Of course the Sony DVD was junk. It was a Sony product containing moving parts.
Moving parts = problems.
Solid-state = fewer problems.
That's pretty much the way to tell if a Sony is going to be a problem, although buying Sony in the first place is kind of a bad move to begin with.
Anyway, I have a $150 DVD player/Recorder and a $30 DVD player. Do you want to guess which one plays perfectly, never has any issues and just generally works, versus which one is a pain in the butt, freezes, refuses to read discs, refuses to eject them, refuses to turn on or off, and stutters when it does work?
Yeah, the expensive one is the crappy one. It's a Lite-On not a Sony, but Sony uses Lite-On drives as an OEM so in a way, it IS a Sony and it's junk. The cheap DVD player is a, uh, actually, I have no idea what brand it is. The remote has no name on it.
I should send my old Belkin WAP to this guy. When the WAP is powered on, it sickens everyone in the house, causes agitation and fights and just a really bad scene.
Unplug power and everyone is suddenly fine.
It sucks as a WAP but apparently it's useful as an anti-personnel weapon.
Since you said "consoles ever sold at a loss" then you have to think back to entire history of game consoles (you said "ever" not me) which is a lot longer than you seem to be thinking.
And are you limiting this to first-sales or do you include the used market? Let's stick with new for now.
Atari dumped plenty of 2600s, then redid the box for a lower price, then undercut that and dumped them again along with dumping the games for far less than cost. Atari has a long history of dumping.
Coleco dumped tons of Colecovision consoles. I saw some of them on sale for $49 at the very end. That's surely less than cost. But did Coleco set that price or was it the store's idea. Who to blame? Well it sold below cost so it qualifies under your statement.
Nintendo. Saw the Virtual Boy and the re-engineered NES both on super discount closeout. Had to be below cost. The GC surely costs more than $99 to make yet that's what I can get one for.
Serpo.org proports to tell another part of the Zeta Reticuli story.
I can't say I believe this story but it's interesting enough. It would be stunning if it's true.
Assuming it's true, one take-away from this story was that the beings living there came from somewhere else. It's not their "home world" where their form of life developed and evolved.
Most of our scientists -and nearly all the "probable habitable planets" charts seem to always stick to looking at stars that might support life RIGHT NOW. If this story is true, then life might develop one place and move to one or more additional planets as it saw fit or as conditions warranted.
It's another aspect to considered when choosing where we think we might find life. Life might have its own ideas about where it wants to be. UFO stories or not, that's a simple truth that makes searching potentially a lot harder.
I'd like to inform you, that ony of my many clients has in posession
before expecting to read something about the mighty sum of two hundreds of millions of dollars, tied up in a bank account managed by the cousin of somebody who died in a car accident leaving no known heirs.
You are assuming you will be able to buy a used PS3.
There have been rumors about the range of DRM to be included in the PS3. Some rumors stated the console and the games will be locked to the original purchaser's console only, Sony's goal being to destroy the used game market that doesn't pass any money into Sony coffers.
Hard to imagine paying full retail for each and every game. And what happens when the PS3 breaks and you have to buy a new one? All your old games die with the broken console?
I hope this is not what Sony is planning but I would not put it past them.
Lockheed never publically acknowledges current Skunk projects. They only talk about stuff that is 10-15 years OLD, only AFTER it has been replaced by something far better or more advanced.
That means whatever was revealed is ancient history and absolutely NOT the state of the art.
It may also be a pile of red herrings designed to delude competitors or enemies, such as a series of expensive dead-end projects they WANT the bad guys to worry about, while the real toys continue to remain hidden.
Have a crapload of dead-end secret projects you can't fund? Can't exactly scrap them in public, so hey, pile them up, call them really really secret and show them off. Turn a pile of garbage into a hot new machine, and bonus points for getting the WSJ to write it up. Brilliant! Very typical defense contrator stuff.
In any case, that giant airship or one like it has been in tons of UFO reports for at least two decades. That we had one wasn't much of a secret. Why the hell we would need such a thing was more of a question. I don't buy the story given. Hauling troops anywhere quickly is what they said the V-22 was for, and that sure has turned out _real_ well. Our military would never settle for a slow blimp, unless it's got anti-grav or some exotic weapon.
Being able to use or even fully use One's education in One's Job is a great thing but the vast majority of people end up doing something entirely different or at least relatively unrelated to what they studied in school.
School is part training but a good part of it just to prove that you can show up on time for something everyday.
You may find more satisfaction and far more opportinities if you explore jobs options that don't directly relate to your studies. Not always. But if you approach jobs that ONLY involve using a CS major's skills, then that rules out a whole ton of other rewarding and challenging things that might be perfectly good other than not directly using a CS degree.
There are a ton of ways to exploit your talents without trashing the job that provides what appear to be good working conditions and benefits. You say coding is in your blood. So, do that in your spare time. Start a for-hire coding business on the weekends. Consult on the side and/or write apps for small businesses that could not afford full-blown programmers. Write apps and sell them on the 'net. You might stumble across something that makes a major pile of money, assuming that's what you want. Or you might make just a small amount of cash but hey, writing code is really what you wanted.
Meanwhile I wouldn't dismiss a nice stable job that appears to have few if any downsides and I wouldn't worry a bit about using my degree.
I work nights, sleep days. It'd be natural hours only if I lived in Japan, and I don't. Been on this shift for about five years now.
Sleeping during the day is hard. So, I sometimes take a melatonin supplement to help push things along and it works great for me. A very small dose at 11am and by noon I'm out cold for a solid 8.
I found a bit of a problem trying to get going at night because my body doesn't want to clean out melatonin at night, it wants to make more. It's not like a typical sleeping pill (eg, diphenhyrdramine) where it wears off. Melatonin eventually increases by itself.
One effective trick that works for me is to shine a REALLY bright light on my face for about five minutes. I use a halogen desk lamp. The huge boost in light seems to work magic. So, now I can sleep easy and wake up easy.
I know I've heard this guy on George Noory's radio show from time to time.
No judgement made on the validity of his claims, but he's been on there.
Yeah, I sometimes listen in on my way to lunch at night. The guest topics help me decide what to eat. If it's ghosts, is time for Subway. If it's UFOs, it's time for a Chik-fil-a chicken salad. Climate change means the burrito from the gas station.
I'm a Bellsouth DSL user and have been for something like 7 years and most of that time has been at 50 smackers a month, thanks very much. I was such an early adopter, the installer techs used my install to train each other. And they still screwed it up. But I digress....
*I* pay for my use of the Bellsouth network. MY money pays for what I see and do. Nobody pushes any content to me.
When I want to find something or do online shopping, I use my choice of sites. I don't use Bellsouth's useless portal page. HMMMM Maybe this is a weird ploy to push users at the Bellsouth portal which will be free of course. Naturally.
Other options?
Comcast will happily sell me cable modem service, at twice the speed for about 10 bucks more per month. Too bad I don't want Comcast for TV. Makes it cost more. 'course, I can always mooch free wifi off my neighbor's Comcast feed. He never notices.
Other DSL providers will sell me their service over Bellsouth's lines, but that puts yet another party in the blame game when the service goes out. Earthlink will blame BS. BS will blame Earthlink, my router, Microsoft, gnomes, sunspots and rain probably.
The MiG-25 had everybody scared to death. Here was a super interceptor the likes of which the world had never seen. How could the USSR make such an advanced machine! If you weren't scared, you were impressed. Or both.
And then we got our hands on a MiG-25 and found out..... it wasn't advanced at all, just a big fighter with a ton of horsepower. It was closer to strapping a man on a Chinese New Year rocket than it was a sophisticated machine of doom. Very low tech.
As always, the brass and politicians worked under strange math:
If the enemy threat was really bad, they asked for lots of money.
If the enemy threat turned out to be not so bad or a freaking joke, they still asked for the same money and usually hyped up the threat anwyay until they started believing their own reports.
Have they checked a calendar lately? I know SoCal is uniquely warm all the time but it hasn't STARTED snowing in a lot of other places yet. Spring is months away.
Sad to see so many public radio and TV stations going begging 24/7/365. The TV stations stuff their pledge breaks with programs they never show outside of pledge breaks. "Send in your pledges to pay for these great, expensive shows you'll never, ever see on a daily basis!" Seems a bit shady to me.
My MP3 player lasts for about 12 hours on a good battery charge.
My phone has around three hours of talk time.
Assuming iRadio uses battery life at about the same rate as a regular call, I will be UNABLE to actually USE THE PHONE after three hours or so. But at least I got to listen to tunes! I don't really need to call anyone.*
Actually, this product has already failed./\/\ has failed to line up ANY cellular launch parters. Without their support for streaming without using cell minutes, this is just a glorified MP3 player. Since the cell companies look at music as the golden cash cow, there is NO way they'd ALLOW/\/\ to do the same thing for free. They are still pissed about the Razr phone with iTunes. Mot has few friends, at least until they start paying bribes again. Get out the good checkbook boys! It's time to find more lobbyists!
Now that Iradio is out of the closet, maybe now Kenradio can shut the hell up about it. They've been pushing iradio for a solid six months as if it was the second coming of Jesus. And once unveilved, iradio turns out to be mostly nothing really. *yawn*
*Hypothetical. I have no friends TO call and never use more than 10% of my cell minutes.
They've redubbed Mark Tewksbury's voice starting with episodes aired mid-December onward.
Yay! His delivery was the voice equivalent of Keanu Reeves' acting, which is to say, like plywood. Lynn's voice has also been erased: a new narrator is replacing both of them. Alas, he's not a lot better than Mark. He sounds like he's asleep.
Anyway, they're just redubbing the same script so the horrible puns and bizarre Canada-only words remain. The episode where they show the assembly of a common PC (a P3 iirc, showing the age) and refer to the "power switch" as a "commutator" sent me to the dictionary.
As far as I knew, a commutator is part of a motor. Which doesn't have anything to do with computers. But there is apparently an obscure meaning for "switch" too. Wow. Do they NOT use the term "power switch" in Canada?
Maybe somebody else has decent value-added stuff that people would actually want to pay for, but at LiveJournal, there is virtually zero difference between a free LiveJournal account and a paid LiveJournal account.
The main difference is that a PAID account should (but doesn't) have some sort of better performance compared to a free "you get what you pay for" account that loses posts, fails to update friend's posts, hoards emails, etc.
In other words, I had a free LJ account. I tried paying for it for a few months just to see what was what. Nothing was any better with a paid account. When LJ broke, it felt like I was throwing away money. I went back to the free one. When LJ breaks now, it's eh, well, it's free. No big deal.
Oh my blog is all about how much I hate the world, of course. Wouldn't be a blog without that now would it? LOL
Last I heard, Blockbuster had a policy where company HQ exercised total control over what the stores could rent, and the company had a rather conservative stance on what they would allow. Local stores had zero authority to add "unapproved" titles.
This made every Blockbuster more or less the same (fat chance of ever finding that rare film) and effectively blocked controversial films and adult movies. Perhaps the company will rethink this policy now that Blockbuster is in decline. Adding porn and controversial movies might bring people back to the stores.
A girl? On Slashdot? Hold on a sec while I clean up a bit.
Yes, let them go. It may be merchandise to you and the store but it's not worth taking a bullet. I knew a guy who worked as a bagger for a grocery store. Nice guy, full of energy, always hopping to help with any task in the store. He was slightly retarded but he had a job and did it well.
The grocery store got shoplifted one night and the bagger tried to stop them. He chased them to the parking lot whereupon one of the robbers produced a gun and killed him. Blew him away. Media reports later said what I did not know: the bagger was the sole bread winner for his disabled mother and a couple disabled siblings. Really a tough life. The robbers didn't care about who he was or his family.
I knew another guy who worked the night shift at a gas station. I had a paper route that started next to his station so I used to fuel up pretty much every night. Really nice guy. The store was robbed and he was killed.
Recently at a local Walmart, a 70+ door greeter tried to stop a shoplifter. He followed the robber to the parking lot where the robber backed his car right over the man before leading police on a chase. The victim barely survived.
So the message is, your life is just not worth merchandise.
I always heard employee theft was the biggest part of shrinkage. Nothing easier than backing a truck up the dock at night and making off not with one digital camera but with pallets of cameras, big screens, etc.
In my late teen years, I used to shop at a certain now defunct chain. Store security used to follow me around the store apparently waiting or watching to catch me stealing something. These idiots were very obvious and very inept and useless because stuff still got stolen -we used to joke that store was pefect because you could pretty much guarantee that somebody else would have opened all the latest toys and gadgets and left the stuff lying around. Nobody had to buy anything.
Anyway, they never caught me doing anything but they DID eventualy catch employees carting tons and tons of stuff out the backdoors. Big time hauls from what I recall. It made the news. The losses were a major factor in the demise of the chain.
One of my current co-workers used to work in the stock room at CompUSA and has talked at length about the stupid flaws in the store security. For example securing laptops in a room with a heavy padlock and metal door but 1/2" drywall walls. Theives simply went through the wall and cleaned out the room. Security cameras? Not connected. Alarm? Regularly left disarmed. He says they used to lose a lot of stuff to pro thieves rather than shoplifters. LP mostly worried about grilling employees over missing till money but did little about stuff flying out the back.
My current workplace -IT, not retail- has invested a lot in cardkeys and cameras and whatnot, but the walls are still just drywall and the camera system would be a joke to defeat. We have a high security cage area in our warehouse but you could drive a forklift right up to it and rip the cage to shreds.
My point is that true security is had to do right and there will always be fatal flaws that go undetected or unrealized up until the moment someone exploits them.
Providing something for free doesn't automatically free them from criticism.
The email doesn't belong to them. It belongs to me or to the people who sent it to me. Filtering that mail for spam is one thing. There's a folder I can browse to review it if I want to see if they've tagged valid mail.
Deleting the mail at the server level without notice or review is asking me and everyone else to just trust them. There's no folder to review, no notice, no override.
Except they didn't actually ask us to trust them anyway, they just went and did it. A feature, you know. Trust us. We're Google. We're not evil. We promise!
I'm sure they mean well. Sometimes criticism helps point out better ways to do things that perhaps were overlooked or missed.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course the Sony DVD was junk. It was a Sony product containing moving parts.
Moving parts = problems.
Solid-state = fewer problems.
That's pretty much the way to tell if a Sony is going to be a problem, although buying Sony in the first place is kind of a bad move to begin with.
Anyway, I have a $150 DVD player/Recorder and a $30 DVD player. Do you want to guess which one plays perfectly, never has any issues and just generally works, versus which one is a pain in the butt, freezes, refuses to read discs, refuses to eject them, refuses to turn on or off, and stutters when it does work?
Yeah, the expensive one is the crappy one. It's a Lite-On not a Sony, but Sony uses Lite-On drives as an OEM so in a way, it IS a Sony and it's junk. The cheap DVD player is a, uh, actually, I have no idea what brand it is. The remote has no name on it.
I should send my old Belkin WAP to this guy. When the WAP is powered on, it sickens everyone in the house, causes agitation and fights and just a really bad scene.
Unplug power and everyone is suddenly fine.
It sucks as a WAP but apparently it's useful as an anti-personnel weapon.
Since you said "consoles ever sold at a loss" then you have to think back to entire history of game consoles (you said "ever" not me) which is a lot longer than you seem to be thinking.
And are you limiting this to first-sales or do you include the used market? Let's stick with new for now.
Atari dumped plenty of 2600s, then redid the box for a lower price, then undercut that and dumped them again along with dumping the games for far less than cost. Atari has a long history of dumping.
Coleco dumped tons of Colecovision consoles. I saw some of them on sale for $49 at the very end. That's surely less than cost. But did Coleco set that price or was it the store's idea. Who to blame? Well it sold below cost so it qualifies under your statement.
Nintendo. Saw the Virtual Boy and the re-engineered NES both on super discount closeout. Had to be below cost. The GC surely costs more than $99 to make yet that's what I can get one for.
It goes on and on.
Serpo.org proports to tell another part of the Zeta Reticuli story.
I can't say I believe this story but it's interesting enough. It would be stunning if it's true.
Assuming it's true, one take-away from this story was that the beings living there came from somewhere else. It's not their "home world" where their form of life developed and evolved.
Most of our scientists -and nearly all the "probable habitable planets" charts seem to always stick to looking at stars that might support life RIGHT NOW. If this story is true, then life might develop one place and move to one or more additional planets as it saw fit or as conditions warranted.
It's another aspect to considered when choosing where we think we might find life. Life might have its own ideas about where it wants to be. UFO stories or not, that's a simple truth that makes searching potentially a lot harder.
I'd like to inform you, that ony of my many clients has in posession
before expecting to read something about the mighty sum of two hundreds of millions of dollars, tied up in a bank account managed by the cousin of somebody who died in a car accident leaving no known heirs.
You are assuming you will be able to buy a used PS3.
There have been rumors about the range of DRM to be included in the PS3. Some rumors stated the console and the games will be locked to the original purchaser's console only, Sony's goal being to destroy the used game market that doesn't pass any money into Sony coffers.
Hard to imagine paying full retail for each and every game. And what happens when the PS3 breaks and you have to buy a new one? All your old games die with the broken console?
I hope this is not what Sony is planning but I would not put it past them.
Lockheed never publically acknowledges current Skunk projects. They only talk about stuff that is 10-15 years OLD, only AFTER it has been replaced by something far better or more advanced.
That means whatever was revealed is ancient history and absolutely NOT the state of the art.
It may also be a pile of red herrings designed to delude competitors or enemies, such as a series of expensive dead-end projects they WANT the bad guys to worry about, while the real toys continue to remain hidden.
Have a crapload of dead-end secret projects you can't fund? Can't exactly scrap them in public, so hey, pile them up, call them really really secret and show them off. Turn a pile of garbage into a hot new machine, and bonus points for getting the WSJ to write it up. Brilliant! Very typical defense contrator stuff.
In any case, that giant airship or one like it has been in tons of UFO reports for at least two decades. That we had one wasn't much of a secret. Why the hell we would need such a thing was more of a question. I don't buy the story given. Hauling troops anywhere quickly is what they said the V-22 was for, and that sure has turned out _real_ well. Our military would never settle for a slow blimp, unless it's got anti-grav or some exotic weapon.
Being able to use or even fully use One's education in One's Job is a great thing but the vast majority of people end up doing something entirely different or at least relatively unrelated to what they studied in school.
School is part training but a good part of it just to prove that you can show up on time for something everyday.
You may find more satisfaction and far more opportinities if you explore jobs options that don't directly relate to your studies. Not always. But if you approach jobs that ONLY involve using a CS major's skills, then that rules out a whole ton of other rewarding and challenging things that might be perfectly good other than not directly using a CS degree.
There are a ton of ways to exploit your talents without trashing the job that provides what appear to be good working conditions and benefits. You say coding is in your blood. So, do that in your spare time. Start a for-hire coding business on the weekends. Consult on the side and/or write apps for small businesses that could not afford full-blown programmers. Write apps and sell them on the 'net. You might stumble across something that makes a major pile of money, assuming that's what you want. Or you might make just a small amount of cash but hey, writing code is really what you wanted.
Meanwhile I wouldn't dismiss a nice stable job that appears to have few if any downsides and I wouldn't worry a bit about using my degree.
In ten years, nobody will remember how to read anyway.
Ironically, Slashdot wants me to type the word "Mailman" to prove I am not a script.
I work nights, sleep days. It'd be natural hours only if I lived in Japan, and I don't. Been on this shift for about five years now.
Sleeping during the day is hard. So, I sometimes take a melatonin supplement to help push things along and it works great for me. A very small dose at 11am and by noon I'm out cold for a solid 8.
I found a bit of a problem trying to get going at night because my body doesn't want to clean out melatonin at night, it wants to make more. It's not like a typical sleeping pill (eg, diphenhyrdramine) where it wears off. Melatonin eventually increases by itself.
One effective trick that works for me is to shine a REALLY bright light on my face for about five minutes. I use a halogen desk lamp. The huge boost in light seems to work magic. So, now I can sleep easy and wake up easy.
I know I've heard this guy on George Noory's radio show from time to time.
No judgement made on the validity of his claims, but he's been on there.
Yeah, I sometimes listen in on my way to lunch at night. The guest topics help me decide what to eat. If it's ghosts, is time for Subway. If it's UFOs, it's time for a Chik-fil-a chicken salad. Climate change means the burrito from the gas station.
I wish this wasn't true.
Maybe the title will get fixed by the time the story gets duped.
Or possibly by the second time it gets duped.
There's always hope!
But but but! Don't you know, he can code Windows on the back of a napkin in his hand-optimised assembler code!!! /sarcasm
I'm a Bellsouth DSL user and have been for something like 7 years and most of that time has been at 50 smackers a month, thanks very much. I was such an early adopter, the installer techs used my install to train each other. And they still screwed it up. But I digress....
*I* pay for my use of the Bellsouth network. MY money pays for what I see and do. Nobody pushes any content to me.
When I want to find something or do online shopping, I use my choice of sites. I don't use Bellsouth's useless portal page. HMMMM Maybe this is a weird ploy to push users at the Bellsouth portal which will be free of course. Naturally.
Other options?
Comcast will happily sell me cable modem service, at twice the speed for about 10 bucks more per month. Too bad I don't want Comcast for TV. Makes it cost more. 'course, I can always mooch free wifi off my neighbor's Comcast feed. He never notices.
Other DSL providers will sell me their service over Bellsouth's lines, but that puts yet another party in the blame game when the service goes out. Earthlink will blame BS. BS will blame Earthlink, my router, Microsoft, gnomes, sunspots and rain probably.
WiMax is starting to sound better.
The MiG-25 had everybody scared to death. Here was a super interceptor the likes of which the world had never seen. How could the USSR make such an advanced machine! If you weren't scared, you were impressed. Or both.
And then we got our hands on a MiG-25 and found out..... it wasn't advanced at all, just a big fighter with a ton of horsepower. It was closer to strapping a man on a Chinese New Year rocket than it was a sophisticated machine of doom. Very low tech.
As always, the brass and politicians worked under strange math:
If the enemy threat was really bad, they asked for lots of money.
If the enemy threat turned out to be not so bad or a freaking joke, they still asked for the same money and usually hyped up the threat anwyay until they started believing their own reports.
Spring fund drive?
Have they checked a calendar lately? I know SoCal is uniquely warm all the time but it hasn't STARTED snowing in a lot of other places yet. Spring is months away.
Sad to see so many public radio and TV stations going begging 24/7/365. The TV stations stuff their pledge breaks with programs they never show outside of pledge breaks. "Send in your pledges to pay for these great, expensive shows you'll never, ever see on a daily basis!" Seems a bit shady to me.
It varies. Some shoot the animation first and dub to it, others record the voices first and tailor the animation to match.
Let's see...
/\/\ has failed to line up ANY cellular launch parters. Without their support for streaming without using cell minutes, this is just a glorified MP3 player. Since the cell companies look at music as the golden cash cow, there is NO way they'd ALLOW /\/\ to do the same thing for free. They are still pissed about the Razr phone with iTunes. Mot has few friends, at least until they start paying bribes again. Get out the good checkbook boys! It's time to find more lobbyists!
My MP3 player lasts for about 12 hours on a good battery charge.
My phone has around three hours of talk time.
Assuming iRadio uses battery life at about the same rate as a regular call, I will be UNABLE to actually USE THE PHONE after three hours or so. But at least I got to listen to tunes! I don't really need to call anyone.*
Actually, this product has already failed.
Now that Iradio is out of the closet, maybe now Kenradio can shut the hell up about it. They've been pushing iradio for a solid six months as if it was the second coming of Jesus. And once unveilved, iradio turns out to be mostly nothing really. *yawn*
*Hypothetical. I have no friends TO call and never use more than 10% of my cell minutes.
Secret Life of Machines = best. show. evar.
The series was a masterpiece. And I have to say, it's available on DVD now too.
They've redubbed Mark Tewksbury's voice starting with episodes aired mid-December onward.
Yay! His delivery was the voice equivalent of Keanu Reeves' acting, which is to say, like plywood. Lynn's voice has also been erased: a new narrator is replacing both of them. Alas, he's not a lot better than Mark. He sounds like he's asleep.
Anyway, they're just redubbing the same script so the horrible puns and bizarre Canada-only words remain. The episode where they show the assembly of a common PC (a P3 iirc, showing the age) and refer to the "power switch" as a "commutator" sent me to the dictionary.
As far as I knew, a commutator is part of a motor. Which doesn't have anything to do with computers. But there is apparently an obscure meaning for "switch" too. Wow. Do they NOT use the term "power switch" in Canada?
Maybe somebody else has decent value-added stuff that people would actually want to pay for, but at LiveJournal, there is virtually zero difference between a free LiveJournal account and a paid LiveJournal account.
The main difference is that a PAID account should (but doesn't) have some sort of better performance compared to a free "you get what you pay for" account that loses posts, fails to update friend's posts, hoards emails, etc.
In other words, I had a free LJ account. I tried paying for it for a few months just to see what was what. Nothing was any better with a paid account. When LJ broke, it felt like I was throwing away money. I went back to the free one. When LJ breaks now, it's eh, well, it's free. No big deal.
Oh my blog is all about how much I hate the world, of course. Wouldn't be a blog without that now would it? LOL
++++NO CARRIER
Last I heard, Blockbuster had a policy where company HQ exercised total control over what the stores could rent, and the company had a rather conservative stance on what they would allow. Local stores had zero authority to add "unapproved" titles.
This made every Blockbuster more or less the same (fat chance of ever finding that rare film) and effectively blocked controversial films and adult movies. Perhaps the company will rethink this policy now that Blockbuster is in decline. Adding porn and controversial movies might bring people back to the stores.
A girl? On Slashdot? Hold on a sec while I clean up a bit.
Yes, let them go. It may be merchandise to you and the store but it's not worth taking a bullet. I knew a guy who worked as a bagger for a grocery store. Nice guy, full of energy, always hopping to help with any task in the store. He was slightly retarded but he had a job and did it well.
The grocery store got shoplifted one night and the bagger tried to stop them. He chased them to the parking lot whereupon one of the robbers produced a gun and killed him. Blew him away. Media reports later said what I did not know: the bagger was the sole bread winner for his disabled mother and a couple disabled siblings. Really a tough life. The robbers didn't care about who he was or his family.
I knew another guy who worked the night shift at a gas station. I had a paper route that started next to his station so I used to fuel up pretty much every night. Really nice guy. The store was robbed and he was killed.
Recently at a local Walmart, a 70+ door greeter tried to stop a shoplifter. He followed the robber to the parking lot where the robber backed his car right over the man before leading police on a chase. The victim barely survived.
So the message is, your life is just not worth merchandise.
I always heard employee theft was the biggest part of shrinkage. Nothing easier than backing a truck up the dock at night and making off not with one digital camera but with pallets of cameras, big screens, etc.
In my late teen years, I used to shop at a certain now defunct chain. Store security used to follow me around the store apparently waiting or watching to catch me stealing something. These idiots were very obvious and very inept and useless because stuff still got stolen -we used to joke that store was pefect because you could pretty much guarantee that somebody else would have opened all the latest toys and gadgets and left the stuff lying around. Nobody had to buy anything.
Anyway, they never caught me doing anything but they DID eventualy catch employees carting tons and tons of stuff out the backdoors. Big time hauls from what I recall. It made the news. The losses were a major factor in the demise of the chain.
One of my current co-workers used to work in the stock room at CompUSA and has talked at length about the stupid flaws in the store security. For example securing laptops in a room with a heavy padlock and metal door but 1/2" drywall walls. Theives simply went through the wall and cleaned out the room. Security cameras? Not connected. Alarm? Regularly left disarmed. He says they used to lose a lot of stuff to pro thieves rather than shoplifters. LP mostly worried about grilling employees over missing till money but did little about stuff flying out the back.
My current workplace -IT, not retail- has invested a lot in cardkeys and cameras and whatnot, but the walls are still just drywall and the camera system would be a joke to defeat. We have a high security cage area in our warehouse but you could drive a forklift right up to it and rip the cage to shreds.
My point is that true security is had to do right and there will always be fatal flaws that go undetected or unrealized up until the moment someone exploits them.
Providing something for free doesn't automatically free them from criticism.
The email doesn't belong to them. It belongs to me or to the people who sent it to me. Filtering that mail for spam is one thing. There's a folder I can browse to review it if I want to see if they've tagged valid mail.
Deleting the mail at the server level without notice or review is asking me and everyone else to just trust them. There's no folder to review, no notice, no override.
Except they didn't actually ask us to trust them anyway, they just went and did it. A feature, you know. Trust us. We're Google. We're not evil. We promise!
I'm sure they mean well. Sometimes criticism helps point out better ways to do things that perhaps were overlooked or missed.