It should be noted that the commission didn't find any particular flaw that prevented them from recommending the system, but rather they felt they didn't have time to properly vet it:
The Commission has identified and acknowledged the benefits of electronic voting and the fact that the selected system can accurately and consistently record voter preferences. It emphasises that its conclusion is not based on any finding that the present system will not work, but on the desirability of allowing time for further testing and quality assurance. The Commission makes detailed and valuable recommendations for the conduct of this further testing.
They won't have to - apparently they are setting up a preferred class of stock to be held largely by the founders, which greater voting privileges so they can maintain control.
Investors will be able to get a slice of the profits (assuming Google ever pays a dividend), but they won't run the show.
I've always wondered about Bert's affinity for pigeons, though...
Seriously, though, there was a hilarious little joke thrown in a sketch I saw recently (I've got 3 toddlers in the house, so Sesame Street is real big around here), that might be appropriate here.
Bert walks into the room and sees Ernie talking into a banana like it was a telephone. Bert's like, "what are you doing?", and Ernie explains that he's pretending to talk Gladys the Elephant on the banana. He cajoles Bert into trying a turn ("I'm just not emotionally secure enough for this", complains Bert), whereupon Bert awkwardly starts up a conversation of his own with Gladys. Eventually he gets into it ("hey, this is pretty kinky", he says), and the conversation starts rolling.
The kicker is that their real phone rings, and Ernie answers, saying that no, Bert can't come to the phone because he's talking to an elephant on a banana. In the background, though, you can hear Bert saying "oh, me? Six foot four, blonde hair... no, I don't think we should meet..."
My wife and I just about fell off the couch we were laughing so hard!
You have an excellent point; what is being potentially "outsourced" (the new name for an old practice) is the distribution of music, not it's creation. Just another example of the music industry not understanding that the genie is already out of the bottle...
I pretty much looked at the later editions of AD&D simply as a vehicle for a company to try and keep a steady revenue stream going, a la video game companies now that roll out new sports games each year for $40 apiece, when all they've done is updated rosters and made a few minor tweaks.
The important thing in RPG's is creating a setting conducive to imaginative play - not fine tuning combat rules to the Nth degree.
Re:The flagship...
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Is that the bubble-gum colored variety from the old D&D Basic Set? Those seemed prone to early wear. For nostalgia's sake I still kept it in my dice bag, for those times when you want extra suspense over a particular roll. After all, the thing could roll around the desktop for quite a while before coming to a stop...
"Hmm, I didn't realize a owning Toyota was a social statement."
While most registered voters don't actually take to the polls on Election Day, your purchasing activity on a daily basis is an incredibly powerful statement of your personal preferences. Corporations spend billions of dollars annually trying to better understand these preferences and more profitably satisfy them. What people fail to realize in this whole debate is that "fault" (I prefer to think of it as causality) lies not with the PHB or the low-paid outsourcer, but rather with the Almighty Consumer, which sends a clear message to the marketplace: Price Matters Above All Else.
If "Buy American" campaigns actually resulted in people changing their spending habits, you'd see offshoring initiatives dry up. But they don't - given the choice, consumers have consistently gone for lower prices instead.
Forget buying software using such a kiosk, what about putting something like that in a Blockbuster store, allowing people to buy movies and have them burned immediately to a DVD? They could even pay right at the machine with a credit card, and be able to get a wider variety of content (rare? foreign? pr0n?) than the store would normally want to stock on their shelves.
It hurts to hear it, but in comparison to many places around the world, the US middle class (myself included) is indeed fat & happy. The big concern around food isn't how to get it and whether or not it's safe to eat, but instead how do we stop ourselves from gorging ourselves into obesity! Our other main concerns as a society? Gas prices hitting $2 a gallon, and whether it's going to be worth going to the polls in November (over half of the eligible voters likely won't).
We simply don't have to make the same kinds of choices that people in other parts of the world have to make - and they would love to get a taste of our standard of living. Can you blame them?
You're almost on the right track here, but you're seeing things in far too polarized a view. True, US labor laws, environmental standards, and other factors (like the cost of health care) have a large influence on the cost of doing business here. It's a tradeoff between quality of life (clean air, kids not having to work, world-class medical care) and full employment that every country makes through their own legislative process. Some countries aren't to the point yet where they can afford something akin to the Clean Air Act, for example - but history has shown that as countries become wealthier, those kinds of social standards become more important.
In my eyes, I see 3 major factors that could contribute to American labor competitiveness in the global marketplace. First, the continued decline in the US dollar relative to European and Asian currencies. Second, subsidies (gasp!) to encourage worker training and education while they are still employed, rather than trying to retrain a laid-off worker in some new field. And lastly, the issue of health care costs needs to be aggressively attacked. It seems like there's a built-in expectation that health care costs are going to continue to rise at double-digit rates, which simply shouldn't be acceptable.
"It's immoral to lay off a head of household to hire someone outside the country just to increase profits."
But what if you hire two heads of households outside the country to replace the one domestic worker just laid off, and still cut costs?
And who, exactly, is being immoral under your judgement? The executive who makes the decision, or the buying public, who continuously sends strong signals to companies that lowering prices is the most important thing they can do to increase sales? People vote with their buying power every day, and you've seen the results in the rise of discount chains like Wal-Mart and Best Buy.
The bottom line here is that white-collar types have gotten fat and happy over the last several decades, and are now shocked to find that they are facing global competition much like agricultural and manufacturing workers have for decades.
IBM is a decades-old giant in the American business community with a reputation to maintain, and will most assuredly have done their homework before trying to make such a bold move. This stands in contrast to SCO, which has basically bet their whole company on the outcome of these suits, and is thus willing to try just about anything, no matter how desperate, to make their case.
And if you have young kids, Tivo can be a life saver - we've always got the latest episodes of the Wiggles or Sesame Street ready to go whenever the need arises. These shows are usually only on in the mornings, but are now available anytime, without having to dig through DVD's and start a whole 'nother battle...
"Lawmakers report that their constituents are angry about cable bills that have risen at three times the rate of inflation..."
I get so sick of hearing complaints about the cost of X rising than more than the rate of inflation. Guess what, the inflation rate is an overall value, some things will grow at a higher rate, some lower. Given the fact that the value provided by cable has grown*, I really think people don't have much to complain about here. Think also of how much time people really spend watching cable - it is basically the main form of entertainment in most homes.
This is like the constant whining over the price of gas. If you actually consider the value that consumers get out of it, the price itself isn't so bad.
* While it is fashionable to constantly bemoan the lack of good content on TV, look at the diversity of offerings that cable provides, and the opportunity for shows to reach major success from small beginnings that never would have occured on network TV (like Trading Spaces or Queer Eye).
Slashdot Mirror
Ditto, I spent $200 upgrading my Atari 400 from 8K to 16K... man the power!
They won't have to - apparently they are setting up a preferred class of stock to be held largely by the founders, which greater voting privileges so they can maintain control.
Investors will be able to get a slice of the profits (assuming Google ever pays a dividend), but they won't run the show.
I understand that, but what I'm asking about is the link in the article up top...
Color me ignorant, but what exactly does everythingisnt.com have to do with customized HOSTS files?
Sounds like a /. editor wannabe.
Poor guy... don't they offer counseling for that sort of thing???
1. Come up with software to play DVD's under Linux
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
I've always wondered about Bert's affinity for pigeons, though...
Seriously, though, there was a hilarious little joke thrown in a sketch I saw recently (I've got 3 toddlers in the house, so Sesame Street is real big around here), that might be appropriate here.
Bert walks into the room and sees Ernie talking into a banana like it was a telephone. Bert's like, "what are you doing?", and Ernie explains that he's pretending to talk Gladys the Elephant on the banana. He cajoles Bert into trying a turn ("I'm just not emotionally secure enough for this", complains Bert), whereupon Bert awkwardly starts up a conversation of his own with Gladys. Eventually he gets into it ("hey, this is pretty kinky", he says), and the conversation starts rolling.
The kicker is that their real phone rings, and Ernie answers, saying that no, Bert can't come to the phone because he's talking to an elephant on a banana. In the background, though, you can hear Bert saying "oh, me? Six foot four, blonde hair... no, I don't think we should meet..."
My wife and I just about fell off the couch we were laughing so hard!
You have an excellent point; what is being potentially "outsourced" (the new name for an old practice) is the distribution of music, not it's creation. Just another example of the music industry not understanding that the genie is already out of the bottle...
Security Blimps have been around for a long time; just check out the 400 lb. Mall Cop who's passed out after polishing off a box of Krispy Kremes...
The economy is being offshored to pay off the debts of the super-rich and their political lackeys!
So who do the super-rich owe money to? The super-duper rich???
Moron.
I pretty much looked at the later editions of AD&D simply as a vehicle for a company to try and keep a steady revenue stream going, a la video game companies now that roll out new sports games each year for $40 apiece, when all they've done is updated rosters and made a few minor tweaks.
The important thing in RPG's is creating a setting conducive to imaginative play - not fine tuning combat rules to the Nth degree.
Is that the bubble-gum colored variety from the old D&D Basic Set? Those seemed prone to early wear. For nostalgia's sake I still kept it in my dice bag, for those times when you want extra suspense over a particular roll. After all, the thing could roll around the desktop for quite a while before coming to a stop...
The first Super Bowl had this too. I'll bet those guys were happy not to have a "wardrobe malfunction"!
I guess they could have used a more defensive tool to withstand the inevitable slashdotting...
"Hmm, I didn't realize a owning Toyota was a social statement."
While most registered voters don't actually take to the polls on Election Day, your purchasing activity on a daily basis is an incredibly powerful statement of your personal preferences. Corporations spend billions of dollars annually trying to better understand these preferences and more profitably satisfy them. What people fail to realize in this whole debate is that "fault" (I prefer to think of it as causality) lies not with the PHB or the low-paid outsourcer, but rather with the Almighty Consumer, which sends a clear message to the marketplace: Price Matters Above All Else.
If "Buy American" campaigns actually resulted in people changing their spending habits, you'd see offshoring initiatives dry up. But they don't - given the choice, consumers have consistently gone for lower prices instead.
Forget buying software using such a kiosk, what about putting something like that in a Blockbuster store, allowing people to buy movies and have them burned immediately to a DVD? They could even pay right at the machine with a credit card, and be able to get a wider variety of content (rare? foreign? pr0n?) than the store would normally want to stock on their shelves.
It hurts to hear it, but in comparison to many places around the world, the US middle class (myself included) is indeed fat & happy. The big concern around food isn't how to get it and whether or not it's safe to eat, but instead how do we stop ourselves from gorging ourselves into obesity! Our other main concerns as a society? Gas prices hitting $2 a gallon, and whether it's going to be worth going to the polls in November (over half of the eligible voters likely won't).
We simply don't have to make the same kinds of choices that people in other parts of the world have to make - and they would love to get a taste of our standard of living. Can you blame them?
You're almost on the right track here, but you're seeing things in far too polarized a view. True, US labor laws, environmental standards, and other factors (like the cost of health care) have a large influence on the cost of doing business here. It's a tradeoff between quality of life (clean air, kids not having to work, world-class medical care) and full employment that every country makes through their own legislative process. Some countries aren't to the point yet where they can afford something akin to the Clean Air Act, for example - but history has shown that as countries become wealthier, those kinds of social standards become more important.
In my eyes, I see 3 major factors that could contribute to American labor competitiveness in the global marketplace. First, the continued decline in the US dollar relative to European and Asian currencies. Second, subsidies (gasp!) to encourage worker training and education while they are still employed, rather than trying to retrain a laid-off worker in some new field. And lastly, the issue of health care costs needs to be aggressively attacked. It seems like there's a built-in expectation that health care costs are going to continue to rise at double-digit rates, which simply shouldn't be acceptable.
"It's immoral to lay off a head of household to hire someone outside the country just to increase profits."
But what if you hire two heads of households outside the country to replace the one domestic worker just laid off, and still cut costs?
And who, exactly, is being immoral under your judgement? The executive who makes the decision, or the buying public, who continuously sends strong signals to companies that lowering prices is the most important thing they can do to increase sales? People vote with their buying power every day, and you've seen the results in the rise of discount chains like Wal-Mart and Best Buy.
The bottom line here is that white-collar types have gotten fat and happy over the last several decades, and are now shocked to find that they are facing global competition much like agricultural and manufacturing workers have for decades.
IBM is a decades-old giant in the American business community with a reputation to maintain, and will most assuredly have done their homework before trying to make such a bold move. This stands in contrast to SCO, which has basically bet their whole company on the outcome of these suits, and is thus willing to try just about anything, no matter how desperate, to make their case.
Hmmm... I wonder what color parachute Darl has...
And if you have young kids, Tivo can be a life saver - we've always got the latest episodes of the Wiggles or Sesame Street ready to go whenever the need arises. These shows are usually only on in the mornings, but are now available anytime, without having to dig through DVD's and start a whole 'nother battle...
"Lawmakers report that their constituents are angry about cable bills that have risen at three times the rate of inflation..."
I get so sick of hearing complaints about the cost of X rising than more than the rate of inflation. Guess what, the inflation rate is an overall value, some things will grow at a higher rate, some lower. Given the fact that the value provided by cable has grown*, I really think people don't have much to complain about here. Think also of how much time people really spend watching cable - it is basically the main form of entertainment in most homes.
This is like the constant whining over the price of gas. If you actually consider the value that consumers get out of it, the price itself isn't so bad.
* While it is fashionable to constantly bemoan the lack of good content on TV, look at the diversity of offerings that cable provides, and the opportunity for shows to reach major success from small beginnings that never would have occured on network TV (like Trading Spaces or Queer Eye).
When one of the most-used sites on the web revises their visual design by actually making it simpler, that IS news.
Sad, but true...