The 'game' of politics is corruption. It's also in knowing the right people and presenting the 'correct' image. Not religious? Not going to get elected in the US (this is statistically true even other non-religious people won't vote for you which makes no sense, and it can actually keep you from getting on the ballot). Not a democrat or republican? Then not much chance to get on the ballot for any state or federal offices in many states. Local office? County office? Probably, but you don't have much authority at those levels.
Lol,.1-.3 or 1-3 mbps DSL is that way do to 'distance'? What crap. This is my house which is 1000 feet from the phone companies local wiring office for my town. I have seen DSL faster then TW offers cable speeds at. My state of PA has given VZ 100's of millions of dollars to offers broadband and I don't even know of a single location in my state that they offer FIOS in and they certainly could offer DSL in higher speeds to be competitive with cable. But they chose not to.
TW could go higher as well, they offer much higher speeds in other places, but with VZ as the only competition and them offering a meer 1-3 mbps as the 'best effort' why bother?
I don't know where you are, but here (PA) I cannot even get insurance through my employer for $80/month. Right now I'm looking about $100/bimonthly through my current employer, who having around a thousand employees gets fairly good rates. They also pay 80% of my insurance rates. Though now I'm in my thirties and the average age where I work is fairly high (The average about 37), which brings things back to the level of private insurance 5 years ago in my state.
Luckily for me I've been a independent since I could vote... I try awfully hard to pick someone who shows some sanity... Sadly I haven't found many over the years...
You can afford more than $1000/month? I spent time as a consultant and sans an employer that was the quoted figure to cover one 20-something with no medical issues around five years ago. I couldn't afford it and neither could most people in my area. Lots of people think they can because their employer foots 80% or more of their medical insurance bill.
Like the other poster mentioned, we actually have tried remote access for that CEO. In fact right before the conversation I mentioned above. He hated the experience and he certainly didn't feel it meet his needs. We do not have an in house development team (they outsourced it ages ago), so we don't have someone to make a custom app for the Ipads just to get this to work reliably. Using the existing apps we had considerable problems getting it to look like it's just an app (and so not confuse him) and the performance sucked. It also had major issues accepting touch input in a reliable fashion.
If you would like to deal with a normal load of issues with a staff of four and try to play with stupid ipad apps to get this to work be my guest. I on the other hand would rather they just rewrite the stupid web app and be done with it.
As a IT admin, I can attest we are not all lazy. It more often then not is a matter of pulling upper levels of the business kicking and screaming into modern times by spending some money to make sure things still work. They would often rather spend tons of money maintaining old OSes on modern hardware then make sure old software they feel is critical actually gets fixed to work on modern OSes.
It's even crazier when they then want some ancient IE6 based web app to miraculously work on their shiny new Ipads and don't understand that they simply won't work. I have had a a CEO complain that we need to put IE6 on his Ipad because he needs to run X web app that was made 15 years ago and only works in IE6. He refused to accept that an Ipad will not run IE6, to the point where he even cursed at us and demanded we install Win XP on his Ipad to 'make it work'.
Most of us IT admins know that we have to get this stuff working and get them off of systems often setup before we were even hired. Getting large businesses and governments to do such things though is at times futile.
The Quality of DSL versus Cable can be effected considerably by who offers service as well. Where I live I have two broadband providers:
Verizon DSL with.1-.3 mbps SDSL and 1-3 mbps ADSL Time Warner with 12 mbps DOSCIS 3 cable and 24 mbps DOSCIS 3 cable
I chose the 12 mbps TW cable. The lowest bandwidth I've ever seen with TW was 3 mbps, which is the highest Verizon even offers. Verizon charges $46/month for the 1-2 mbps connection and I pay $53/month for 12 mbps. I think my choice was rather a no brainer option as Verizon seems rather content to have crippled themselves by simply relying on old DSL technology while TW has been updating their systems steadily.
This reminds me so much of the people at companies who say "Why care about the environment? I won't be around to live in it." Sure we can sit on our single rock in the sky and wait for the next climate changing disaster to wipe us out or we could, you know go elsewhere and maybe see what is there.
Quite a few people? Most books I've bought from Amazon to use on my tablet are $2.99 or below and they are some of the most popular titles available in their genres through Amazon.
At least in the US it's getting harder and harder to find a carrier willing to let you use a phne that isn't a 'smart' phone of some kind... Or at least that has been my experience. The only ones I've seen that still have a good number of cellphones are pay as you go companies.
They simply take a cut of each video that GEMA claims breaks their copyrights, this is more or less what happens now (but with a yearly lump sum to cover any possible infringement until 2008). GEMA is the one that selects what videos fall under that currently (& if other companies are any example they will claim stuff even if they don't own the copyrights).
For me, as a writer of science fiction, my works tend more towards dystopias because the world seem bound and determined to become a giant thought police state run by and for corporations. I simply write an extrapolation of what I see. What I see is not fairie land with unicorns and rainbows in the future. Their was far more optisim about the future even 30 years ago as the world goes more and more to shit.
My career goal is actually to be a CIO and degree wise I have a BIS (Business Information Systems) bachelor's degree and am working on a MBA to go with it. My experience is heavily 'tech savvy', but my training is business heavy... Which I like to think means that while I don't expect to be the one setting up a system or writing code, I should be able to spot things that will be issues and avoid them. I also figure I'll be better at making a business case for things on technical grounds...
My experience with most CIO's at the moment however is that they seem to have poor business or technical backgrounds, for a job that needs both.
Tell me that when I can vote for them. I can't even write in my vote anymore for who I want, but I'm forced to chose someone who is already on the ballet and the two main parties make that extremely hard past local office.
If no one mentioned it, I was going to suggest this. I don't go anywhere at work anymore without taking my Transformer Prime and it's all I use for notes anymore. I do tend to have the keyboard on and type for the most part, but some things are just easier on the touch screen. That includes diagrams, which you can't really do with a keyboard as input.
The fact that it only loosely tells the story (by having the same characters and some of the same plotting and redoing everything else) may have alot to do with it. As is I've read the books and they were not that great for sci-fi. The interesting thing from them was a mars with people on it (and for some the fact that the marsians were nudists), neither point was really used by Disney to tell an interesting story. So that may have far more to do with the failures of Disney's take on Barsoom.
That said the changes were probably made to 'bring the story in line with modern ideals' that are dominated by hollywood and I'd love to see actual fans try their hand at it...
I would also love to know (for sure) if the 2350 yuan is weekly, biweekly, or monthly. The article reads as if that is weekly. As a weekly rate though 2350 yuan is ~$373 USD. US minimum wage pays about the same (30 hours a week is $225). I think the numbers are meant to be monthly or Chinese workers make way more then we think they do.
Some parts of the EU are not doing so great, but that said the EU is first or second place (after China and along side the US) in pure GDP. So I doubt much can be said about one truly doing better than the other.
You should have seen this one (male) boss I had. He summoned me to a meeting I hadn't been invited to do, then once I arrived he went off on me for not having finished a project another manager had just that morning asked for help completing. He was ranting, raving, flailing his arms, and hit a pen so hard on the desk the top just popped off and flew through the air to hit me.
Theoretically complaints for actions like that were supposed to be handled by HR, however HR decided to use that as blackmail against me deciding it was more in their interests to leverage my 'accusations' against me, then to do their job and report it to the board (The manager was a C level exec and so decisions were the responsability of the board).
I'm hard pressed to come up with any good managers in my 20 years of work.
I referenced their rules within their books, never actually repeating single word of text from them. That is not illegal. However feel free to continue to misconstrue my actions.
SJG has actively pursued many people playing online in various forms and does in fact require all players to have their own copies of the books used online. I've been subject to some of their C&D claims for stuff that didn't use any of their works, but used their rule set.
Try drivethroughrpg.com (If I recall the name correctly), it's dominated by PDF copies of a wide range of RPG/Tabletop books and publishers...
I used to admire GURPS, but they don't seem to want to move on to an online age... I moved my campaign stuff to obsidianportal because my group spread out and stopped meeting physically. SJG started sending copyright take down notices initially for as little as one repeated paragraph from a source (posted to clarify something among players) and now they send me takedown notices for campaigns that don't even use their rules as some sort of harrassement. So they may have been one of the first to go into ebooks, but they may well be the last to adopt to the internet age in general. While not a fan of their rules, Eclipse Phase has the best license for online campaigning possible.
I have been doing network management for a university for the last couple years, we don't own a single $1000+ dollar HP anything. We have laserjets, but they don't cost more than about $500 USD. Printing beyond that is done by Ricoh Copier/Printers nearly exclusively (A couple Toshiba's are mixed in). I have seen a $500 office laserjet just decide it doesn't won't to see the network before (the line tested fine, the printer worked on other lines but not that one), let alone the sheer volume of random jamming issues (where the 'service technicians' just suggested we get a 'maintenance kit', all of a month before it just stopped working).
Don't even get me started on the various 'officejet' products and related 'small business' printers that get used in various offices. Or my own home Photosmart all in one C2780 that barely goes 5 sheets before complaining of a paperjam where the stupid paper guide mechanism just didn't work right.
Maybe they are good at $1000+, but frankly I don't know who is buying those. Networked copiers dominate large scale printing at every place I've worked in in the last decade. That market is dominated by Ricoh and Toshiba locally (because the local office machine company carries those brands).
That said they used to make very good printers, we still own a few workhorse 5 series laserjets from 15 years ago that rarely if ever have issues. The 5 series though predates Carly Fiona's management of HP. When she took over the workhorse models got phased out and their repalcements frankly are just not what the old ones were.
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The 'game' of politics is corruption. It's also in knowing the right people and presenting the 'correct' image. Not religious? Not going to get elected in the US (this is statistically true even other non-religious people won't vote for you which makes no sense, and it can actually keep you from getting on the ballot). Not a democrat or republican? Then not much chance to get on the ballot for any state or federal offices in many states. Local office? County office? Probably, but you don't have much authority at those levels.
Lol, .1-.3 or 1-3 mbps DSL is that way do to 'distance'? What crap. This is my house which is 1000 feet from the phone companies local wiring office for my town. I have seen DSL faster then TW offers cable speeds at. My state of PA has given VZ 100's of millions of dollars to offers broadband and I don't even know of a single location in my state that they offer FIOS in and they certainly could offer DSL in higher speeds to be competitive with cable. But they chose not to.
TW could go higher as well, they offer much higher speeds in other places, but with VZ as the only competition and them offering a meer 1-3 mbps as the 'best effort' why bother?
I don't know where you are, but here (PA) I cannot even get insurance through my employer for $80/month. Right now I'm looking about $100/bimonthly through my current employer, who having around a thousand employees gets fairly good rates. They also pay 80% of my insurance rates. Though now I'm in my thirties and the average age where I work is fairly high (The average about 37), which brings things back to the level of private insurance 5 years ago in my state.
Luckily for me I've been a independent since I could vote... I try awfully hard to pick someone who shows some sanity... Sadly I haven't found many over the years...
You can afford more than $1000/month? I spent time as a consultant and sans an employer that was the quoted figure to cover one 20-something with no medical issues around five years ago. I couldn't afford it and neither could most people in my area. Lots of people think they can because their employer foots 80% or more of their medical insurance bill.
Like the other poster mentioned, we actually have tried remote access for that CEO. In fact right before the conversation I mentioned above. He hated the experience and he certainly didn't feel it meet his needs. We do not have an in house development team (they outsourced it ages ago), so we don't have someone to make a custom app for the Ipads just to get this to work reliably. Using the existing apps we had considerable problems getting it to look like it's just an app (and so not confuse him) and the performance sucked. It also had major issues accepting touch input in a reliable fashion.
If you would like to deal with a normal load of issues with a staff of four and try to play with stupid ipad apps to get this to work be my guest. I on the other hand would rather they just rewrite the stupid web app and be done with it.
As a IT admin, I can attest we are not all lazy. It more often then not is a matter of pulling upper levels of the business kicking and screaming into modern times by spending some money to make sure things still work. They would often rather spend tons of money maintaining old OSes on modern hardware then make sure old software they feel is critical actually gets fixed to work on modern OSes.
It's even crazier when they then want some ancient IE6 based web app to miraculously work on their shiny new Ipads and don't understand that they simply won't work. I have had a a CEO complain that we need to put IE6 on his Ipad because he needs to run X web app that was made 15 years ago and only works in IE6. He refused to accept that an Ipad will not run IE6, to the point where he even cursed at us and demanded we install Win XP on his Ipad to 'make it work'.
Most of us IT admins know that we have to get this stuff working and get them off of systems often setup before we were even hired. Getting large businesses and governments to do such things though is at times futile.
The Quality of DSL versus Cable can be effected considerably by who offers service as well. Where I live I have two broadband providers:
Verizon DSL with .1-.3 mbps SDSL and 1-3 mbps ADSL
Time Warner with 12 mbps DOSCIS 3 cable and 24 mbps DOSCIS 3 cable
I chose the 12 mbps TW cable. The lowest bandwidth I've ever seen with TW was 3 mbps, which is the highest Verizon even offers. Verizon charges $46/month for the 1-2 mbps connection and I pay $53/month for 12 mbps. I think my choice was rather a no brainer option as Verizon seems rather content to have crippled themselves by simply relying on old DSL technology while TW has been updating their systems steadily.
This reminds me so much of the people at companies who say "Why care about the environment? I won't be around to live in it." Sure we can sit on our single rock in the sky and wait for the next climate changing disaster to wipe us out or we could, you know go elsewhere and maybe see what is there.
Quite a few people? Most books I've bought from Amazon to use on my tablet are $2.99 or below and they are some of the most popular titles available in their genres through Amazon.
At least in the US it's getting harder and harder to find a carrier willing to let you use a phne that isn't a 'smart' phone of some kind... Or at least that has been my experience. The only ones I've seen that still have a good number of cellphones are pay as you go companies.
They simply take a cut of each video that GEMA claims breaks their copyrights, this is more or less what happens now (but with a yearly lump sum to cover any possible infringement until 2008). GEMA is the one that selects what videos fall under that currently (& if other companies are any example they will claim stuff even if they don't own the copyrights).
For me, as a writer of science fiction, my works tend more towards dystopias because the world seem bound and determined to become a giant thought police state run by and for corporations. I simply write an extrapolation of what I see. What I see is not fairie land with unicorns and rainbows in the future. Their was far more optisim about the future even 30 years ago as the world goes more and more to shit.
My career goal is actually to be a CIO and degree wise I have a BIS (Business Information Systems) bachelor's degree and am working on a MBA to go with it. My experience is heavily 'tech savvy', but my training is business heavy... Which I like to think means that while I don't expect to be the one setting up a system or writing code, I should be able to spot things that will be issues and avoid them. I also figure I'll be better at making a business case for things on technical grounds...
My experience with most CIO's at the moment however is that they seem to have poor business or technical backgrounds, for a job that needs both.
Tell me that when I can vote for them. I can't even write in my vote anymore for who I want, but I'm forced to chose someone who is already on the ballet and the two main parties make that extremely hard past local office.
If no one mentioned it, I was going to suggest this. I don't go anywhere at work anymore without taking my Transformer Prime and it's all I use for notes anymore. I do tend to have the keyboard on and type for the most part, but some things are just easier on the touch screen. That includes diagrams, which you can't really do with a keyboard as input.
The fact that it only loosely tells the story (by having the same characters and some of the same plotting and redoing everything else) may have alot to do with it. As is I've read the books and they were not that great for sci-fi. The interesting thing from them was a mars with people on it (and for some the fact that the marsians were nudists), neither point was really used by Disney to tell an interesting story. So that may have far more to do with the failures of Disney's take on Barsoom.
That said the changes were probably made to 'bring the story in line with modern ideals' that are dominated by hollywood and I'd love to see actual fans try their hand at it...
I would also love to know (for sure) if the 2350 yuan is weekly, biweekly, or monthly. The article reads as if that is weekly. As a weekly rate though 2350 yuan is ~$373 USD. US minimum wage pays about the same (30 hours a week is $225). I think the numbers are meant to be monthly or Chinese workers make way more then we think they do.
Some parts of the EU are not doing so great, but that said the EU is first or second place (after China and along side the US) in pure GDP. So I doubt much can be said about one truly doing better than the other.
I own an xbox 360 Elite from when that was new and I have never had an issue with it. So anecdote for anecdote we seem to be even.
You should have seen this one (male) boss I had. He summoned me to a meeting I hadn't been invited to do, then once I arrived he went off on me for not having finished a project another manager had just that morning asked for help completing. He was ranting, raving, flailing his arms, and hit a pen so hard on the desk the top just popped off and flew through the air to hit me.
Theoretically complaints for actions like that were supposed to be handled by HR, however HR decided to use that as blackmail against me deciding it was more in their interests to leverage my 'accusations' against me, then to do their job and report it to the board (The manager was a C level exec and so decisions were the responsability of the board).
I'm hard pressed to come up with any good managers in my 20 years of work.
I referenced their rules within their books, never actually repeating single word of text from them. That is not illegal. However feel free to continue to misconstrue my actions.
SJG has actively pursued many people playing online in various forms and does in fact require all players to have their own copies of the books used online. I've been subject to some of their C&D claims for stuff that didn't use any of their works, but used their rule set.
Try drivethroughrpg.com (If I recall the name correctly), it's dominated by PDF copies of a wide range of RPG/Tabletop books and publishers...
I used to admire GURPS, but they don't seem to want to move on to an online age... I moved my campaign stuff to obsidianportal because my group spread out and stopped meeting physically. SJG started sending copyright take down notices initially for as little as one repeated paragraph from a source (posted to clarify something among players) and now they send me takedown notices for campaigns that don't even use their rules as some sort of harrassement. So they may have been one of the first to go into ebooks, but they may well be the last to adopt to the internet age in general. While not a fan of their rules, Eclipse Phase has the best license for online campaigning possible.
I have been doing network management for a university for the last couple years, we don't own a single $1000+ dollar HP anything. We have laserjets, but they don't cost more than about $500 USD. Printing beyond that is done by Ricoh Copier/Printers nearly exclusively (A couple Toshiba's are mixed in). I have seen a $500 office laserjet just decide it doesn't won't to see the network before (the line tested fine, the printer worked on other lines but not that one), let alone the sheer volume of random jamming issues (where the 'service technicians' just suggested we get a 'maintenance kit', all of a month before it just stopped working).
Don't even get me started on the various 'officejet' products and related 'small business' printers that get used in various offices. Or my own home Photosmart all in one C2780 that barely goes 5 sheets before complaining of a paperjam where the stupid paper guide mechanism just didn't work right.
Maybe they are good at $1000+, but frankly I don't know who is buying those. Networked copiers dominate large scale printing at every place I've worked in in the last decade. That market is dominated by Ricoh and Toshiba locally (because the local office machine company carries those brands).
That said they used to make very good printers, we still own a few workhorse 5 series laserjets from 15 years ago that rarely if ever have issues. The 5 series though predates Carly Fiona's management of HP. When she took over the workhorse models got phased out and their repalcements frankly are just not what the old ones were.