You mean just scanning 7 million of them and putting them online,......publishers...... That "same way that Google did"?
Yes, I think thats exactly what GP meant. Why should google, just because they took the time, effort and MONEY to scan all of these books, be required to just give away the fruits of their labor for free?
There is nobody here saying that you will owe google money if you track down a dead-tree version of this book and scan it yourself, or if somebody does exactly the same thing as google has done and sells it to you.
There is no controversy here, everybody calm the hell down.
When you're computer equipment gets raided, it doesn't ever get shut down. IF it did, you could just let everything live in a ramdisk and not worry about it.
I have a small network, and use ClamWin on the windows boxes. It runs a full scan nightly and emails me if it sees anything fishy. I've been looking for a better solution, but googling seems to turn up lots of marketing cruft.
If I downloaded every.torrent on TPB for archival purposes, I would be doing nothing wrong.
That doesn't mean that you wouldn't be doing something that the court feels is illegal. We need to come to grips with the fact that our court system doesn't work based on facts, it works based on feelings.
Yes, but downloading a.torrent file, you haven't done anything to contribute to the piracy of any copyrighted materials.
But the courts feel like you did, so you can be convicted for it. Its sad, and I think it speaks to the way that geek-minds work...we're analytical.
We look at a box and when somebody asks us to describe it, we say things like "It is royal-blue, it is 14cm tall and a perfect cube." Sadly, the judges would respond by "Well...I think the box is kindof squarish, it looks like it was probably used as a doorstop for a few years".
Facts vs. Feelings. This is the problem behind nearly every major legal battle that geeks are fighting. The facts support us, people's emotions do not.
The megapixel war is very very very very very far from being anywhere even near over.
This confuses most people because they don't understand the that the CCD (the part of the camera that is replacing the film) isn't the same size in every camera.
There is the "digital" size (nikon calls it dx). This is low-end consumer level stuff. I know a nature photographer that shots on a d300 and loves it, but if you're really doing anything serious you want something called a "full-frame image sensor" (thats is: its just a little tiny bit smaller than a piece of 35mm film, unlike dx, which is much, much smaller. check out this Link for an idea of how hard you are being screwed on DX).
A "full frame" is bigger than "dx". (these are nikon's terms I know, but I shoot nikon and don't know as much about canon, sorry). Full frame sensors are what you're going to find in "prosumer" and professional cameras (in nikon, the D700, the D3 and the D3x). These can shoot at higher isos (without TOO much noise).
But that isn't where it ends...
There are also "medium format" digital cameras that are made by companies like PhaseOne and Hasselblad. These are NOT cameras that you are going to find at best buy, and probably not at your local camera shop either. These $30,000+ cameras shoot in the 100mp and up range...these are the cameras taking the photos you'll see on billboards, in magazines, or on the sides of buildings (and semi-trucks).
Consumer level stuff can stop at about 10mp, pro-level stuff cannot. There are people that even STILL insist on shooting film just simply for the resolution.
BTW, all of this is good for smart-prosumers...you can pick up the legendary hasselblad 500cm for ~$1200 now.
The point is: megapixel war was over for you nikon coolpix years and years ago...for pros it still rages on.
I hate it for ordinary business calls because I can't read email, munch on raisins, pick my nose, stare out the window, or whatever else I'd normally do.
You also can't mouth "This guy is a jackass" to the other people in your office when you're on a con-call.
The worst are software vendors that require it, then force you "upgrade" to the latest version. Yes, this happened to me. Yes, the "upgrade" that they are forcing me to use crashes when you run it on a roaming profile. AWESOME!
If I were to buy some of these giftcards, apple could absolutely terminate my account, I would expect that, but am I breaking any laws? This doesn't seem to be "breaking in" to anything (although I'm sure a judge would see it that way) so is it still considered some sort of cyber-trespass?
Doesn't this fall in to the same category as "the vending machine gave me an extra candy bar. I told the maintenance guy, but he didn't care". What if you even went as far as to email steve@mac.com (or whatever his address is) to show that you tried to contact apple?
Why is a full reboot even an standard option? I feel like doing that should be under an administrative menu or something.
This seems really obvious...write the contents of ram out to disk, and shut the power down. When you power back UP, load the ram-image back into the ram and continue working (which is how hibernation works, I believe).
I don't know why anybody would ever use usenet anyhow. There is almost now content on it, its really really slow, releases usually end up on usenet last (I recommend using Kazaa or bearshare if you want to get anything quickly).
Also, the chance of you getting caught is pretty much 100%. Usenet is never encrypted and most of the providers are actually part of the FBI, btw. Oh, and most of the files on it are viruses. It might also offend your cat, and make your breath smell really bad.
AVOID IT AT ALL COSTS!
If you want a really high-quality, low-risk P2P client, I recommend either Bittorrent or Kazaa.
How do you know power mongering publishers aren't making subtle changes to the written version?
They are. In fact, they're even up-front about it. This is why you'll book collectors talking about "edition"...1st edition, 2nd edition etc. etc. and "marks".
Generally, if a publisher finds a type or something in a book, they will fix it and release a new "edition". "Marks" are the things that they have changed and are what make rare books identifiable.
Maybe. Probably a better question is why are we allowing google to continue doing this at all? Shouldn't it be an opt-in service rather than opt-out? Shouldn't it have always been that way?
I am not an author, so I don't know, but.
Are libraries required to ask permission of the author to offer their books? I have to imagine not. This brings up a very interesting topic for debate...thinking about digital libraries, that is. Why, legally, can a dead-tree library exist, but a digital one cannot? Why can I not get digitized books for free on my Kindle?
I would have absolutely no problem at all with a DRM-locked file that sits on my kindle one at a time. I only get to keep one (or two or 3 or 20 or whatever *your* local library has at its limit) at a time, and only get a new one if I delete the old one etc. etc. etc.
Are there laws that explicitly allow dead-tree libraries, but forbid digital ones?
I don't know about this, at least not in the near future, and probably not on a device as weak (computationally) as the kindle.
There is a lot *more* to speech that the words, the sounds of the letters. Speech is music, words are like tabs.
Every tried to play a guitar song by looking at a tab and having never heard the song before? Or tried to sing karaoke? Its hard. Its almost impossible to get it right. Computers are trying to do the same thing with text-to-speech. Text doesn't tell you what sort of inflection to use, what sort of cadence to use, says nothing of dynamic range. (can you see that I'm trying to draw a correlation between speech and music).
More analogies: Text-To-Speech is a lot like trying to get a concert masterpiece from a midi file...except that even the midi file is telling you WHEN to play the notes. The text doesn't even do that. A lof of the cues that we use to read speech naturally comes from our ability to "render" whatever scene we're reading from in our head, and use the cues from the scene to act out the part of whatever we're reading (be it the narrator, or a character, or a journalist in a magazine article).
Is it possible to replace human speech with a computer? Yes, most definitely. Is it practical to do it in something like the kindle with current technology? No.
Sound familiar? Yeah...that is because this is the voice used in airports across the land to say things like "Thomas Anderson. You have a message waiting. Please go to the paging station".
I cannot think of ANYBODY (that can otherwise read) that would ever want to listen to a book or newspaper read to them in that voice. The text-to-speech needs to be looked at as a tool for blind people to be able to have books read to them, not as an add-on feature that replaces audio books.
Everyone thought the same thing about myspace. They quickly learned that they were wrong. The problem is that, while there is a wealth of data there, the data is worthless. Nobody CARES that you're "taking a poo in the loo, haha!", there is no value there.
Look at what happens to people when the run for office. We found some pictures of Barack Obama when he did some joke modeling thing with one of his friends in college (or something like that).
Can you imagine if we had a searchable index of every single conversation a presidental or senatorial candidate had ever had? Imagine being in your 40s and having to account for a "private" conversation that you had 20 years ago at 2:00am when you were drunk. *shudder* Guys, this isn't some crazy whackjob ranting about the evil government. This is reality! My username can, with not a whole lot of work, be tied to me in real life. If somebody wanted to, they could go back through every single comment I had ever made on any message board or blog that I use this handle on.
Scary. Really really scary. My bet is that almost everybody is in this same boat. Google has made it TOO easy to find things.
The bulk of your father's music can likely be upgraded to the DRM free format (with a higher bitrate) for a small cost.
It's okay, Apple maintains a library of every version of iTunes...meaning that I can download an older version and use it along with qtfairuse to just extract unencrypted.aac files from RAM.
The thing is that most people don't have somebody around to do that for them. For them, they're stuck paying a fee for it.
Because the companies are run by old-timer that are still trying to apply a set of rules that no longer apply to a failing business model.
Look, the internet is here, it isn't leaving. Portable electronics are not some sort of passing fad. Dead-tree publishing is an old technology. As things like the kindle and the sony reader start showing people that they don't need to purchase a stack of paper to read a book, they're going to start demanding that when they purchase a book, they own the *book* not the rights to display the text of it on one specific device.
People are starting to catch on to it, too. There is a marketing tool that we use at my work that requires a serial # to activate. Since then, we have installed the software for all of the serials (this is a result of everybody demanding that they need access to it...not just the people we bought it for). I finally told the boss that we don't have any more serials, we need more, and this is how much it's going to cost. He flipped out. Why was I being so difficult! The receptionist isn't using her copy any more, just use the serial number for that one!
I'm sure this is pretty common. People don't understand how completely and totally ridiculous DRM is until they actually run into it. As digital media becomes more and more ubiquitous, this is happening more and more and people are having their eyes opened.
Another example is when my Dad decided that he wanted to add MP3 playback capability to his home automation system (like what I showed him at my house). Problem was that all(most) of his music had been purchased in the iTunes Music Store and the tool that I was using for music playback ran on linux.
Sadly, it might actually take as long as it takes for some of the people running these companies to retire before things start to change.
We have about the same number of employees and "helpdesk" currently consists of:
10 DIAL BLHACK'S DESK PHONE!!!! --- No answer 20 DIAL BLHACK'S CELL PHONE!!!! --- No answer 30 SEND BLHACK 30 EMAILS ALL MARKED AS URGENT --- No answer
goto 10
In all honesty, about 90% of these questions are things like "I'm trying to download and it keeps saying that thing!", that "thing" is usually dansguardian telling them that they are not allowed to download.exe. Or "the things aren't going across" where the "things" are records and "across" means updating them in the database. This is about 100% because they are alt-tabbing between 4-5 session and have the record locked in another one. Point is, really high volume of the exact same questions every single day. We need something so that they can see from way back 20 minutes ago when they asked the exact same thing and what the answer was. "Close the 4 other sessions you have open" or "you aren't allowed to download.exe's, if you need some additional software, get your manager to request it for you". What am I getting at here?
Have you ever considered just writing your own tool to do it? I've found that the majority of the time, writing simple tools like this ends up being a lot easier than using somebody else's. Reason being that a lot of times you end up using their tools for something CLOSE to what they were actually intended for. Me working through it in my head sees it as something very much like a blog, except instead of stories, you have trouble tickets. The Ticket number is the story's ID and the comments are how the problem was resolved. A lot of times, my problem is that other people's solutions also seem to have a LOT of bloat on them.
Okay, sorry, I'm rambling here (long day of fighting with the machines...). My point is that you should try writing your own helpdesk software! You might even get a bonus for it!:-D!
However, you should consider that giving a tax cut to consumers means they will spend money, and they will give the money (in theory) to those which are best equipped to survive, and those businesses will therefore be able to cut jobs.
But where do these people spend their money? They're not investing it.
They spend on computers, or televisions. Things built in china. They spend it on cheap, non-american cars. Giving money to the poor is good way of flushing into other economies. Giving it to the rich (in the form of doing things like cutting the capital gains tax) is a great way of keeping the money IN the economy.
This isn't speculation. This is reality. Open a history book and take a look at what happens when you cut taxes for the wealthy and for the corporations that they run, then take a look at what happens when you take the money away from the rich and give it to the poor.
Warm fuzzy feelings or not, giving money to the poor is one of the most idiotic economic moves you can make.
He cut taxes, where's the increase you're babbling about?
He cut taxes for the wrong people.
Bush gave billions to the financial and car industries anyway
It makes people angry, I know, but trickle-down economics *works*. Giving money to the ultra-rich makes people angry (myself included), but what are those rich people good at? Turning 1 dollar into 20. Give them a million dollars and watch them create a multi-million dollar job creation machine. People that make $30,000 a year are not out there building wealth and creating jobs. People making $3 million a year, are.
I don't know why you're being modded "flamebait" (okay, yes i do).
Have people really got their heads that far up their ass? Look around you. Look at what Obama is doing. Every time that this guy gets on the television the stock market takes a nosedive. The "economic stimulus bill" that he passed is one of the most absurd, destructive, ridiculous things in the history of the American Economy.
So...what is he doing? I mean...not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, hill-dwelling, gun-hoarding psycho here, but if you were going to set yourself up as the dictator of a socialist nation, what would you do?
He got lots and lots and lots and LOTS of support during the election. People fell in love with him. People had an almost religious experience. They were so completely and utterly devoted to anything Obama that he could do no wrong in their eyes.
Then...only a few WEEKS after he gets into office he starts mucking about in the Economy. An economic stimulus bill that almost deliberately nearly a trillion dollars on failing projects. Why? Why would he do that?
Then, during a recession mind you, he decides to INCREASE taxes!? That is one of the most batshit insane fucking things a person can do!
Okay....well then we start seeing things like the "fairness doctrine" popping up. Sounds like a great way of censoring people that don't agree with you, wouldn't you say?
Okay, guys...I promise, I usually poke fun at the people "wake up sheeple!" types, but seriously? Is ANY of this stuff explainable? WTF is going on? What motivation could there possibly be for pretty much everything that he has done if NOT to intentionally drive our country into a crisis?
Slashdot Mirror
You mean just scanning 7 million of them and putting them online, ......publishers......
That "same way that Google did"?
Yes, I think thats exactly what GP meant. Why should google, just because they took the time, effort and MONEY to scan all of these books, be required to just give away the fruits of their labor for free?
There is nobody here saying that you will owe google money if you track down a dead-tree version of this book and scan it yourself, or if somebody does exactly the same thing as google has done and sells it to you.
There is no controversy here, everybody calm the hell down.
When you're computer equipment gets raided, it doesn't ever get shut down. IF it did, you could just let everything live in a ramdisk and not worry about it.
they use this: Hotplug
That "mouse jiggler" thing that you see sold on thinkgeek and the like and laugh at? That is what it is for.
What AV scanner are you using?
I have a small network, and use ClamWin on the windows boxes. It runs a full scan nightly and emails me if it sees anything fishy.
I've been looking for a better solution, but googling seems to turn up lots of marketing cruft.
If I downloaded every .torrent on TPB for archival purposes, I would be doing nothing wrong.
That doesn't mean that you wouldn't be doing something that the court feels is illegal.
We need to come to grips with the fact that our court system doesn't work based on facts, it works based on feelings.
Yes, but downloading a .torrent file, you haven't done anything to contribute to the piracy of any copyrighted materials.
But the courts feel like you did, so you can be convicted for it.
Its sad, and I think it speaks to the way that geek-minds work...we're analytical.
We look at a box and when somebody asks us to describe it, we say things like "It is royal-blue, it is 14cm tall and a perfect cube."
Sadly, the judges would respond by
"Well...I think the box is kindof squarish, it looks like it was probably used as a doorstop for a few years".
Facts vs. Feelings. This is the problem behind nearly every major legal battle that geeks are fighting. The facts support us, people's emotions do not.
Isn't part of the point of linux that there isn't a face to it?
Linux is my mailserver
Linux runs my mythtv
Linux runs on my access point
Linux runs on my sister's laptop.
Linux runs on our company's DVR.
Linux is not an operating system for the desktop or for the server, or for the embedded device. Linux is an operating system for EVERYTHING.
Its like a ball of clay, endless potential and totally at the hands of the artist.
The megapixel war is very very very very very far from being anywhere even near over.
This confuses most people because they don't understand the that the CCD (the part of the camera that is replacing the film) isn't the same size in every camera.
There is the "digital" size (nikon calls it dx). This is low-end consumer level stuff. I know a nature photographer that shots on a d300 and loves it, but if you're really doing anything serious you want something called a "full-frame image sensor" (thats is: its just a little tiny bit smaller than a piece of 35mm film, unlike dx, which is much, much smaller. check out this Link for an idea of how hard you are being screwed on DX).
A "full frame" is bigger than "dx". (these are nikon's terms I know, but I shoot nikon and don't know as much about canon, sorry).
Full frame sensors are what you're going to find in "prosumer" and professional cameras (in nikon, the D700, the D3 and the D3x). These can shoot at higher isos (without TOO much noise).
But that isn't where it ends...
There are also "medium format" digital cameras that are made by companies like PhaseOne and Hasselblad. These are NOT cameras that you are going to find at best buy, and probably not at your local camera shop either. These $30,000+ cameras shoot in the 100mp and up range...these are the cameras taking the photos you'll see on billboards, in magazines, or on the sides of buildings (and semi-trucks).
Consumer level stuff can stop at about 10mp, pro-level stuff cannot. There are people that even STILL insist on shooting film just simply for the resolution.
BTW, all of this is good for smart-prosumers...you can pick up the legendary hasselblad 500cm for ~$1200 now.
The point is: megapixel war was over for you nikon coolpix years and years ago...for pros it still rages on.
I hate it for ordinary business calls because I can't read email, munch on raisins, pick my nose, stare out the window, or whatever else I'd normally do.
You also can't mouth "This guy is a jackass" to the other people in your office when you're on a con-call.
The worst are software vendors that require it, then force you "upgrade" to the latest version.
Yes, this happened to me. Yes, the "upgrade" that they are forcing me to use crashes when you run it on a roaming profile.
AWESOME!
Any lawyers in here wanna weigh in on this?
If I were to buy some of these giftcards, apple could absolutely terminate my account, I would expect that, but am I breaking any laws? This doesn't seem to be "breaking in" to anything (although I'm sure a judge would see it that way) so is it still considered some sort of cyber-trespass?
Doesn't this fall in to the same category as "the vending machine gave me an extra candy bar. I told the maintenance guy, but he didn't care". What if you even went as far as to email steve@mac.com (or whatever his address is) to show that you tried to contact apple?
Why is a full reboot even an standard option? I feel like doing that should be under an administrative menu or something.
This seems really obvious...write the contents of ram out to disk, and shut the power down. When you power back UP, load the ram-image back into the ram and continue working (which is how hibernation works, I believe).
So....wtf, guys?
You're an idiot.
Read my post again, okay?
First rule of usenet.
I don't know why anybody would ever use usenet anyhow. There is almost now content on it, its really really slow, releases usually end up on usenet last (I recommend using Kazaa or bearshare if you want to get anything quickly).
Also, the chance of you getting caught is pretty much 100%. Usenet is never encrypted and most of the providers are actually part of the FBI, btw.
Oh, and most of the files on it are viruses.
It might also offend your cat, and make your breath smell really bad.
AVOID IT AT ALL COSTS!
If you want a really high-quality, low-risk P2P client, I recommend either Bittorrent or Kazaa.
How do you know power mongering publishers aren't making subtle changes to the written version?
They are. In fact, they're even up-front about it. This is why you'll book collectors talking about "edition"...1st edition, 2nd edition etc. etc. and "marks".
Generally, if a publisher finds a type or something in a book, they will fix it and release a new "edition". "Marks" are the things that they have changed and are what make rare books identifiable.
Maybe. Probably a better question is why are we allowing google to continue doing this at all? Shouldn't it be an opt-in service rather than opt-out? Shouldn't it have always been that way?
I am not an author, so I don't know, but.
Are libraries required to ask permission of the author to offer their books? I have to imagine not.
This brings up a very interesting topic for debate...thinking about digital libraries, that is. Why, legally, can a dead-tree library exist, but a digital one cannot? Why can I not get digitized books for free on my Kindle?
I would have absolutely no problem at all with a DRM-locked file that sits on my kindle one at a time. I only get to keep one (or two or 3 or 20 or whatever *your* local library has at its limit) at a time, and only get a new one if I delete the old one etc. etc. etc.
Are there laws that explicitly allow dead-tree libraries, but forbid digital ones?
This actually sounds like quite a bit MORE work than just having somebody read through it.
Speech is art, like it or not. If we get to a point where computers are producing our art, I'm quiting.
I think the quality issue will change.
I don't know about this, at least not in the near future, and probably not on a device as weak (computationally) as the kindle.
There is a lot *more* to speech that the words, the sounds of the letters. Speech is music, words are like tabs.
Every tried to play a guitar song by looking at a tab and having never heard the song before? Or tried to sing karaoke? Its hard. Its almost impossible to get it right.
Computers are trying to do the same thing with text-to-speech. Text doesn't tell you what sort of inflection to use, what sort of cadence to use, says nothing of dynamic range. (can you see that I'm trying to draw a correlation between speech and music).
More analogies:
Text-To-Speech is a lot like trying to get a concert masterpiece from a midi file...except that even the midi file is telling you WHEN to play the notes. The text doesn't even do that.
A lof of the cues that we use to read speech naturally comes from our ability to "render" whatever scene we're reading from in our head, and use the cues from the scene to act out the part of whatever we're reading (be it the narrator, or a character, or a journalist in a magazine article).
Is it possible to replace human speech with a computer? Yes, most definitely. Is it practical to do it in something like the kindle with current technology?
No.
The authors need to STFU immediately.
This is what the text-to-"speech" sounds like Keep in mind that this is bezos himself presenting the thing....its the best conditions possible for it to work correctly.
Sound familiar? Yeah...that is because this is the voice used in airports across the land to say things like "Thomas Anderson. You have a message waiting. Please go to the paging station".
I cannot think of ANYBODY (that can otherwise read) that would ever want to listen to a book or newspaper read to them in that voice. The text-to-speech needs to be looked at as a tool for blind people to be able to have books read to them, not as an add-on feature that replaces audio books.
Also, it is easily mine-able.
Everyone thought the same thing about myspace. They quickly learned that they were wrong. The problem is that, while there is a wealth of data there, the data is worthless. Nobody CARES that you're "taking a poo in the loo, haha!", there is no value there.
Look at what happens to people when the run for office. We found some pictures of Barack Obama when he did some joke modeling thing with one of his friends in college (or something like that).
Can you imagine if we had a searchable index of every single conversation a presidental or senatorial candidate had ever had?
Imagine being in your 40s and having to account for a "private" conversation that you had 20 years ago at 2:00am when you were drunk.
*shudder*
Guys, this isn't some crazy whackjob ranting about the evil government. This is reality! My username can, with not a whole lot of work, be tied to me in real life. If somebody wanted to, they could go back through every single comment I had ever made on any message board or blog that I use this handle on.
Scary. Really really scary. My bet is that almost everybody is in this same boat. Google has made it TOO easy to find things.
The bulk of your father's music can likely be upgraded to the DRM free format (with a higher bitrate) for a small cost.
It's okay, Apple maintains a library of every version of iTunes...meaning that I can download an older version and use it along with qtfairuse to just extract unencrypted .aac files from RAM.
The thing is that most people don't have somebody around to do that for them. For them, they're stuck paying a fee for it.
So why are book publishers doing the same thing?
Because the companies are run by old-timer that are still trying to apply a set of rules that no longer apply to a failing business model.
Look, the internet is here, it isn't leaving. Portable electronics are not some sort of passing fad. Dead-tree publishing is an old technology. As things like the kindle and the sony reader start showing people that they don't need to purchase a stack of paper to read a book, they're going to start demanding that when they purchase a book, they own the *book* not the rights to display the text of it on one specific device.
People are starting to catch on to it, too. There is a marketing tool that we use at my work that requires a serial # to activate. Since then, we have installed the software for all of the serials (this is a result of everybody demanding that they need access to it...not just the people we bought it for).
I finally told the boss that we don't have any more serials, we need more, and this is how much it's going to cost. He flipped out. Why was I being so difficult! The receptionist isn't using her copy any more, just use the serial number for that one!
I'm sure this is pretty common. People don't understand how completely and totally ridiculous DRM is until they actually run into it. As digital media becomes more and more ubiquitous, this is happening more and more and people are having their eyes opened.
Another example is when my Dad decided that he wanted to add MP3 playback capability to his home automation system (like what I showed him at my house). Problem was that all(most) of his music had been purchased in the iTunes Music Store and the tool that I was using for music playback ran on linux.
Sadly, it might actually take as long as it takes for some of the people running these companies to retire before things start to change.
We have about the same number of employees and "helpdesk" currently consists of:
10 DIAL BLHACK'S DESK PHONE!!!! --- No answer
20 DIAL BLHACK'S CELL PHONE!!!! --- No answer
30 SEND BLHACK 30 EMAILS ALL MARKED AS URGENT --- No answer
goto 10
In all honesty, about 90% of these questions are things like "I'm trying to download and it keeps saying that thing!", that "thing" is usually dansguardian telling them that they are not allowed to download .exe. Or "the things aren't going across" where the "things" are records and "across" means updating them in the database. This is about 100% because they are alt-tabbing between 4-5 session and have the record locked in another one. .exe's, if you need some additional software, get your manager to request it for you".
Point is, really high volume of the exact same questions every single day. We need something so that they can see from way back 20 minutes ago when they asked the exact same thing and what the answer was. "Close the 4 other sessions you have open" or "you aren't allowed to download
What am I getting at here?
Have you ever considered just writing your own tool to do it? I've found that the majority of the time, writing simple tools like this ends up being a lot easier than using somebody else's. Reason being that a lot of times you end up using their tools for something CLOSE to what they were actually intended for.
Me working through it in my head sees it as something very much like a blog, except instead of stories, you have trouble tickets. The Ticket number is the story's ID and the comments are how the problem was resolved.
A lot of times, my problem is that other people's solutions also seem to have a LOT of bloat on them.
Okay, sorry, I'm rambling here (long day of fighting with the machines...). My point is that you should try writing your own helpdesk software! You might even get a bonus for it! :-D!
However, you should consider that giving a tax cut to consumers means they will spend money, and they will give the money (in theory) to those which are best equipped to survive, and those businesses will therefore be able to cut jobs.
But where do these people spend their money? They're not investing it.
They spend on computers, or televisions. Things built in china. They spend it on cheap, non-american cars. Giving money to the poor is good way of flushing into other economies. Giving it to the rich (in the form of doing things like cutting the capital gains tax) is a great way of keeping the money IN the economy.
This isn't speculation. This is reality. Open a history book and take a look at what happens when you cut taxes for the wealthy and for the corporations that they run, then take a look at what happens when you take the money away from the rich and give it to the poor.
Warm fuzzy feelings or not, giving money to the poor is one of the most idiotic economic moves you can make.
He cut taxes, where's the increase you're babbling about?
He cut taxes for the wrong people.
Bush gave billions to the financial and car industries anyway
It makes people angry, I know, but trickle-down economics *works*. Giving money to the ultra-rich makes people angry (myself included), but what are those rich people good at? Turning 1 dollar into 20.
Give them a million dollars and watch them create a multi-million dollar job creation machine. People that make $30,000 a year are not out there building wealth and creating jobs. People making $3 million a year, are.
Its simple, its mean, its cold, but it works.
I don't know why you're being modded "flamebait" (okay, yes i do).
Have people really got their heads that far up their ass? Look around you. Look at what Obama is doing. Every time that this guy gets on the television the stock market takes a nosedive. The "economic stimulus bill" that he passed is one of the most absurd, destructive, ridiculous things in the history of the American Economy.
So...what is he doing? I mean...not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, hill-dwelling, gun-hoarding psycho here, but if you were going to set yourself up as the dictator of a socialist nation, what would you do?
He got lots and lots and lots and LOTS of support during the election. People fell in love with him. People had an almost religious experience. They were so completely and utterly devoted to anything Obama that he could do no wrong in their eyes.
Then...only a few WEEKS after he gets into office he starts mucking about in the Economy. An economic stimulus bill that almost deliberately nearly a trillion dollars on failing projects. Why? Why would he do that?
Then, during a recession mind you, he decides to INCREASE taxes!? That is one of the most batshit insane fucking things a person can do!
Okay....well then we start seeing things like the "fairness doctrine" popping up. Sounds like a great way of censoring people that don't agree with you, wouldn't you say?
Okay, guys...I promise, I usually poke fun at the people "wake up sheeple!" types, but seriously? Is ANY of this stuff explainable? WTF is going on? What motivation could there possibly be for pretty much everything that he has done if NOT to intentionally drive our country into a crisis?