Knowing the likelihood of MIT students to be in boiler rooms and other such locations, it would not surprise me in the least to find that you can, in fact, pick up a wireless internet connection there. Whether or not that particular WAP was involved is another question.
Unfortunately, PayPal is not big on "outlining the ramifications" of just about anything unless you go through and read their entire support site. My sister and I have both been burned by dishonest eBayers (a seller for me, a buyer for her). Both times, PayPal refused to get our money back due to rules that exist, but that you wouldn't find in the normal course of setting up and using an account unless you dug deep. In my case, it probably wasn't even in the terms of agreement I clicked through when I first set up the account, because I set up my account before they offered *any* buyer protection. Of course, when they started offering it they showed me lots of ads telling me it existed, so I expected to have it - but the limitations were well-hidden.
Basically, they always have a rule somewhere saying exactly why they can't get you your money back - but damned if you'll ever see them until you have a problem and go looking for them.
I actually just emailed the comments address. I started watching the video, but it droned on for a minute or two about how I could share with no one, or one person, or a group, or the world... And then I lost all hope of getting useful information and stopped watching.
When I clicked on the link, I wanted to know what this software is, what it does, how it works, why I should download it. That information doesn't need to be pretty, it just needs to be THERE. People won't be willing to spend 10 minutes on your site finding that info.
What a poorly-designed website (indi). I've clicked through several of the pages and still am not sure exactly what it is or how it works. I know it has something to do with sharing stuff, but that's it. And I'm not going to download the software if I don't even know what it's going to do. It's like they're trying their hardest to keep the information from you. That could be really useful for me, but I don't have time right now to figure it out.
There's nothing inherently inaccurate about the measurement system itself. You can measure down to the millionth of an inch if you want. If a contractor is going to be loose with their measurements, they could just as easily say "Eh, that's about two meters" as "Eh, that's about seven feet". You can't make people measure down the the millimeter just because it's available on their measuring tape.
They truly revolutionized computers in the 70s and 80s. The iPhone stands to truly revolutionize portable devices.
My guess is that 5-7 years down the line, they introduce something that is barely recognizable as a "computer" that's aimed at replacing the current personal computer. The long-rumored tablet, but as different from current Tablet PCs as the iPhone is from blackberrys. A whole different class of product.
I'm really hoping that this and other devices of this type will lead cable providers to change their ridiculous service model. No way am I paying $60 a month for 10 channels I'll watch and 150 more I'll flip past. My dream is cable for $20/month or less, I get to pick whatever 10-20 channels I want. THAT I would sign up for in a heartbeat, and I could probably even convince my anti-TV husband.
With so many other options (Netflix if you don't mind waiting a season, iTunes, free episodes on nbc.com), they can't ignore it forever.
I spent my Christmas break with (among other people) my 16-year-old brother and a neverending parade of his 15-18-year-old male friends. These guys have spent the past 3-4 years of their lives playing PS2 and XBox til their eyes bleed, with a little GC thrown in now and then. My brother has long since sold his GC to my sister.
Number of PS3s among them by New Year's Day: Zero. Number of XBox 360s: One or two. Number of Wiis: 3. All of which were procured by *camping out*, even weeks after launch. They wanted those Wiis. Some of them plan to get PS3s next Christmas, my brother right now doesn't care about the PS3 until they release better games. He does own a PSP, though he doesn't watch movies on it. He asked for UMD movies last year for Christmas, but not this year.
It's anecdotal, yes, but I'm not seeing these key demographic members herding themselves straight from the PS2 to the PS3. I mostly saw them pretending to bowl, then spending hours and hours on Twilight Princess. The price was a factor, but as my brother had saved enough to get a Wii, extra controller + nunchuk, and two extra games, he could easily have saved a little more and gotten a PS3 instead. But he said it just didn't have any games he was interested in.
And I think part of the point is that if Dell has to shell it out enough times, they might make it easier to buy a computer with no OS installed to start with.
a) After analyzing the costs vs specifications of many machines, I have found that this particular Dell machine comes closest to giving me exactly what I am looking for for the best price. EXCEPT:
b) It comes with Windows, which I will not use, but will have to pay for.
Is it more "jerkish" for me to buy the machine from Dell and get a refund for the OS, or to buy a machine from a different company so that it comes without an OS and Dell doesn't see a penny of my money? Jerkish to whom? I'm betting Dell would rather make the sale and lose a few dollars on the support call than entirely lose the sale.
There are plenty of legitimate educational uses for sites like MySpace (not necessarily MS itself, but it's not the only thing that would have been banned).
A few possibilities:
Connecting your students with students in other states or countries studying the same thing, to look at the issue from many perspectives.
Keeping students engaged in learning while they're at home, where they can post questions about the homework or have side discussions about things brought up in class.
Giving students a place to post and critique writing anonymously (to everyone but the teacher).
Making collaboration on projects and papers easier.
That's just what I came up with off the top of my head here. I'm sure that good teachers with a little ingenuity who are thinking about this stuff full-time could do better.
This is the main difference between the Animal Rights movement and the Animal Welfare movement.
AR says humans must not use animals for our own purposes at all. We should not inflict our will upon them in any way, and they should have all of the same rights we do.
AW says that while we have the right to use animals for our benefit, with this right comes the responsibility to minimize the suffering we cause in doing so. So AR says that cow should be free, while AW says we can kill it for food and leather but should treat it well while it is alive and kill it as humanely as possible.
And if the money situation is anything like the other third-world countries I've been to, 3cUS probably has the spending power of a full dollar, if not the entire $3 that the cup of coffee costs the American.
This is why I like it, as well. Not everyone has a nice 30" widescreen monitor - or even a 17". I was working on a 15" monitor using Windows at my last job, and there was just no room, especially since I often had 5-6 Word documents open as well as a couple browser windows and 1-2 excel files. The tiny bit of space a shared menubar would have saved would have been much appreciated. Even if it wouldn't have given me enough space for a whole additional window, making things a bit less cluttered would have just *felt* nicer.
Isn't that kind of what they're trying to do with Spotlight? No more need to organize your files, just keyword them all and use the magic search?
I've used Spotlight once or twice, but only when I would normally have used Sherlock - when something accidentally got saved to some unknown place. I *like* my neatly-organized heirarchical folders, thank you very much. The reason the metaphor has lived for so long is that it's one that makes sense to many people. If they do try something "revolutionary", I hope they implement it like they did Spotlight - if you like it, you can use it, if you're perfectly happy already, you can ignore it.
The only difference is, it sucks horribly! It takes 30-60 sec to start up, and at least 30 sec to save a document. Sometimes the lag will get bad enough that it *can't* catch up to what I've written so far, it just forgets the last third of it.
You know, Navi never really told me anything I didn't already know. I just thought she was annoying because she always made it sound so urgent, and after I interrupted myself to talk to her I was always left thinking gee, thanks, couldn't have lived without that.
Hm, your comment about easy bosses actually makes me think I'll like it. Bosses are always more of an annoyance to me than anything. I'd much prefer having moderately easy bosses and harder puzzles when you're trying to get around places.
I love WindWaker's art, too. It's got some beautiful things in it. Playing it, I feel like I'm actually controlling a cartoon movie. Not a CGI movie, an old-school painted cels cartoon. That is awesome.
I don't have a Wii and haven't seen TP in person, but I prefer the WW art from what I've seen. TP just doesn't look very colorful, and Zelda feels like it should be colorful (unless a lack of color is signifying something, like a dark world). Not that I'm saying it should look like WW, but like you say they could have tried something new and different like they did in WW. Well, hopefully next time.
Because even $250 is too much for some people to spend on a console? I worship Nintendo, but I didn't get a GC til last Christmas when I could get one for $100 including Mario Party 7. I probably won't get a Wii for at least another year, if not more - although I might be buying a used DS (not lite) soon.
Oh fer fuck's sake. You just can't be everywhere all the time. I worked at a Border's that was well-staffed, but we still had this kind of theft. There were days when I'd leave the children's section for ten minutes after being in there for two hours, and when I got back there'd be a stack of empty DVD boxes shoved behind a row of books. They bring in razors, slice them open, and take the discs. And because of the strange layout of the store, the children's section was hard to see unless someone was standing right in or by it, so they'd do it there as soon as a customer asked you to help them find something in another section. Y'know, "BEING THERE for the customer and making sure they get what they need, and up to the checkout in the shortest possible time" rather than making them wait while you track down another staffer to keep an eye on the section for you. The theives aren't customers. They're not there to buy or to be helped. They want as little interaction with the staff as possible, which is why asking anyone suspicious if you can help them usually scares them away. But you're going to miss it sometimes.
Yes, the store used the reusable plastic lock boxes on some DVDs, but they didn't have enough of them at that point to cover every single box. Customers hate those, too, btw.
That wouldn't have helped me much. I graduated from college, worked for a year for hardly enough pay to cover everything, then started a Master's program. During the Master's program, I was mostly living on student loans. I was also diagnosed with cancer at age 24. My net worth was around -$60K at that point. I probably should have been saving more than I was during and after college, but it still would have amounted to a few thousand dollars - which would have made barely a dent in the over $100K in medical bills I racked up that year. Not to mention that I have about ten thousand or more in scans, tests, and prescriptions every year now for follow-up and side effects of treatment. And if I hadn't been insured then, it would all be a pre-existing condition that no insurer would dare touch now.
Now I do have savings, as well as a mortgage. Still not nearly enough to pay for what cancer would have cost me. Unless you've already had a chance to save up quite a lot of money, I'd never recommend anyone cancel their health insurance and depend on savings.
The reason for negotiated prices, etc, is that hospitals have to cover the people who just don't pay. The people who would rather take bankruptcy than work out a payment plan for their $10,000 hospital stay for pneumonia or whatever. There are plenty of them, I know a couple in my own family.
It's a vicious cycle, and I don't have any ideas for fixing it. People can't pay, so the hospitals have to charge others more to make up for it, or just stop treating people who don't have good insurance. The higher charges make more people unable to pay. Etc etc.
If you have insurance, at least they KNOW that they're going to get a good chunk of the total. They're willing to take 75% of what they charge, because it's more than they get from some people. And they probably have insurance companies that they trust more than others to actually follow through and pay their claims. I'm saddled with about 10K extra bills right now because my insurance company just kinda lost track of my hundreds of claims and doesn't seem to have any interest in paying or even acknowledging that they didn't pay a good chunk of them. That doctor doesn't know for sure that she'll see any of that from me (she will, I'll take a payment plan over bankruptcy any day thanks), thanks to my insurance company's incompetence. A more reliable company may have earned the right to lower prices because they actually pay their bills.
If your insurance pays some good-sized chunk and you're fairly poor, most public hospitals will knock 50-100% off the remainder if you apply for aid. They're required to do a certain # of charity writeoffs per year, and yes, everyone else pays for that in the inflated costs too, so if you don't like it don't ask for nationalized health care.
You should join your school's graduate student association (or whatever they call it there) and push for better coverage. Many schools offer perfectly acceptable (though not always amazing) insurance for graduate students. Although, coverage for spouses sometimes sucks majorly because spouses of graduate students tend to be women in their 20s who have babies. (No, insurance companies don't care how sexist it is to imply that grad students themselves aren't female.) (I'm a female grad student, by the way.)
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Knowing the likelihood of MIT students to be in boiler rooms and other such locations, it would not surprise me in the least to find that you can, in fact, pick up a wireless internet connection there. Whether or not that particular WAP was involved is another question.
Basically, they always have a rule somewhere saying exactly why they can't get you your money back - but damned if you'll ever see them until you have a problem and go looking for them.
I believe it is spelled "DI'EHNT."
When I clicked on the link, I wanted to know what this software is, what it does, how it works, why I should download it. That information doesn't need to be pretty, it just needs to be THERE. People won't be willing to spend 10 minutes on your site finding that info.
What a poorly-designed website (indi). I've clicked through several of the pages and still am not sure exactly what it is or how it works. I know it has something to do with sharing stuff, but that's it. And I'm not going to download the software if I don't even know what it's going to do. It's like they're trying their hardest to keep the information from you. That could be really useful for me, but I don't have time right now to figure it out.
There's nothing inherently inaccurate about the measurement system itself. You can measure down to the millionth of an inch if you want. If a contractor is going to be loose with their measurements, they could just as easily say "Eh, that's about two meters" as "Eh, that's about seven feet". You can't make people measure down the the millimeter just because it's available on their measuring tape.
My guess is that 5-7 years down the line, they introduce something that is barely recognizable as a "computer" that's aimed at replacing the current personal computer. The long-rumored tablet, but as different from current Tablet PCs as the iPhone is from blackberrys. A whole different class of product.
I hope.
With so many other options (Netflix if you don't mind waiting a season, iTunes, free episodes on nbc.com), they can't ignore it forever.
Number of PS3s among them by New Year's Day: Zero. Number of XBox 360s: One or two. Number of Wiis: 3. All of which were procured by *camping out*, even weeks after launch. They wanted those Wiis. Some of them plan to get PS3s next Christmas, my brother right now doesn't care about the PS3 until they release better games. He does own a PSP, though he doesn't watch movies on it. He asked for UMD movies last year for Christmas, but not this year.
It's anecdotal, yes, but I'm not seeing these key demographic members herding themselves straight from the PS2 to the PS3. I mostly saw them pretending to bowl, then spending hours and hours on Twilight Princess. The price was a factor, but as my brother had saved enough to get a Wii, extra controller + nunchuk, and two extra games, he could easily have saved a little more and gotten a PS3 instead. But he said it just didn't have any games he was interested in.
And I think part of the point is that if Dell has to shell it out enough times, they might make it easier to buy a computer with no OS installed to start with.
a) After analyzing the costs vs specifications of many machines, I have found that this particular Dell machine comes closest to giving me exactly what I am looking for for the best price. EXCEPT:
b) It comes with Windows, which I will not use, but will have to pay for.
Is it more "jerkish" for me to buy the machine from Dell and get a refund for the OS, or to buy a machine from a different company so that it comes without an OS and Dell doesn't see a penny of my money? Jerkish to whom? I'm betting Dell would rather make the sale and lose a few dollars on the support call than entirely lose the sale.
A few possibilities:
- Connecting your students with students in other states or countries studying the same thing, to look at the issue from many perspectives.
- Keeping students engaged in learning while they're at home, where they can post questions about the homework or have side discussions about things brought up in class.
- Giving students a place to post and critique writing anonymously (to everyone but the teacher).
- Making collaboration on projects and papers easier.
That's just what I came up with off the top of my head here. I'm sure that good teachers with a little ingenuity who are thinking about this stuff full-time could do better.AR says humans must not use animals for our own purposes at all. We should not inflict our will upon them in any way, and they should have all of the same rights we do.
AW says that while we have the right to use animals for our benefit, with this right comes the responsibility to minimize the suffering we cause in doing so. So AR says that cow should be free, while AW says we can kill it for food and leather but should treat it well while it is alive and kill it as humanely as possible.
And if the money situation is anything like the other third-world countries I've been to, 3cUS probably has the spending power of a full dollar, if not the entire $3 that the cup of coffee costs the American.
This is why I like it, as well. Not everyone has a nice 30" widescreen monitor - or even a 17". I was working on a 15" monitor using Windows at my last job, and there was just no room, especially since I often had 5-6 Word documents open as well as a couple browser windows and 1-2 excel files. The tiny bit of space a shared menubar would have saved would have been much appreciated. Even if it wouldn't have given me enough space for a whole additional window, making things a bit less cluttered would have just *felt* nicer.
I've used Spotlight once or twice, but only when I would normally have used Sherlock - when something accidentally got saved to some unknown place. I *like* my neatly-organized heirarchical folders, thank you very much. The reason the metaphor has lived for so long is that it's one that makes sense to many people. If they do try something "revolutionary", I hope they implement it like they did Spotlight - if you like it, you can use it, if you're perfectly happy already, you can ignore it.
The only difference is, it sucks horribly! It takes 30-60 sec to start up, and at least 30 sec to save a document. Sometimes the lag will get bad enough that it *can't* catch up to what I've written so far, it just forgets the last third of it.
Hm, your comment about easy bosses actually makes me think I'll like it. Bosses are always more of an annoyance to me than anything. I'd much prefer having moderately easy bosses and harder puzzles when you're trying to get around places.
I don't have a Wii and haven't seen TP in person, but I prefer the WW art from what I've seen. TP just doesn't look very colorful, and Zelda feels like it should be colorful (unless a lack of color is signifying something, like a dark world). Not that I'm saying it should look like WW, but like you say they could have tried something new and different like they did in WW. Well, hopefully next time.
Because even $250 is too much for some people to spend on a console? I worship Nintendo, but I didn't get a GC til last Christmas when I could get one for $100 including Mario Party 7. I probably won't get a Wii for at least another year, if not more - although I might be buying a used DS (not lite) soon.
Yes, the store used the reusable plastic lock boxes on some DVDs, but they didn't have enough of them at that point to cover every single box. Customers hate those, too, btw.
NAMBLA also protested the bill, saying that they, too, needed pretexting to find both missing and non-missing children.
Now I do have savings, as well as a mortgage. Still not nearly enough to pay for what cancer would have cost me. Unless you've already had a chance to save up quite a lot of money, I'd never recommend anyone cancel their health insurance and depend on savings.
It's a vicious cycle, and I don't have any ideas for fixing it. People can't pay, so the hospitals have to charge others more to make up for it, or just stop treating people who don't have good insurance. The higher charges make more people unable to pay. Etc etc.
If you have insurance, at least they KNOW that they're going to get a good chunk of the total. They're willing to take 75% of what they charge, because it's more than they get from some people. And they probably have insurance companies that they trust more than others to actually follow through and pay their claims. I'm saddled with about 10K extra bills right now because my insurance company just kinda lost track of my hundreds of claims and doesn't seem to have any interest in paying or even acknowledging that they didn't pay a good chunk of them. That doctor doesn't know for sure that she'll see any of that from me (she will, I'll take a payment plan over bankruptcy any day thanks), thanks to my insurance company's incompetence. A more reliable company may have earned the right to lower prices because they actually pay their bills.
If your insurance pays some good-sized chunk and you're fairly poor, most public hospitals will knock 50-100% off the remainder if you apply for aid. They're required to do a certain # of charity writeoffs per year, and yes, everyone else pays for that in the inflated costs too, so if you don't like it don't ask for nationalized health care.
You should join your school's graduate student association (or whatever they call it there) and push for better coverage. Many schools offer perfectly acceptable (though not always amazing) insurance for graduate students. Although, coverage for spouses sometimes sucks majorly because spouses of graduate students tend to be women in their 20s who have babies. (No, insurance companies don't care how sexist it is to imply that grad students themselves aren't female.) (I'm a female grad student, by the way.)