I'm honestly sick and tired of so much of the culture being so kid focused, there's not much left for the adults to enjoy.
(Tangent warning)
I remember being a kid, and being so pissed off that the world was designed for thirty-somethings to enjoy. When I was sixteen, there was absolutely nothing for teenagers to do besides sit around and conspire against The Man.
Now that I'm older, I'm doubly pissed because all that stuff that I imagined adults enjoying while I was young appears to have vanished, and every company in the free world wants to market to... teenagers.
Who's next now, when I get older, towards retirement? Will the commerical world be trying to get toddlers beating a path to their doors? No, fetuses. That's going to be the target market in twenty years: fetuses. Then, when I'm ready to die, they'll be going after individual sperm and egg cells.
Re:Hacking is a lot like life...
on
Hacker Boot Camp
·
· Score: 1
As a matter of fact, I took one of these courses with TechNow in Austin, TX, in 2003(?). Same kind of deal, it was $5K for the week, but that included airfare, hotel and $25/day worth of meals, so the cost wasn't so bad. Plus, I wasn't paying for it; it came out of the training budget at work. My access to computers as a youth was more extensive than the general public, but a far cry from what I'm sure most/.'ers had - so I am an admitted "semi-psuedo-hacker."
Going into it, I didn't expect a whole lot from just a week, but I figured it would be fun. What I came away with was not "here's the specific way you break into everything," but rather "making your way into a system is about finding a little hole and prying it open from various angles." Being able to run an IIS5 exploit and get a command shell shoveled back was pretty enlightening. "Ohhh.... That's what Microsoft means when they say 'may allow arbitrary code execution!'"
Anyway, the class I took was beneficial from that standpoint. Didn't make me uber-1337, but gave me an awareness I didn't have previously, simply because I'd never been exposed to it.
Re:Hacking is a lot like life...
on
Hacker Boot Camp
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, but that's just a little bit elitist. I agree that real life experience in anything makes you more knowledgeable than just reading books. But everyone has to start somewhere.
People who get on the bandwagon early are not necessarily better than people who get on the same bandwagon later. And by the time the later people get on, some of the people who got on early have written books, allowing the latecomers to benefit from their knowledge, get a jump start, and hopefully expand the overall knowledgebase.
Note that when you open an Experts Exchange page without logging in, a popup ad window appears. If you leave that window open behind your question page, you can scroll down to the answers. If you close that window, the question page excludes the answers from your view.
I will say that the unregistered EE is heavy on the advertising, and they make it fairly difficult to register for a free account. This signs you up as an "expert," although any registered user, paid or not, can answer questions.
You get a limited number of points per month to ask questions with, and need to earn 10,000 expert points (answer a question for 500 points with an 'A' grade, and you get 2000 expert points) to get free premium membership, then 3000 pts/mo to maintain that membership. If you are knowledgeable about anything tech, you can do it easy.
The tech forums are extremely well moderated, and the caliber of people who answer questions is fairly high.
This goes out to all of the naysayers who've posted about how there are much more important things to do for the third world than get them computers.
You're right.
Pharmaceutical companies should be doing ever more to handle the issue of medication in the third world. Educational organizations should be doing ever more to teach in the developing world. Food producers should be doing ever more to deliver much needed food to the developing world, and agricultural engineers should be doing ever more to enhance the production of crops in the developing world.
Computer and technology companies - like Intel - should be doing ever more to give the developing world access to information and services online. Do you want pharmaceutical, educational, or agricultural organizations doing that? No, you want tech companies doing that, and Intel is.
So - don't get down on Intel for doing for the developing world what Intel does for the developed world, even if what they're doing is a lower priority concern than some other things. Consider that other organizations might take a cue from Intel and do what they do for the developing world.
Now, maybe Intel's motives are more along the lines of getting in on an existing market, considering that there are many internet kiosks in the third world already. Look askance at Intel for that, if you must.
... somehow, the forces of the story always seem to wipe them [pacifist societies] out, seriously undermining the surface-level "pacifism is superior" message.Tangent alert.
Let's say you have a pacifist civilzation and a non-pacifist civilization, they come into contact. If the Pacifists (P) have anything that the non-pacifists (NP) want, they will be forced into subservience. Raw materials, technology, strategic location, cheap labor - what have you. Nothing P can do about it but plead and hope, and we know how far that'll get you when you're looking at the business end of a weapon.
Feel free to substitute P and NP for two civilizations (or nations, frankly) of which neither is pacifist, and where one has a substantial military superiority. Same result.
The only way for the weak not to be the bitches of the strong is for the weak to not have anything the strong want (or hide it very very well), and thereby become ignored. However, being able to hide your labor force and economy requires that you not trade at all with any other groups, and so you must be able to produce everything you want or need internally. Think pre-Nixon China, though China was not then nor is now pacifist or weak.
So basically, if all the nations on Earth would finally get their shit together and we somehow became a single pacifist society, that would work great. Until we met the aliens. Then we'd have to defend ourselves. That means we'd have to continue developing weapons in preparation for dealing with an unknown future external threat, or play a pretty big game of catch-up.
It's a link! Posted on Slashdot! I must not only click the link (as opposed to just reading the URL in the link and being amused by proxy), but also scroll down the resulting page to review all of the content, and perhaps dig deeper into the site! Because it's on Slashdot!
The real joke is that many/.'ers (present company included) are sometimes just as much like sheep as the unwashed masses that are oft mocked by said/.'ers.
My qualifier: I was a DSL installer in the heyday of 3rd party DSL providers.
The real problem with DSL anymore isn't the speed, it's the physical infrastructure that the signal is carried on. I'm sure I would be fine with 1.5Mb service instead of 6Mb, but I don't trust the dependability of the copper pair network, considering how it operates.
Coaxial cable internet is carried over a network of wire which is largely much newer than POTS copper, and a single piece of cable carries signal to multiple nodes. POTS copper is usually much older than cable, sometime by decades, and each pair of copper wires is dedicated to a node, following all the way back to the telco central office.
Where coax uses fewer sections of wire and fewer junction points, copper pair uses more. From the telco CO to the big cabinet on the corner that serves a large neighborhood - that's referred to as the "F1" pair. From that cabinet to the pole or pedestal behind your house, which serves six or eight residences - that's the "F2" pair. You'll have anywhere from one to six pair from the pole/pedestal to the box on the side of your house (demarc), depending on age. If your node is in a multi-tenant building, you've got another stretch of "communal" pairs (and I am here to tell you that some high-rises are complete freaking messes).
The telco agrees to provide you a contiguous copper pair from the CO to your demarc - but they can and will change which specific F1 and F2 is carrying signal to your house depending on the needs of other customers in your area.
What that means is that your DSL may work wonderfully today, then someone down the street adds another phone line to their house, and your F1 or F2 (or both) get switched. You don't notice any difference in your voice telephone service, but suddenly your DSL service is slower, and seems to drop frequently. That's because the specific copper pairs you were originally using had low resistance - they were good quality wires. The ones you're using now have higher resistance - due to age, damage, incorrect termination at punch down blocks, wrong cross connections, additional equipment on those pairs - any number of reasons.
But all you see is "One day my DSL was fine and now it kind of sucks." If the problem is similar to what's described above, good luck trying to get anyone at the telco to work that out for you. When I was installing for Rhythms (remember them?), we would go back and forth with telcos all the time.
"But I have SBC/Yahoo DSL. They are the telco!" No they're not. There's some kind of ownership deal there, but as business operations, they're completely separate.
Can these kinds of infrastructure problems happen with coax? Sure. But they're way way less likely to occur. There's just not as many moving parts in a coax network, so to speak.
I was going to talk about pricing, try to make the point that in order to have DSL you also have to have local phone service from the telco that you're getting DSL from (since the telcos ran all the 3rd party carriers out of business, or since the 3rd party carriers mismanaged themselves out of business, however you want to look at it). Which means that you've got to pay $30/mo for DSL (non-promotional), and at least $25 for phone service you may not want. But then I realized that Comcast sells their internet service at different rates depending on whether you have TV service or not --
-- and then I decided that all the mashing together of telecommunications services is way too confusing, and I'm going to go live in a cave with some clay and a stick to write with instead.
The way to gather information on US soil is to ignore the courts. Surely the security of the nation hinges on Microsoft continuing to thrive as a company, especially in this time of war. That makes it a matter of national security, which means the feds should invoke the PATRIOT Act to demand whatever information they need without bothering with courts or subpoenas.
Oh, the information is in the hands of a foreign land? And they don't want to give it to us? Must be terrorists; we'd better invade right away.
(I know, way way off topic. Sorry, I just couldn't help myself.)
I recall hearing about a study wherein monkeys were given the option of pressing one of two buttons at mealtime. Button A would always produce normal food. Button B would infrequently produce a treat, and usually produce nothing. The monkeys always pressed Button B.
(I know, you can't let monkeys starve to death in an experiment, so it wasn't perfect perhaps, but it makes my point.)
Shifting gears just a bit -- I have wondered for a long time myself how humanity has accomplished all that it has when such a large proportion of humans (those in charge of things as well as not) are complete morons. It seems to defy logic.
Let's presume that the results of that experiment are correct. (If anyone has a link to substantiate my claim, I would appreciate it.) Monkeys gamble; they try to get something for nothing instead of going for the sure steady payoff. The inference, of course, is that humans do the same thing.
Perhaps, over the long term (and I'm talking generations long), the "gambles" that individual human beings take pay off to the benefit of humanity as a whole. Think of the vast numbers of people, in attempts to invent fireworks, who must have blown their fingers or hands or heads off. People still do it. That's individual stupidity.
But we've gone to the moon, we've sent probes to far-off planets, we have a world-girdling network of communications satellites. None of that would have been possible without the moronic work of tens of thousands of individual idiots.
So, my hypothesis is as follows:
The sum of individual stupidity is communal success.
It's not tools, or language or brain size that sets humans apart from the beasts. We are more successful as a species because we are stupider as individuals.
I put that in quotes because it makes me shudder just to say it. But I already digress.
Hotmail, should I choose to use it, is already on my desktop, since my web browser brings it to me along with all sorts of applications these days.
Microsoft's sending Hotmail to a pure OS-installed interface only points to the fact that they [can't | don't want to] keep up with other online mail services. Gmail and Yahoo are updating their web interfaces all the time.
Strangely, those web interfaces are still available to me on my desktop.
I seem to recall (someone will correct me if I'm wrong, I trust) the same issue with the Atari 5200 way back in the day. When it was released, it was quite a powerful console -- but the games available for it were marginal.
I'm not a big gamer, but I think the "form over function" model will usually fail. A (re)playable library of games will support a system with weaker specs over a high-powered system with weak games.
To me, it also looks like the car dealership lured the customer back by increasing the price
Doesn't really apply to my anecdote, since I was talking about selling parts wholesale to a body shop. They were fully aware that they were getting parts at 5% over cost before, and at 10% over cost after.
But you're right. I can tell you this - the price of a new car has very little to do with the sticker price. And the price of a used car has nothing to do with the value of the car; it has everything to do with how much the dealer paid for the car on trade-in, how long it's been on the lot, and how hard a bargain you drive.
Getting ever further off-topic, extended warranties are not warranties; they're insurance policies, and they're always inclusive (meaning they only cover what's listed, which is never very much). Undercoating is a total sham, they charge you $300 for ~$25 worth of spray that they have one of the carwash jockeys spray on randomly. And whenever you want to buy parts, the dealer is not selling them to you at list price (known as "Price 6"). They mark the parts up 10% to 25% above mfr suggested retail price.
Just because I have written down a bunch of notes doesn't mean I understand what I've written, and just because I've written down nothing at all doesn't mean I don't understand what's being taught.
Notes have never done me any good, and I've never taken them. My high-school biology teacher gave me a public dress-down for not taking notes about various Latin-named microscopic organisms. I still didn't take any notes, and got an A- on the test. The teacher apologized to me.
Also, just because I pass a test doesn't mean I understand the material.
Back in the day, I used to work in auto parts for car dealerships. We sold a lot of wholesale parts to body shops at the time. There was one particular local chain of body shops that was quite a lot of our business, and were getting their parts for something like 5% over cost. Considering that we had to drive to all their locations daily, and jump to do emergency runs, we weren't making a lot of money at all on them.
One day, this body shop comes and says, "Hey, your big warehouse competitor will give us parts at 3% over cost? Meet it or we're switching." Fine, go. Good luck.
Three months later, the body shop came back. "We want to buy parts from you again. The service at the other place was horrible." No problem - now it's 10% over cost.
They took the deal. Just another example of how service beats price.
In the vein of "Alien vs. Predator," someone should make "Star Trek vs. Star Wars." Wherein the nth Captain of the Starship Enterprise finally reaches the "galaxy far far away," introducing humanity to the Empire, and teleporters to the Rebel Alliance.
1)Ultra-over-engineered to be sure that the system/thing is ultra-safe or ultra-reliable or ultra-accountable 2)Woefully inadequate because the person(s) in the bureaucracy don't have the tech expertise to foster the effort correctly - and yet place massive, uninformed, and inappropriate amounts of pressure on the worker bees to get the job done as per the way the non-tech person thinks it needs to go. 3)Many projects die on the vine because mis-direction (and management that honestly doesn't have the knowledge they need to lead the effort) makes the project wander in the desert for huge periods of time.
Don't think these problems exist only in governmental organizations. Companies of all kinds have these very same issues.
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I'm honestly sick and tired of so much of the culture being so kid focused, there's not much left for the adults to enjoy.
... teenagers.
(Tangent warning)
I remember being a kid, and being so pissed off that the world was designed for thirty-somethings to enjoy. When I was sixteen, there was absolutely nothing for teenagers to do besides sit around and conspire against The Man.
Now that I'm older, I'm doubly pissed because all that stuff that I imagined adults enjoying while I was young appears to have vanished, and every company in the free world wants to market to
Who's next now, when I get older, towards retirement? Will the commerical world be trying to get toddlers beating a path to their doors? No, fetuses. That's going to be the target market in twenty years: fetuses. Then, when I'm ready to die, they'll be going after individual sperm and egg cells.
As a matter of fact, I took one of these courses with TechNow in Austin, TX, in 2003(?). Same kind of deal, it was $5K for the week, but that included airfare, hotel and $25/day worth of meals, so the cost wasn't so bad. Plus, I wasn't paying for it; it came out of the training budget at work. My access to computers as a youth was more extensive than the general public, but a far cry from what I'm sure most /.'ers had - so I am an admitted "semi-psuedo-hacker."
.... That's what Microsoft means when they say 'may allow arbitrary code execution!'"
Going into it, I didn't expect a whole lot from just a week, but I figured it would be fun. What I came away with was not "here's the specific way you break into everything," but rather "making your way into a system is about finding a little hole and prying it open from various angles." Being able to run an IIS5 exploit and get a command shell shoveled back was pretty enlightening. "Ohhh
Anyway, the class I took was beneficial from that standpoint. Didn't make me uber-1337, but gave me an awareness I didn't have previously, simply because I'd never been exposed to it.
Sorry, but that's just a little bit elitist. I agree that real life experience in anything makes you more knowledgeable than just reading books. But everyone has to start somewhere.
People who get on the bandwagon early are not necessarily better than people who get on the same bandwagon later. And by the time the later people get on, some of the people who got on early have written books, allowing the latecomers to benefit from their knowledge, get a jump start, and hopefully expand the overall knowledgebase.
Note that when you open an Experts Exchange page without logging in, a popup ad window appears. If you leave that window open behind your question page, you can scroll down to the answers. If you close that window, the question page excludes the answers from your view.
I will say that the unregistered EE is heavy on the advertising, and they make it fairly difficult to register for a free account. This signs you up as an "expert," although any registered user, paid or not, can answer questions.
You get a limited number of points per month to ask questions with, and need to earn 10,000 expert points (answer a question for 500 points with an 'A' grade, and you get 2000 expert points) to get free premium membership, then 3000 pts/mo to maintain that membership. If you are knowledgeable about anything tech, you can do it easy.
The tech forums are extremely well moderated, and the caliber of people who answer questions is fairly high.
I want to know how Web 2.0 will get me laid.
Web 2.0 can get me laid?! That's just what I've been looking for! I bet my wife will be surprised to find this out as well.
Now I won't be able to prioritize traffic from web servers at .xxx TLD as I had hoped.
This goes out to all of the naysayers who've posted about how there are much more important things to do for the third world than get them computers.
You're right.
Pharmaceutical companies should be doing ever more to handle the issue of medication in the third world.
Educational organizations should be doing ever more to teach in the developing world.
Food producers should be doing ever more to deliver much needed food to the developing world, and agricultural engineers should be doing ever more to enhance the production of crops in the developing world.
Computer and technology companies - like Intel - should be doing ever more to give the developing world access to information and services online. Do you want pharmaceutical, educational, or agricultural organizations doing that? No, you want tech companies doing that, and Intel is.
So - don't get down on Intel for doing for the developing world what Intel does for the developed world, even if what they're doing is a lower priority concern than some other things. Consider that other organizations might take a cue from Intel and do what they do for the developing world.
Now, maybe Intel's motives are more along the lines of getting in on an existing market, considering that there are many internet kiosks in the third world already. Look askance at Intel for that, if you must.
... somehow, the forces of the story always seem to wipe them [pacifist societies] out, seriously undermining the surface-level "pacifism is superior" message.Tangent alert.
Let's say you have a pacifist civilzation and a non-pacifist civilization, they come into contact. If the Pacifists (P) have anything that the non-pacifists (NP) want, they will be forced into subservience. Raw materials, technology, strategic location, cheap labor - what have you. Nothing P can do about it but plead and hope, and we know how far that'll get you when you're looking at the business end of a weapon.
Feel free to substitute P and NP for two civilizations (or nations, frankly) of which neither is pacifist, and where one has a substantial military superiority. Same result.
The only way for the weak not to be the bitches of the strong is for the weak to not have anything the strong want (or hide it very very well), and thereby become ignored. However, being able to hide your labor force and economy requires that you not trade at all with any other groups, and so you must be able to produce everything you want or need internally. Think pre-Nixon China, though China was not then nor is now pacifist or weak.
So basically, if all the nations on Earth would finally get their shit together and we somehow became a single pacifist society, that would work great. Until we met the aliens. Then we'd have to defend ourselves. That means we'd have to continue developing weapons in preparation for dealing with an unknown future external threat, or play a pretty big game of catch-up.
Oh my god, I know plenty well how to spell "ridiculous," but having seen it spelled with an 'e' here so many times, I thought it was a running joke.
I just wanted to be part of the in crowd.
It's a link! Posted on Slashdot! I must not only click the link (as opposed to just reading the URL in the link and being amused by proxy), but also scroll down the resulting page to review all of the content, and perhaps dig deeper into the site! Because it's on Slashdot!
/.'ers (present company included) are sometimes just as much like sheep as the unwashed masses that are oft mocked by said /.'ers.
The real joke is that many
"LOL" is a written - not spoken - word. Attempting to speak it is as rediculous as trying to spell a specific fart.
With that, let the fart-spelling commence.
To force that on all of the people who have chosen "simple design."
I had to switch back to defaults to get the full effect.
My qualifier: I was a DSL installer in the heyday of 3rd party DSL providers.
The real problem with DSL anymore isn't the speed, it's the physical infrastructure that the signal is carried on. I'm sure I would be fine with 1.5Mb service instead of 6Mb, but I don't trust the dependability of the copper pair network, considering how it operates.
Coaxial cable internet is carried over a network of wire which is largely much newer than POTS copper, and a single piece of cable carries signal to multiple nodes. POTS copper is usually much older than cable, sometime by decades, and each pair of copper wires is dedicated to a node, following all the way back to the telco central office.
Where coax uses fewer sections of wire and fewer junction points, copper pair uses more. From the telco CO to the big cabinet on the corner that serves a large neighborhood - that's referred to as the "F1" pair. From that cabinet to the pole or pedestal behind your house, which serves six or eight residences - that's the "F2" pair. You'll have anywhere from one to six pair from the pole/pedestal to the box on the side of your house (demarc), depending on age. If your node is in a multi-tenant building, you've got another stretch of "communal" pairs (and I am here to tell you that some high-rises are complete freaking messes).
The telco agrees to provide you a contiguous copper pair from the CO to your demarc - but they can and will change which specific F1 and F2 is carrying signal to your house depending on the needs of other customers in your area.
What that means is that your DSL may work wonderfully today, then someone down the street adds another phone line to their house, and your F1 or F2 (or both) get switched. You don't notice any difference in your voice telephone service, but suddenly your DSL service is slower, and seems to drop frequently. That's because the specific copper pairs you were originally using had low resistance - they were good quality wires. The ones you're using now have higher resistance - due to age, damage, incorrect termination at punch down blocks, wrong cross connections, additional equipment on those pairs - any number of reasons.
But all you see is "One day my DSL was fine and now it kind of sucks." If the problem is similar to what's described above, good luck trying to get anyone at the telco to work that out for you. When I was installing for Rhythms (remember them?), we would go back and forth with telcos all the time.
"But I have SBC/Yahoo DSL. They are the telco!" No they're not. There's some kind of ownership deal there, but as business operations, they're completely separate.
Can these kinds of infrastructure problems happen with coax? Sure. But they're way way less likely to occur. There's just not as many moving parts in a coax network, so to speak.
I was going to talk about pricing, try to make the point that in order to have DSL you also have to have local phone service from the telco that you're getting DSL from (since the telcos ran all the 3rd party carriers out of business, or since the 3rd party carriers mismanaged themselves out of business, however you want to look at it). Which means that you've got to pay $30/mo for DSL (non-promotional), and at least $25 for phone service you may not want. But then I realized that Comcast sells their internet service at different rates depending on whether you have TV service or not --
-- and then I decided that all the mashing together of telecommunications services is way too confusing, and I'm going to go live in a cave with some clay and a stick to write with instead.
The way to gather information on US soil is to ignore the courts. Surely the security of the nation hinges on Microsoft continuing to thrive as a company, especially in this time of war. That makes it a matter of national security, which means the feds should invoke the PATRIOT Act to demand whatever information they need without bothering with courts or subpoenas.
Oh, the information is in the hands of a foreign land? And they don't want to give it to us? Must be terrorists; we'd better invade right away.
(I know, way way off topic. Sorry, I just couldn't help myself.)
No, seriously.
I recall hearing about a study wherein monkeys were given the option of pressing one of two buttons at mealtime. Button A would always produce normal food. Button B would infrequently produce a treat, and usually produce nothing. The monkeys always pressed Button B.
(I know, you can't let monkeys starve to death in an experiment, so it wasn't perfect perhaps, but it makes my point.)
Shifting gears just a bit -- I have wondered for a long time myself how humanity has accomplished all that it has when such a large proportion of humans (those in charge of things as well as not) are complete morons. It seems to defy logic.
Let's presume that the results of that experiment are correct. (If anyone has a link to substantiate my claim, I would appreciate it.) Monkeys gamble; they try to get something for nothing instead of going for the sure steady payoff. The inference, of course, is that humans do the same thing.
Perhaps, over the long term (and I'm talking generations long), the "gambles" that individual human beings take pay off to the benefit of humanity as a whole. Think of the vast numbers of people, in attempts to invent fireworks, who must have blown their fingers or hands or heads off. People still do it. That's individual stupidity.
But we've gone to the moon, we've sent probes to far-off planets, we have a world-girdling network of communications satellites. None of that would have been possible without the moronic work of tens of thousands of individual idiots.
So, my hypothesis is as follows:
The sum of individual stupidity is communal success.
It's not tools, or language or brain size that sets humans apart from the beasts. We are more successful as a species because we are stupider as individuals.
I put that in quotes because it makes me shudder just to say it. But I already digress.
Hotmail, should I choose to use it, is already on my desktop, since my web browser brings it to me along with all sorts of applications these days.
Microsoft's sending Hotmail to a pure OS-installed interface only points to the fact that they [can't | don't want to] keep up with other online mail services. Gmail and Yahoo are updating their web interfaces all the time.
Strangely, those web interfaces are still available to me on my desktop.
I seem to recall (someone will correct me if I'm wrong, I trust) the same issue with the Atari 5200 way back in the day. When it was released, it was quite a powerful console -- but the games available for it were marginal.
I'm not a big gamer, but I think the "form over function" model will usually fail. A (re)playable library of games will support a system with weaker specs over a high-powered system with weak games.
... the government surveilles --
HEY WAIT A MINUTE
The CEO will insist on having a 8000GHZ, 256-core machine with 12TB RAM and infinity-plus-one hard drive, so he can feel more important.
Even though all he uses for work are Outlook and Word, neither of them well, and installs every ActiveX control that promises free porn.
To me, it also looks like the car dealership lured the customer back by increasing the price
Doesn't really apply to my anecdote, since I was talking about selling parts wholesale to a body shop. They were fully aware that they were getting parts at 5% over cost before, and at 10% over cost after.
But you're right. I can tell you this - the price of a new car has very little to do with the sticker price. And the price of a used car has nothing to do with the value of the car; it has everything to do with how much the dealer paid for the car on trade-in, how long it's been on the lot, and how hard a bargain you drive.
Getting ever further off-topic, extended warranties are not warranties; they're insurance policies, and they're always inclusive (meaning they only cover what's listed, which is never very much). Undercoating is a total sham, they charge you $300 for ~$25 worth of spray that they have one of the carwash jockeys spray on randomly. And whenever you want to buy parts, the dealer is not selling them to you at list price (known as "Price 6"). They mark the parts up 10% to 25% above mfr suggested retail price.
Just because I have written down a bunch of notes doesn't mean I understand what I've written, and just because I've written down nothing at all doesn't mean I don't understand what's being taught.
Notes have never done me any good, and I've never taken them. My high-school biology teacher gave me a public dress-down for not taking notes about various Latin-named microscopic organisms. I still didn't take any notes, and got an A- on the test. The teacher apologized to me.
Also, just because I pass a test doesn't mean I understand the material.
Back in the day, I used to work in auto parts for car dealerships. We sold a lot of wholesale parts to body shops at the time. There was one particular local chain of body shops that was quite a lot of our business, and were getting their parts for something like 5% over cost. Considering that we had to drive to all their locations daily, and jump to do emergency runs, we weren't making a lot of money at all on them.
One day, this body shop comes and says, "Hey, your big warehouse competitor will give us parts at 3% over cost? Meet it or we're switching." Fine, go. Good luck.
Three months later, the body shop came back. "We want to buy parts from you again. The service at the other place was horrible." No problem - now it's 10% over cost.
They took the deal. Just another example of how service beats price.
Ah well, I never watched Star Trek anyway.
In the vein of "Alien vs. Predator," someone should make "Star Trek vs. Star Wars." Wherein the nth Captain of the Starship Enterprise finally reaches the "galaxy far far away," introducing humanity to the Empire, and teleporters to the Rebel Alliance.
Discuss.
That study is misleading, since it uses aluminum foil, not tinfoil.
1)Ultra-over-engineered to be sure that the system/thing is ultra-safe or ultra-reliable or ultra-accountable
2)Woefully inadequate because the person(s) in the bureaucracy don't have the tech expertise to foster the effort correctly - and yet place massive, uninformed, and inappropriate amounts of pressure on the worker bees to get the job done as per the way the non-tech person thinks it needs to go.
3)Many projects die on the vine because mis-direction (and management that honestly doesn't have the knowledge they need to lead the effort) makes the project wander in the desert for huge periods of time.
Don't think these problems exist only in governmental organizations. Companies of all kinds have these very same issues.