Would that be the Honda Fit? It's a small, 5-door competitor to the Toyota Matrix which outperforms it in all customer satisfaction metrics, as well as fuel efficiency and crash safety.
The Fit is actually a rather nice car (my father owns one).
I wonder why that doesn't work in politics? When a politicians screws-up his "brand" (name) is sullied forever.
You might want to watch presidential elections in Uruguay and other South American countries. Former president Lacalle is running up for president again, after having been accused of corruption, and his main rival is a former guerrilla leader, both would have been unsuitable candidates only 5 years ago.
In Perú, former president Alan Garcia won again, and he had his name sullied "forever" only 10 years ago (hyperinflation, corruption, you name it). Heck, even former Argentinean president Menem made a run for it recently, and there are few more sullied than him there.
once talked to an executive of a Finnish (but international) company called Lappset. It builds playground stuff (things children can climb on, etc.) and operates in many countries of Europe, Asia, South-America and also in Mexico and Canada. It doesn't operate in USA. Why?
In USA it's competitors are constantly sued because "A child went head first down this slide and broke a tooth. There was nothing in this product to prevent sliding head first, which might lead to damage in a small percentage of cases. As such, we sue you for $10 million for these damages." kind of attitude is so common.
The company doesn't go to USA because they would need more lawyers than marketing people and instead choose to stay in countries where the justice system is at least somewhat sane. I really don't think this is the preferred situation.
Indeed. I'm AMAZED at the high cost of medical insurance, and car insurance as well, in the US and UK. And I've been told that most of that is due to the humongous cost in lawsuits, lawyering and such.
Just for comparison: my car insurance (for a U$ 5000 car) is U$ 500 yearly, for the maximum coverage possible. I saw on Top Gear the cost for a similarly priced car in the UK was in the hundreds of pounds monthly, and my mother pays U$ 800 monthly for hers in Canada (also valued at about U$ 5000, and the same coverage).
Everything but services and food is way more expensive here (Uruguay) than in the US or UK, however, so no, I don't have a cost advantage on you:P
Sounds like the insurance industry to me (who never deny an insurance application, but always investigate the application when you make a claim).
Erm... I'd say that statement is not accurate, because I happen to work for the insurance industry (which, of course is not uniform across the world, and I'm specifically excluding the US invention of health insurance which IMO shouldn't be considered insurance at all).
As far as I know, the company I work for has always paid claims, provided they followed the above guidelines.
The purpose of an insurance is to share risk amongst the insured, thus promoting investments by minimizing the risk for any one individual involved (and of course, make some money for the insurance company in the process:) ).
Actually it looks like John Philip Sousa's prediction was correct. We Don't sit-around home pianos in our parlors listening to somebody music
No we do it in Karaoke bars.
And Guitar Hero and the like.
Not to mention that, in addition to those that these games inspired to pick up an instrument, it's always been popular (at least over here) to learn guitar or an instrument.. (which more often than not, lies forgotten shortly after said studies are finished or interrupted, until a new generation picks it up).
Or remember before that when the Dvorak layout was being pushed as a better way to type?
Dvorak was and still is a better layout to QWERTY to type with.
As long as you primarily type in English, you mean. That got me thinking... it would be nice to have keyboards with the keys showing the current keyboard layout (but probably too expensive for too little gain for mass production I guess). And I'll have to look up the optimal layout for my language.
If this was our standard, people would not be considered adults until age 25 - that's when the brain finishes making its final connections. I think the onset of menarche (typically 15) is a better point to call someone an adult.
Well, I don't know about the US, but over here (Uruguay), it's implicitly recognized that people under 25 are not fully mature / adults.
Several things require an age of 25 or older - for instance, running for the equivalent of a House seat, which I have wanted to do for some time and am able to do for the first time this year ( not that I have any chance of winning:P )
That, of course has nothing to do with physical maturity:)
John Williams has done music for pretty much every blockbuster of the past 30+ years
Although I appreciate John W's work (especially Schindlers list, Seven years in Tibet), he's not the only composer on the block. It seems somehow you've missed Hans Zimmer then.
Oddly enough, I haven't seen most of those, and can't recall any of those soundtracks (understandably), but even for those I did see. OTOH I do recall most of John William's work:) . Anecdotal, but there you have it:)
Talk about business risks, you're just begging to have the BSA commandos sweep in and decide that whatever you guessed (or what MS told you to do) isn't correct and you are now a dirty thief who owes a pile of cash.
Sounds like law, then:( . Ask three lawyers, get three answers, and hope the police and the judge (no jury here) don't decide you're in the wrong.
What are most people's iPods filled with? We'll not kid ourselves: pirated music.
The only person you're kidding is yourself. My iPod is 100% legit music. And yes, I'm more than tech. savoy enough to find everything I want for free. I'm willing to bet out side of one small demographic, most people's MP3 players are filled with legit music as well. You're making the same assumptions that record companies make. Congratulations.
Hmm... I guess it depends. First, I don't own an iPod:P , I do own a brandless MP3 player, as do 99% of the MP3-listening population of my country.
Second, over here (Uruguay), it's so hard to buy legal music in MP3 format, and so easy to just get some pirated music, that even were they so inclined, most people just don't. Heck, some people actually think it's legal to download MP3s, or pay for "services". The result is that I'd estimate that 99.99% of the MP3 players in my country (which is admittedly a drop in the bucket compared to the US) are not filled with purchased MP3s, rather they are filled with "pirated" or at best media-shifted music (huge difference, I know).
I daresay some employees in the private sector are wasting time reading Slashdot right at this very moment when they are nominally getting paid to do other things.
What! You libelous slanderer!!!... wait, it's true:P
Somehow, Penn & Teller's conclusions are always libertarian. Maybe it's a coincidence. Maybe libertarians are the smartest people in the world and so anyone with a brain would arrive upon the same conclusions.
I hear stories from my mother about cars and HOMES without air conditioning a few decades ago.
Erm... neither my car nor my (rented) home have air conditioning over here (Uruguay, South America). And AFAIK that's the standard everywhere but the 1st world (not to mention I'm considered "rich" and an oligarch by the leading wannabe dictator-candidate because I have a car at the young age of 28).
Indeed. That was (is) the highest money sink I've ever played. And the Online version is ludicrous (you pay MSRP for DIGITAL cards !!! ) yet many people (myself included) play it (the "trick" is that the game is subsidized by heavy prize support, which you don't get if you just play casually).
And they added even more ridiculous stuff recently.
That said, it's only insanely expensive if you play competitively, or the "limited" formats (which are basically where you pay for a tournament where they give you the cards, as opposed to "bring your own cards", and you get to keep the cards afterwards, but they do charge almost retail for them).
in the proprietary world, the scenario you described can't happen. I can't go to my boss and tell him, "Screw this, I'm going to spend the next month refactoring our messy code, rather than adding new functionality." However, I can do that in an open-source project.
Yes, in the closed source world you can, but you really have to pitch it, have an understanding boss, and your ass is on the line if it goes wrong. And I wish that my current mess took only one month.
If you could do anything you wanted, but were sure to die in a decade or two, would you really spend time programming computers? Programming can be fun, but there's more interesting things to do in life.
I'd spend my time trying to change the world:) . Seriously. I'm into politics (I'm running for our equivalent of the house of representatives right now, but without a chance:P ), I'd go into energy, law (there are interesting things to do, one thing I'd love is logical proofing of the laws passed in parliament:P... could a code of law ever "compile"? ), economics (lots of interesting experiments and simulations to do), etc.. I'd probably use computers along the way:P
At my school we used a spanish educational typing program... it worked very well... I remember girls took it up instantly because they had been chatting on IRC and ICQ already:)
Does your bank grab control of the contents of safety deposit boxes and then profit from that control?
The answer to that question is, more or less, yes. Look up "retail deposit sweeping" - they don't grab the safety deposit boxes, but they do grab everything else.
In retail deposit sweeping, banks reclassify checkable deposits as savings deposits so as to reduce statutory reserve requirements. And of course, then they can re-loan it (and good luck - in the event of a banking run you'll realize that yes, they grabbed your non-savings account).
How would an ID... be able to verify an identity any better than a driver's license or passport, or even a gas bill.
I am not from the UK, but in my experience, one of the three is not like the others: passports and driver's licenses are usually conceived as identification, while gas bills are not.
By the way, over here (Uruguay), we have a cumbersome process for buying and selling cars (and houses and other expensive stuff) which involves not only an ID card, but also the official registry that you own the item being sold, and a special kind of clerk, called "escribano", which is supposed to make all the necessary findings and attest that what you are buying can legally be sold (not subject to mortgages, embargoes, fines or whatever). It is a huge bureaucratic hassle, but on the other hand, it does make it supposedly "safer" to buy property.
I don't doubt that it's the kind of bureaucracy which your countries are envisioning:P . It does create a lot of jobs, but they are not jobs which I particularly want to exist.
Slashdot Mirror
I was leaning toward a small Honda anyway
Would that be the Honda Fit? It's a small, 5-door competitor to the Toyota Matrix which outperforms it in all customer satisfaction metrics, as well as fuel efficiency and crash safety.
The Fit is actually a rather nice car (my father owns one).
I wonder why that doesn't work in politics? When a politicians screws-up his "brand" (name) is sullied forever.
You might want to watch presidential elections in Uruguay and other South American countries. Former president Lacalle is running up for president again, after having been accused of corruption, and his main rival is a former guerrilla leader, both would have been unsuitable candidates only 5 years ago.
In Perú, former president Alan Garcia won again, and he had his name sullied "forever" only 10 years ago (hyperinflation, corruption, you name it). Heck, even former Argentinean president Menem made a run for it recently, and there are few more sullied than him there.
once talked to an executive of a Finnish (but international) company called Lappset. It builds playground stuff (things children can climb on, etc.) and operates in many countries of Europe, Asia, South-America and also in Mexico and Canada. It doesn't operate in USA. Why?
In USA it's competitors are constantly sued because "A child went head first down this slide and broke a tooth. There was nothing in this product to prevent sliding head first, which might lead to damage in a small percentage of cases. As such, we sue you for $10 million for these damages." kind of attitude is so common.
The company doesn't go to USA because they would need more lawyers than marketing people and instead choose to stay in countries where the justice system is at least somewhat sane. I really don't think this is the preferred situation.
Indeed. I'm AMAZED at the high cost of medical insurance, and car insurance as well, in the US and UK. And I've been told that most of that is due to the humongous cost in lawsuits, lawyering and such.
:P
Just for comparison: my car insurance (for a U$ 5000 car) is U$ 500 yearly, for the maximum coverage possible. I saw on Top Gear the cost for a similarly priced car in the UK was in the hundreds of pounds monthly, and my mother pays U$ 800 monthly for hers in Canada (also valued at about U$ 5000, and the same coverage).
Everything but services and food is way more expensive here (Uruguay) than in the US or UK, however, so no, I don't have a cost advantage on you
Sounds like the insurance industry to me (who never deny an insurance application, but always investigate the application when you make a claim).
Erm... I'd say that statement is not accurate, because I happen to work for the insurance industry (which, of course is not uniform across the world, and I'm specifically excluding the US invention of health insurance which IMO shouldn't be considered insurance at all).
:) ).
As far as I know, the company I work for has always paid claims, provided they followed the above guidelines.
The purpose of an insurance is to share risk amongst the insured, thus promoting investments by minimizing the risk for any one individual involved (and of course, make some money for the insurance company in the process
Good thing we have sheetmusictorrent.
Actually it looks like John Philip Sousa's prediction was correct. We Don't sit-around home pianos in our parlors listening to somebody music
No we do it in Karaoke bars.
And Guitar Hero and the like.
Not to mention that, in addition to those that these games inspired to pick up an instrument, it's always been popular (at least over here) to learn guitar or an instrument.. (which more often than not, lies forgotten shortly after said studies are finished or interrupted, until a new generation picks it up).
Or remember before that when the Dvorak layout was being pushed as a better way to type?
Dvorak was and still is a better layout to QWERTY to type with.
As long as you primarily type in English, you mean. That got me thinking... it would be nice to have keyboards with the keys showing the current keyboard layout (but probably too expensive for too little gain for mass production I guess). And I'll have to look up the optimal layout for my language.
The brain hasn't fully developed at 13.
If this was our standard, people would not be considered adults until age 25 - that's when the brain finishes making its final connections. I think the onset of menarche (typically 15) is a better point to call someone an adult.
Well, I don't know about the US, but over here (Uruguay), it's implicitly recognized that people under 25 are not fully mature / adults.
:P )
:)
Several things require an age of 25 or older - for instance, running for the equivalent of a House seat, which I have wanted to do for some time and am able to do for the first time this year ( not that I have any chance of winning
That, of course has nothing to do with physical maturity
Why let yourself in for a world of hurt for a device which will likely never operate in the way you require.
Best to give it as a gift, or sell it on eBay and pocket the cash, and invest that in your stand alone box.
Amen. Was going to say exactly the same thing :)
Although I appreciate John W's work (especially Schindlers list, Seven years in Tibet), he's not the only composer on the block. It seems somehow you've missed Hans Zimmer then.
Oddly enough, I haven't seen most of those, and can't recall any of those soundtracks (understandably), but even for those I did see. OTOH I do recall most of John William's work :) . Anecdotal, but there you have it :)
Talk about business risks, you're just begging to have the BSA commandos sweep in and decide that whatever you guessed (or what MS told you to do) isn't correct and you are now a dirty thief who owes a pile of cash.
Sounds like law, then :( . Ask three lawyers, get three answers, and hope the police and the judge (no jury here) don't decide you're in the wrong.
A computer is almost synonymous with "laptop" or "netbook" these days.
Hm. That's news to me. Oh well.
I do think that laptop and netbook sales surpassed desktops in the US. Not yet in the rest of the world, but we'll get there I guess.
:P.
Here, I found claims for that as far back as 2005, but I read about that in 2007 and 2008 too, so I guess it depends on who you ask
http://news.cnet.com/PC-milestone--notebooks-outsell-desktops/2100-1047_3-5731417.html
What are most people's iPods filled with? We'll not kid ourselves: pirated music.
The only person you're kidding is yourself. My iPod is 100% legit music. And yes, I'm more than tech. savoy enough to find everything I want for free. I'm willing to bet out side of one small demographic, most people's MP3 players are filled with legit music as well. You're making the same assumptions that record companies make. Congratulations.
Hmm... I guess it depends. First, I don't own an iPod :P , I do own a brandless MP3 player, as do 99% of the MP3-listening population of my country.
Second, over here (Uruguay), it's so hard to buy legal music in MP3 format, and so easy to just get some pirated music, that even were they so inclined, most people just don't. Heck, some people actually think it's legal to download MP3s, or pay for "services". The result is that I'd estimate that 99.99% of the MP3 players in my country (which is admittedly a drop in the bucket compared to the US) are not filled with purchased MP3s, rather they are filled with "pirated" or at best media-shifted music (huge difference, I know).
I daresay some employees in the private sector are wasting time reading Slashdot right at this very moment when they are nominally getting paid to do other things.
What! You libelous slanderer!!!... wait, it's true :P
Somehow, Penn & Teller's conclusions are always libertarian. Maybe it's a coincidence. Maybe libertarians are the smartest people in the world and so anyone with a brain would arrive upon the same conclusions.
Maybe reality has a known libertarian bias :P
I hear stories from my mother about cars and HOMES without air conditioning a few decades ago.
Erm... neither my car nor my (rented) home have air conditioning over here (Uruguay, South America). And AFAIK that's the standard everywhere but the 1st world (not to mention I'm considered "rich" and an oligarch by the leading wannabe dictator-candidate because I have a car at the young age of 28).
Magic The Gathering
Indeed. That was (is) the highest money sink I've ever played. And the Online version is ludicrous (you pay MSRP for DIGITAL cards !!! ) yet many people (myself included) play it (the "trick" is that the game is subsidized by heavy prize support, which you don't get if you just play casually).
And they added even more ridiculous stuff recently.
That said, it's only insanely expensive if you play competitively, or the "limited" formats (which are basically where you pay for a tournament where they give you the cards, as opposed to "bring your own cards", and you get to keep the cards afterwards, but they do charge almost retail for them).
in the proprietary world, the scenario you described can't happen. I can't go to my boss and tell him, "Screw this, I'm going to spend the next month refactoring our messy code, rather than adding new functionality." However, I can do that in an open-source project.
Yes, in the closed source world you can, but you really have to pitch it, have an understanding boss, and your ass is on the line if it goes wrong. And I wish that my current mess took only one month.
What Moron uses Windows for Mission Critical Enterprise applications?
I hate to tell you, but one of the big three credit bureaus has at least one MS Windows Datacenter Edition running a massive Oracle DB. And it works.
If you could do anything you wanted, but were sure to die in a decade or two, would you really spend time programming computers? Programming can be fun, but there's more interesting things to do in life.
I'd spend my time trying to change the world :) . Seriously. I'm into politics (I'm running for our equivalent of the house of representatives right now, but without a chance :P ), I'd go into energy, law (there are interesting things to do, one thing I'd love is logical proofing of the laws passed in parliament :P ... could a code of law ever "compile"? ), economics (lots of interesting experiments and simulations to do), etc.. I'd probably use computers along the way :P
Most games in multimon scenarios really need odd number of displays; 5 is better than 6 in this case
The article states that they expect the most common setup to be 3 monitors (which makes sense).
This guy already had this set up for a while, it's pretty cool (now 12 screens):
http://www.stefandidak.com/office/
At my school we used a spanish educational typing program... it worked very well... I remember girls took it up instantly because they had been chatting on IRC and ICQ already :)
Does your bank grab control of the contents of safety deposit boxes and then profit from that control?
The answer to that question is, more or less, yes. Look up "retail deposit sweeping" - they don't grab the safety deposit boxes, but they do grab everything else.
In retail deposit sweeping, banks reclassify checkable deposits as savings deposits so as to reduce statutory reserve requirements. And of course, then they can re-loan it (and good luck - in the event of a banking run you'll realize that yes, they grabbed your non-savings account).
How would an ID ... be able to verify an identity any better than a driver's license or passport, or even a gas bill.
I am not from the UK, but in my experience, one of the three is not like the others: passports and driver's licenses are usually conceived as identification, while gas bills are not.
:P . It does create a lot of jobs, but they are not jobs which I particularly want to exist.
By the way, over here (Uruguay), we have a cumbersome process for buying and selling cars (and houses and other expensive stuff) which involves not only an ID card, but also the official registry that you own the item being sold, and a special kind of clerk, called "escribano", which is supposed to make all the necessary findings and attest that what you are buying can legally be sold (not subject to mortgages, embargoes, fines or whatever). It is a huge bureaucratic hassle, but on the other hand, it does make it supposedly "safer" to buy property.
I don't doubt that it's the kind of bureaucracy which your countries are envisioning
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escribano
If you don't find it offensive, I will pray for you and your grandfather.
I'm not religious, but I don't find it offensive at all and I appreciate your support.