As a victim of bullying as a child (up til about 16 when I beat the hell out of a bully who pushed me down a short flight of stairs and there was no more til I graduated) I understand *EVERY SINGLE TIME* one of these people breaks and kills a lot of people.
You have years of tormenting- never stopped by authority figures- perhaps even tacitly supported by some of them. And you have a gun and you can put a stop to all of it.
Fortunately, I didn't go down that road but bullies are way too tolerated by school authorities. I think some of them were former bullies themselves and get their kicks off seeing the "wimps" picked on.
But gaming- the best that might teach is accuracy and quick target selection. I think the basic problem is that the concept of going on a killing spree is out there now. You can't put it back in pandora's box.
I have never moderated a single comment down. There are way to many inappropriate downmods. I spend 4 or all 5 of my points moving those comments back up.
I see vindictive downmods which are clearly being done because of some past grudge and I see pointless downmods.
The faq can say whatever it wants- you post on certain issues and you are going to be down/upmodded by people with an agenda on that issue not because of something the Faq says.
Every time I pay rack price and read that people around the world are paying between $3 and $30 (below cost when you consider patents) it really irritates me. Because part of the reason my milk is $5, and my taxes are high, and my costs are high is that everyone else here is also paying full price.
Then I get put into competition with these people who I am subsidizing and see jobs in my field offshored left and right because they are cheaper. It is just not right. It is not fair.
I still have trouble getting away from office as well.
Partially, it is not that it has a better interface but that we are familiar with it. I know OO gives me fits with the way they moved some things even tho I recognize the moves were logical and Office is irrational (and is going to change a lot with the Vista Version).
But I *will* change to OO. I've been slowly doing so for about 2 years now. It's getting very good and I'm getting more familiar with it.
As it is, running full regression tests for one browser takes days. There is no ROI for supporting firefox yet.
I use it personally. I'm using it now. I do personal testing of the site with firefox to make sure we are a little compatible but I'm not going to run 4,000 tests for each browser.
The clearer it becomes how random and arbitrary our system is.
We pretend to have a democratic system where the little guy has equal footing but in reality it is just propaganda to keep us docile. The entire system is basically set up to keep us working and consuming as slaves and to not get mad and spill over into a revolution.
It is really about naked power with random assertions of right and wrong used as cover for the attacks. That's why some times a charge will stick (it has a lot of power behind it) and other times, the person just gets away with doing the same thing (they have more power).
However, I would say that it has gotten worse (more obvious) over the last 20 years.
The media is not liberal or republican. It is pro "local power brokers and business people".
The media may play with being liberal or republican on the editorial pages but where it really matters, they squash, bury, or front page and highlight news as desired by the local elite.
I think that my "I Spy" episodes run 52 minutes per episode. I think my "Get Smart" episodes run 26 minutes per episode. Both consistent with 8 minutes of commercials per hour or 13%.
I think "Moonlighting" (1980's) episodes are 48 minutes long. That's about 12 minutes of commercials per hour.
(I'm not at home so I can't verify those run times however.)
Some recent episodes of network television ran over 20 minutes of ads (partially by stealing minutes from the preceding and following hours when the show was aired).
And they frequently stack a large set of commercials right before the end of the show.
Thank god for DVR's and instant commercial skipping.
What i do these days is start the show, hit pause, and go do something else for 15 minutes. Then as i hit each block of commercials, I just zap through them.
It depends on the portion of the show you are watching.
The last hour of some movies on television run every bit of 50% even tho the average load is lighter.
The basic format is:
teaser->Heavy ads->significant portion of the movie->light ads->movie->light ads(message movie is coming) more light adds-> more movie -> relentless ads -> last few minutes of the movie.
Consider the end of Battlestar Galactica recently. You have to endure 4 to 7 minutes of ads to get the last 30 to 45 second long "cut scene" from the show.
However, I was more referring to web sites for the 50% load. They often show you a 60 second commercial and then show you a 60 second news clip.
One episode of Alias had 38 minutes of content and 24 minutes of ads (yup- 62 minutes- they ate a minute from the prior and following hours- playing hell with tivo's)
Just six weeks ago, what I was searching for and purchasing and googling is completely different than what I'm getting today. My needs were satisfied. If they send me ads for similar items, it will just be noise for two or three years.
Taxes are only due on a net profit which is determined by your basis.
If you basis is $330 and you sell it on ebay for $380, you owe taxes on $50 profit. You might be able to reduce that further by showing expenses for the internet connect, your gas to go buy the item, and so on.
If all business were to go to ebay, it becomes trivially obvious that ebay profits must be taxed since the government has to collect some taxes.
Ebay has been benefiting from the garage sale except (too small to worry about) but folks who hold large garage sales every week get noticed.
It's perfectly okay for sharpton and jackson to make racist remarks all day long.
Only whites can't make racist remarks.
Re:Who Wants To Move Apartments Every Year?
on
The End is Nigh for XP
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Your post is the story of my life.
I'm so weary of the constant change.
You can never "master" anything before it is obsolete and time to move on.
After five or six of these iterations, I'm losing interest in mastering anything and withdrawing from computing. I've gone from being a developer to being a project manager (a stable field with a set of rules you can master). I've switched my entire software stack except everquest to open, multi-os software packages that will not be forcibly obsoleted.
I KNOW that some will go obsolete. Heck, if you offer me something 10 times as good, I might upgrade.
But Microsoft seems to be offering 1% to -10% "improvement" to someone like me and they want to force me into a subscription model.
I just want to do artwork, word processing, record/process audio, play shows. XP does all that. Linux does all that. The only software holding me to XP at this time is Everquest and I'm very close to leaving that behind for the same reasons. Every six months there is another expansion which invalidates everything you have done before. After having six sets of gear invalidated, you start to lose interest in getting on the ride again. And suffering through another three months of flagging to open up parts of the software that you are already paying for.
I agree- I want a nice house that I can polish. not a new house every year that has a new host of problems. When is life going to stabilize again? I can't see security out more than 2 or 3 years into the future. It makes me weary.
Slashdot Mirror
As a victim of bullying as a child (up til about 16 when I beat the hell out of a bully who pushed me down a short flight of stairs and there was no more til I graduated) I understand *EVERY SINGLE TIME* one of these people breaks and kills a lot of people.
You have years of tormenting- never stopped by authority figures- perhaps even tacitly supported by some of them.
And you have a gun and you can put a stop to all of it.
Fortunately, I didn't go down that road but bullies are way too tolerated by school authorities. I think some of them were former bullies themselves and get their kicks off seeing the "wimps" picked on.
But gaming- the best that might teach is accuracy and quick target selection. I think the basic problem is that the concept of going on a killing spree is out there now. You can't put it back in pandora's box.
I have never moderated a single comment down. There are way to many inappropriate downmods. I spend 4 or all 5 of my points moving those comments back up.
I see vindictive downmods which are clearly being done because of some past grudge and I see pointless downmods.
The faq can say whatever it wants- you post on certain issues and you are going to be down/upmodded by people with an agenda on that issue not because of something the Faq says.
Every time I pay rack price and read that people around the world are paying between $3 and $30 (below cost when you consider patents) it really irritates me. Because part of the reason my milk is $5, and my taxes are high, and my costs are high is that everyone else here is also paying full price.
Then I get put into competition with these people who I am subsidizing and see jobs in my field offshored left and right because they are cheaper. It is just not right. It is not fair.
I still have trouble getting away from office as well.
Partially, it is not that it has a better interface but that we are familiar with it. I know OO gives me fits with the way they moved some things even tho I recognize the moves were logical and Office is irrational (and is going to change a lot with the Vista Version).
But I *will* change to OO. I've been slowly doing so for about 2 years now. It's getting very good and I'm getting more familiar with it.
Waiting for perfection results in never doing anything.
Doing something imperfect invariably results in tuning to address those imperfections.
As it is, running full regression tests for one browser takes days.
There is no ROI for supporting firefox yet.
I use it personally.
I'm using it now.
I do personal testing of the site with firefox to make sure we are a little compatible but I'm not going to run 4,000 tests for each browser.
It's bad enough as it is now with Sarbanes Oxley.
At least judges don't tear people's arms off when they get upset.
The clearer it becomes how random and arbitrary our system is.
We pretend to have a democratic system where the little guy has equal footing but in reality it is just propaganda to keep us docile. The entire system is basically set up to keep us working and consuming as slaves and to not get mad and spill over into a revolution.
It is really about naked power with random assertions of right and wrong used as cover for the attacks. That's why some times a charge will stick (it has a lot of power behind it) and other times, the person just gets away with doing the same thing (they have more power).
However, I would say that it has gotten worse (more obvious) over the last 20 years.
The parent poster has it closer to the truth.
The media is not liberal or republican. It is pro "local power brokers and business people".
The media may play with being liberal or republican on the editorial pages but where it really matters, they squash, bury, or front page and highlight news as desired by the local elite.
Yes and on top of that there was an article on Slashdot very recently where some companies admitted, "yes it is basically because of cheap labor".
I'm making the rational choice and leaving it for project management.
I'm really very sorry for these kids.
This is a terrible tragedy.
I think that my "I Spy" episodes run 52 minutes per episode.
I think my "Get Smart" episodes run 26 minutes per episode.
Both consistent with 8 minutes of commercials per hour or 13%.
I think "Moonlighting" (1980's) episodes are 48 minutes long.
That's about 12 minutes of commercials per hour.
(I'm not at home so I can't verify those run times however.)
Some recent episodes of network television ran over 20 minutes of ads (partially by stealing minutes from the preceding and following hours when the show was aired).
And they frequently stack a large set of commercials right before the end of the show.
Thank god for DVR's and instant commercial skipping.
What i do these days is start the show, hit pause, and go do something else for 15 minutes. Then as i hit each block of commercials, I just zap through them.
It depends on the portion of the show you are watching.
The last hour of some movies on television run every bit of 50% even tho the average load is lighter.
The basic format is:
teaser->Heavy ads->significant portion of the movie->light ads->movie->light ads(message movie is coming) more light adds-> more movie -> relentless ads -> last few minutes of the movie.
Consider the end of Battlestar Galactica recently. You have to endure 4 to 7 minutes of ads to get the last 30 to 45 second long "cut scene" from the show.
However, I was more referring to web sites for the 50% load. They often show you a 60 second commercial and then show you a 60 second news clip.
One episode of Alias had 38 minutes of content and 24 minutes of ads (yup- 62 minutes- they ate a minute from the prior and following hours- playing hell with tivo's)
Just six weeks ago, what I was searching for and purchasing and googling is completely different than what I'm getting today. My needs were satisfied. If they send me ads for similar items, it will just be noise for two or three years.
That's the approach i took to network television.
10% ad load is not so bad (say 10 seconds for a 100 second video). That's what the ad load was like for television back in the 1950's and 1960's.
Advertisers have pushed it way past 33%. In some cases the ad load is almost 50%.
How can they even expect us to bother wading through 50% ads to get to content?
I mean, natural selection and all.
If 70% of hives collapse- that's not 100%.
The 30% that is resistant or immune to this effect becomes the new breeding stock.
That's okay, we'll just genetically engineer some wasps that make honey.
Taxes are only due on a net profit which is determined by your basis.
If you basis is $330 and you sell it on ebay for $380, you owe taxes on $50 profit.
You might be able to reduce that further by showing expenses for the internet connect, your gas to go buy the item, and so on.
If all business were to go to ebay, it becomes trivially obvious that ebay profits must be taxed since the government has to collect some taxes.
Ebay has been benefiting from the garage sale except (too small to worry about) but folks who hold large garage sales every week get noticed.
Sorry but if you try to code straight JSP's with mixed java code, you deserve to be shot.
And that was cutting edge about five years ago.
Everything is like that. Yesterday's hot technology is today's joke.
Agree with you entirely as far as the rest of your post tho.
How can companies think we are going to invest 50k in self education when they are going to fire us mercilessly.
Not at all.
It's perfectly okay for sharpton and jackson to make racist remarks all day long.
Only whites can't make racist remarks.
Your post is the story of my life.
I'm so weary of the constant change.
You can never "master" anything before it is obsolete and time to move on.
After five or six of these iterations, I'm losing interest in mastering anything and withdrawing from computing. I've gone from being a developer to being a project manager (a stable field with a set of rules you can master). I've switched my entire software stack except everquest to open, multi-os software packages that will not be forcibly obsoleted.
I KNOW that some will go obsolete. Heck, if you offer me something 10 times as good, I might upgrade.
But Microsoft seems to be offering 1% to -10% "improvement" to someone like me and they want to force me into a subscription model.
I just want to do artwork, word processing, record/process audio, play shows. XP does all that. Linux does all that. The only software holding me to XP at this time is Everquest and I'm very close to leaving that behind for the same reasons. Every six months there is another expansion which invalidates everything you have done before.
After having six sets of gear invalidated, you start to lose interest in getting on the ride again. And suffering through another three months of flagging to open up parts of the software that you are already paying for.
I agree- I want a nice house that I can polish. not a new house every year that has a new host of problems.
When is life going to stabilize again? I can't see security out more than 2 or 3 years into the future. It makes me weary.
Given an option between a Waiting, or Xbox or PS3 now, I must choose waiting.
I have interest in a fun console game with a new and unique controller that sells for about $250 before taxes.
Substituting an expensive machine with great graphics but controllers that will hurt my hands isn't a solution.
I hear some are coming out late April.
Still not a hint of interestin Xbox or Playstation (tho I have looked at the PS2 as a sub til I can get a Wii).
Controllers and Nunchuks are finally in high supply at Fry's.
I have not seen anything like this in a couple decades.
And the only question is...
How the heck ARE we causing global warming on Mars and the outer moons?
But the answer is undeniably: Yes.
Ohhh.. the question is... can you get a picture of Britney's woo woo?
And have those pictures caused warming around the globe?
The answer is undeniably: Yes.