I think you missed my point that *far larger* capacity devices should seemingly be practical with advances in SSD storage; those marginally bigger smartphones than the iPod classic also end up chock full of other stuff since they're multi-function devices, so if you aren't using it solely as a music player, the effective amount of storage isn't much of a gain over what the iPod classics topped out at... what I'm getting at, is I'm surprised nobody is making 1TB+ portable media devices.
I did find your comment "most any decent portable music player that isn't made by a company that uses a piece of fruit as its logo has a micro-SD slot allowing you to add another 400GB of storage" amusing too, because I have yet to find many options for a *decent* portable music player other than what the ostensible fruit-peddlers have to offer (and I'm not saying that as any sort of fanboy, I just really haven't found anything that stands out as a remotely better option for capacity, usability, and price... Apple cornered the market and then killed it).
The end of the iPod Classic series, based on the flawed premise that we'd get all our media from "the cloud," left the market without any quality high-capacity portable music/media players. Considering that 1TB+ SSDs are now in "quite affordable" territory, I don't understand why no company has made an affordable media player built around one (well, I kind of get why companies like Apple wouldn't want to make one... it potentially eats into their attempt to sell us all bandwidth-sucking subscription services). The only "high capacity" options readily available are smartphone type devices that top out at a paltry 256MB. So anyone with a sizable music library who wants to keep it in a high-quality format is pretty much stuck being unable to have their entire collection conveniently at their fingertips.
re broadband: in the Madison area for small business and home, not so great, but not terrible either. Big players are the telco DSL services and Charter cable... none of which are particularly cheap, fast, or reliable, but within a tolerable level of service. Very limited areas of the metro area have access to direct fiber services like AT&T UVerse. As for large business and academic connections though, there are some big pipes to tap into... UW and state government have some heavy duty net infrastructure, including extensive linkups to the "Internet2" academic network.
re taxes: In Dane County (where Madison is located), sales tax is actually 5.5% And if a Regional Transit Authority is created in the not-too-distant future, the plan is to fund that through an additional sales tax (kind of odd to fund an RTA with sales tax, but that's a different conversation all together). Anyways, 5.5 is cheap compared to the exorbitant sales taxes to be found around Chicagoland.
Madison is often a highly rated place to live and work, but lots of us who live here consider it a bit overrated... Wisconsin winters detract from the city's charms a whole lot.:)
I find it kind of odd that Kohl didn't include US Cellular as a recipient of his letter. As one of the big regional telecom players in Wisconsin, you'd think they'd be on his radar, particularly considering that their a la carte SMS rates have nearly doubled (from 15 cents to 25 cents per msg) in the last 2 years.
Oh well, I guess I'd expect Herb Kohl to forget to include them on the letter... he's been becoming quite senile over the last few years. Luckily for the Badger State, we've got the notoriously feisty Russ Feingold as our other Senator, and he's been busy with more important telecoms issues... like trying to stop Ma Bell's metamorphosis into Big Brother.
I found myself in much the same conundrum--overall, I needed to finance my education with loans, however I knew I would need to have a small contingency fund for when I graduated. Many people can't rely on just moving back home for a few months while they look for a job. Alot of students count on having that rainy day fund.
Basically, since you're dealing with a short term investment, you want to aim for stability, but since a student's financial situation is also topsy-turvy, you want flexibility too. With that you really have a limited set of options. Here are the four best, in order from lowest return to highest:
1) conventional savings account -- maximum flexibility, minimal return.
2) high-yield savings -- something like an ING Orange account, which places minimal limits on transactions, is FDIC-backed, and has a respectable interest rate compared to a regular savings account.
3) money market account -- not federally insured, but higher returns and most let you make a few withdrawals without penalty, so you can get at some of your money if you need it earlier than planned.
4) certificate of deposit -- returns at about the same level or slightly better than the money market option, but your money is locked in for the length of the CD, unless you want to pay a hefty penalty. This is your best option though if you know for sure that you won't need the money until a given time.
Realize that all four aren't exactly lucrative options... right now the max you'd probably get is between 4.5 to 7% interest on the latter two options. And the savings account option is barely an investment in terms of return... I get a paltry 0.55% on my savings, but hey, it's stable and I can get at my cash whenever I want.
I noticed alot of people were critical of trying to invest while taking out student loans. As long as you're not taking out the loans for purposes of investing them, there is nothing wrong with what you're doing. The federal financial aid process is designed to take into account your existing assets and projected earnings during the school year you are receiving a loan for. If you already have or earn funds that you would like to invest, there is really no restriction on this, so long as you can prove that the balance of your loans was applied to legitimate educational and living expenses as defined in the terms of your loan.
I also fail to see why some people consider the possibility of investing while taking out student loans to be illogical or unethical. It's financially prudent to at least retain a reasonable sum of reserve funds at all times, especially if you know you will need that money later, for when you can't rely on loans to help cover your expenses. It's really just a question of finding a reasonable balance between holding on to money now and saving yourself from later costs from interest on your loans.
To those who think it's unethical to retain funds in a sound investment while taking out taxpayer-backed loans, it's quite clear that these people don't understand the basics of how loans work. When you buy a house and get a federally-backed loan, they don't expect you to empty your entire checking and savings account, 401k, and kids' college fund before giving you the loan. That would obviously be counterproductive, as you'd simply manage to send the person careening into an instant bankruptcy. So why should you have to completely bankrupt yourself to pay for your education? Clearly anyone who makes such a criticism does not understand basics of how things like student loans, credit and mortgages work--and clearly you shouldn't listen to their advice!
And BTW, "federally backed" loans does not mean taxpayer funded for the most part. The system of loan guarantees is funded with seed money from the federal government--thus from the taxpayers--but once the money is placed in the system, it is recycled into new loans over and over again, and the default rate is sufficiently low so as not to trigger growth in the federal inputs into
What alot of Americans don't understand about the nature of their own political system is the "big tent" structure of the political parties. As our system favors a bipolar division between two parties, a wide range of ideologies end up getting grouped into each of the major parties. They are often linked by a tenuous agreement on certain ideological points (historically, this has often been economic policy), but otherwise the ideological alignments within political parties can be vastly different. Ideologies can also change drastically over time as party's various wings rises and fall in relative strength.
What probably keeps people like Bloomberg, Schwarzenegger and Sullivan in the party is the traditional orientation towards fiscal conservativism found in the Republican party since the 1950s. Essentially, they are adherents to an ideology that would most closely be aligned with what predominated in the Republican party of Eisenhower's day. That tendency still exists and exerts some influence over the party's politics, but today it's often overshadowed by social conservativism (a.k.a. Christian fundamentalism) and neoconservativism. That doesn't mean that folks like Bloomberg are irrelevant, they just represent a different part of the "big tent" that embraces the full gamut of Republicans.
It's important to remember that American parties are not consistently "right" or "left," but this varies by time, region, individual personalities, etc. For example, the Progressive Party of the early 20th century, perceived as firmly left-wing by today's standards, was an offshoot of the Republican Party. For many decades, the Democrats were seen as the driving force behind very right-wing policies like segregation in the South. At the same time as the "Dixiecrats" were propping up Jim Crow laws, you had other Democrats backing the quasi-socialist New Deal.
If you want to get down to the problem of people ending up in seemingly ideologically bizarre party alignments, the issue is not the parties themselves but the electoral system. In a system based off single-member districts, and "first-past-the-post" simple majority elections, you have a predisposition to having two major parties, and perhaps maybe a third spoiler party that can pick off voters on key issues. In the USA, we have the Democrats and Republicans, and only rarely a credible and variable third-party spoiler... comparable systems would be Canada (Liberals and Conservatives, with the New Democrats as the third player) and England (Labour and Conservative, Liberal Democrats as the third).
In systems using other electoral systems, like the various forms of proportional representation, combined with parliamentary systems that provide for coalition-based government, you tend to have a wider variety of parties since there is a greater statistical probability of more than 2 parties achieving some degree of representation. This allows parties to be more specifically focused, and the inherent conflict of the "big tent" structure is avoided (or at least transposed to coalitions formed after the election).
You could basically say the parties in the USA are sort of a pre-defined coalition of what in other countries could be separate parties... You cannot directly compare our parties to alot of foreign parties, because the Democrats could split into socialists, greens, liberal centrists, etc.; the Republicans could split into economic conservatives, libertarians, religious conservatives, etc. So is Bloomberg really a "Republican?" Sure. But is he secretly really a "Democrat?" Maybe. It all depends on where he feels comfortable, and where he can be a credible participant. Another factor not to be discounted is simple opportunism--if your party allegiance is flexible, and your ideology can fit into either party, you may decide what party to align with simply by which one gives you a better shot at winning (probably a big decisive factor for Schwarzenegger, running against an entrenched Democrat like Gray Davis).
Hey, I read the fine print, and Wired signed me up for automatic renewal anyways, without ever consulting me or sending me any addendum to the subscriber agreement (there was nothing about it in the original materials I received when I first started subscribing, and nothing new thereafter).
Needless to say, I was quite pissed off when I started receiving notices telling me my credit card was about to be automatically charged "for my convenience" to renew my subscription. I have a feeling this guy probably was a victim of the same tactics. I probably should report Wired to my state consumer protection authority... this seems like some pretty shady behavior.
Notably, I never had any problems with Wired until they were acquired by Conde Nast... from there the quality of both customer service and the magazine itself went downhill fast.
Being fed up with the rapidly declining quality of their publication and their strongarm tactics, rather than renew, I called their surprisingly hassle-free customer service line and canceled my subscription. I used to love Wired, but lately they just suck.
I was wondering if anyone else works in an environment with what I'd call a "two-tier" dress code... My employer, a major medical software company, doesn't have any sort of dress/appearance code for the usual around-the-office environment. NO rules whatsoever, except for "If there are visitors, wear clothes." (I'm serious, that's the only rule in the employee handbook). I also see quite a sizable number of people with piercings or crazy looking hair around the company... its not very common, but it is tolerated.
The only time a dress code comes into play is when dealing with customers in a training or on-site environment. In those situations were are to dress according to the on-site dress code of our customer, remove any visible piercings if possible, cover up tatoos, etc., just basically look as professional as possible, but the trend seems to be that even our customers' IS/IT departments go by pretty lax dress standards too... often we don't have to dress up beyond the lower end of the "business casual" spectrum (i.e. khakis or even decent looking jeans and a polo shirt).
Our CEO, who established this code way back in the early days of the company, bases it on the idea that people should work in whatever environment they find most comfortable. If sweltering in a suit-and-tie hinders your ability to code, what's the point of demanding that you dress that way?
I know a few people here at my university who are dual majors in CS and Political Science. At first it seemed like an odd combination, but it works quite well both in terms of academics and employment prospects.
Political Science classes tend to be pretty flexible in terms of managing writing and reading assignments, so they mesh good with the more deadline-intensive CS projects. Since Poli Sci tends to emphasize writing, its also a good major to build your language skills with. (Not to mention, a political theory class with a unit on Machiavelli has priceless potential when its lessons are applied in the workplace!)
In terms of employment, there are a ton of opportunities in academia, business, and government. There's a surprisingly large demand for techies in political research, as things like polls often require lots of customized code to carry out statistical analyses. Then there's the government potential... a Poli Sci degree is a ticket into many government agencies, and combined with Comp Sci, you bring useful and much needed tech skills... (you'd be especially well suited if you wanted to go down that whole secret agent CIA/NSA/FBI sort of route).
Similarly, Sociology or Psychology also work well with CS from what I've heard, for many of the same reasons. So definitely don't overlook the social sciences as an option.
The City of Madison (Wisconsin) just recently installed something similar to one of these "Pedestrian Corridors" at a problem crossing on W. Johnson Street, one of the busiest routes in the city.
The big difference with the Madison one is that its a full-blown pedestrian-vs.-car intersection. It has automated light timing like a normal intersection, but one of the "streets" is strictly pedestrian.
It's quite an improvement from the unregulated crossing they had there... literally thousands of students from UW dorms on one side of the street had to risk being hit every day there. Now they can cross without fear... though it took a while to trust that cars would actually stop, among those of us who remember the old crossing.
Here in Madison, WI we have quite the opposite problem from "gutless pedestrian crossings"... the county decided to install little buckets full of red flags at unregulated crosswalks. And these take some real guts to use.
The idea is you walk out with your flag waving and everybody stops for you. Problem is, most drivers are either too stupid to realize "Maybe I should stop because there's a guy standing in the middle of the road frantically waving a red flag" or are distracted and just fly through the crosswalks absentmindedly.
So, if you try the flag thing on a busy street, you have a pretty high probability of getting hit... If I recall correctly, there were 8 car-pedestrian collisions on Monroe Street alone in the first 3 weeks of the program. Needless to say, not many people use the flags. They just wait til traffic calms down.
I used to have a Schaeffer cartridge fountain pen that dated back to the 1950s... but through the late 1990s it became harder and harder to find cartridges, and well, now its near impossible.
Today my favorite pen seems to be the Sanford "Liquid Expresso." It's got a nice wide body, so it has some of the tactile feel of a fountain pen, but its also rather nice and lightweight and has a great fine-line tip. It writes with nice bold, clean looking lines. And unlike similar types of pens, the cap actually stays on firmly... loose caps always annoy me. The only downside is that the ink can be a bit bleedy on some types of paper like really cheap notebook paper or super absorbent papers.
Hmm... I always thought McDonalds had wifi already... Friends of mine have reported that there seems to be no problem getting online at the Regent Street McD's here in Madison.
So if McDonalds isn't providing it, it must be from the unsecured wireless LAN from the hospital across the street...
Maybe the hospital planned this intentionally, after all, a look through some patient files might be an effective way to show you what that Quarter Pounder with Cheese is going to do to your arteries. It's not a security vulnerability... its preventative medicine!
In my community, we used a program slightly similar to DARE in elementary/middle school called "CounterAct". Our city's police took the program and sort of tweaked it a bit into an actually objective program that wasn't so much the "use drugs and you're an evil person" argument you hear about in DARE, but more of a "here are the facts, you decide" type of thing. I think it worked great. From my observation, it may not have entirely stopped people from drinking and smoking pot, but it got rid of alot of the mentality that you had to do that stuff because you were being told not to. I think it helped breed a generation of kids who were at least responsible with their decisions about drugs.
The CounterAct program appeared to be so successful in my semi-suburban hometown (Sheboygan Falls, WI), that the largest city in the county (Sheboygan) abandoned their highly unsuccessful DARE program and switched over to CounterAct. I'm pretty sure nearly all the schools in the entire county now use the tweaked version of CounterAct, most of them having abandoned their original DARE programs. I guess that says alot about DARE's effectiveness.
I just love when people bring up 1984 to bash socialism. Well guess what folks... Orwell himself was a democratic socialist (as is David McReynolds). Orwell's target was totalitarian systems of government in general, and unless you take a very extreme definition of "totalitarian," democratic socialism is certainly not totalitarianism.
Umm... I find it funny you point out UNIX as some great massive innovation that the government had no part in... which really doesn't make sense, since *computers* (at least in the modern sense...) were developed with government funds (and usually government scientists). I think the computer itself is the more important innovation than UNIX...
Well, now that AOL/Netscape has hijacked all the content I've created for the DMOZ, I've decided to quit my editor position. I was editor in Politics/Parties/USA/Socialist (recently migrated into a regional subcat), but not anymore. Previously I quit editor positions in several local categories for Sheboygan, WI because of all the frequent and stupid changes in editing guidelines. What's up with their copyright policy anyways... they always made it sound like DMOZ was an open source thing affiliated with AOL/Netscape, not *owned and operated* by them.
Anyways, this was my resignation message:
"After reading on Slashdot about the corporate censorship of the ODP, I no longer will sacrifice my time and efforts into what was supposed to be a kind of "open source" project.Thanks AOL/Netscape for stealing all my damn work. I'm glad that the corporation wants to profit off the copyright of work they STOLE from me. It's crap like this that made me a socialist."
Yep, the Soviets made several gas and oil reservoirs for cities in the far east and southcentral regions of the S.U. through nuclear explosions. In present-day Kazakhstan, they built several *drinking* water reservoirs by detonating small devices a small distance under the ground, resulting in the creation of a large crater at the surface. A good source for info on nukes in civil engineering is the IAEA's bibliography booklet "Peaceful Uses of Atomic Explosions." (gosh that is a paradoxical sentence.) It's available at most UN Records Depositories (i.e. university law libraries). If you can't find it, the University of Wisconsin Physics Library has one for sure!
Slashdot Mirror
I think you missed my point that *far larger* capacity devices should seemingly be practical with advances in SSD storage; those marginally bigger smartphones than the iPod classic also end up chock full of other stuff since they're multi-function devices, so if you aren't using it solely as a music player, the effective amount of storage isn't much of a gain over what the iPod classics topped out at... what I'm getting at, is I'm surprised nobody is making 1TB+ portable media devices.
I did find your comment "most any decent portable music player that isn't made by a company that uses a piece of fruit as its logo has a micro-SD slot allowing you to add another 400GB of storage" amusing too, because I have yet to find many options for a *decent* portable music player other than what the ostensible fruit-peddlers have to offer (and I'm not saying that as any sort of fanboy, I just really haven't found anything that stands out as a remotely better option for capacity, usability, and price... Apple cornered the market and then killed it).
The end of the iPod Classic series, based on the flawed premise that we'd get all our media from "the cloud," left the market without any quality high-capacity portable music/media players. Considering that 1TB+ SSDs are now in "quite affordable" territory, I don't understand why no company has made an affordable media player built around one (well, I kind of get why companies like Apple wouldn't want to make one... it potentially eats into their attempt to sell us all bandwidth-sucking subscription services). The only "high capacity" options readily available are smartphone type devices that top out at a paltry 256MB. So anyone with a sizable music library who wants to keep it in a high-quality format is pretty much stuck being unable to have their entire collection conveniently at their fingertips.
re broadband: in the Madison area for small business and home, not so great, but not terrible either. Big players are the telco DSL services and Charter cable... none of which are particularly cheap, fast, or reliable, but within a tolerable level of service. Very limited areas of the metro area have access to direct fiber services like AT&T UVerse. As for large business and academic connections though, there are some big pipes to tap into... UW and state government have some heavy duty net infrastructure, including extensive linkups to the "Internet2" academic network.
re taxes: In Dane County (where Madison is located), sales tax is actually 5.5% And if a Regional Transit Authority is created in the not-too-distant future, the plan is to fund that through an additional sales tax (kind of odd to fund an RTA with sales tax, but that's a different conversation all together). Anyways, 5.5 is cheap compared to the exorbitant sales taxes to be found around Chicagoland.
Madison is often a highly rated place to live and work, but lots of us who live here consider it a bit overrated... Wisconsin winters detract from the city's charms a whole lot. :)
I find it kind of odd that Kohl didn't include US Cellular as a recipient of his letter. As one of the big regional telecom players in Wisconsin, you'd think they'd be on his radar, particularly considering that their a la carte SMS rates have nearly doubled (from 15 cents to 25 cents per msg) in the last 2 years.
Oh well, I guess I'd expect Herb Kohl to forget to include them on the letter... he's been becoming quite senile over the last few years. Luckily for the Badger State, we've got the notoriously feisty Russ Feingold as our other Senator, and he's been busy with more important telecoms issues... like trying to stop Ma Bell's metamorphosis into Big Brother.
I found myself in much the same conundrum--overall, I needed to finance my education with loans, however I knew I would need to have a small contingency fund for when I graduated. Many people can't rely on just moving back home for a few months while they look for a job. Alot of students count on having that rainy day fund.
Basically, since you're dealing with a short term investment, you want to aim for stability, but since a student's financial situation is also topsy-turvy, you want flexibility too. With that you really have a limited set of options. Here are the four best, in order from lowest return to highest:
1) conventional savings account -- maximum flexibility, minimal return.
2) high-yield savings -- something like an ING Orange account, which places minimal limits on transactions, is FDIC-backed, and has a respectable interest rate compared to a regular savings account.
3) money market account -- not federally insured, but higher returns and most let you make a few withdrawals without penalty, so you can get at some of your money if you need it earlier than planned.
4) certificate of deposit -- returns at about the same level or slightly better than the money market option, but your money is locked in for the length of the CD, unless you want to pay a hefty penalty. This is your best option though if you know for sure that you won't need the money until a given time.
Realize that all four aren't exactly lucrative options... right now the max you'd probably get is between 4.5 to 7% interest on the latter two options. And the savings account option is barely an investment in terms of return... I get a paltry 0.55% on my savings, but hey, it's stable and I can get at my cash whenever I want.
I noticed alot of people were critical of trying to invest while taking out student loans. As long as you're not taking out the loans for purposes of investing them, there is nothing wrong with what you're doing. The federal financial aid process is designed to take into account your existing assets and projected earnings during the school year you are receiving a loan for. If you already have or earn funds that you would like to invest, there is really no restriction on this, so long as you can prove that the balance of your loans was applied to legitimate educational and living expenses as defined in the terms of your loan.
I also fail to see why some people consider the possibility of investing while taking out student loans to be illogical or unethical. It's financially prudent to at least retain a reasonable sum of reserve funds at all times, especially if you know you will need that money later, for when you can't rely on loans to help cover your expenses. It's really just a question of finding a reasonable balance between holding on to money now and saving yourself from later costs from interest on your loans.
To those who think it's unethical to retain funds in a sound investment while taking out taxpayer-backed loans, it's quite clear that these people don't understand the basics of how loans work. When you buy a house and get a federally-backed loan, they don't expect you to empty your entire checking and savings account, 401k, and kids' college fund before giving you the loan. That would obviously be counterproductive, as you'd simply manage to send the person careening into an instant bankruptcy. So why should you have to completely bankrupt yourself to pay for your education? Clearly anyone who makes such a criticism does not understand basics of how things like student loans, credit and mortgages work--and clearly you shouldn't listen to their advice!
And BTW, "federally backed" loans does not mean taxpayer funded for the most part. The system of loan guarantees is funded with seed money from the federal government--thus from the taxpayers--but once the money is placed in the system, it is recycled into new loans over and over again, and the default rate is sufficiently low so as not to trigger growth in the federal inputs into
What alot of Americans don't understand about the nature of their own political system is the "big tent" structure of the political parties. As our system favors a bipolar division between two parties, a wide range of ideologies end up getting grouped into each of the major parties. They are often linked by a tenuous agreement on certain ideological points (historically, this has often been economic policy), but otherwise the ideological alignments within political parties can be vastly different. Ideologies can also change drastically over time as party's various wings rises and fall in relative strength.
What probably keeps people like Bloomberg, Schwarzenegger and Sullivan in the party is the traditional orientation towards fiscal conservativism found in the Republican party since the 1950s. Essentially, they are adherents to an ideology that would most closely be aligned with what predominated in the Republican party of Eisenhower's day. That tendency still exists and exerts some influence over the party's politics, but today it's often overshadowed by social conservativism (a.k.a. Christian fundamentalism) and neoconservativism. That doesn't mean that folks like Bloomberg are irrelevant, they just represent a different part of the "big tent" that embraces the full gamut of Republicans.
It's important to remember that American parties are not consistently "right" or "left," but this varies by time, region, individual personalities, etc. For example, the Progressive Party of the early 20th century, perceived as firmly left-wing by today's standards, was an offshoot of the Republican Party. For many decades, the Democrats were seen as the driving force behind very right-wing policies like segregation in the South. At the same time as the "Dixiecrats" were propping up Jim Crow laws, you had other Democrats backing the quasi-socialist New Deal.
If you want to get down to the problem of people ending up in seemingly ideologically bizarre party alignments, the issue is not the parties themselves but the electoral system. In a system based off single-member districts, and "first-past-the-post" simple majority elections, you have a predisposition to having two major parties, and perhaps maybe a third spoiler party that can pick off voters on key issues. In the USA, we have the Democrats and Republicans, and only rarely a credible and variable third-party spoiler... comparable systems would be Canada (Liberals and Conservatives, with the New Democrats as the third player) and England (Labour and Conservative, Liberal Democrats as the third).
In systems using other electoral systems, like the various forms of proportional representation, combined with parliamentary systems that provide for coalition-based government, you tend to have a wider variety of parties since there is a greater statistical probability of more than 2 parties achieving some degree of representation. This allows parties to be more specifically focused, and the inherent conflict of the "big tent" structure is avoided (or at least transposed to coalitions formed after the election).
You could basically say the parties in the USA are sort of a pre-defined coalition of what in other countries could be separate parties... You cannot directly compare our parties to alot of foreign parties, because the Democrats could split into socialists, greens, liberal centrists, etc.; the Republicans could split into economic conservatives, libertarians, religious conservatives, etc. So is Bloomberg really a "Republican?" Sure. But is he secretly really a "Democrat?" Maybe. It all depends on where he feels comfortable, and where he can be a credible participant. Another factor not to be discounted is simple opportunism--if your party allegiance is flexible, and your ideology can fit into either party, you may decide what party to align with simply by which one gives you a better shot at winning (probably a big decisive factor for Schwarzenegger, running against an entrenched Democrat like Gray Davis).
Now here's the big thing t
Hey, I read the fine print, and Wired signed me up for automatic renewal anyways, without ever consulting me or sending me any addendum to the subscriber agreement (there was nothing about it in the original materials I received when I first started subscribing, and nothing new thereafter).
Needless to say, I was quite pissed off when I started receiving notices telling me my credit card was about to be automatically charged "for my convenience" to renew my subscription. I have a feeling this guy probably was a victim of the same tactics. I probably should report Wired to my state consumer protection authority... this seems like some pretty shady behavior.
Notably, I never had any problems with Wired until they were acquired by Conde Nast... from there the quality of both customer service and the magazine itself went downhill fast.
Being fed up with the rapidly declining quality of their publication and their strongarm tactics, rather than renew, I called their surprisingly hassle-free customer service line and canceled my subscription. I used to love Wired, but lately they just suck.
There's an easy way for Borders to get around this ruling... it's called:
;-)
Nevada.
So close, and yet so far from the California's revenue authorities.
I was wondering if anyone else works in an environment with what I'd call a "two-tier" dress code... My employer, a major medical software company, doesn't have any sort of dress/appearance code for the usual around-the-office environment. NO rules whatsoever, except for "If there are visitors, wear clothes." (I'm serious, that's the only rule in the employee handbook). I also see quite a sizable number of people with piercings or crazy looking hair around the company... its not very common, but it is tolerated.
The only time a dress code comes into play is when dealing with customers in a training or on-site environment. In those situations were are to dress according to the on-site dress code of our customer, remove any visible piercings if possible, cover up tatoos, etc., just basically look as professional as possible, but the trend seems to be that even our customers' IS/IT departments go by pretty lax dress standards too... often we don't have to dress up beyond the lower end of the "business casual" spectrum (i.e. khakis or even decent looking jeans and a polo shirt).
Our CEO, who established this code way back in the early days of the company, bases it on the idea that people should work in whatever environment they find most comfortable. If sweltering in a suit-and-tie hinders your ability to code, what's the point of demanding that you dress that way?
I know a few people here at my university who are dual majors in CS and Political Science. At first it seemed like an odd combination, but it works quite well both in terms of academics and employment prospects.
Political Science classes tend to be pretty flexible in terms of managing writing and reading assignments, so they mesh good with the more deadline-intensive CS projects. Since Poli Sci tends to emphasize writing, its also a good major to build your language skills with. (Not to mention, a political theory class with a unit on Machiavelli has priceless potential when its lessons are applied in the workplace!)
In terms of employment, there are a ton of opportunities in academia, business, and government. There's a surprisingly large demand for techies in political research, as things like polls often require lots of customized code to carry out statistical analyses. Then there's the government potential... a Poli Sci degree is a ticket into many government agencies, and combined with Comp Sci, you bring useful and much needed tech skills... (you'd be especially well suited if you wanted to go down that whole secret agent CIA/NSA/FBI sort of route).
Similarly, Sociology or Psychology also work well with CS from what I've heard, for many of the same reasons. So definitely don't overlook the social sciences as an option.
The City of Madison (Wisconsin) just recently installed something similar to one of these "Pedestrian Corridors" at a problem crossing on W. Johnson Street, one of the busiest routes in the city.
The big difference with the Madison one is that its a full-blown pedestrian-vs.-car intersection. It has automated light timing like a normal intersection, but one of the "streets" is strictly pedestrian.
It's quite an improvement from the unregulated crossing they had there... literally thousands of students from UW dorms on one side of the street had to risk being hit every day there. Now they can cross without fear... though it took a while to trust that cars would actually stop, among those of us who remember the old crossing.
Here in Madison, WI we have quite the opposite problem from "gutless pedestrian crossings"... the county decided to install little buckets full of red flags at unregulated crosswalks. And these take some real guts to use.
The idea is you walk out with your flag waving and everybody stops for you. Problem is, most drivers are either too stupid to realize "Maybe I should stop because there's a guy standing in the middle of the road frantically waving a red flag" or are distracted and just fly through the crosswalks absentmindedly.
So, if you try the flag thing on a busy street, you have a pretty high probability of getting hit... If I recall correctly, there were 8 car-pedestrian collisions on Monroe Street alone in the first 3 weeks of the program. Needless to say, not many people use the flags. They just wait til traffic calms down.
I used to have a Schaeffer cartridge fountain pen that dated back to the 1950s... but through the late 1990s it became harder and harder to find cartridges, and well, now its near impossible.
Today my favorite pen seems to be the Sanford "Liquid Expresso." It's got a nice wide body, so it has some of the tactile feel of a fountain pen, but its also rather nice and lightweight and has a great fine-line tip. It writes with nice bold, clean looking lines. And unlike similar types of pens, the cap actually stays on firmly... loose caps always annoy me. The only downside is that the ink can be a bit bleedy on some types of paper like really cheap notebook paper or super absorbent papers.
Hmm... I always thought McDonalds had wifi already... Friends of mine have reported that there seems to be no problem getting online at the Regent Street McD's here in Madison. So if McDonalds isn't providing it, it must be from the unsecured wireless LAN from the hospital across the street... Maybe the hospital planned this intentionally, after all, a look through some patient files might be an effective way to show you what that Quarter Pounder with Cheese is going to do to your arteries. It's not a security vulnerability... its preventative medicine!
In my community, we used a program slightly similar to DARE in elementary/middle school called "CounterAct". Our city's police took the program and sort of tweaked it a bit into an actually objective program that wasn't so much the "use drugs and you're an evil person" argument you hear about in DARE, but more of a "here are the facts, you decide" type of thing. I think it worked great. From my observation, it may not have entirely stopped people from drinking and smoking pot, but it got rid of alot of the mentality that you had to do that stuff because you were being told not to. I think it helped breed a generation of kids who were at least responsible with their decisions about drugs. The CounterAct program appeared to be so successful in my semi-suburban hometown (Sheboygan Falls, WI), that the largest city in the county (Sheboygan) abandoned their highly unsuccessful DARE program and switched over to CounterAct. I'm pretty sure nearly all the schools in the entire county now use the tweaked version of CounterAct, most of them having abandoned their original DARE programs. I guess that says alot about DARE's effectiveness.
I just love when people bring up 1984 to bash socialism. Well guess what folks... Orwell himself was a democratic socialist (as is David McReynolds). Orwell's target was totalitarian systems of government in general, and unless you take a very extreme definition of "totalitarian," democratic socialism is certainly not totalitarianism.
Umm... I find it funny you point out UNIX as some great massive innovation that the government had no part in... which really doesn't make sense, since *computers* (at least in the modern sense...) were developed with government funds (and usually government scientists). I think the computer itself is the more important innovation than UNIX...
Well, now that AOL/Netscape has hijacked all the content I've created for the DMOZ, I've decided to quit my editor position. I was editor in Politics/Parties/USA/Socialist (recently migrated into a regional subcat), but not anymore. Previously I quit editor positions in several local categories for Sheboygan, WI because of all the frequent and stupid changes in editing guidelines. What's up with their copyright policy anyways... they always made it sound like DMOZ was an open source thing affiliated with AOL/Netscape, not *owned and operated* by them. Anyways, this was my resignation message: "After reading on Slashdot about the corporate censorship of the ODP, I no longer will sacrifice my time and efforts into what was supposed to be a kind of "open source" project.Thanks AOL/Netscape for stealing all my damn work. I'm glad that the corporation wants to profit off the copyright of work they STOLE from me. It's crap like this that made me a socialist."
Yep, the Soviets made several gas and oil reservoirs for cities in the far east and southcentral regions of the S.U. through nuclear explosions. In present-day Kazakhstan, they built several *drinking* water reservoirs by detonating small devices a small distance under the ground, resulting in the creation of a large crater at the surface. A good source for info on nukes in civil engineering is the IAEA's bibliography booklet "Peaceful Uses of Atomic Explosions." (gosh that is a paradoxical sentence.) It's available at most UN Records Depositories (i.e. university law libraries). If you can't find it, the University of Wisconsin Physics Library has one for sure!