R2.0 wrote:
Where on earth are you getting this data? Please provide at least some reference to any accumulation of people that is self sufficient on solar and wind. How about from Slashdot, still on the main page as of my writing this post?
moderratorrater wrote:
According to the legends, everything on MacGuyver could have been done, so why not have them show how it was right? In fact, have [Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage] make a mythbusters proving/disproving the movie anyway; it'll be a big boost to publicity for both shows. The Mythbusters have already done a MacGyver episode. Several of the myths were busted, though many of them did have an element of truth to them, they could not be performed nearly so bare bones as Mac did.
deathmonkey wrote:
A fat person with no insurance should not get treated either. I'm overweight, now, because I didn't get treated without insurance when I needed it. My tale of how I'm not allowed to work in the US anymore, due to government bigotry, has been detailed here before. The short version though, is that I was an able bodied, upstanding natural born Caucasian US citizen.
I don't have insurance now, and likely never will. I didn't several years ago either, when I broke my foot. Since that was apparently not emergency enough (I obviously didn't die, no life threat..); I didn't get treated.
Now I'm overweight, because I can barely stand up to get to the bathroom. When I was younger, I was physically active on a daily basis. I had practiced Taekwondo since I was 11, and was in great shape.
So a hearty fuck you to you, and all the moderators who gave you a +5 for this stupidity. Not everyone who's overweight (or even most, from what I can tell) got their by eating nothing but Big Macs and Twinkies.
Obviously, they need smart people like you to measure their ad campaign in pennies per viewer when it is a time based medium, not pages like your magazine.
This is close to buying time on television, which does not cost pennies. You could not buy a placement spot to run 24/7 for 20$/month/viewer.
This is also NCSoft, which is a factor you're leaving out. This company has been willing to piss off their userbase time and again, and doesn't care if they lose even 80% of their bottom line. I'd be surprised if they have 150k users still, but I'll take your word on it. They have been willing to lose 500k users before over a bad update that didn't make them any money, so I wouldn't be surprised if they'd lose 100k for continued cash. Maybe they're hedging that they can keep the advertisers on the line longer than they can the players at this point.
RandomU wrote:
Why does anyone think a profitable company would risk losing 20, 40 or even 60% of their player base so they can make a few extra bucks with MANDATORY ads? Because the advertisers can pay more than 60% of the smallest MMO's playerbase?
eldavojohn wrote:
[President Bush's] religion encourages him to love his neighbor and to treat him as he would want to be treated. Yet a fence between his country and Mexico says otherwise. Um, I'm no Bush supporter (and it's sad that I have to run a disclaimer for even being fair to the man), but in the interest of fairness, are you saying you want to be able to just walk in no questions asked and stay as long as you want in any nation?
Sorry but no, I expect and want to be permitted to enter through legally established means, so that I may be an upstanding guest of the place I am visiting.
My difficulty in affording Apple products make me think they are discriminating against the poor. What? Discriminating against the poor? Has discrimination become this catch-all now? Everyone hates discrimination, therefore, anything I don't like, down to the price someone asks for their wares is discrimination? You think someone at Apple is going "You know, we could produce these things for virtually free and give them away, but forget all that profit and paying our employees shit, what we really have to avoid is all those poor schmoes sullying our good name by using our product with a low disposable income!"
Discrimination is when you use an irrelevant attribute to make decisions. The ability to afford the product at a profitable price(*) is hardly irrelevant, and distracts from real discrimination -- and Apple is one the top 10 companies to work for if you're a minority. I'm not a fanboi, I'm just homosexual and love my wife just the same, and wish her capacity for pregnancy did not prevent her from receiving health care (I don't work for Apple, sadly).
~Rebecca
(*) Someone will invariably make a comment of gasoline or food or some such. Please understand that we're talking about Apple computer, which to my knowledge does not produce or sell anything in the "necessary for sustainable life" category. If iPods become as important as the automobile, groceries, or healthcare, we'll reconsider.
DraconPern wrote:
It's not Verizon that is pushing that metric. It's the outsourced company that is trying to make a buck off Verizon. If I pay you to do something (Handle as many calls as possible for as cheap as possible), how am I off the hook when you do it?
ShieldW0lf wrote:
If I give Kong a discount, am I still going to be able to eat? Or am I going to die slow? There's a web full of anti wal-mart sites out there that can show you just how many companies (Levi Jeans, Master Locks, Huffy Bikes, etc.) this has happened to.
So your first question is unfortunately irrelevant. Your second, is however, as the only winning move in this situation is not to play with King Kong at all, and attack him instead of yourselves as he demand. How to get that to happen is a topic for another day, under another revolution thread; as the Kong you'd have to defeat here has help this time.
JimboFBX wrote:
So in other words, Sams Club is going to try to give themselves a $2 discount? I think I tried that with my cell phone bill because the service wasn't as good as I wanted. It didn't work out very well. Imagine you were, well you, and you were standing under King Kong's foot. If he steps on you, the obvious happens. Kong demands "a $2 discount" from you, even though you are his banana supplier.
The question of the day is, does Kong get his bananas for $2 less? For extra credit, can you explain why reverse would not be true, if you attempted to demand a $2 on Kong's security services he's providing you?
Irish_Samurai wrote:
If you think Google is free, you don't get it.
Search isn't Google's product, you are. They sell your eyes to advertisers. Search is just the honey pot to get you there.
Why are people so blatantly naive? Perhaps to some of us, Google [Service] is the product, and our eyes are our currency. Google has been successful by making this exchange work in both directions. I get something I want (for me, mail and search), at a price I am willing to pay (viewing text ads).
I was not willing to pay the price Microsoft asked (viewing flashing pictures); at that point the price was too high and I used to use that other currency (dollars) to pay someone else to give me what I wanted with no ads at all.
Many of us naive folks use "Free as in Beer" and not "Free as in zero expenditure of anything of any kind whatsoever".
Opportunist wrote:
That is about as much not a spoiler as the average trailer to your average current movie. Speaking as probably one of the few on Slashdot who doesn't have BioShock, or know anything about the game other than it was a pretty popular Sci Fi game this year -- I have no idea what happens in the game after having read the summary.
AC wrote:
A preceding "-" means "exclude" in googlese. Is that really what you meant, there? It's really bad that I saw "googlese." in the preview and expected there to be a.cx after I expanded the quote...
ivan256 wrote:
It is much harder to learn to play a real guitar with any decency than it is to be fairly good at guitar hero. At least for me it is... It's not just you. In a recent issue of Game Informer; Slash (of GNR fame and boss of GH3) said that he actually can't play Guitar Hero for beans. He actually knows how to play those songs and can't get over it enough to play the game.
butterflysrage wrote:
[Overtime's quality of being cheaper than hiring more employees] puts it totally at odds with why overtime was first introduced. During the great depression, overtime was introduced to pressure employers to hire extra staff rather then simply working the ones they had into the ground. Overtime still works that way, just not in the way that you expect. It is cheaper still to hire more part-time employees and refuse them both benefits AND overtime. Overtime contributes significantly to this equation; as it is possible for a part time employee to be paid overtime on a short term basis without running afoul of federal laws that would change their status to full time. The resulting expenses however cause any employer of part time employees to be downright paranoid of you "going over" at any time, usually to the point of pushing you out the door as soon as you get close.
Mind you as I say this, I'm not against overtime laws or want to remove them in any way. However, overtime is helping to create more part-time jobs. As I said though, the solution here to create more full time jobs is not to remove overtime but rather to further increase the pressure by requiring benefit packages to be extended to all employees regardless of the hours worked. Most benefits require some employee contribution, such as insurance fees, premiums, 401(k) contributions, etc. Or an employer could simply raise their payroll, and get rid of employer tied benefits altogether, a more reasonable approach in my opinion.
You do understand the use of the conjunction "and", don't you? The AC writing the comment asserts that actions described in phrase A ("you make a joke mocking the person for being unaware of the information you ignored") are combined with the conditions in phrase B ("And it's modded "Funny"?").
So he's not being crabby just because you misread the sentence, but because you also got modded funny for your off-base mockery. This whole explanation is Tongue-in-Cheek jest.
IANAL. Duh. In general, it depends heavily on the laws of the jurisdiction in which the trial falls. A state case in California ruled that if the recipient is in California, California's two-party law takes precedence.
Federal cases have generally taken the view that the person doing the recording's laws take precedence. To my knowledge in these cases, the person doing the recording and the person aware of the recording were always the same person. But again, IANAL nor a legal encyclopedia, so it could have happened. I am unsure exactly what view would be taken if you were dealing with multiple parties to the call and yet a third party in yet another jurisdiction. I suspect, that would depend heavily on the minutiae of the case. And this isn't an issue unless one of the 12 two party consent states is involved somewhere in the equation. Pudding can probably avoid a significant portion of liability here by placing their monitoring stations in a one party state, and using the service contract to offload responsibility of local compliance to the end user.
This may be the dark side of single party notification laws; which generally are a good thing as they allow a consumer to record abusive collections calls, sales offers, and customer service calls without having to scare off the representative on the other end of the line, and "catch them in the act". How many times have you talked to someone from a company in one of these scenarios, had them promise you the sun, the moon, and the stars, then find out a month later that it was nothing of the sort. These laws normally function to serve as your weapon against that; so while advertising taking advantage of it is a negative, I would still consider it a worthwhile one to retain this right in other areas (I do own a telephone recording device for this purpose).
timmarhy wrote:
actually, "doing other things" often ends up pretty expensive. I never made any claim that the sum of everything we spend otherwise is less than sitting in front of the boob tube and doing nothing else. It is more enjoyable however. You're factoring "cost" only in terms of dollars; I'm including "hassle" and "advertising viewing time" as costs I have to spend to enjoy it.
My TV was a pretty cheap investment for the amount of pleasure i get out of it. So long as you feel that way; you'll still be part of their market. My comment was simply stating that as they add on these additional costs, in extra fees, equipment that doesn't work properly, multiple subscriptions I have to deal with and pay for, an ad avalanche, and others -- they are pushing people out of the market.
Surt wrote:
For a lot less than the price of that computer, you can get a great 37" 1080p LCD TV. Yes, but your economic factor fails to realize that the computer is going to be purchased anyway. So it's either buy the computer, and the TV; or just buy the computer.
tekrat wrote:
The guarantee is that every 5 years, you need to spend 10 grand on another entertainment setup. This, and excessive advertising, have combined to push myself and my household entirely out of the market. Now they get nothing. We don't own any TVs, PVRs, or any of that nonsense. We don't pay money every month for cable TV or satellite that still has ads that we have to pay a further subscription to try and skip the ads on tivo and run in to intentional scheduling errors, or any of their other BS. We're done, and we've been done for almost 3 years now.
Instead, we have one computer that has a large monitor. Now, admittedly, our "large" monitor isn't anywhere near the size of a 2000 inch TV that takes up an entire wall of most people's living rooms. But we've gotten over that. We can still comfortably watch any movie we want in DVD format. With no commercials, on our schedule. I know some slashdotters will still get up in arms about the DRM on the DVD format and whatnot, but we're a regular, non ubergeek family. We don't care. Now the only money anyone gets from us in this fashion is the $17/month it costs for Blockbuster Online.
Isn't that fun? Not really; and I don't suspect our family will be the last to be pushed out of the market by their bullshit. When you add it all up; its just not worth it anymore. Now we spend the money doing other things; going out and having fun. It's alot better for our relationship, too.
hawk wrote:
The court there found that it was not a matter of his fields being contaminated, but of him using Roundup to kill the regular plants before harvesting "his" seed . .. Um, no they didn't. Here's a couple of choice quotes to help you out.
The Court dismissed the argument that "use" of patented cells or genes applied only in the context of their isolated form. Nor does the fact that Schmeiser did not use Roundup herbicide on his crops [emphasis mine ~R] preclude "use" of the gene. and
Even though the plants propagate without human intervention the realities of modern agriculture mean there is always human intervention in the growth of plants and thus farming is a method of "use" of plant genes.
The Court ruled that Schmeiser deprived Monsanto of its monopoly on the special canola plant by storing and planting the Roundup Ready canola seeds pursuant to his commercial interests. Now I realize the case is very complicated, and there was a point where Schmeiser did use Roundup to conduct some isolated tests; I am merely pointing out that it WAS a matter of his fields being contaminated, and not of him using Roundup on his crops.
The court simply took the position that even though the contamination was not found to be Schmeiser's fault; he should have destroyed all of the leftover seed instead of keeping it for next year. As pointed out elsewhere in the article, Canadian Law does not recognize "farmer's rights"; and rejected Schmeiser's (and most of the public's) opinion that he should have been allowed to reuse "his own seed". The court took the view that it was more like a disaster, a massive fire or flood that decimated his crops -- unfortunate, to be sure, but something for him to work out on his own, and not giving him the right to violate Monsanto's patents.
Now, before I get flamed to hell for this, realize that I personally support Mr. Schmeiser and feel his case is a prime example of the sad state of legal affairs around the world today, a phenomenon not limited to the USA as this case demonstrates. Common sense has lost weight to doublespeak and incoherant legalese.
fredklein wrote:
Do you automatically communicate with others when you are 'sleeping'? Then why should an iPhone? QFT/QED. You just won the thread.
I hope this man goes to court, and says exactly that when AT&T/Apple tries to trot out the sleep mode excuse. Neither myself nor my home computer do this communication thing when in 'sleep mode'.
Yeah, um... these Americans who are qualified for the job but losing them to Indian or Chinese candidates... Could you send them my way? Absolutely, could you post some contact information, a name of a company, something? I am certain we can find on slashdot as many as you need.
when we have an open job requisition and I'm looking at 10 resumes (7 from India, 1 from China, 1 from Bangladesh and one native) and the only American candidate is laughably unqualified The 7 Americans, 1 more American, and 1 more American, who didn't get a free engineering education since the 7 Indians, 1 Chinese, and 1 Bangladesh-ian got the money instead. You are pretty much making my point here, we do have qualified Americans, and we would have that many more of them if we were doing as the article suggests.
Where in the article does it state that foreign students will be receiving a free education? You're right, it doesn't. However, this is a second-level deep reply. In my original reply, I said that it would be a good idea to support what was in the article; because it has obviously worked so well in the past when we have done something similar (but to Indian/Chinese recipients, not Americans).
Your vitriol is completely obscuring your point, to the point where I have to ask, what bridge do you live under? I'm not trolling, but it's obvious you are, since you posted AC. I would go so far as to guess you didn't realize I started the top level post on this thread, and just wanted to rant angrily and expected to get modded down for it. The article has passed its point where any moderators are paying attention to it, so if you're not, feel free to sign in and reply to me and I'll gladly have this debate with you.
Country of origin is irrelevant to this debate. In this case, it is most definitely relevant, as it impacts whether the poster is paying for something someone else gets for free, or gets a free ride on our ticket.
Why? Do non-Americans somehow know less about education systems? All of your absurd suggestions aside, the reason why is because there is an obvious bias in suggesting it is a good idea for a foreign country, that you don't pay taxes to, to pay for your education and import a foreigner. Americans, who fund the policy, should be the ones deciding whether it goes to Americans, or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Where on earth are you getting this data? Please provide at least some reference to any accumulation of people that is self sufficient on solar and wind. How about from Slashdot, still on the main page as of my writing this post?
~Rebecca
According to the legends, everything on MacGuyver could have been done, so why not have them show how it was right? In fact, have [Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage] make a mythbusters proving/disproving the movie anyway; it'll be a big boost to publicity for both shows. The Mythbusters have already done a MacGyver episode. Several of the myths were busted, though many of them did have an element of truth to them, they could not be performed nearly so bare bones as Mac did.
~Rebecca
A fat person with no insurance should not get treated either. I'm overweight, now, because I didn't get treated without insurance when I needed it. My tale of how I'm not allowed to work in the US anymore, due to government bigotry, has been detailed here before. The short version though, is that I was an able bodied, upstanding natural born Caucasian US citizen.
I don't have insurance now, and likely never will. I didn't several years ago either, when I broke my foot. Since that was apparently not emergency enough (I obviously didn't die, no life threat..); I didn't get treated.
Now I'm overweight, because I can barely stand up to get to the bathroom. When I was younger, I was physically active on a daily basis. I had practiced Taekwondo since I was 11, and was in great shape.
So a hearty fuck you to you, and all the moderators who gave you a +5 for this stupidity. Not everyone who's overweight (or even most, from what I can tell) got their by eating nothing but Big Macs and Twinkies.
~Rebecca
Obviously, they need smart people like you to measure their ad campaign in pennies per viewer when it is a time based medium, not pages like your magazine.
This is close to buying time on television, which does not cost pennies. You could not buy a placement spot to run 24/7 for 20$/month/viewer.
This is also NCSoft, which is a factor you're leaving out. This company has been willing to piss off their userbase time and again, and doesn't care if they lose even 80% of their bottom line. I'd be surprised if they have 150k users still, but I'll take your word on it. They have been willing to lose 500k users before over a bad update that didn't make them any money, so I wouldn't be surprised if they'd lose 100k for continued cash. Maybe they're hedging that they can keep the advertisers on the line longer than they can the players at this point.
~Rebecca
Why does anyone think a profitable company would risk losing 20, 40 or even 60% of their player base so they can make a few extra bucks with MANDATORY ads? Because the advertisers can pay more than 60% of the smallest MMO's playerbase?
~Rebecca
[President Bush's] religion encourages him to love his neighbor and to treat him as he would want to be treated. Yet a fence between his country and Mexico says otherwise. Um, I'm no Bush supporter (and it's sad that I have to run a disclaimer for even being fair to the man), but in the interest of fairness, are you saying you want to be able to just walk in no questions asked and stay as long as you want in any nation?
Sorry but no, I expect and want to be permitted to enter through legally established means, so that I may be an upstanding guest of the place I am visiting. My difficulty in affording Apple products make me think they are discriminating against the poor. What? Discriminating against the poor? Has discrimination become this catch-all now? Everyone hates discrimination, therefore, anything I don't like, down to the price someone asks for their wares is discrimination? You think someone at Apple is going "You know, we could produce these things for virtually free and give them away, but forget all that profit and paying our employees shit, what we really have to avoid is all those poor schmoes sullying our good name by using our product with a low disposable income!"
Discrimination is when you use an irrelevant attribute to make decisions. The ability to afford the product at a profitable price(*) is hardly irrelevant, and distracts from real discrimination -- and Apple is one the top 10 companies to work for if you're a minority. I'm not a fanboi, I'm just homosexual and love my wife just the same, and wish her capacity for pregnancy did not prevent her from receiving health care (I don't work for Apple, sadly).
~Rebecca
(*) Someone will invariably make a comment of gasoline or food or some such. Please understand that we're talking about Apple computer, which to my knowledge does not produce or sell anything in the "necessary for sustainable life" category. If iPods become as important as the automobile, groceries, or healthcare, we'll reconsider.
It's not Verizon that is pushing that metric. It's the outsourced company that is trying to make a buck off Verizon. If I pay you to do something (Handle as many calls as possible for as cheap as possible), how am I off the hook when you do it?
~Rebecca
If I give Kong a discount, am I still going to be able to eat? Or am I going to die slow? There's a web full of anti wal-mart sites out there that can show you just how many companies (Levi Jeans, Master Locks, Huffy Bikes, etc.) this has happened to.
So your first question is unfortunately irrelevant. Your second, is however, as the only winning move in this situation is not to play with King Kong at all, and attack him instead of yourselves as he demand. How to get that to happen is a topic for another day, under another revolution thread; as the Kong you'd have to defeat here has help this time.
~Rebecca
So in other words, Sams Club is going to try to give themselves a $2 discount? I think I tried that with my cell phone bill because the service wasn't as good as I wanted. It didn't work out very well. Imagine you were, well you, and you were standing under King Kong's foot. If he steps on you, the obvious happens. Kong demands "a $2 discount" from you, even though you are his banana supplier.
The question of the day is, does Kong get his bananas for $2 less? For extra credit, can you explain why reverse would not be true, if you attempted to demand a $2 on Kong's security services he's providing you?
~Rebecca
If you think Google is free, you don't get it. Search isn't Google's product, you are. They sell your eyes to advertisers. Search is just the honey pot to get you there. Why are people so blatantly naive? Perhaps to some of us, Google [Service] is the product, and our eyes are our currency. Google has been successful by making this exchange work in both directions. I get something I want (for me, mail and search), at a price I am willing to pay (viewing text ads).
I was not willing to pay the price Microsoft asked (viewing flashing pictures); at that point the price was too high and I used to use that other currency (dollars) to pay someone else to give me what I wanted with no ads at all.
Many of us naive folks use "Free as in Beer" and not "Free as in zero expenditure of anything of any kind whatsoever".
~Rebecca
That is about as much not a spoiler as the average trailer to your average current movie. Speaking as probably one of the few on Slashdot who doesn't have BioShock, or know anything about the game other than it was a pretty popular Sci Fi game this year -- I have no idea what happens in the game after having read the summary.
~Rebecca
A preceding "-" means "exclude" in googlese. Is that really what you meant, there? It's really bad that I saw "googlese." in the preview and expected there to be a
~Rebecca
It is much harder to learn to play a real guitar with any decency than it is to be fairly good at guitar hero. At least for me it is... It's not just you. In a recent issue of Game Informer; Slash (of GNR fame and boss of GH3) said that he actually can't play Guitar Hero for beans. He actually knows how to play those songs and can't get over it enough to play the game.
~Rebecca
[Overtime's quality of being cheaper than hiring more employees] puts it totally at odds with why overtime was first introduced. During the great depression, overtime was introduced to pressure employers to hire extra staff rather then simply working the ones they had into the ground. Overtime still works that way, just not in the way that you expect. It is cheaper still to hire more part-time employees and refuse them both benefits AND overtime. Overtime contributes significantly to this equation; as it is possible for a part time employee to be paid overtime on a short term basis without running afoul of federal laws that would change their status to full time. The resulting expenses however cause any employer of part time employees to be downright paranoid of you "going over" at any time, usually to the point of pushing you out the door as soon as you get close.
Mind you as I say this, I'm not against overtime laws or want to remove them in any way. However, overtime is helping to create more part-time jobs. As I said though, the solution here to create more full time jobs is not to remove overtime but rather to further increase the pressure by requiring benefit packages to be extended to all employees regardless of the hours worked. Most benefits require some employee contribution, such as insurance fees, premiums, 401(k) contributions, etc. Or an employer could simply raise their payroll, and get rid of employer tied benefits altogether, a more reasonable approach in my opinion.
~Rebecca
satire mode="on"
You do understand the use of the conjunction "and", don't you? The AC writing the comment asserts that actions described in phrase A ("you make a joke mocking the person for being unaware of the information you ignored") are combined with the conditions in phrase B ("And it's modded "Funny"?").
So he's not being crabby just because you misread the sentence, but because you also got modded funny for your off-base mockery. This whole explanation is Tongue-in-Cheek jest.
Cheers,
~Rebecca
IANAL. Duh. In general, it depends heavily on the laws of the jurisdiction in which the trial falls. A state case in California ruled that if the recipient is in California, California's two-party law takes precedence.
Federal cases have generally taken the view that the person doing the recording's laws take precedence. To my knowledge in these cases, the person doing the recording and the person aware of the recording were always the same person. But again, IANAL nor a legal encyclopedia, so it could have happened. I am unsure exactly what view would be taken if you were dealing with multiple parties to the call and yet a third party in yet another jurisdiction. I suspect, that would depend heavily on the minutiae of the case. And this isn't an issue unless one of the 12 two party consent states is involved somewhere in the equation. Pudding can probably avoid a significant portion of liability here by placing their monitoring stations in a one party state, and using the service contract to offload responsibility of local compliance to the end user.
~Rebecca
Really? Is it for the recipient of the call? How does he/she know that the call is being recorded? They probably don't. Most states (38/51) are single party notification states. See also Wikipedia on Telephone Recording Laws.
This may be the dark side of single party notification laws; which generally are a good thing as they allow a consumer to record abusive collections calls, sales offers, and customer service calls without having to scare off the representative on the other end of the line, and "catch them in the act". How many times have you talked to someone from a company in one of these scenarios, had them promise you the sun, the moon, and the stars, then find out a month later that it was nothing of the sort. These laws normally function to serve as your weapon against that; so while advertising taking advantage of it is a negative, I would still consider it a worthwhile one to retain this right in other areas (I do own a telephone recording device for this purpose).
~Rebecca
actually, "doing other things" often ends up pretty expensive. I never made any claim that the sum of everything we spend otherwise is less than sitting in front of the boob tube and doing nothing else. It is more enjoyable however. You're factoring "cost" only in terms of dollars; I'm including "hassle" and "advertising viewing time" as costs I have to spend to enjoy it.
My TV was a pretty cheap investment for the amount of pleasure i get out of it. So long as you feel that way; you'll still be part of their market. My comment was simply stating that as they add on these additional costs, in extra fees, equipment that doesn't work properly, multiple subscriptions I have to deal with and pay for, an ad avalanche, and others -- they are pushing people out of the market.
~Rebecca
For a lot less than the price of that computer, you can get a great 37" 1080p LCD TV. Yes, but your economic factor fails to realize that the computer is going to be purchased anyway. So it's either buy the computer, and the TV; or just buy the computer.
~Rebecca
The guarantee is that every 5 years, you need to spend 10 grand on another entertainment setup. This, and excessive advertising, have combined to push myself and my household entirely out of the market. Now they get nothing. We don't own any TVs, PVRs, or any of that nonsense. We don't pay money every month for cable TV or satellite that still has ads that we have to pay a further subscription to try and skip the ads on tivo and run in to intentional scheduling errors, or any of their other BS. We're done, and we've been done for almost 3 years now.
Instead, we have one computer that has a large monitor. Now, admittedly, our "large" monitor isn't anywhere near the size of a 2000 inch TV that takes up an entire wall of most people's living rooms. But we've gotten over that. We can still comfortably watch any movie we want in DVD format. With no commercials, on our schedule. I know some slashdotters will still get up in arms about the DRM on the DVD format and whatnot, but we're a regular, non ubergeek family. We don't care. Now the only money anyone gets from us in this fashion is the $17/month it costs for Blockbuster Online.
Isn't that fun? Not really; and I don't suspect our family will be the last to be pushed out of the market by their bullshit. When you add it all up; its just not worth it anymore. Now we spend the money doing other things; going out and having fun. It's alot better for our relationship, too.
~Rebecca
The court there found that it was not a matter of his fields being contaminated, but of him using Roundup to kill the regular plants before harvesting "his" seed . .
The court simply took the position that even though the contamination was not found to be Schmeiser's fault; he should have destroyed all of the leftover seed instead of keeping it for next year. As pointed out elsewhere in the article, Canadian Law does not recognize "farmer's rights"; and rejected Schmeiser's (and most of the public's) opinion that he should have been allowed to reuse "his own seed". The court took the view that it was more like a disaster, a massive fire or flood that decimated his crops -- unfortunate, to be sure, but something for him to work out on his own, and not giving him the right to violate Monsanto's patents.
Now, before I get flamed to hell for this, realize that I personally support Mr. Schmeiser and feel his case is a prime example of the sad state of legal affairs around the world today, a phenomenon not limited to the USA as this case demonstrates. Common sense has lost weight to doublespeak and incoherant legalese.
~Rebecca
Do you automatically communicate with others when you are 'sleeping'? Then why should an iPhone? QFT/QED. You just won the thread.
I hope this man goes to court, and says exactly that when AT&T/Apple tries to trot out the sleep mode excuse. Neither myself nor my home computer do this communication thing when in 'sleep mode'.
~Rebecca
when we have an open job requisition and I'm looking at 10 resumes (7 from India, 1 from China, 1 from Bangladesh and one native) and the only American candidate is laughably unqualified The 7 Americans, 1 more American, and 1 more American, who didn't get a free engineering education since the 7 Indians, 1 Chinese, and 1 Bangladesh-ian got the money instead. You are pretty much making my point here, we do have qualified Americans, and we would have that many more of them if we were doing as the article suggests.
~Rebecca
~Rebecca
Why? Do non-Americans somehow know less about education systems? All of your absurd suggestions aside, the reason why is because there is an obvious bias in suggesting it is a good idea for a foreign country, that you don't pay taxes to, to pay for your education and import a foreigner. Americans, who fund the policy, should be the ones deciding whether it goes to Americans, or not.
~Rebecca