And I would say that if I bought the stock on the promise that they were not going to provide forecasts, then they would be violating their promise to me if they started providing them.
I think I'd have a good 500 years in me before I got bored.
That's why I didn't say "forever" like the other thread here. I wouldn't want to live forever unless I definately had a way to off myself when I was ready. Being unable to die period would be a kind of a curse (which makes you wonder if there really was a "God" then it would suffer from that curse- read an interesting SF story where only people who hated God in the story were saved- so they could think of a way to kill it.)
If I had to choose between my daughter dying of diabetes or creating a dozen mice doomed to die of diabetes that the choice is a no-brainer.
And if there was just about anything to do with mice that would give me a healthy 35 year old body for say... 500 years, I'd be for it.
The conflict is unresolved in my brain.
But I guess every day that I engage in -any- kind of luxury instead of helping those poor starving folks in other countries that I'm in engaging in a similar kind of calculus.
Because you don't bigger guns, more paintballs, or better gear as a result of investing time in paintball. The only thing you might get from time is improved skill (unless you are hand making your gear?).
Buying gold is like buying an extra 2000 shots for your paintball machinegun when everyone agreed that the contest was going to be with 400 shots each.
While they are running around making short controlled bursts, you are free to hose down the area.
--- My paintball story... It was 1997-- the game came down to one person on each team-- for "fun" they decided to allow the other guy to use his downed buddies machinegun as well as his own so he had two machine guns. I had a large tree and a single action pistol with under 10 shots left.
He charges me shouting... paint splattering all over the tree... paint balls are flying everywhere.
I calmly came out on one knee-- the gun leveled in front of me and took him down with one shot- center mass. Not a speck of paint on me.
Oh come on.. you only need to think about any "amateur" olympic event to blow apart your statement.
Some countries now give their "amateurs" free room & board, training, thousands of dollars worth of equipment. Repeatedly they are caught doping their atheletes in ways which result in higher performance now and an early death later.
Having someone else do the work to earn you gold or level up a character which you then buy for money would be like having a soccer league where you could buy a position on one of the playoff teams or in the championship game and be counted the "winner" if your team won.
It would be like buying a position on one of the two teams in the Superbowl and if your team won, being treated like you had been on the team all along (you get the ring, invited to all the parties, in the record books, team photos, etc.)
But as I said in my parent post- if the rules of the game allow it, then it's not cheating. In the sports you list, it is legal to buy the best equipment you can- but it is not legal for example, to buy a robot to serve for you in tennis or raquetball (return this perfect, 145 mph serve!).
Besides, the EULA in these games specifically forbids this kind of activity in many cases. Right there you are breaking the basic rules of the game and so you are cheating. As I said, if you can go to a store inside the game and purchase any item or game flag in exchange for real world money- then it's not cheating. The last I heard, there are no such stores in Wow or any other MMorg.
Imagine if there was no rule that said you couldn't buy the pot if you had enough money.
Wow- I have a winning hand.
Okay I raise you 10,000 dollars.
I don't have that much.
Ah well- you lose-- SUCKER.
---
There is no equivalent of an "all in" rule or any other kind of limit when it comes to purchasing virtual gold, pre-leveled and flagged characters, etc.
---
In fact, buying gold is like buying a winning hand in an already running game. To save time you know- just cut straight to the part where you win.
---
And besides- I qualified my original statement to begin with-- if you can buy gold, gear, flags with cash -IN THE GAME- to begin with then it's not creating. It's part of the game then- just like buying chips in poker is.
Imagine being able to bring use real cash to buy extra game money or pieces.
Hmm. I need some $300 dollars more to buy that hotel on boardwalk- okay, I'll just put down $3.00 of real money to buy $3000 game money. Wow- this is so much fun- this game of monopoly is so much faster and I'm much more likely to win since I have $100 in my pocket and you only have $20.
Unless the game itself explicitly allows you to buy items with cash, then buying gold this way is cheating. ---
It can't be stopped tho. So any game that has a market means that normal people are playing in a game where people are rampantly cheating all around them. And the games are fundamentally unfair in several ways: 1) If you don't have to work... you win. 2) If you can log on just an hour earlier than the majority of the players.. you win if critical content is not instanced. 3) If you start the game with a group of friends from a previous game- you have a huge advantage.
These are advantages but they are not cheating. Buying gold and equipment with real world money means you are not playing the game (unless the games rules explicitly allow you to purchase items with real cash in game).
I think he still would have made it if he knew it would lose money because of the religious issues involved (the story being written by the founder of scientology (or perhaps ghost writers if you accept the "hubbard was dead" theory).
Scientology- the only religion founded on a bar bet*.
Part of this relies on what percentage of workers make minimum wage these days.
Back then, a lot of fast food workers made minimum wage. These days it is not uncommon to start at 6.00 or higher. I've read recently that they have to offer 7.00 to get workers in many areas.
I had almost talked myself into agreeing since inflation adjusted wages should be 8.30 and no one is offering that high for min-wage jobs yet but then I realized that gasoline is in a spike (and already back down to 2.11 in my area).
If you compare spikes - I paid 1.58 back in 1978. Gas is cheaper on this spike than previous price spikes. If you compare non-spike pricing then 2.11 * 3.33 = 7.02-- minimum wage reported of 7.00. Gasoline is up 1% by those figures.
Part of the reason actual minimum wages go up is that because of inflation, if they don't offer enough, there is no point in working (as a lot of mom's with second incomes are figuring out that the cost of a 2nd job is often 70-80% of their entire second income when they figure in clothes, home services, gas, and extra eating out.)
No one really gave a damn about any other character.
There wasn't any character conflict with any other character.
The dinner scene where jar jar irritated leem nielson was about the only character conflict in the entire movie (and revealed more about the jedi master's character than any other scene in the movie).
No one really cares about the other characters in the movie but they all have an opinion on Jarjar. So I say most annoying AND the best character after palpatine in all three movies.
Two points. 1) It's not just programmers any more. It is -any- high paying job that requires a very expensive education to qualify for. Radiologists, para-legals, programmers, even lawyers. I.e. There is no job safe except upper level management, government jobs (especially with security considerations) and work that must be physically performed here. In other words, a huge swath of jobs are being shipped overseas with very few jobs left to replace them.
2) The same corporations shipping things overseas are having laws passed that create artificial monopolies so the prices of their products sell for between 10 and 20 times more in the US as they do in other countries.
It would be one thing if all the products we were purchasing were dropping to a 10th of the price, so that we could afford to make less (and thus compete with outsourcing better). But our high costs are being locked in while the very businesses that are doing this are taking advantage of labor that costs a fraction of what ours does- in part because they are paying a 10th of the prices we are.
It's a really nasty mix. I can only see it ending very badly when we pass below some crucial tipping point and basically collapse economically down to the levels of the other countries and can't buy the products at the artificially inflated prices.
And at that point, there will be no market for products made in these other countries. Essentially these companies are getting rich by mining america's wealth built up over the last fifty years.
I think that reasoning breaks down when one part of the world uses child labor, slave labor, and manufacturing processes that destroy the environment with long-term toxins.
The government has to step in and set minimum standards or it is a race to the bottom with a return to slavery and radium water.
And in a free market, I'd be paying $4 for my medicine and $2.40 for my first run dvd movies. My sugar would be.05 per pound.
We have a lot of monopolies in america that mean we really are not in a free market.
Part of the problem is property tax that goes up if the value of your land goes up. As a result, people from other places who have money can bid up property in your area and then you get disposessed when you can't afford the new 10x higher property taxes. Property taxes are an abomination that means you never own your property- you are merely renting it and maintaining it for the government.
Agreed. Songs from allofmp3.com sell for about 30 cents a piece.
If I pay a buck a license I want them to record that license for the rest of my life and let me redownload the song for free once a year to whatever media I'm using at that time.
I'm sorry you read but lacked the ability to comprehend the article.
I'm going to quote the relevant passages.... Playing to the backlash against ubiquitous communication, a company called NaturalNano is developing a special high-tech paint that relies on the wizardry of nanotechnology to create a system that locks out unwanted cell phone signals on demand.... The radio filter would allow all emergency radio communications to pass through the shield, Crowley said. With all other signals, like cell phones, the filter would act like a spigot to block or allow them to pass through--say, only during intermission. --- Now... how are they going to lock "...out unwanted cell phone signals on demand." and "...act like a spigot to block or allow them through-say, only during intermission..." without the paint being switchable?
Of course, you could admit you were wrong, went off half half-cocked and apologize but refusing and showing what a jerk you are will be just as satisfying to me.
Not going to argue since I can't link private investment newsletters.
But several that I get (which are not the sky is falling lunatics) are forecasting recessions.
That recessions happen historically soon after rates stop rising is just a fact they state- I haven't done the personal research. They speculate that it is because the Fed always raises rates just a little too much and actually causes the recession as a result.
The longer term dates I mention are part of an 11 year cycle (tho the 2006-7 lays over one of the minor humps in the cycle) that another person has been pushing for quite a few years and it's matching up fairly well so far.
Correct.. incorrect? I don't know.
But the parent post said no one was talking about recessions- all I'm saying is several financial newsletters I follow are talking about them based on the fact that the current expansion is now over 3 years old without a recession. Nothing goes up forever.
While I think it is legal, clearly it is a device that is applied in paint form. Otherwise you couldn't switch it on and off. Actually, it's tens of thousands of tiny devices.
I hear the word recession every night on the financial programs I listen to. The yield curve is not looking that great and historically we always have a recession soon after the fed stops raising rates.
The longer term forecasts are for a sharp short recession in late 2006 to mid 2007 then 2 good years, then a very harsh longer recession from 2010 to 2011.
I went to best buy and there was this expensive dvd/vcr recorder. next to it was a knock off brand for about 100 less. I opened the vcr door and looked inside. It was identical inside. I could even see a few numbers on the circuit boards and they were the same.
The effect of this one act has been dramatic. My productivity has dropped by 75% in the last 3 years.
I used to: develop a rough tech document. estimate hours. develop code. test code. install code. do any emergency fixes for problems that turn up in production since none of our testing environments match production. emergency fix code. install code.
Now I: propose the project or recieve request for project from business analysts create "swag" hours estimate for project. fill out a form for pmo wait for 2-3 weeks. If I have no work in the meantime, I just sit, train, daydream (just don't play games), write the next great american novel, hmmm browse slashdot. get authorization to start project. create formal user requirement documents (No I could not prepare them earlier without getting in trouble- the work can't be done -under penalty- before the project is approved. create formal technical documents create formal estimate of time to complete program. fill out a form. submit it to pmo. wait for pmo to approve project. Work on something else in the mean time or repeat above activities. receive formal approval. start coding. hold weekly progress meetings. produce regular status reports detailing what I've completed, estimate how much I have to go. Update the hours estimate up or down so the project plan can be adjusted. test code. schedule a meeting to install to production formally test code and produce a formal test results document. have meeting to install to production. install to formal testing department computers. wait for a month. formal testing department says code is good. wait for a week to a month until the next formal install window. install code. do any emergency fixes for problems that turn up in production since none of our testing environments match production. emergency fix code. install code.
elapsed time for a 20 to 40 hour project is now about 320 hours. In only 3 years. To be fair, we are beginning to get our hands around the lag times and schedule work into them so we are probably going to reduce this to about 240 hours for a 20 to 40 hour project.
Ghandi was wise enough to choose the right people to protest against.
If ghandi peacefully protested against the chinese communist party, the islamic nationalists in Iran, Sadham Hussien when he was in power, etc. He would have just ended up dead.
The key to dealing with peaceful protesters appears to be to kill them as quickly as possible before they gather a movement.
--- As far as the U.S. media, I'm about ready to puke for how cowardly they have been with regard to the cartoons. They pretend to be so brave when dealing with civilized people but they lack the courage reporters had only 40 to 50 years ago back when reporting on civil rights issues got you killed.
Slashdot Mirror
And I would say that if I bought the stock on the promise that they were not going to provide forecasts, then they would be violating their promise to me if they started providing them.
Which is amazing that we all keep working since we are dying the day we are born.
Yet we give away 50% of our waking lives without a thought to what that means.
Ignoring the folks whose work really is exactly what they wanted to do in life (maybe 15% of people- probably less).
For some people.
I think I'd have a good 500 years in me before I got bored.
That's why I didn't say "forever" like the other thread here. I wouldn't want to live forever unless I definately had a way to off myself when I was ready. Being unable to die period would be a kind of a curse (which makes you wonder if there really was a "God" then it would suffer from that curse- read an interesting SF story where only people who hated God in the story were saved- so they could think of a way to kill it.)
Yea it does to me too.
If I had to choose between my daughter dying of diabetes or creating a dozen mice doomed to die of diabetes that the choice is a no-brainer.
And if there was just about anything to do with mice that would give me a healthy 35 year old body for say... 500 years, I'd be for it.
The conflict is unresolved in my brain.
But I guess every day that I engage in -any- kind of luxury instead of helping those poor starving folks in other countries that I'm in engaging in a similar kind of calculus.
Excuse me?
Did you mean money?
Because you don't bigger guns, more paintballs, or better gear as a result of investing time in paintball. The only thing you might get from time is improved skill (unless you are hand making your gear?).
Buying gold is like buying an extra 2000 shots for your paintball machinegun when everyone agreed that the contest was going to be with 400 shots each.
While they are running around making short controlled bursts, you are free to hose down the area.
---
My paintball story... It was 1997-- the game came down to one person on each team-- for "fun" they decided to allow the other guy to use his downed buddies machinegun as well as his own so he had two machine guns. I had a large tree and a single action pistol with under 10 shots left.
He charges me shouting... paint splattering all over the tree... paint balls are flying everywhere.
I calmly came out on one knee-- the gun leveled in front of me and took him down with one shot- center mass. Not a speck of paint on me.
Oh come on.. you only need to think about any "amateur" olympic event to blow apart your statement.
Some countries now give their "amateurs" free room & board, training, thousands of dollars worth of equipment. Repeatedly they are caught doping their atheletes in ways which result in higher performance now and an early death later.
Having someone else do the work to earn you gold or level up a character which you then buy for money would be like having a soccer league where you could buy a position on one of the playoff teams or in the championship game and be counted the "winner" if your team won.
It would be like buying a position on one of the two teams in the Superbowl and if your team won, being treated like you had been on the team all along (you get the ring, invited to all the parties, in the record books, team photos, etc.)
But as I said in my parent post- if the rules of the game allow it, then it's not cheating. In the sports you list, it is legal to buy the best equipment you can- but it is not legal for example, to buy a robot to serve for you in tennis or raquetball (return this perfect, 145 mph serve!).
Besides, the EULA in these games specifically forbids this kind of activity in many cases. Right there you are breaking the basic rules of the game and so you are cheating. As I said, if you can go to a store inside the game and purchase any item or game flag in exchange for real world money- then it's not cheating. The last I heard, there are no such stores in Wow or any other MMorg.
Imagine if there was no rule that said you couldn't buy the pot if you had enough money.
Wow- I have a winning hand.
Okay I raise you 10,000 dollars.
I don't have that much.
Ah well- you lose-- SUCKER.
---
There is no equivalent of an "all in" rule or any other kind of limit when it comes to purchasing virtual gold, pre-leveled and flagged characters, etc.
---
In fact, buying gold is like buying a winning hand in an already running game. To save time you know- just cut straight to the part where you win.
---
And besides- I qualified my original statement to begin with-- if you can buy gold, gear, flags with cash -IN THE GAME- to begin with then it's not creating. It's part of the game then- just like buying chips in poker is.
No.
I don't need character conflict.
I want art to either make me -think- or -feel-.
There was very little in the 3 new movies that made me do either. So they were not art- just pretty drab entertainment to be consumed and forgotten.
Picture any other game.
Monopoly
Axis & Allies
Checkers
Chess
Imagine being able to bring use real cash to buy extra game money or pieces.
Hmm. I need some $300 dollars more to buy that hotel on boardwalk- okay, I'll just put down $3.00 of real money to buy $3000 game money. Wow- this is so much fun- this game of monopoly is so much faster and I'm much more likely to win since I have $100 in my pocket and you only have $20.
Unless the game itself explicitly allows you to buy items with cash, then buying gold this way is cheating.
---
It can't be stopped tho. So any game that has a market means that normal people are playing in a game where people are rampantly cheating all around them. And the games are fundamentally unfair in several ways:
1) If you don't have to work... you win.
2) If you can log on just an hour earlier than the majority of the players.. you win if critical content is not instanced.
3) If you start the game with a group of friends from a previous game- you have a huge advantage.
These are advantages but they are not cheating. Buying gold and equipment with real world money means you are not playing the game (unless the games rules explicitly allow you to purchase items with real cash in game).
I can support this as well.
I use Openoffice to fix corrupted word documents.
Word says it can't read it.
I open and save it to Doc format in OOo (it usually shrinks by a couple megabytes).
Now it opens in Word fine.
Word clearly needs some kind of "listen damnit- just read it in as best as you can so I can resave it" read mode.
Agreed, but when your house is robbed, you won't be sent to jail as an accessory to the theft since you left your door open.
I think they can give you some kind of fine for leaving the keys in your car tho-- attractive nuisance or something like that.
I think he still would have made it if he knew it would lose money because of the religious issues involved (the story being written by the founder of scientology (or perhaps ghost writers if you accept the "hubbard was dead" theory).
Scientology- the only religion founded on a bar bet*.
*It was between Heinlein and Hubbard.
You may be right- you not be.
Part of this relies on what percentage of workers make minimum wage these days.
Back then, a lot of fast food workers made minimum wage. These days it is not uncommon to start at 6.00 or higher. I've read recently that they have to offer 7.00 to get workers in many areas.
I had almost talked myself into agreeing since inflation adjusted wages should be 8.30 and no one is offering that high for min-wage jobs yet but then I realized that gasoline is in a spike (and already back down to 2.11 in my area).
If you compare spikes - I paid 1.58 back in 1978. Gas is cheaper on this spike than previous price spikes.
If you compare non-spike pricing then 2.11 * 3.33 = 7.02-- minimum wage reported of 7.00. Gasoline is up 1% by those figures.
Part of the reason actual minimum wages go up is that because of inflation, if they don't offer enough, there is no point in working (as a lot of mom's with second incomes are figuring out that the cost of a 2nd job is often 70-80% of their entire second income when they figure in clothes, home services, gas, and extra eating out.)
Jar jar was the best character in the movies.
Art is about emotion.
No one really gave a damn about any other character.
There wasn't any character conflict with any other character.
The dinner scene where jar jar irritated leem nielson was about the only character conflict in the entire movie (and revealed more about the jedi master's character than any other scene in the movie).
No one really cares about the other characters in the movie but they all have an opinion on Jarjar. So I say most annoying AND the best character after palpatine in all three movies.
I agree with a lot of what you are saying.
Two points.
1) It's not just programmers any more. It is -any- high paying job that requires a very expensive education to qualify for. Radiologists, para-legals, programmers, even lawyers. I.e. There is no job safe except upper level management, government jobs (especially with security considerations) and work that must be physically performed here. In other words, a huge swath of jobs are being shipped overseas with very few jobs left to replace them.
2) The same corporations shipping things overseas are having laws passed that create artificial monopolies so the prices of their products sell for between 10 and 20 times more in the US as they do in other countries.
It would be one thing if all the products we were purchasing were dropping to a 10th of the price, so that we could afford to make less (and thus compete with outsourcing better). But our high costs are being locked in while the very businesses that are doing this are taking advantage of labor that costs a fraction of what ours does- in part because they are paying a 10th of the prices we are.
It's a really nasty mix. I can only see it ending very badly when we pass below some crucial tipping point and basically collapse economically down to the levels of the other countries and can't buy the products at the artificially inflated prices.
And at that point, there will be no market for products made in these other countries. Essentially these companies are getting rich by mining america's wealth built up over the last fifty years.
I think that reasoning breaks down when one part of the world uses child labor, slave labor, and manufacturing processes that destroy the environment with long-term toxins.
The government has to step in and set minimum standards or it is a race to the bottom with a return to slavery and radium water.
And in a free market, I'd be paying $4 for my medicine and $2.40 for my first run dvd movies. My sugar would be .05 per pound.
We have a lot of monopolies in america that mean we really are not in a free market.
Part of the problem is property tax that goes up if the value of your land goes up. As a result, people from other places who have money can bid up property in your area and then you get disposessed when you can't afford the new 10x higher property taxes. Property taxes are an abomination that means you never own your property- you are merely renting it and maintaining it for the government.
Agreed. Songs from allofmp3.com sell for about 30 cents a piece.
If I pay a buck a license I want them to record that license for the rest of my life and let me redownload the song for free once a year to whatever media I'm using at that time.
I'm sorry you read but lacked the ability to comprehend the article.
... ...
I'm going to quote the relevant passages.
Playing to the backlash against ubiquitous communication, a company called NaturalNano is developing a special high-tech paint that relies on the wizardry of nanotechnology to create a system that locks out unwanted cell phone signals on demand.
The radio filter would allow all emergency radio communications to pass through the shield, Crowley said. With all other signals, like cell phones, the filter would act like a spigot to block or allow them to pass through--say, only during intermission.
---
Now... how are they going to lock "...out unwanted cell phone signals on demand." and "...act like a spigot to block or allow them through-say, only during intermission..." without the paint being switchable?
Of course, you could admit you were wrong, went off half half-cocked and apologize but refusing and showing what a jerk you are will be just as satisfying to me.
Not going to argue since I can't link private investment newsletters.
But several that I get (which are not the sky is falling lunatics) are forecasting recessions.
That recessions happen historically soon after rates stop rising is just a fact they state- I haven't done the personal research. They speculate that it is because the Fed always raises rates just a little too much and actually causes the recession as a result.
The longer term dates I mention are part of an 11 year cycle (tho the 2006-7 lays over one of the minor humps in the cycle) that another person has been pushing for quite a few years and it's matching up fairly well so far.
Correct.. incorrect? I don't know.
But the parent post said no one was talking about recessions- all I'm saying is several financial newsletters I follow are talking about them based on the fact that the current expansion is now over 3 years old without a recession. Nothing goes up forever.
While I think it is legal,
clearly it is a device that is applied in paint form. Otherwise you couldn't switch it on and off.
Actually, it's tens of thousands of tiny devices.
I hear the word recession every night on the financial programs I listen to.
The yield curve is not looking that great and historically we always have a recession soon after the fed stops raising rates.
The longer term forecasts are for a sharp short recession in late 2006 to mid 2007 then 2 good years, then a very harsh longer recession from 2010 to 2011.
Supposed to be okay after that.
I went to best buy and there was this expensive dvd/vcr recorder. next to it was a knock off brand for about 100 less. I opened the vcr door and looked inside. It was identical inside. I could even see a few numbers on the circuit boards and they were the same.
The effect of this one act has been dramatic. My productivity has dropped by 75% in the last 3 years.
I used to:
develop a rough tech document.
estimate hours.
develop code.
test code.
install code.
do any emergency fixes for problems that turn up in production since none of our testing environments match production.
emergency fix code.
install code.
Now I:
propose the project or recieve request for project from business analysts
create "swag" hours estimate for project.
fill out a form for pmo
wait for 2-3 weeks. If I have no work in the meantime, I just sit, train, daydream (just don't play games), write the next great american novel, hmmm browse slashdot.
get authorization to start project.
create formal user requirement documents (No I could not prepare them earlier without getting in trouble- the work can't be done -under penalty- before the project is approved.
create formal technical documents
create formal estimate of time to complete program.
fill out a form. submit it to pmo.
wait for pmo to approve project. Work on something else in the mean time or repeat above activities.
receive formal approval.
start coding.
hold weekly progress meetings.
produce regular status reports detailing what I've completed, estimate how much I have to go. Update the hours estimate up or down so the project plan can be adjusted.
test code.
schedule a meeting to install to production
formally test code and produce a formal test results document.
have meeting to install to production.
install to formal testing department computers.
wait for a month.
formal testing department says code is good.
wait for a week to a month until the next formal install window.
install code.
do any emergency fixes for problems that turn up in production since none of our testing environments match production.
emergency fix code.
install code.
elapsed time for a 20 to 40 hour project is now about 320 hours. In only 3 years. To be fair, we are beginning to get our hands around the lag times and schedule work into them so we are probably going to reduce this to about 240 hours for a 20 to 40 hour project.
Insane? YES.
Ghandi was wise enough to choose the right people to protest against.
If ghandi peacefully protested against the chinese communist party, the islamic nationalists in Iran, Sadham Hussien when he was in power, etc. He would have just ended up dead.
The key to dealing with peaceful protesters appears to be to kill them as quickly as possible before they gather a movement.
---
As far as the U.S. media, I'm about ready to puke for how cowardly they have been with regard to the cartoons. They pretend to be so brave when dealing with civilized people but they lack the courage reporters had only 40 to 50 years ago back when reporting on civil rights issues got you killed.