This also bears on inheritance. Someone with a music collection dies and their heirs cannot inherit that music collection because when Big Media gets ahold of the laws like this, their heirs have no legal right to the media
At one place I worked, I was in the IT department. One of the guys there managed the company servers (all running Redhat wherever possible), his name was Rob. Rob needed to check something to do with the software the company was producing so he cobbled together a rough tool (programmed in perl I *think*) that let him do the stuff he needed to do. He was not a developer as I said, he wrote it to do what he needed and didn't worry about anything other than that. I think he essentially learned to program in perl (or whatever it was) on this little program.
One day someone was down from Sales to ask Rob about something, and he opened up this tool to check something for the Sales guy.
Three days later the Sales guy phoned down to Rob and asked him about that little tool he had seen him use. Was it easy to use, was the documentation any good (there was none) and what was it called exactly (it had no name). Rob asked why he needed to know those things, and the Sales guy said "Oh well we just got a big contract signed for the company software but I had to promise we would include that tool you showed me a few days ago to cinch the deal, so I just wanted more details so I could provide the customers with them".
The result: several folks in development had to drop everything and then after grilling Rob on what his tool was used for, code up a whole new version of it in a more polished manner so it would be ready for the customer's use. The Art department had to do emergency design work, a half dozen people worked overtime etc, rewriting the tool in C++, we had to write a short but complete user's guide etc. In short it cost the company a lot of man hours and money to create this new management tool and only because the Sales guy would say yes to anything that clinched the deal - and without checking on anything first, like say, does the product in fact exist.
Many non-developers do not get it and will never get it with regards to programming/development.
Oh and while I think of it, I recall sitting talking to the Boss of a local small development company/ISP in my home town. He got a call from a potential customer asking if they had software that did X. He said sure we do and can the guy hold for a sec. he put him on hold for a minute, while he and the head developer thought up a good name for the product, then got back on the line and told the guy the name and proceeded to answer questions from the customer on the features. Amazingly it had all of the customer's required features. He took notes for the requirements as he talked to the guy, then took his CC info and processed the sale (I think $1800 but I can't recall exactly). Then he hung up. Then they discussed writing it. All the while I was sitting as witness to this process and I said to him "Isn't the guy gonna want his software right away?" and he said oh we can whip something up in a few days and ship it out, it should work well enough for us to produce the "upgrade version" that really works properly. He then started working on the label art.
There are some shoddy people out there in the computer world I can tell ya. I decided not to see if I could work there.
I recall reading about someone being brought in to replace the (sole) developer for a key piece of business software because the previous one had been fired. (Caveat: I have no idea if this is true and can't recall where I encountered it).
They opened up the source code to give it a check and discovered that the previous developer had used variable names that varied mostly in the number of letters used. So you had variables named like: $m, $mm, $mmm, $mmmm, $mmmmm, $mmmmmm, $sa, $saa, $saaa, $saaaa
and so on. Not a single variable that appeared in the software had an even vaguely informative name. There were no apparent notes to help translate it at all (the previous developer likely left with them).
Massive job security I suppose but I think I would want to hunt them down and murder them myself.
That implies that all of those people care to spend the time meeting - and they often don't - and also know or are willing to listen to a detailed explanation of what is involved - and they aren't or are not capable of it. Everyone knows the problems, no one admits to their part of the problem. Also management tends towards Seagull management - arrive suddenly, shit all over everything until everyone is worked up, then leave. Rinse, repeat until the project is done or cancelled. Honestly I have been through this sort of cycle a few times, and despite the best efforts of the developer side to get management to agree to the design document as defined, the end result is featuritis, people sticking their nose in who shouldn't be able to but who are higher up in the food chain than you (or anyone else in development) is etc. Half of the art of software design is dealing with people who don't understand it, or care to learn.
Then in school they should be recreating the actual real world experience, you know: * a representative from the "Business" comes to you with a vague concept of what they want, mostly consisting of "Something like X" but more like "Y" with some of the features of "Z" (3 completely different things that have no apparent relationship to each other). After a few days of meetings you determine that what the person wants is based more on the colors used and the layout being pretty to them and not at all on the features or functionality. * You then seek out a group of various people who actually know what might be required, and grill them to try to get an idea of the features and functionality required. From this you create an initial design document. * You run the design document that describes what you think are the features and functionality past the people above who all agree you are on the right track. You add more details and they all agree its perfect. Mostly they don't actually understand what you are talking about but they nod their heads sagely and agree because they don't want to look incompetent. * You begin coding (or possibly get together with a team and fight over things for a few days/weeks/months) and get a prototype built. You show it to those you have spoken with and again its on the right track. * You code up the first version. You reveal it to people and its "great". * Then the people start filtering in with design "suggestions" that mean massive changes to what has been written and done, possibly shifting the entire project in a different direction. These conflict with each other and trying to find the middle ground occupies as much of your time as actually trying to write anything. * The marketing people come into the picture and it turns out that *they* are the ones that really have the authority to make the design decisions, not the people who you originally talked to, but as an added bonus the marketing people don't have the slightest clue about the required features or functionality - just what they think they can sell to customers. Getting their salable features shoe-horned into the program becomes your top priority now. * The program also has to look "pretty" so the art department enters the picture and they demand massive changes so that the layout is much nicer and easier for them to do, minimizing their workload as much as possible because they are completely overworked and under-budgeted. You meet with artists in rooms that are completely dark and stare at photoshop images that are renderings of what they see the program looking like. It bears no resemblance to what you have been working on and they have made massive changes to everything renaming all the menu entries etc. It is however pretty, or rather the 3 different versions of it are pretty, and you have to wait until marketing determines which one is the best. * now you are way off schedule because of all the monkeys who are making changes based on whats the most important thing from their perspective. * Eventually its all nailed down and you hurriedly code the new first version up as fast as possible because of pressure from above to be "done this thing already". * At the last moment when its done, it gets cancelled to be replaced by some other project which is higher priority, or they announce it must be entirely recoded in a different language/script.
Shove that student into this environment. Get people to play the various roles that are about as knowledgeable as people you will encounter in the corporate environment - which is to say find the most qualified idiots you can and put them in the roles.
I am as stunned as you are. How many other localized/.s are there I wonder? Is there a slashdot in Russia? Germany? I think its neat. Sadly I don't read any Japanese at all.
Just a note: where I live there are *almost* no public bathrooms. McDonalds only allows some people into theirs and then only if you spend money, other places lock the bathrooms between 9pm and 7am (ignoring the laws that say they cannot do this, but no repercussions so far). There are almost no options available and many are miles apart. I don't approve when people pee into the bushes, but I do understand it. If you don't own a car - or if you are drunk and responsibly not driving it - you are SOL in 90% of the city. Going behind a bush to pee should *not* get you registered as a sex offender, that is absolutely ridiculous. Now, waving it around in full view of the public, sure no problem.
Ah very good criticism of Esperanto, thanks for that. Note that I didn't suggest it because I thought it was a terribly good language but simply because its an easy to learn second language:)
There is no actual "Justice" available. Its for sale these days, all it takes is enough litigation to break the opposition, or the threat of it, and your principles, justice, honor etc, is meaningless. So we have gone from "Justice is Blind" to "Justice is a Whore"... This is why corporations are so evil I think, it enables people with an agenda to wield bigger bank accounts with zero risk to themselves and use those to bludgeon free speech and political opinion to death.
Have you not played any space empire games? Its just because the power-that-be have been spending points on the Communications and Electronic Engineering lines of research and not enough points on Basic Drive Systems. Once they realize their mistake they will develop new drives in short order. Once we finish the next box or two we can move on to Interstellar Drives or Jump Drives no problem.
Useful? Probably not, but you are already speaking the most useful language for tech related discussions and the effective Lingua Franca for the modern world. I only suggest Esperanto because it is very logical, and thus very easy to learn (I think it has 16 rules of grammar, and the spelling is *perfectly* regular). There is a fair amount of material to read much of it available on the web. its based on a variety of European languages and has vocabulary that is similar to a lot of them. It uses the Latin alphabet which means you don't need to spend any additional time learning an orthography. There are small pockets of Esperanto speakers in almost every country in the world, so if you travel at the least you should be able to find someone who can help you - although again we are back to English which is becoming the default 2nd language for anyone who doesn't speak it as their first language.
My other suggestions would be Spanish, French, German and Russian. Mandarin would be good to learn and no doubt useful - but the learning curve is so steep its a cliff and learning the writing system will be a royal pain at the least.
Shame on you for leaving out Icelandic - the girls are definitely hot there too:P Plus the language is somewhat like hearing Old English. its not an easy one to learn though.
Yes given that you need to pay for Cable up here in Canada, then pay for specialty channels etc, someone in another forum post worked out that watching Game of Thrones would cost you something around $1000 Cdn. I can't recall the math but its hardly impossible. I don't have cable at the moment and haven't had it for most of the past 3 years - except when the Olympics are on or something similar - because the bulk of the programming is complete shit and not worth watching, and the few shows that I do consider worth watching are only available if I subscribe to specialty channel packages that are arranged to maximize Shaw's profits (although Telus is no better), not to be convenient to the customer. TV is simply not worth bothering with. Oh and of course I now no longer have to endure ads. If I need to watch something, there are DvDs. In the end its far cheaper to download the content, or go buy the content, or take it out of the library than it is to sign up for cable TV. Netflix and the iOS BBC app are a godsend for good programs. This is the way to go for the future IMHO.
The content producers are pricing themselves out of the market and making consuming their content so difficult that potential customers chose other means - sometimes illegally downloading that content. If it was priced effectively and conveniently a *lot* of those users would choose to pay for it. Instead they present as many obstacles to viewing their content as I can conceive possible. Bad marketing strategy is bad and doomed to fail.
Well far be it from me to advocate murder:P BUT, if some of the Westboro people are ever slaughtered out of hand by someone who has had enough of their putrid hate and evil actions - I suggest that we need to combine the situation with the suggestion someone made above about busing 10k gay activists to the Westboro funeral to do some protesting in turn. Give them a taste of their own medicine.
No perhaps they won't go *directly* to beating up workers who complain, but I can see: * less attention spent on worker safety, updating fire suppression systems, ensuring First Aid personnel are available, equipped etc. That costs money for no visible gain, easy to reduce spending on. * longer hours demanded of workers, no overtime paid, lower wages - you want to keep your job? Shut up and suck it up. There are long lines of people waiting for your position. * Less vacation time, possibly a culture of insisting people not take a vaction but take cash in its place - with the cash amount being reduced over time. * no more payments from the company into retirement plans/pensions, or at least reduced rates before its eliminated. * On the spot firing for anyone who complains. Don't like it? talk to our lawyers, we have the cash, you don't. * Gonna try striking?, the management will hire Blackwater or their like to ensure you let strikebreakers through, and they won't worry about how rough they are. * No one to call out management when they do any sort of abuse of employees.
Not all companies are going to behave badly lacking workers having some organized way to resist changes, but the bigger the company the better the chance they will. Mix in a healthy dose of corruption in government and law enforcement for added problems.
Look at employment conditions in poor third world countries if you want the model for the workplace environment when *no one* is enforcing the rules. Unions at least can speak for their workers in some instances to help push the rights of all workers - even none union ones (minimum wage, 40 hour work week, pensions, overtime - all the result of union actions in the past).
The only way to get a fair and reasonable deal between workers and employers is for both sides to have people who can hash out an agreement. If the unions get too powerful then its bad for business, if there are no unions, then the corporations are too powerful and its bad for their employees. Its pretty simple. A lot of the basic concepts concerning the workplace, worker's rights and expectations etc that we hold as obvious have been bought with the blood of unionized workers who fought for those rights and died in the hundreds in the last century. I have only been part of one union, and personally speaking they were pretty useless, but I fully support the right of employees to unionize and defend their rights.
Do I think that perhaps the way in which unions are run needs some supervising to avoid abuses, sure, that might be the case, but we *need* unions more than ever these days, despite what all the right-wing nutjobs will post here in response.
Yep get rid of all the unions and we can go back to the good old days of companies hiring "Strike-Breakers" to beat people to death because they don't want to work for slave labor wages. That'll be fun./sarcasm off
Unions served to get some essential rights for workers from the rich industrial barons who didn't give a fuck about those who slaved for them. For a while they served very well.
Now the rich and powerful are destroying the unions in the name of increased profits and will again fuck their employees. Its an Employers world right now, and they get to make the rules - unless you are in high demand in a few rare industries, government or management. The loss of union power and collective bargaining will NOT be good for North America. I guess this is what they mean by "trickle down economics" eh?
I forsee the rise of the welfare state - without any welfare. Except of course, someone has to *buy* the stuff our robot overlords are producing on behalf of the rich elite who own us. So we have to be given enough money to be consumers, but the rest can continue to go to the 1%
As someone who has been at least nominally Wiccan for the past 30 years, I suspect your only exposure to Wiccans has been the teenage angst-filled dressed like a goth crowd. There are others out there who don't fill the stereotype who are otherwise normal people. We blend in.
Its "Monotheism" that is evil specifically. It teaches people that they have the *one* truth, and that anyone else must be wrong. Polytheists are generally more accepting I find.
Thats whats been wrong all along - its been bugging me. We in the West have been working on "Survival of the Fattest", having missed the typo. Sheesh. Fittest, who woulda thunk it:P
We had to switch to self-service everything because those shitty jobs you describe started getting paid a reasonable amount of money, and many good jobs were unionized and the unions spoke up for their workers to get them decent working conditions, a pension to retire on etc. Because paying for the labour of things cost more (as it should have) the slave-labour jobs disappeared and we did more ourselves to ensure that the cost of the things we paid for were kept down. If you want to be treated like Royalty you still can almost anywhere - it just costs a lot. The problem is that all a long the rich kept getting richer and have gradually been paying less and less taxes. Now they have engineered the destruction of many of the unions, so they can pay shit wages again and continue to get rich on the backs (and bodies) of the workers who make it possible for them. Corporations now rule the world in effect. Oh sure, they allow us the illusion of government and democratic elections but they control the strings behind the puppets we elect, and the government works to their benefit before ours mostly. Its not all cut and dried, not all back and white of course, its many subtle shades of grey too, but the welfare of the average person is not the prime motivation for the elected governments of the age. If it ever was it certainly isnt now. Increased reliance on automation is going to put even more people out of work. If they can automate the industrial side, whats to say they can't automate the service side too? Then where do the ex-members of the middle class go to find work?
Well there is the little fact that the Apple products are easier to use, generally more reliable, very user friendly, have a great UI design, and are of course extremely stylish. If you are willing to settle for things which okay to use, mostly reliable, somewhat user friendly, have an ok UI design with very little thought put into it by comparison, and can be considered stylish as long as you haven't seen the comparable apple product, then yeah there seems to be only the 1 leading company. I have an iMac desktop, it dualboots into OS/X and Win7. There is no comparison between the two operating systems in my opinion. OS/X wins pretty much hands down on every category except "Runs the games I play" which Win7 wins hands down, and is thus installed on my box. If OS/X ever becomes the popular OS to develop for that MS Windows is at the moment, I will never look at Windows again. I have owned an iPod Touch, again very nice kit. Not at all comparable to anything else. I have a Blackberry Playbook, my wife has an iPad. She has apps available to do all sorts of fascinating things, many of them free. There's probably half a million of the suckers available. The Playbook has apps, none of which do anything remotely interesting to me, and they number at least a hundred or so. As a piece of kit, the Playbook is great, but the support and the apps available are just plain sad. I have a Samsung Galaxy S smart phone. Its not bad unless you have played with an iPhone of course. The Samsung works but the UI is poorly thought out IMHO. I am constantly frustrated by strange choices in the way it works. I seldom feel that way about Apple products.
I am not a fanboy, but I am not blind either. Apple's products work very well, and when compared to their competition, the price really isn't all that out to lunch despite the naysayers. My iMac desktop is 5+ years old, and the only thing I have needed to fix on it so far is the hard drive which I had replaced. I can't think of a single one of the many PCs I owned in the past that lasted 5 years without having had to have multiple things replaced and/or repaired.
WW2 - Finished by the USSR, with US/UK/Commonwealth assistance.
And you are ignoring the horde of instances where the US meddled in other countries affairs to suit various corporate interests and/or invaded those countries (most of Central America for instance).
Or lose the horde of Batshit-Crazy (tm) Born-Again Christians who think that only by supporting Israel at all costs and ensuring that the Middle East is a continuous battlefield can they ensure the 2nd Coming of Jesus and the Apocalypse they are all dying to have happen - and get some sane, intelligent, and non-religious politicians who will try to do things for the electorate, rather than do things for themselves. I know thats asking the moon of course. I can only think of a handful of politicians I believe implicitly when they open their mouths. The rest I believe have agendas, and I am probably wrong about those I trust:(
Slashdot Mirror
This also bears on inheritance. Someone with a music collection dies and their heirs cannot inherit that music collection because when Big Media gets ahold of the laws like this, their heirs have no legal right to the media
At one place I worked, I was in the IT department. One of the guys there managed the company servers (all running Redhat wherever possible), his name was Rob.
Rob needed to check something to do with the software the company was producing so he cobbled together a rough tool (programmed in perl I *think*) that let him do the stuff he needed to do. He was not a developer as I said, he wrote it to do what he needed and didn't worry about anything other than that. I think he essentially learned to program in perl (or whatever it was) on this little program.
One day someone was down from Sales to ask Rob about something, and he opened up this tool to check something for the Sales guy.
Three days later the Sales guy phoned down to Rob and asked him about that little tool he had seen him use. Was it easy to use, was the documentation any good (there was none) and what was it called exactly (it had no name). Rob asked why he needed to know those things, and the Sales guy said "Oh well we just got a big contract signed for the company software but I had to promise we would include that tool you showed me a few days ago to cinch the deal, so I just wanted more details so I could provide the customers with them".
The result: several folks in development had to drop everything and then after grilling Rob on what his tool was used for, code up a whole new version of it in a more polished manner so it would be ready for the customer's use. The Art department had to do emergency design work, a half dozen people worked overtime etc, rewriting the tool in C++, we had to write a short but complete user's guide etc. In short it cost the company a lot of man hours and money to create this new management tool and only because the Sales guy would say yes to anything that clinched the deal - and without checking on anything first, like say, does the product in fact exist.
Many non-developers do not get it and will never get it with regards to programming/development.
Oh and while I think of it, I recall sitting talking to the Boss of a local small development company/ISP in my home town. He got a call from a potential customer asking if they had software that did X. He said sure we do and can the guy hold for a sec. he put him on hold for a minute, while he and the head developer thought up a good name for the product, then got back on the line and told the guy the name and proceeded to answer questions from the customer on the features. Amazingly it had all of the customer's required features. He took notes for the requirements as he talked to the guy, then took his CC info and processed the sale (I think $1800 but I can't recall exactly). Then he hung up.
Then they discussed writing it. All the while I was sitting as witness to this process and I said to him "Isn't the guy gonna want his software right away?" and he said oh we can whip something up in a few days and ship it out, it should work well enough for us to produce the "upgrade version" that really works properly. He then started working on the label art.
There are some shoddy people out there in the computer world I can tell ya. I decided not to see if I could work there.
I recall reading about someone being brought in to replace the (sole) developer for a key piece of business software because the previous one had been fired. (Caveat: I have no idea if this is true and can't recall where I encountered it).
They opened up the source code to give it a check and discovered that the previous developer had used variable names that varied mostly in the number of letters used. So you had variables named like:
$m, $mm, $mmm, $mmmm, $mmmmm, $mmmmmm,
$sa, $saa, $saaa, $saaaa
and so on. Not a single variable that appeared in the software had an even vaguely informative name. There were no apparent notes to help translate it at all (the previous developer likely left with them).
Massive job security I suppose but I think I would want to hunt them down and murder them myself.
That implies that all of those people care to spend the time meeting - and they often don't - and also know or are willing to listen to a detailed explanation of what is involved - and they aren't or are not capable of it. Everyone knows the problems, no one admits to their part of the problem.
Also management tends towards Seagull management - arrive suddenly, shit all over everything until everyone is worked up, then leave. Rinse, repeat until the project is done or cancelled.
Honestly I have been through this sort of cycle a few times, and despite the best efforts of the developer side to get management to agree to the design document as defined, the end result is featuritis, people sticking their nose in who shouldn't be able to but who are higher up in the food chain than you (or anyone else in development) is etc.
Half of the art of software design is dealing with people who don't understand it, or care to learn.
Then in school they should be recreating the actual real world experience, you know:
* a representative from the "Business" comes to you with a vague concept of what they want, mostly consisting of "Something like X" but more like "Y" with some of the features of "Z" (3 completely different things that have no apparent relationship to each other). After a few days of meetings you determine that what the person wants is based more on the colors used and the layout being pretty to them and not at all on the features or functionality.
* You then seek out a group of various people who actually know what might be required, and grill them to try to get an idea of the features and functionality required. From this you create an initial design document.
* You run the design document that describes what you think are the features and functionality past the people above who all agree you are on the right track. You add more details and they all agree its perfect. Mostly they don't actually understand what you are talking about but they nod their heads sagely and agree because they don't want to look incompetent.
* You begin coding (or possibly get together with a team and fight over things for a few days/weeks/months) and get a prototype built. You show it to those you have spoken with and again its on the right track.
* You code up the first version. You reveal it to people and its "great".
* Then the people start filtering in with design "suggestions" that mean massive changes to what has been written and done, possibly shifting the entire project in a different direction. These conflict with each other and trying to find the middle ground occupies as much of your time as actually trying to write anything.
* The marketing people come into the picture and it turns out that *they* are the ones that really have the authority to make the design decisions, not the people who you originally talked to, but as an added bonus the marketing people don't have the slightest clue about the required features or functionality - just what they think they can sell to customers. Getting their salable features shoe-horned into the program becomes your top priority now.
* The program also has to look "pretty" so the art department enters the picture and they demand massive changes so that the layout is much nicer and easier for them to do, minimizing their workload as much as possible because they are completely overworked and under-budgeted. You meet with artists in rooms that are completely dark and stare at photoshop images that are renderings of what they see the program looking like. It bears no resemblance to what you have been working on and they have made massive changes to everything renaming all the menu entries etc. It is however pretty, or rather the 3 different versions of it are pretty, and you have to wait until marketing determines which one is the best.
* now you are way off schedule because of all the monkeys who are making changes based on whats the most important thing from their perspective.
* Eventually its all nailed down and you hurriedly code the new first version up as fast as possible because of pressure from above to be "done this thing already".
* At the last moment when its done, it gets cancelled to be replaced by some other project which is higher priority, or they announce it must be entirely recoded in a different language/script.
Shove that student into this environment. Get people to play the various roles that are about as knowledgeable as people you will encounter in the corporate environment - which is to say find the most qualified idiots you can and put them in the roles.
I am as stunned as you are. How many other localized /.s are there I wonder? Is there a slashdot in Russia? Germany? I think its neat.
Sadly I don't read any Japanese at all.
Just a note: where I live there are *almost* no public bathrooms. McDonalds only allows some people into theirs and then only if you spend money, other places lock the bathrooms between 9pm and 7am (ignoring the laws that say they cannot do this, but no repercussions so far). There are almost no options available and many are miles apart.
I don't approve when people pee into the bushes, but I do understand it. If you don't own a car - or if you are drunk and responsibly not driving it - you are SOL in 90% of the city.
Going behind a bush to pee should *not* get you registered as a sex offender, that is absolutely ridiculous. Now, waving it around in full view of the public, sure no problem.
Ah very good criticism of Esperanto, thanks for that. Note that I didn't suggest it because I thought it was a terribly good language but simply because its an easy to learn second language :)
There is no actual "Justice" available. Its for sale these days, all it takes is enough litigation to break the opposition, or the threat of it, and your principles, justice, honor etc, is meaningless. So we have gone from "Justice is Blind" to "Justice is a Whore"...
This is why corporations are so evil I think, it enables people with an agenda to wield bigger bank accounts with zero risk to themselves and use those to bludgeon free speech and political opinion to death.
Have you not played any space empire games? Its just because the power-that-be have been spending points on the Communications and Electronic Engineering lines of research and not enough points on Basic Drive Systems. Once they realize their mistake they will develop new drives in short order. Once we finish the next box or two we can move on to Interstellar Drives or Jump Drives no problem.
Useful? Probably not, but you are already speaking the most useful language for tech related discussions and the effective Lingua Franca for the modern world.
I only suggest Esperanto because it is very logical, and thus very easy to learn (I think it has 16 rules of grammar, and the spelling is *perfectly* regular). There is a fair amount of material to read much of it available on the web. its based on a variety of European languages and has vocabulary that is similar to a lot of them. It uses the Latin alphabet which means you don't need to spend any additional time learning an orthography. There are small pockets of Esperanto speakers in almost every country in the world, so if you travel at the least you should be able to find someone who can help you - although again we are back to English which is becoming the default 2nd language for anyone who doesn't speak it as their first language.
My other suggestions would be Spanish, French, German and Russian. Mandarin would be good to learn and no doubt useful - but the learning curve is so steep its a cliff and learning the writing system will be a royal pain at the least.
Shame on you for leaving out Icelandic - the girls are definitely hot there too :P
Plus the language is somewhat like hearing Old English. its not an easy one to learn though.
Yes given that you need to pay for Cable up here in Canada, then pay for specialty channels etc, someone in another forum post worked out that watching Game of Thrones would cost you something around $1000 Cdn. I can't recall the math but its hardly impossible.
I don't have cable at the moment and haven't had it for most of the past 3 years - except when the Olympics are on or something similar - because the bulk of the programming is complete shit and not worth watching, and the few shows that I do consider worth watching are only available if I subscribe to specialty channel packages that are arranged to maximize Shaw's profits (although Telus is no better), not to be convenient to the customer. TV is simply not worth bothering with. Oh and of course I now no longer have to endure ads.
If I need to watch something, there are DvDs. In the end its far cheaper to download the content, or go buy the content, or take it out of the library than it is to sign up for cable TV.
Netflix and the iOS BBC app are a godsend for good programs. This is the way to go for the future IMHO.
The content producers are pricing themselves out of the market and making consuming their content so difficult that potential customers chose other means - sometimes illegally downloading that content. If it was priced effectively and conveniently a *lot* of those users would choose to pay for it. Instead they present as many obstacles to viewing their content as I can conceive possible.
Bad marketing strategy is bad and doomed to fail.
Well far be it from me to advocate murder :P
BUT, if some of the Westboro people are ever slaughtered out of hand by someone who has had enough of their putrid hate and evil actions - I suggest that we need to combine the situation with the suggestion someone made above about busing 10k gay activists to the Westboro funeral to do some protesting in turn. Give them a taste of their own medicine.
No perhaps they won't go *directly* to beating up workers who complain, but I can see:
* less attention spent on worker safety, updating fire suppression systems, ensuring First Aid personnel are available, equipped etc. That costs money for no visible gain, easy to reduce spending on.
* longer hours demanded of workers, no overtime paid, lower wages - you want to keep your job? Shut up and suck it up. There are long lines of people waiting for your position.
* Less vacation time, possibly a culture of insisting people not take a vaction but take cash in its place - with the cash amount being reduced over time.
* no more payments from the company into retirement plans/pensions, or at least reduced rates before its eliminated.
* On the spot firing for anyone who complains. Don't like it? talk to our lawyers, we have the cash, you don't.
* Gonna try striking?, the management will hire Blackwater or their like to ensure you let strikebreakers through, and they won't worry about how rough they are.
* No one to call out management when they do any sort of abuse of employees.
Not all companies are going to behave badly lacking workers having some organized way to resist changes, but the bigger the company the better the chance they will. Mix in a healthy dose of corruption in government and law enforcement for added problems.
Look at employment conditions in poor third world countries if you want the model for the workplace environment when *no one* is enforcing the rules. Unions at least can speak for their workers in some instances to help push the rights of all workers - even none union ones (minimum wage, 40 hour work week, pensions, overtime - all the result of union actions in the past).
The only way to get a fair and reasonable deal between workers and employers is for both sides to have people who can hash out an agreement. If the unions get too powerful then its bad for business, if there are no unions, then the corporations are too powerful and its bad for their employees. Its pretty simple.
A lot of the basic concepts concerning the workplace, worker's rights and expectations etc that we hold as obvious have been bought with the blood of unionized workers who fought for those rights and died in the hundreds in the last century.
I have only been part of one union, and personally speaking they were pretty useless, but I fully support the right of employees to unionize and defend their rights.
Do I think that perhaps the way in which unions are run needs some supervising to avoid abuses, sure, that might be the case, but we *need* unions more than ever these days, despite what all the right-wing nutjobs will post here in response.
Yep get rid of all the unions and we can go back to the good old days of companies hiring "Strike-Breakers" to beat people to death because they don't want to work for slave labor wages. That'll be fun. /sarcasm off
Unions served to get some essential rights for workers from the rich industrial barons who didn't give a fuck about those who slaved for them. For a while they served very well.
Now the rich and powerful are destroying the unions in the name of increased profits and will again fuck their employees. Its an Employers world right now, and they get to make the rules - unless you are in high demand in a few rare industries, government or management. The loss of union power and collective bargaining will NOT be good for North America. I guess this is what they mean by "trickle down economics" eh?
I forsee the rise of the welfare state - without any welfare. Except of course, someone has to *buy* the stuff our robot overlords are producing on behalf of the rich elite who own us. So we have to be given enough money to be consumers, but the rest can continue to go to the 1%
As someone who has been at least nominally Wiccan for the past 30 years, I suspect your only exposure to Wiccans has been the teenage angst-filled dressed like a goth crowd. There are others out there who don't fill the stereotype who are otherwise normal people. We blend in.
Just sayin'
Its "Monotheism" that is evil specifically. It teaches people that they have the *one* truth, and that anyone else must be wrong. Polytheists are generally more accepting I find.
Thats whats been wrong all along - its been bugging me. We in the West have been working on "Survival of the Fattest", having missed the typo. Sheesh. :P
Fittest, who woulda thunk it
We had to switch to self-service everything because those shitty jobs you describe started getting paid a reasonable amount of money, and many good jobs were unionized and the unions spoke up for their workers to get them decent working conditions, a pension to retire on etc. Because paying for the labour of things cost more (as it should have) the slave-labour jobs disappeared and we did more ourselves to ensure that the cost of the things we paid for were kept down. If you want to be treated like Royalty you still can almost anywhere - it just costs a lot.
The problem is that all a long the rich kept getting richer and have gradually been paying less and less taxes. Now they have engineered the destruction of many of the unions, so they can pay shit wages again and continue to get rich on the backs (and bodies) of the workers who make it possible for them.
Corporations now rule the world in effect. Oh sure, they allow us the illusion of government and democratic elections but they control the strings behind the puppets we elect, and the government works to their benefit before ours mostly. Its not all cut and dried, not all back and white of course, its many subtle shades of grey too, but the welfare of the average person is not the prime motivation for the elected governments of the age. If it ever was it certainly isnt now.
Increased reliance on automation is going to put even more people out of work. If they can automate the industrial side, whats to say they can't automate the service side too? Then where do the ex-members of the middle class go to find work?
Well there is the little fact that the Apple products are easier to use, generally more reliable, very user friendly, have a great UI design, and are of course extremely stylish. If you are willing to settle for things which okay to use, mostly reliable, somewhat user friendly, have an ok UI design with very little thought put into it by comparison, and can be considered stylish as long as you haven't seen the comparable apple product, then yeah there seems to be only the 1 leading company.
I have an iMac desktop, it dualboots into OS/X and Win7. There is no comparison between the two operating systems in my opinion. OS/X wins pretty much hands down on every category except "Runs the games I play" which Win7 wins hands down, and is thus installed on my box. If OS/X ever becomes the popular OS to develop for that MS Windows is at the moment, I will never look at Windows again.
I have owned an iPod Touch, again very nice kit. Not at all comparable to anything else.
I have a Blackberry Playbook, my wife has an iPad. She has apps available to do all sorts of fascinating things, many of them free. There's probably half a million of the suckers available. The Playbook has apps, none of which do anything remotely interesting to me, and they number at least a hundred or so. As a piece of kit, the Playbook is great, but the support and the apps available are just plain sad.
I have a Samsung Galaxy S smart phone. Its not bad unless you have played with an iPhone of course. The Samsung works but the UI is poorly thought out IMHO. I am constantly frustrated by strange choices in the way it works. I seldom feel that way about Apple products.
I am not a fanboy, but I am not blind either. Apple's products work very well, and when compared to their competition, the price really isn't all that out to lunch despite the naysayers. My iMac desktop is 5+ years old, and the only thing I have needed to fix on it so far is the hard drive which I had replaced. I can't think of a single one of the many PCs I owned in the past that lasted 5 years without having had to have multiple things replaced and/or repaired.
I would modify that to read:
WW2 - Finished by the USSR, with US/UK/Commonwealth assistance.
And you are ignoring the horde of instances where the US meddled in other countries affairs to suit various corporate interests and/or invaded those countries (most of Central America for instance).
Or lose the horde of Batshit-Crazy (tm) Born-Again Christians who think that only by supporting Israel at all costs and ensuring that the Middle East is a continuous battlefield can they ensure the 2nd Coming of Jesus and the Apocalypse they are all dying to have happen - and get some sane, intelligent, and non-religious politicians who will try to do things for the electorate, rather than do things for themselves. I know thats asking the moon of course. I can only think of a handful of politicians I believe implicitly when they open their mouths. The rest I believe have agendas, and I am probably wrong about those I trust :(