3D sound, well beyond the quad-speaker setup; they are particularly effective while wearing headphones.
What they do is simulate the delay, volume and "sound wrapping"/pitch shift effects experienced in natural sound. Part of these are obvious: it takes a fraction longer for sound to reach the distant ear, and the volume will be lower; others are less obvious, caused by the bending of the soundwave as it wraps around the head -- or, at higher frequencies, is blocked by the head.
Anyway, point is that it is difficult to simulate 3D sound. A3D had it: you could swear that the rocket went within an inch of your head; or hear the click of a trap behind you. It added a lot to the game experience -- it's like the leap from Wolfenstein to Quake III. An order or two of magnitude difference in realism.
And now that A3D is stomped, I'm very doubtful that we'll be hearing good game sound any time soon. It's like going back to Wolfenstein; sure, things will still be fun... but they won't be anywhere near as sweet.
ATI is currently a much more profitable company. It has outsold NVidia by nearly double: ATI chipsets are spec'd in nearly every laptop and many OEM boxes. But it has recently lost Apple's contracts, and NVidia is making inroads into the laptop market.
Matrox ruled the world with its 2D cards. They were fast and, every bit as importantly, incredibly stable. If you were using specialty software, you could rely on a Matrox card to work with it. The same could not be said of *many* other cards: driver incompatibilities were assured with them.
But both ATI and Matrox appear to have dropped the ball. I don't see any truly kick-ass cards coming out of them. And while Matrox 2D is still top-of-the-heap, it's not enough any more: fast 2D can be done by anyone, and not enough people require driver stability to make that Matrox's saving grace.
What happens if either, or both, of those companies fold? We'll be stuck with the same sort of abysmal situation we have with soundcards: a complete lack of innovation or advancement during the past ten years. Creative Labs owns the soundcard market, and to this day we do not have advanced sound capabilities of any sort of respectable nature.
I'd hate to see that happen, particularly with 3D. The visual presentation is nearly as important as the aural presentation, when it comes to fooling the mind into believing in the virtual environment. If NVidia becomes near-monopolistic, we'll end up with the same mediocre performance and features as the SoundBlaster.
Let's not forget the time, a few weeks back, when some sleazoid marketer managed to post a "hey, is this deal too good to be true" request regarding a cheapass DVD player.
Some guy was offering to stop by the actual offices of the sleazy company. I'm wondering what happened -- was it an apartment, or a real office? Did you get a picture?
For a price of US$10 to US$500+, you can donate to one of the few global charities that puts by far most of its money toward helping people, instead of paying the executive directors outrageous salaries.
[http://heifer.org/] -- where you can donate everything from honeybees to heifers, to an impoverished third-world villages. The animals are not directly used for food: they will be used as breeding stock and the beginning of a business foundation that will ensure an increased standard of living for the community.
It's a good gig. Checkitout, and help make the world a better place.
--
Re:Geeks need to make the effort
on
Gifts For Geeks
·
· Score: 2
Oh, don't be a dork. Christmas has bugger all to do with Christians these days, and everything to do with crass commercialism.
Now that I'm a little calmer (though Taco still has me really pissed for putting such terribly misleading, ignorant information on a site that has so much influence), I'd like to rephrase a bit.
I've been working on the beta software for the past three years. Opera's staff has always been top-notch: they take the feedback gratefully, deal with priority issues quickly, and really have the idealistic goals of creating a fully-compliant, robust, user-tweakable browser that is truly best-of-class.
During the beta period of the adware, we beta testers hammered hell out of Opera management and programmers. We knew that adware would be a potentially flammable decision, and we made damned sure that Opera fully understood the need to separate the advertising from anything even remotely associated with personal data, including browser habit-tracking.
We also demanded that Opera provide *EVERY* possible detail of the adware implementation, so that there could be no doubt that there were no privacy problems whatsoever. We did registry searches, binary file text searches, re-wrote the "welcome to" text, grilled them to death. We even halted release while we dealt with a few niggling details in wording.
You can be damn sure that your privacy interests were fully represented.
And then to have Taco shoot off his mouth without having a fucking clue how the advertising is implemented, without bothering to spend three minutes of his precious time actually reading Opera's well-detailed and highly informative privacy statement...
...well, hell, it's just too much.
For all our efforts to make sure that there couldn't be controversy, we never accounted for the possibility that influential media personalities wouldn't actually *try* to be responsible.
So, please, don't be a Taco: before you get your panties in a know about privacy, go [read the Opera privacy statement] and educate yourself.
I'm not saying that the adware is wonderful; I personally don't like it being full-height, and I'm worried that they may serve overly distracting animations.
But there are *no* privacy flaws, and it is a *wonderful* browser. It'll take a few days to get comfortable with it, but I am confident that almost everyone will find that its features will make it faster and easier to browser the web.
Christ, there are a lot of *IGNORANT* Slashdot users out there. Most of them are making comments and passing judgement without having the first fucking clue what they're talking about, because THEY'RE TOO GODDAMNED LAZY TO DO SOME RESEARCH.
For starters, go read [their privacy statement], which is a helluva lot more upfront and detailed than anything you've seen from any other software company.
Then download and install the software. Back up your registry first, if you're really paranoid, and use InCtrl to track installed files.
Oh, *LOOK*. The advertisement is a standard-sized banner, affixed to the toolbar. It's wholly seperate from the web pages.
Now slap on some port-monitoring software.
Oh, *LOOK*. There's *NOT A FUCKING PRIVATE DETAIL* being passed to the ad server. You get a user id so that it knows what ads it's sent you, and *THAT'S IT.*
No information about your browsing habits are shared. No information about your name, address or anything else. If you *choose* to select the variety of ads served you, it naturally has to tell the server that you want tech ads, but not women's hygiene product ads.
Gettafucking clue.
I won't even begin to dwell on the idiocy that surrounds the free versus commercial software crap. Sixty employees, one product: of *course* they gotta make money from it. They don't have the opportunity to fund their browser from sales of the OS or office suite.
Have fun, moderators. Don't let your personal bias show.
"i have always been constantly amazed at the hoops that both the customers , and the employees are made to jump through."
I have always been amazed that any employee wouldn't tell their boss to shove it sideways up his ass, wide end first, and walk out the door.
In almost all of North America, staying with your employer is *optional.* With the exception of some of the more impoverished rural areas, you can get a job within *days* if you get off your ass and get serious about pounding pavement.
The call center people are people who *choose* to suffer abusive employment situations, possibly because they have masochistic tendancies.
Likewise for customers. You can *choose* to find another provider. There are two theatres in my town: one of them fucked up the film the other day and the audience spent over a half-hour waiting for it to start again. When I went out to hunt up some complimentary popcorn, I was rudely told to shove off.
Well, I have. I'll never set foot in the local Famous Players theatre again. Period. I can *choose* to let them abuse me... or I can *choose* to have some self-respect and seek my media fix elsewhere.
The customer -- and employee -- reign supreme these days. Take advantage of it.
It's tough to get rid of the fat kid playing Pokemon (or Nintendo or DnD) because it's more true than not.
Over the past fifteen years, the number of obese children aged 7 to 13 has *doubled.* This is as school physical education programs have been been slashed, simultaneous with the rise of couch-potato entertainment.
Kids that get off their asses and go play sports, walk the malls or do other out-of-the-house activities tend to be healthy.
Kids that play video games, card games or role-playing games a lot tend to be unhealthy.
And it's not just fat: we're talking *obese.* We're talking about an atrociously high risk of heart disease, and a lifespan that is altogether too likely to be twenty years shorter than for healthy people.
The images are accurate. The exceptions -- probably you, for instance -- are not representative of the general population of game-playing kids.
Feel free to type "fat kids increase video" into Google. Learn about the problem. And demand better of yourself for your children: feed them well and keep them active.
For instance, there are *no* sure cures for arachnaphobia. You can't "teach* a person to not fear spiders, and it turns out to be damn difficult to even ease them out of their fears by continued exposure.
It's a fear that's built deep and strongly into the subconscious mind. It's damn near unchangeable, and frequently the best that can be done is to layer it over with filters that prevent it from bubbling up to the conscious mind.
I'm simply appalled that there are still people who think everything they do and think is completely under their control.
They must be remarkably un-self-aware, as contradictory or zen-like as that sounds.
By the age of five, most of your personality and unconcious mind is formed. These facets of your brain are deeply ingrained and extremely difficult to change as an adult. (Indeed, I tend believe that our core never changes, and we merely filter it to varying degrees of success.)
The sensation of heat from chili peppers is not a part of your personality. It's illustrative, however, of how the brain will desensitize to common sensory input.
In other words, the more you eat chili peppers, the less hot they'll seem; and the more a shy adult attends ToastMasters, the easier it is for them to speak publicly (but they'll still be wallflowers at a party).
Whether you're a person that accepts or rejects behaviour that causes bodily harm to others is a personality issue, and *that* is where the risk of desensitization comes in.
An adult desensitized to killing because they're in the front lines in a war will not necessarily find it easy to kill in cold blood back at home once the war is over. Their personality hasn't changed. Just pray they haven't adapted, layered over their personality with a kill-happy filter.
A child desensitized to killing because they've been on the front lines in a war is another matter. Their personality is in the process of being formed: they are learning how the world works and how they should work in it.
The proof is in history: countries that have internal conflict tend to stay in conflict, generation after generation. Countries that are stable tend to stay stable.
But, hey, so you disagree with me. That's fine. Feed your kids whatever violent video, TV and game shit ya want... what kind of personality are they going to form?
Garbage-in, garbage-out.
Hope you enjoy your kids as adults. They're gonna be everything you made them to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Are *you* serious?
Americans come north of the border to get treatment they can't afford to get in the USA because their health insurance system is systematically screwing them out of coverage.
Sure, it'll cost a bit more in taxes up here, but you pay bugger all for extended health, workers' comp, unemployment insurance and all that. All told, you come out about even-stevens.
To say nothing of the difference in quality of society.
The only country that may have a chance of trumping Canada is Australia, and only because they're more laid-back.
--
I mean, who *wouldn't* want to ride a train to Siberia?
:-)
Actually, thinking a bit more, it may be a good idea. Rail transport is surely cheaper than freighter. And there are a pile of Chinese folk just starting to get their shit together to become the biggest consumer market in the world. Might be nice to transport stuff to them cheaply.
On the other hand, I don't recall there being many rail lines from North America to South America, or a (productively working) rail line from Europe to India, the second-largest mass o' peeples. Or perhaps our media doesn't like reporting on it.
Except for the Aussies, the major landmasses would all be interconnected by road/rail. That'd be interesting. And what with global warming and all, maybe Siberia ain't such a bad spot to visit after all.
--
Damn straight.
How about giving away 10% of your precious post-tax income?
Spending an evening in the soup kitchen at the end of the month?
Hugging your kids?
Doing something small every day to make the world a more human place to live?
Sorry, Perhaps I'm feeling just a little cynical, as we mark the beginning of another year of ethnic cleansing, starvation, homeless children and corrupt government.
--
You know, a lot of people eat Hostess Twinkies, but that doesn't make it the best food in the world. Heck, it doesn't even make it food.
--
It looks like you've fallen victim to the media propaganda, friend.
Truth of the matter is, universal healthcare can be *less* expensive than private healthcare. For instance, Canada's healthcare system costs the country about 40% less of its national income than the US healthcare system.
The problem with private healthcare is that its interest *must* be in maximizing profits, *not* maximizing health. If everyone in the USA were to suddenly become healthy, the private healthcare industry would collapse.
It's the same problem with private healthcare insurance. Its interest must, once again, be in maximizing profit. Ergo, it *must* rid itself of coverage of expensive illnesses.
The biggest problem with the American system is, inevitably, its absolute insistence on private corporate profits over public good. The second biggest problem is the brainwashing that those corporations are doing, to ensure that the mass public doesn't think things through.
This is going to sound harsh, but *give your head a shake!* Dare to challenge your own assumptions, habits and beliefs. You just might discover that you've been shammed.
For what it's worth, the [Washington Monthly] has an eye-opening article that begins to chip away at the media/corporate bullshit.
--
It appears that for the bulk of your test subjects, it took about ten hours to achieve half the speed and twice the error rate.
With that amount of retraining, one might as well learn a new layout -- one that is optimal, which would increase speed and decrease the error rate.
From the article: "Half-QWERTY is based on the principle that the human brain controls typing movements according to the finger used, rather than the spatial position of the key."
It's well worth noting that in playing piano, the human brain *does* *not* rely on using the same finger on the key each time. A beginner can pick up a surprising amount of skill in ten hours of piano lesson.
The research would be far more meaningful if you'd included tests for optimal keyboards. Would a user pick up the skills just as quickly for a completely new layout? I'll wager that at the end of the ten hours, they'd be both faster and more accurate than the QWERT users.
I understand that the QWERT layout might appear to be easier to market. But the people choosing your keyboard are deeply self-interested: they're looking for a specialized solution to a particular problem. They're willing to put up with the hassles and time commitment to learn the new tool -- why shouldn't they be interested in an optimized solution?
--
Aha. The coffee problem. I know that one. Makes perfect sense, now. :-)
--
Out of morbid curiousity, I must ask... how did you mistype "QWERTY" as "QUERTY"?!?!
--
Here's my big question:
Why on *earth* is it a QWERT layout (looks like the Y got whacked by a function key)?!
I should think that when cutting the number of keys to a minimum, it would be imperative to put the most-used keys at the easiest-to-access level. Q and Z could be submerged three levels deep and no one is likely to much miss them... but bury "i" beneath a function-shift, and we're talking a major PITA.
It sure looks to me like the user is going to have to relearn to type, what with having to do everything with one hand -- so why not have them learn something efficient?
--
What's missing in soundcards is quality 3D sound. The best was Aureal A3D, but that's vapour now that Creative succeeded in bankrupting them.
Creative offers EAX, which is predefined reverb effects. That's fine for ambient sound, but it doesn't provide good three-dimensional sound location.
QSound, Sensura and A3D all provide some form of 3D sound, well beyond the quad-speaker setup; they are particularly effective while wearing headphones.
What they do is simulate the delay, volume and "sound wrapping"/pitch shift effects experienced in natural sound. Part of these are obvious: it takes a fraction longer for sound to reach the distant ear, and the volume will be lower; others are less obvious, caused by the bending of the soundwave as it wraps around the head -- or, at higher frequencies, is blocked by the head.
Anyway, point is that it is difficult to simulate 3D sound. A3D had it: you could swear that the rocket went within an inch of your head; or hear the click of a trap behind you. It added a lot to the game experience -- it's like the leap from Wolfenstein to Quake III. An order or two of magnitude difference in realism.
And now that A3D is stomped, I'm very doubtful that we'll be hearing good game sound any time soon. It's like going back to Wolfenstein; sure, things will still be fun... but they won't be anywhere near as sweet.
--
is what will happen to ATI and Matrox.
ATI is currently a much more profitable company. It has outsold NVidia by nearly double: ATI chipsets are spec'd in nearly every laptop and many OEM boxes. But it has recently lost Apple's contracts, and NVidia is making inroads into the laptop market.
Matrox ruled the world with its 2D cards. They were fast and, every bit as importantly, incredibly stable. If you were using specialty software, you could rely on a Matrox card to work with it. The same could not be said of *many* other cards: driver incompatibilities were assured with them.
But both ATI and Matrox appear to have dropped the ball. I don't see any truly kick-ass cards coming out of them. And while Matrox 2D is still top-of-the-heap, it's not enough any more: fast 2D can be done by anyone, and not enough people require driver stability to make that Matrox's saving grace.
What happens if either, or both, of those companies fold? We'll be stuck with the same sort of abysmal situation we have with soundcards: a complete lack of innovation or advancement during the past ten years. Creative Labs owns the soundcard market, and to this day we do not have advanced sound capabilities of any sort of respectable nature.
I'd hate to see that happen, particularly with 3D. The visual presentation is nearly as important as the aural presentation, when it comes to fooling the mind into believing in the virtual environment. If NVidia becomes near-monopolistic, we'll end up with the same mediocre performance and features as the SoundBlaster.
That'd be a crying shame.
We need competition. We might not get it.
--
Let's not forget the time, a few weeks back, when some sleazoid marketer managed to post a "hey, is this deal too good to be true" request regarding a cheapass DVD player.
Some guy was offering to stop by the actual offices of the sleazy company. I'm wondering what happened -- was it an apartment, or a real office? Did you get a picture?
--
I gotta really apologise to y'all.
I went and bought a V3-2000 videocard last weekend. Finally gave up on trying to pump Unreal through 4-year-old technology.
And I really, really should have alerted the world about my purchase.
You see, this sort of thing happens to me on a regular basis.
Call it the Purchase of Deth syndrome. The reverse Midas touch. With friends like me, what company needs competition?
Needed a sound card. Picked out Gravis as the best. Company went under a few weeks later.
Needed a video card. Picked out a Diamond Monster. Company quit the video business shortly after.
Needed a sound card upgrade. Picked Aureal A3D. It shut its doors a few months later.
Needed a new video card. Picked out a 3DFX Voodoo3-2000. Bang, within ten days, they fold.
Tell you what... I'll make up for all that.
I'm off to purchase some Microsoft products. Hah! That'll teach the bastards...
--
And your point would be...??
Like I said, it's nothing to do with Christ, and everything to do with consumer orgies.
It's not that your Muslim friends aren't celebrating Christ-Mass, but that they're not engaging in the gift-giving orgy of greed.
Commendable, but nothing to do with religion (and everything to do with good taste).
Wish my family would let me be a Grinch. I'm disgusted by the gift thing.
--
For a price of US$10 to US$500+, you can donate to one of the few global charities that puts by far most of its money toward helping people, instead of paying the executive directors outrageous salaries.
[http://heifer.org/] -- where you can donate everything from honeybees to heifers, to an impoverished third-world villages. The animals are not directly used for food: they will be used as breeding stock and the beginning of a business foundation that will ensure an increased standard of living for the community.
It's a good gig. Checkitout, and help make the world a better place.
--
Oh, don't be a dork. Christmas has bugger all to do with Christians these days, and everything to do with crass commercialism.
--
Okay, now that was quite the over-the-top rant.
Now that I'm a little calmer (though Taco still has me really pissed for putting such terribly misleading, ignorant information on a site that has so much influence), I'd like to rephrase a bit.
I've been working on the beta software for the past three years. Opera's staff has always been top-notch: they take the feedback gratefully, deal with priority issues quickly, and really have the idealistic goals of creating a fully-compliant, robust, user-tweakable browser that is truly best-of-class.
During the beta period of the adware, we beta testers hammered hell out of Opera management and programmers. We knew that adware would be a potentially flammable decision, and we made damned sure that Opera fully understood the need to separate the advertising from anything even remotely associated with personal data, including browser habit-tracking.
We also demanded that Opera provide *EVERY* possible detail of the adware implementation, so that there could be no doubt that there were no privacy problems whatsoever. We did registry searches, binary file text searches, re-wrote the "welcome to" text, grilled them to death. We even halted release while we dealt with a few niggling details in wording.
You can be damn sure that your privacy interests were fully represented.
And then to have Taco shoot off his mouth without having a fucking clue how the advertising is implemented, without bothering to spend three minutes of his precious time actually reading Opera's well-detailed and highly informative privacy statement...
...well, hell, it's just too much.
For all our efforts to make sure that there couldn't be controversy, we never accounted for the possibility that influential media personalities wouldn't actually *try* to be responsible.
So, please, don't be a Taco: before you get your panties in a know about privacy, go [read the Opera privacy statement] and educate yourself.
I'm not saying that the adware is wonderful; I personally don't like it being full-height, and I'm worried that they may serve overly distracting animations.
But there are *no* privacy flaws, and it is a *wonderful* browser. It'll take a few days to get comfortable with it, but I am confident that almost everyone will find that its features will make it faster and easier to browser the web.
--
It is bloody clear what ad software Opera uses, and it's spelled out in exhaustive detail on their webpage.
Pull your head out of your ass and go do some research before you post such stupid things.
--
Christ, there are a lot of *IGNORANT* Slashdot users out there. Most of them are making comments and passing judgement without having the first fucking clue what they're talking about, because THEY'RE TOO GODDAMNED LAZY TO DO SOME RESEARCH.
For starters, go read [their privacy statement], which is a helluva lot more upfront and detailed than anything you've seen from any other software company.
Then download and install the software. Back up your registry first, if you're really paranoid, and use InCtrl to track installed files.
Oh, *LOOK*. The advertisement is a standard-sized banner, affixed to the toolbar. It's wholly seperate from the web pages.
Now slap on some port-monitoring software.
Oh, *LOOK*. There's *NOT A FUCKING PRIVATE DETAIL* being passed to the ad server. You get a user id so that it knows what ads it's sent you, and *THAT'S IT.*
No information about your browsing habits are shared. No information about your name, address or anything else. If you *choose* to select the variety of ads served you, it naturally has to tell the server that you want tech ads, but not women's hygiene product ads.
Gettafucking clue.
I won't even begin to dwell on the idiocy that surrounds the free versus commercial software crap. Sixty employees, one product: of *course* they gotta make money from it. They don't have the opportunity to fund their browser from sales of the OS or office suite.
Have fun, moderators. Don't let your personal bias show.
--
"i have always been constantly amazed at the hoops that both the customers , and the employees are made to jump through."
I have always been amazed that any employee wouldn't tell their boss to shove it sideways up his ass, wide end first, and walk out the door.
In almost all of North America, staying with your employer is *optional.* With the exception of some of the more impoverished rural areas, you can get a job within *days* if you get off your ass and get serious about pounding pavement.
The call center people are people who *choose* to suffer abusive employment situations, possibly because they have masochistic tendancies.
Likewise for customers. You can *choose* to find another provider. There are two theatres in my town: one of them fucked up the film the other day and the audience spent over a half-hour waiting for it to start again. When I went out to hunt up some complimentary popcorn, I was rudely told to shove off.
Well, I have. I'll never set foot in the local Famous Players theatre again. Period. I can *choose* to let them abuse me... or I can *choose* to have some self-respect and seek my media fix elsewhere.
The customer -- and employee -- reign supreme these days. Take advantage of it.
--
It's tough to get rid of the fat kid playing Pokemon (or Nintendo or DnD) because it's more true than not.
Over the past fifteen years, the number of obese children aged 7 to 13 has *doubled.* This is as school physical education programs have been been slashed, simultaneous with the rise of couch-potato entertainment.
Kids that get off their asses and go play sports, walk the malls or do other out-of-the-house activities tend to be healthy.
Kids that play video games, card games or role-playing games a lot tend to be unhealthy.
And it's not just fat: we're talking *obese.* We're talking about an atrociously high risk of heart disease, and a lifespan that is altogether too likely to be twenty years shorter than for healthy people.
The images are accurate. The exceptions -- probably you, for instance -- are not representative of the general population of game-playing kids.
Feel free to type "fat kids increase video" into Google. Learn about the problem. And demand better of yourself for your children: feed them well and keep them active.
--
That's because the business card CDs are bloody expensive.
At [this outlet] they're $1.25 to $2 a pop.
Ouch.
--
Didn't Dan just buy Iridium?
Must be a real bummer to spend a pile o' money on a bunch of fire-sale satellites, figuring that, hey, they're basically unused, gotta be a good deal.
Only to have the wheels fall off as soon as they get outta the parking lot.
I think he outta go back to the store and demand a full refund.
--
There is nothing "simple" about it.
For instance, there are *no* sure cures for arachnaphobia. You can't "teach* a person to not fear spiders, and it turns out to be damn difficult to even ease them out of their fears by continued exposure.
It's a fear that's built deep and strongly into the subconscious mind. It's damn near unchangeable, and frequently the best that can be done is to layer it over with filters that prevent it from bubbling up to the conscious mind.
I'm simply appalled that there are still people who think everything they do and think is completely under their control.
They must be remarkably un-self-aware, as contradictory or zen-like as that sounds.
--
It's not contradictory.
By the age of five, most of your personality and unconcious mind is formed. These facets of your brain are deeply ingrained and extremely difficult to change as an adult. (Indeed, I tend believe that our core never changes, and we merely filter it to varying degrees of success.)
The sensation of heat from chili peppers is not a part of your personality. It's illustrative, however, of how the brain will desensitize to common sensory input.
In other words, the more you eat chili peppers, the less hot they'll seem; and the more a shy adult attends ToastMasters, the easier it is for them to speak publicly (but they'll still be wallflowers at a party).
Whether you're a person that accepts or rejects behaviour that causes bodily harm to others is a personality issue, and *that* is where the risk of desensitization comes in.
An adult desensitized to killing because they're in the front lines in a war will not necessarily find it easy to kill in cold blood back at home once the war is over. Their personality hasn't changed. Just pray they haven't adapted, layered over their personality with a kill-happy filter.
A child desensitized to killing because they've been on the front lines in a war is another matter. Their personality is in the process of being formed: they are learning how the world works and how they should work in it.
The proof is in history: countries that have internal conflict tend to stay in conflict, generation after generation. Countries that are stable tend to stay stable.
But, hey, so you disagree with me. That's fine. Feed your kids whatever violent video, TV and game shit ya want... what kind of personality are they going to form?
Garbage-in, garbage-out.
Hope you enjoy your kids as adults. They're gonna be everything you made them to be.
--