another way of making sure nobody gets any free time.
I wouldn't consider that to be free time, since somebody had to pay for it before you could benefit from it. It's not your problem if the guy before you overpaid, and there's no reason why you shouldn't benefit from it if you can. IMO, "Free" time would be putting quarter-sized sheet metal discs into a meter. (old machines would probably take it, not that I've tried or anything)
I'll assume that you will refuse to accept that Darth Vader is responsible for blowing up Alderaan, even though he was Supreme Military Executor, in charge of all military operations
Blowing up Alderaan seemed to be Tarkin's idea, and Tarkin gave the order to fire. (All Vader did was stand there) In general, Tarkin treated Vader like a subordinate in ANH (he told Vader to release that guy he was choking and Vader obeyed) and it wasn't until ESB when Tarkin was dead that Vader began acting like a commander.
The Death star wasn't fully operational and was still under construction to some extent until ANH, so there were probably plenty of civilians onboard when Luke blew it up. There certainly had to be some people that were only serving the Empire because they had no choice. (although I admit that I'm speculating) Also, did the Rebels ever formally declare war on the Empire before the Battle of Yavin?
Imagine the power draw when the Death Star actually intends to fire. Is it easier to lay the wire and controls necessary to manage that from one reactor, or several?
The superlaser would have to use some sort of huge capacitor since firing the weapon would otherwise cause a brownout by suddenly diverting most the power from the main reactor. Remember, the reactor would have a finite maximum output. Plus, there would probably be a power shortage (or power fluctuations at the very least) during the recharge cycle since the reactor can generate only so much power and it would still have to power everything else at the same time. It would not be difficult or unfeasible to have several dedicated reactors working in a cluster to power the superlaser. That way, the weapon would be able to fire (albeit slowly) and everything else would still have enough power at all times.
The Endor holocaust would make the Rebels just as evil as the Empire, since the rebels effectively destroyed a whole planet (just like the Empire) and committed genocide against the Ewoks. Even though the rebels did it unintentionally, it still doesn't change the fact that their actions directly lead to the deaths of some of the creatures they were trying to help.
Plus, how do you get around the fact that Luke killed way more people by destroying the Death Star I than Vader ever did?
Death Star An unshielded exhaust port leading directly to the central reactor? Really? And when you rebuild it, your solution to this problem is four paths into the central core so large that you can literally fly a spaceship through them? Brilliant. Note to the Emperor: Someone on your Death Star design staff is in the pay of Rebel forces. Oh, right, you can't get the memo because someone threw you down a huge exposed shaft in your Death Star throne room.
I agree with the critique on the Death Stars. Centralized power was the fatal flaw in both, so it would have made a lot more sense to use distributed power systems throughout the Death Star II. (lots of little reactors instead of one big one) That way, the rebels would have had to destroy the DSII apart piece by piece. Given how much time that would take, the Imperials probably would have won.
I won't even go into the Endor holocaust in detail. (guess what happens when you detonate a small artificial moon near a planetary atmosphere? You get lots of fallout, resulting in nuclear winter and lots of dead ewoks)
Now the adverts in cinemas run on the idea that the cinema 'experience' can't be replicated by pirated content.
Yep, that's right. You sure can't get the nasty seats with skid marks on them, sticky floors, blurry picture, and overpriced food except with an authentic cinema experience.
I'm doing my manuscript in LaTeX. Over they years, I've found Word (or Writer, or any other conventional word processor) to be absolutely horrible for large documents. ( >= 50 pages) If you're doing something small, it is easier to use a WYSIWYG tool like Word/Writer, but for something with many citations, cross-references, emphasis on document structure, etc. LaTeX is second to none. Plus, many publishers I'm considering use LaTeX anyway, so I can just give them my manuscript and it will save everyone a whole lot of trouble.
O'Reilly is only meh as far as treating authors. They play favorites, they pay the lowest royalty rate (10%), and they shove so many books out the door that yours may get lost. They pay the same rate for digital sales, which really stinks because their overhead is a lot lower. OTOH they are very good at actually selling books, they keep trying new forms of distribution, the O'Reilly brand is tops, and they pay royalties quarterly, which is a nice thing. Better than the typical annual or bi-annual.
I'm writing a tech book as well and I deliberately skipped O'Reilly for an altogether different reason. I never liked how their books all look the same; it gives me a definite "work for hire" vibe whenever I look at their stuff. (they all have an animal on the front or have a consistent look with other books O'Reilly has published in the same category) For instance, every time I see one of their books, I think "Oh, here's an O'Reilly book" instead of "Oh, here's a book written by $author." I'm writing a book mainly to get exposure and to help open other doors career-wise down the road (the royalties are nice too) and I don't want to do all the work and have someone like O'Reilly get all the kudos. Granted, they do have good distribution, but so do other publishers that don't over-brand your work like O'Reilly does.
If you have a problem with the laws, talk to Congress or the SCOTUS.
Why would congress listen to you, or me, or anyone else except a lobbyist with a lot of money? Individual people are just one vote and bring nothing else to the table. Most everyone on Capitol Hill is either corrupt or already has their own agenda that the wishes of the American people probably don't fit into. SCOTUS is even less accountable than congress is.
I heard somewhere that if you drink bottle-conditioned beer, many of the yeasts in there are still alive and can eventually colonize your GI tract. They do you no harm (after all, your body is always full of microorganisms, and it should be if you want to stay healthy) but these yeasts can process some of the sugars you eat into trace amounts of ethanol. That's probably where that 0.02 came from.
At the same time, the self-esteem and all-must-have-prizes philosophies that now pervade much of education have convinced everybody that they deserve to walk right into their dream job, just because they've done nothing more than show up for class and turn in assignments most of the time.
Something like that is everyone's fault. Shame on parents for teaching many kids that university is essential for everyone, when in truth it isn't for everyone. Shame on the university for giving people false hope, (students are often lead to believe that employers will be actively trying to recruit them; while it probably does happen a little bit for the best of the best, it sure doesn't happen to everyone else) and shame on me for believing all of it.
After all, anyone who cares is free to download any number of free browsers. When "free as in beer" is the default price of a web browser, how is MS giving theirs away anti-competitive?
Most people that still use IE probably do it because they don't know any better. Although IE has gotten a lot better with the past two releases (IE6 was a joke, as we all know) it still isn't fair when Microsoft is able to give their own browser preferential treatment over the others by having it be the only one installed out of the box. If Windows came with no built-in browser at all (but relied on some sort of wget system to retrieve and install a browser as part of the setup experience, with randomized placement each time to remove any sort of bias from the listing like others have suggested) that would help level the playing field.
To me, this program seems like a bad deal in general.
To begin with, many clunkers still run well and are paid off. My car is 10 years old (1998 Ford Contour) and I have no intention of getting a new one unless something happens to it. It's not the best looking car around (it has its share of dents) or the most powerful, but it works, is well-maintained, and gets me where I need to go. To me, it's not worth it to give up a car that is paid-off, runs well just to go into debt to buy a new car in a time where I should be working to get out of debt. You can argue about fuel efficiency, but new car payments would cost me much more. (I telecommute almost exclusively and don't do much back-and-forth driving) It just doesn't make much sense.
The point of working in the music industry is to create music and share it with others.
No, the point of working in the music industry is to make money. The point of being an artist is to create music and share it with others. There is a huge difference.
If you need your cursive-written pages to last long term, then you had better use acid-free paper. I've seen lots of cheap paper get yellow and brittle and then start to crumble after 10-15 years, which is hardly archival. After 70+ years, your logbook is probably going to crumble to dust if someone tries to read it if you are writing it in a blue-lined spiral notebook.
Today, without Android, what we're seeing is the case for network neutrality in the form of ringtone racketeering.
The worst thing is that the carriers are going along with the ringtone scammers. (the ones who bait unwary people with "free" ringtones and then auto-subscribe them to an expensive ringtone service or worse, spam them several times a day with expensive text messages) Most people don't realize that they could be trapped if they put in their phone number on one of the scam sites; for some reason, a phone number is treated just like a credit card but without any of the consumer protections. The carriers could help to shut these criminals down if they wanted to, but they don't because they get a pierce of the action.
I heard that E-harmony includes people that are no longer active on the site in your "matches". Back when I tried eharmony, I had written to a lot of people who never wrote back. I had a decent profile and am not a freak or too bad looking, (basically your average guy) so it's more likely I was just talking to a wall. The profiles I looked at indicated recent activity, but things like login times are easy to fake, especially if you have no choice but to trust what the service tells you. From what I observed, eharmony artificially inflates the count of your matches, plus they ration out only a few matches at a time to string you along for a few extra months on the service. (I had a lot up front but then only a few a week by the time I cancelled) Plus, you have no way of knowing if the matches that do respond to you are actually real people or just dummy accounts staffed by employees meant to keep you interested in the site. (the real test is if they bail out when you want to meet) The commercials you see are obviously designed to exploit lonely people in an emotionally vulnerable situation. When you sign up you have such optimism that you are going to find someone and then you get slammed hard with disappointment after a few weeks of it. The whole thing just seems really dishonest to me. Maybe I've grown cynical or just merely wiser about how these things work.
My advice is to date in the real world and get some friends to hang out with. Friends have other friends outside of your immediate circle (and out from there) and chances are the right one is in there somewhere.
In the end, I had to threaten Wells Fargo with the Better Business Bureau in order to get them to remove the charges for insurance that I refused to pay for (since I had already been insured and notified them multiple times of it).
While it sounds intimidating, the Better Business Bureau is not a government agency and is therefore powerless to make a company do the right thing. (If you want to play that angle, just hope the guy you're talking to doesn't know that) If you really want to put the fear of God into a business when they try to rip you off, I heard you should threaten to talk to your state Attorney General instead.
I definitely remember the original Jedi Knight game. It had awesome multiplayer, but I mainly got into it for the add-on singleplayer maps. Even 10 years after the game came out, I remember making stuff for it in Jed. Good times....
If you want a quality life, it costs money. What you described isn't what every person wants, but I can't blame those who do want that lifestyle for trying. $80K may seem like a lot and more than what the job is worth to some people, but should he be happy to scape by with less? From what I've seen, the name of the game these days is to get all you can out of your employer, because someone else will if you don't.
What if you make your own? Most phones have some sort of voice memo feature that you can save. (and saved audio can often be set as a ringtone) All I did was start with a mp3, convert it to mono in Audacity, and record the song as a "voice memo" by holding the phone up to one of my pc speakers. It worked surprisingly well.
Here's a better life: Meet your spouse in high school. Get married and start having children immediately. Stay married until you die. Work from home in a business you've created. Home school your children. Grow as much of your own food as you can. Avoid debt.
The older I get, (I'm currently 25) the more that lifestyle appeals to me. I try to live by it as much as I can, except for the spouse... I don't have one yet. I can't understand people who work long hours just to pursue the typical consumer lifestyle with loads of debt. Going into debt just to keep up with the Joneses is a form of slavery, and chances are no one is keeping score anyway.
If he has motor-coordination issues, that could also make him dislike sports.
That's how it was for me when I was younger. (high school age and below) I couldn't compete in sports with other people my age at the time, so I focused on other things. (like computers/programming) I remember feeling socially isolated, but there was little I could do about it. Now, (10 years later) my social skills are mostly normal and I estimate that my physical abilities are about 80-85% normal, but I got to that point only after years of intensive physical training and it is still far from easy.
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I wouldn't consider that to be free time, since somebody had to pay for it before you could benefit from it. It's not your problem if the guy before you overpaid, and there's no reason why you shouldn't benefit from it if you can. IMO, "Free" time would be putting quarter-sized sheet metal discs into a meter. (old machines would probably take it, not that I've tried or anything)
Blowing up Alderaan seemed to be Tarkin's idea, and Tarkin gave the order to fire. (All Vader did was stand there) In general, Tarkin treated Vader like a subordinate in ANH (he told Vader to release that guy he was choking and Vader obeyed) and it wasn't until ESB when Tarkin was dead that Vader began acting like a commander.
The Death star wasn't fully operational and was still under construction to some extent until ANH, so there were probably plenty of civilians onboard when Luke blew it up. There certainly had to be some people that were only serving the Empire because they had no choice. (although I admit that I'm speculating) Also, did the Rebels ever formally declare war on the Empire before the Battle of Yavin?
The superlaser would have to use some sort of huge capacitor since firing the weapon would otherwise cause a brownout by suddenly diverting most the power from the main reactor. Remember, the reactor would have a finite maximum output. Plus, there would probably be a power shortage (or power fluctuations at the very least) during the recharge cycle since the reactor can generate only so much power and it would still have to power everything else at the same time. It would not be difficult or unfeasible to have several dedicated reactors working in a cluster to power the superlaser. That way, the weapon would be able to fire (albeit slowly) and everything else would still have enough power at all times.
The Endor holocaust would make the Rebels just as evil as the Empire, since the rebels effectively destroyed a whole planet (just like the Empire) and committed genocide against the Ewoks. Even though the rebels did it unintentionally, it still doesn't change the fact that their actions directly lead to the deaths of some of the creatures they were trying to help.
Plus, how do you get around the fact that Luke killed way more people by destroying the Death Star I than Vader ever did?
I agree with the critique on the Death Stars. Centralized power was the fatal flaw in both, so it would have made a lot more sense to use distributed power systems throughout the Death Star II. (lots of little reactors instead of one big one) That way, the rebels would have had to destroy the DSII apart piece by piece. Given how much time that would take, the Imperials probably would have won.
I won't even go into the Endor holocaust in detail. (guess what happens when you detonate a small artificial moon near a planetary atmosphere? You get lots of fallout, resulting in nuclear winter and lots of dead ewoks)
Or you could go medieval and build a catapult.
Yep, that's right. You sure can't get the nasty seats with skid marks on them, sticky floors, blurry picture, and overpriced food except with an authentic cinema experience.
I'm doing my manuscript in LaTeX. Over they years, I've found Word (or Writer, or any other conventional word processor) to be absolutely horrible for large documents. ( >= 50 pages) If you're doing something small, it is easier to use a WYSIWYG tool like Word/Writer, but for something with many citations, cross-references, emphasis on document structure, etc. LaTeX is second to none. Plus, many publishers I'm considering use LaTeX anyway, so I can just give them my manuscript and it will save everyone a whole lot of trouble.
I'm writing a tech book as well and I deliberately skipped O'Reilly for an altogether different reason. I never liked how their books all look the same; it gives me a definite "work for hire" vibe whenever I look at their stuff. (they all have an animal on the front or have a consistent look with other books O'Reilly has published in the same category) For instance, every time I see one of their books, I think "Oh, here's an O'Reilly book" instead of "Oh, here's a book written by $author." I'm writing a book mainly to get exposure and to help open other doors career-wise down the road (the royalties are nice too) and I don't want to do all the work and have someone like O'Reilly get all the kudos. Granted, they do have good distribution, but so do other publishers that don't over-brand your work like O'Reilly does.
Why would congress listen to you, or me, or anyone else except a lobbyist with a lot of money? Individual people are just one vote and bring nothing else to the table. Most everyone on Capitol Hill is either corrupt or already has their own agenda that the wishes of the American people probably don't fit into. SCOTUS is even less accountable than congress is.
I heard somewhere that if you drink bottle-conditioned beer, many of the yeasts in there are still alive and can eventually colonize your GI tract. They do you no harm (after all, your body is always full of microorganisms, and it should be if you want to stay healthy) but these yeasts can process some of the sugars you eat into trace amounts of ethanol. That's probably where that 0.02 came from.
Something like that is everyone's fault. Shame on parents for teaching many kids that university is essential for everyone, when in truth it isn't for everyone. Shame on the university for giving people false hope, (students are often lead to believe that employers will be actively trying to recruit them; while it probably does happen a little bit for the best of the best, it sure doesn't happen to everyone else) and shame on me for believing all of it.
That's what tools like Lyx are for.
Most people that still use IE probably do it because they don't know any better. Although IE has gotten a lot better with the past two releases (IE6 was a joke, as we all know) it still isn't fair when Microsoft is able to give their own browser preferential treatment over the others by having it be the only one installed out of the box. If Windows came with no built-in browser at all (but relied on some sort of wget system to retrieve and install a browser as part of the setup experience, with randomized placement each time to remove any sort of bias from the listing like others have suggested) that would help level the playing field.
To me, this program seems like a bad deal in general.
To begin with, many clunkers still run well and are paid off. My car is 10 years old (1998 Ford Contour) and I have no intention of getting a new one unless something happens to it. It's not the best looking car around (it has its share of dents) or the most powerful, but it works, is well-maintained, and gets me where I need to go. To me, it's not worth it to give up a car that is paid-off, runs well just to go into debt to buy a new car in a time where I should be working to get out of debt. You can argue about fuel efficiency, but new car payments would cost me much more. (I telecommute almost exclusively and don't do much back-and-forth driving) It just doesn't make much sense.
No, the point of working in the music industry is to make money. The point of being an artist is to create music and share it with others. There is a huge difference.
If you need your cursive-written pages to last long term, then you had better use acid-free paper. I've seen lots of cheap paper get yellow and brittle and then start to crumble after 10-15 years, which is hardly archival. After 70+ years, your logbook is probably going to crumble to dust if someone tries to read it if you are writing it in a blue-lined spiral notebook.
The worst thing is that the carriers are going along with the ringtone scammers. (the ones who bait unwary people with "free" ringtones and then auto-subscribe them to an expensive ringtone service or worse, spam them several times a day with expensive text messages) Most people don't realize that they could be trapped if they put in their phone number on one of the scam sites; for some reason, a phone number is treated just like a credit card but without any of the consumer protections. The carriers could help to shut these criminals down if they wanted to, but they don't because they get a pierce of the action.
I heard that E-harmony includes people that are no longer active on the site in your "matches". Back when I tried eharmony, I had written to a lot of people who never wrote back. I had a decent profile and am not a freak or too bad looking, (basically your average guy) so it's more likely I was just talking to a wall. The profiles I looked at indicated recent activity, but things like login times are easy to fake, especially if you have no choice but to trust what the service tells you. From what I observed, eharmony artificially inflates the count of your matches, plus they ration out only a few matches at a time to string you along for a few extra months on the service. (I had a lot up front but then only a few a week by the time I cancelled) Plus, you have no way of knowing if the matches that do respond to you are actually real people or just dummy accounts staffed by employees meant to keep you interested in the site. (the real test is if they bail out when you want to meet) The commercials you see are obviously designed to exploit lonely people in an emotionally vulnerable situation. When you sign up you have such optimism that you are going to find someone and then you get slammed hard with disappointment after a few weeks of it. The whole thing just seems really dishonest to me. Maybe I've grown cynical or just merely wiser about how these things work.
My advice is to date in the real world and get some friends to hang out with. Friends have other friends outside of your immediate circle (and out from there) and chances are the right one is in there somewhere.
While it sounds intimidating, the Better Business Bureau is not a government agency and is therefore powerless to make a company do the right thing. (If you want to play that angle, just hope the guy you're talking to doesn't know that) If you really want to put the fear of God into a business when they try to rip you off, I heard you should threaten to talk to your state Attorney General instead.
I definitely remember the original Jedi Knight game. It had awesome multiplayer, but I mainly got into it for the add-on singleplayer maps. Even 10 years after the game came out, I remember making stuff for it in Jed. Good times....
If you want a quality life, it costs money. What you described isn't what every person wants, but I can't blame those who do want that lifestyle for trying. $80K may seem like a lot and more than what the job is worth to some people, but should he be happy to scape by with less? From what I've seen, the name of the game these days is to get all you can out of your employer, because someone else will if you don't.
What if you make your own? Most phones have some sort of voice memo feature that you can save. (and saved audio can often be set as a ringtone) All I did was start with a mp3, convert it to mono in Audacity, and record the song as a "voice memo" by holding the phone up to one of my pc speakers. It worked surprisingly well.
The older I get, (I'm currently 25) the more that lifestyle appeals to me. I try to live by it as much as I can, except for the spouse... I don't have one yet. I can't understand people who work long hours just to pursue the typical consumer lifestyle with loads of debt. Going into debt just to keep up with the Joneses is a form of slavery, and chances are no one is keeping score anyway.
That's how it was for me when I was younger. (high school age and below) I couldn't compete in sports with other people my age at the time, so I focused on other things. (like computers/programming) I remember feeling socially isolated, but there was little I could do about it. Now, (10 years later) my social skills are mostly normal and I estimate that my physical abilities are about 80-85% normal, but I got to that point only after years of intensive physical training and it is still far from easy.