In 1958, my grandfather worked for Purina and was severely injured falling four stories down an elevator shaft. The elevator had no doors. He was a complete invalid until he died ten years later. His and my grandmother's lives were living hells.
Grandma spoke to a few lawyers in the area, all of whom told her she she had no case, despite Purina's obvious negligence.
My dad found out later that Purina had every lawyer in the state on its payroll. It's disgusting what lawyers who are owned by soulless corporations will do for their dirty money.
Would someone please come up with a better cliche? One that actually had merit?
1. The egg came first. Dinasaurs layed eggs millions of years before they evolved into chickens.
2. Who has chicken for breakfast?
Companies after being burned with IE 6 only sites did not learn their lesson
Then they should die. We should not reward mediocrity and incompetence.
and simply made them IE 8 only which has no HTML 5 support. These users need flash unfortunately.
No, they need to use a browser that doesn't suck. There are plenty of them out there, and they don't cost anything. Speaking of which, the <ol> tag is broken in slashdot on FireFox.
Your mom's smarter than me. I just rebooted this damned notebook Wednesday (for updates) and it nagged me to update again this morning. Now it keeps nagging me to reboot. I wouldn't mind so much if Windows would open everything back up like it was when it booted, like my Linux box does. Ironically, I almost never have to reboot that one, only for a hardware problem or a kernel upgrade.
If I wanted to be nagged I wouldn't have divorced Evil-X. WTF, Microsoft? Will you never catch up with Linux's features and useability?
Just put kubuntu on her computer, she'll then be able to network with your Windows computer; Win 7 will only network with Linux unless you're running the expensive "professional" (HA!) version.
But what, exactly, is the superior alternative for Hollywood?
Cheaper tickets, cheaper popcorn for a start. Take a date to dinner and a movie, and the damned movie costs more than the dinner and drinks! Way, way, WAY overpriced. Especially if the movie turns out to be one of those dog comedies where all the funny parts are in the trailers or you fall asleep halfway through.
The $5 movies at WalMart's bargain bin would be a good deal if it weren't for unskippable FBI warnings and often unskippable trailers, followed by a uselless two minute animated menu to finish playing. When I put the DVD in, damn it, start the fucking movie! Lots of folks are downloading rather than buying because the pirate versions don't subject you to that bullshit. The legal version is a hemorrhoid and the pirate version isn't. WTF is wrong with the morons?
As to Netflix, I run Linux on the machine the TV's hooked up to. If I wanted to download, TPB would be my only choice. As it is, I have to buy cat food anyway so I pick movies up at WalMart and seethe when I sit through the MPAA bullshit. I'm VERY tempted to just say fuck'em and pirate the shit so I won't have to sit through their crap. It's goddamned stupid, their piracy warnings are part of why people pirate.
How about the police check his computer then throw him in jail for a bit? That won't stop piracy but it might stop stupid articles about it from clogging up the internet.
Or should I say YOU morons because it's pretty obvious who you work for.
BTW, how many times over did Passion of the Christ make its money back? If Mel Gibson, who bankrolled it himself, were really a Christian he'd put it up for free download himself. Greed and stinginess are not Christian values.
People are stupid. I've had internet on my phone for years, but sites still act as if their traffic all comes from computers. Duh, if your pages are a megabyte and won't display properly on their phone of course they'll stay away and all your traffic will be from computers. Kind of like the sites that used to greet you with "You need Internet Explorer to visit this site" and when you wrote them they were like "well, 90% of our traffic is IE." Did web developers all ride the short bus to school? Or are normal people all that fucking stupid?
Back ten years ago my old gaming site was full of bells and whistles, and the front page was considered huge* (dialup days) at 250k. How in the hell are they making pages four times that size? It's insane. Are web developers instructed to leave their brains at the door, or are they all using bad tools?
* If my old site was the prototype for web2.0 I apologize profusely to everyone!
Currently, there's generally pretty much only two types of movies being made: 1. big studio movies that get general release and are deliberately targeted at the average under 25's (big, loud, dumb, and 3d where possible) -- this being the only significant viable cinema-going audience, and 2. niche art house movies that are only designed to appeal to movie students, critics, film buffs, and the clinically depressed.
In other words:
Action films
Chick Flicks
if you broadened the distribution system away from cinemas and DVDs, it is possible to target adults again, and release an whole range of genres. It would be like the late 60's and 70's where big-name directors and big stars could experiment, and produce art that was also extremely entertaining (rather than dreary and narcissistic, like the current art house crap).
'60s and '70s? Fist full of dollars, Dirty Harry, Fritz the Cat, Star Wars, 2001, Rocky, True Grit.
Now? Avatar, The Matrix, LOTR, Fried Green Tomatos, The Green Mile, No Country for Old Men, Private Ryan, and, er, True Grit.
2001 was great in1969. Bought the DVD and watched it for the first time since I was young, and... wow, that movie's slow. Kubrick could have cut 45 minutes and nobody would miss it. True Grit? The 2010 movie was a completely different move and IMO, far better than the 1969 version.
The difference? In 1969 some of the movies made now would not have been possible (LOTR and Matrix), and it was impossible for something like Star Wreck - In The Pirkinning to be made by amateurs. It's far better than the best of B movies, and cost a couple thousand bucks to "film".
offtopic to the slashdot coders: <ol> no longer works in FireFox, and a whole lot of stuff broke in IE7. I HATE the new JE interface.
I don't want to out her here without asking her, but she has pretty much seen her ability to survive as a musician destroyed. She was never getting rich, but 5 thousand CDs sold *at least* paid for the time and money spent to make them. Now they are selling a couple hundred and everyone else gets it free.
You're making the same false assumption the RIAA is. If she's been doing it since the eighties, her audience is now in their forties. Most middle aged people don't buy a lot of music, and the younger generation that does probably just doesn't like her style. How is her audience at live shows?
Study after study shows that pirates spend more on music than non-pirates, so she should be looking at other reasons her sales are down, like the fact that the economy is worse than any time since before WWII. Everybody's sales of everything are down.
BTW, 5k CDs @ $5 retail (fan's price) will net her about 3K after expenses.
I'm not the target demographic, either, even though I'm in the US. I live alone and seldom have more than 3 devices sending/receiving data and have unlimited plans for both wired internet and mobile. But the concept is worth discussing, just as stuff BT pulls is.
Do you mean to say that you think if the EPA is disbanded, there will be no method of filing federal lawsuits to correct misconduct?
Do you mean that if the local police force is disbanded there's no way for the bank to sue the bank robbers? It's exactly the same thing. The EPA are the cops that enforce environmental law. If your fairy tale scenario actually worked, rivers wouldn't have been catching fire in the sixties.
Before Nixon signed the clean air act you literally could not breathe while driving past the Monsanto plant. It didn't work then, what on earth makes you think it will work now?
If I had Rority's timeship I'd take you to the Sauget Monsanto plant in the sixties. You would become an instant environmentalist. Things were really BAD. The EPA was and still is necessary; nay, crucial.
Actually, GNOME was the reason I stayed away from Ubuntu. I never did like GNOME, been using KDE since Mandrake. On kubuntu now, I'm not even trying Unity. Coincidentally, I'm posting a ten year old journal that mentions learning a new OS.
And unless one is of the opinion that one's own evil deeds should escape punishment, then getting vengeance is compatible with the golden rule.
Ah, but escaping one's own evil deeds is the bedrock of Christianity. Your sins are forgiven, paid in blood by the world's only innocent man. How can you be forgiven if you refuse to forgive others? That is the difference between Christianity and all other religions.
The goal is not to turn assholes into non-assholes. It's to punish them and to set an example to other would-be assholes - do they want the carrot or the stick?
You can't change people. Assholes will be assholes and there's nothing you or I can do about it. There's no cure for sociopathy.
This was the interpretation of Christianity I had in my youth, the doormat version of Christianity. This was one of the reasons I decided it was not for me. However, to get a correct assessment I would probably have to study everything as an adult and come to my own conclusions.
Studying it as an adult is logical. And rather than being a doormat, you just say "no". Ripped me off? Not getting back in the house again. Didn't pay back the money I loaned? Don't ask for more. Reward good deeds, forgive evil deeds but don't let the evil be rewrded. It isn't easy and nobody can do it well.
Yes, same here. 20/400 vision all my life, wore thick lenses. I was 50 when I got contacts and needed reading glasses with them, since you can't focus contacts by pulling them down your nose. If you have the CrystaLens, try building the focus muscles up. Start with the smallest type you can read without glasses and work your way down. Ask your eye doctor.
Oh, bad news if you were extremely nearsighted; the shape of the nearsighted eye makes it in danger of a detached retina. The surgery for that is NOT fun.
That's the trouble with world-wide free trade -- labor is cheap in places where rent is thirty bucks a month, or there's a repressive political regime. Neither American nor European workers can compete with workers in an impoverished country.
Except that in the real world today, vendors typically do fix it and take a hit, even if the fault is entirely that of the customer.
Example? Seems to me you're wearing rose colored glasses; I see companies covering up design flaws, software bugs, even in dangerous items like cars and drugs.
But that's NOT the golden rule. The golden rule doesn't say treat people how they treat you, or be nice as long as everyone else is. The rule is that you treat people like you would like to be treated because you're suppose to love your neighbor as much as you love yourself, even if your neighbor is the world's biggest asshole.
If you treat an asshole like he treats you, then you're an asshole, too. You're not going to turn many assholes into non-assholes, period, but you certainly wo't get them to stop assholish behavior by being one. Fighting fire with fire only results in a huge fire; you need water, not gasoline.
And besides, everybody is an asshole some time or another. But some people are born sociopaths, nothing will change them. The trick is avoiding them completely.
The whole philosophy is, unhappily, the antithesis of America. Blessed are the meek? Yeah. Blessed are the poor??? (banker laughs his ass off). If someone sues you for your cloak, give him your coat as well? Sure, uh huh. In America? LOL!
Someone yesterday said Christians are weird. He's right, we are.
You pay for what you get? SWEET! Wanna buy a Rolex? Only fifty bucks. You're paying for a Rolex, but you're getting a broken one. Fool.
You usually pay for what you get, but you don't always get what you pay for. When you buy an analgesic, what are you paying for? Pain relief. But generic naproxin sodium is 1/3 the price of Alieve. If you buy Alieve, you do NOT get what you pay for. If you buy Alieve, you're a fool.
Never ever believe anything a salesman says. "You get what you pay for" and "there's no such thing as a free lunch" are lies.
LOL! The only product I've ever seen from Microsoft that was in any way superior to anything else on the market is Excel. They got a big head start on Linux, and Microsoft still can't match Linux's features, let alone Apple's.
I'll never have a Windows phone because I've been using MS products for almost 30 years, and they've gotten steadly worse over time. Take Win 7 vs XP -- little extra I like, lots extra I hate, and muich of what I liked gone completely.
Plus, I don't want to have to learn a new interface every time MS upgrades its OS. Sheesh, just last night I was tagging oggs on the notebook I've been too lazy to upgrade to Linux, and got a picture of the Smothers Brothers Purple Onion album. I opened it in Paint, and there was no right-click copy. No "edit" menu. They put "copy" under "file"; WTF is wrong with them? I get the impression they hate users!
What was worse was after I copied the image, I couldn't paste it into Winamp. I had to copy it from OpenOffice's program to do that.
Microsoft with the best platform? BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! God there are some real comedians here!
Practical applications for new materials and other discoveries are seldom apparent at first. Even new inventions. Fifteen years ago everyone was asking me "why on earth do you have a computer?" When Edison invented voice recording, there were no practical applications for that, either, until Bell turned the wax cylinder into a shellack disk and people started listening to records.
And what's wrong for discovery for the sake of discovery? I'll bet you think astronomy is a wasted science and never should be funded, too.
It boggles the mind that a comment like that would show up on slashdot, of all places. WTF???
My daughter works at a GameStop, and she wouldn't touch an Xbox just because of how many of them come back with the same problems.
I think you just got lucky. I had a Chevy Vega that lasted years with no problems, too. Just because my Vega was a good one doesn't mean that 75% of what came from the assembly line wasn't crap.
Slashdot Mirror
In 1958, my grandfather worked for Purina and was severely injured falling four stories down an elevator shaft. The elevator had no doors. He was a complete invalid until he died ten years later. His and my grandmother's lives were living hells.
Grandma spoke to a few lawyers in the area, all of whom told her she she had no case, despite Purina's obvious negligence.
My dad found out later that Purina had every lawyer in the state on its payroll. It's disgusting what lawyers who are owned by soulless corporations will do for their dirty money.
It's kinda new and I've been too busy/lazy to upgrade to Linux.
I see MS fanbois have mod points. They hate being told how much better Linux is.
It is the chicken and the egg
Would someone please come up with a better cliche? One that actually had merit?
1. The egg came first. Dinasaurs layed eggs millions of years before they evolved into chickens.
2. Who has chicken for breakfast?
Companies after being burned with IE 6 only sites did not learn their lesson
Then they should die. We should not reward mediocrity and incompetence.
and simply made them IE 8 only which has no HTML 5 support. These users need flash unfortunately.
No, they need to use a browser that doesn't suck. There are plenty of them out there, and they don't cost anything. Speaking of which, the <ol> tag is broken in slashdot on FireFox.
Your mom's smarter than me. I just rebooted this damned notebook Wednesday (for updates) and it nagged me to update again this morning. Now it keeps nagging me to reboot. I wouldn't mind so much if Windows would open everything back up like it was when it booted, like my Linux box does. Ironically, I almost never have to reboot that one, only for a hardware problem or a kernel upgrade.
If I wanted to be nagged I wouldn't have divorced Evil-X. WTF, Microsoft? Will you never catch up with Linux's features and useability?
Just put kubuntu on her computer, she'll then be able to network with your Windows computer; Win 7 will only network with Linux unless you're running the expensive "professional" (HA!) version.
But what, exactly, is the superior alternative for Hollywood?
Cheaper tickets, cheaper popcorn for a start. Take a date to dinner and a movie, and the damned movie costs more than the dinner and drinks! Way, way, WAY overpriced. Especially if the movie turns out to be one of those dog comedies where all the funny parts are in the trailers or you fall asleep halfway through.
The $5 movies at WalMart's bargain bin would be a good deal if it weren't for unskippable FBI warnings and often unskippable trailers, followed by a uselless two minute animated menu to finish playing. When I put the DVD in, damn it, start the fucking movie! Lots of folks are downloading rather than buying because the pirate versions don't subject you to that bullshit. The legal version is a hemorrhoid and the pirate version isn't. WTF is wrong with the morons?
As to Netflix, I run Linux on the machine the TV's hooked up to. If I wanted to download, TPB would be my only choice. As it is, I have to buy cat food anyway so I pick movies up at WalMart and seethe when I sit through the MPAA bullshit. I'm VERY tempted to just say fuck'em and pirate the shit so I won't have to sit through their crap. It's goddamned stupid, their piracy warnings are part of why people pirate.
How about the police check his computer then throw him in jail for a bit? That won't stop piracy but it might stop stupid articles about it from clogging up the internet.
Or should I say YOU morons because it's pretty obvious who you work for.
BTW, how many times over did Passion of the Christ make its money back? If Mel Gibson, who bankrolled it himself, were really a Christian he'd put it up for free download himself. Greed and stinginess are not Christian values.
People are stupid. I've had internet on my phone for years, but sites still act as if their traffic all comes from computers. Duh, if your pages are a megabyte and won't display properly on their phone of course they'll stay away and all your traffic will be from computers. Kind of like the sites that used to greet you with "You need Internet Explorer to visit this site" and when you wrote them they were like "well, 90% of our traffic is IE." Did web developers all ride the short bus to school? Or are normal people all that fucking stupid?
Back ten years ago my old gaming site was full of bells and whistles, and the front page was considered huge* (dialup days) at 250k. How in the hell are they making pages four times that size? It's insane. Are web developers instructed to leave their brains at the door, or are they all using bad tools?
* If my old site was the prototype for web2.0 I apologize profusely to everyone!
Currently, there's generally pretty much only two types of movies being made: 1. big studio movies that get general release and are deliberately targeted at the average under 25's (big, loud, dumb, and 3d where possible) -- this being the only significant viable cinema-going audience, and 2. niche art house movies that are only designed to appeal to movie students, critics, film buffs, and the clinically depressed.
In other words:
if you broadened the distribution system away from cinemas and DVDs, it is possible to target adults again, and release an whole range of genres. It would be like the late 60's and 70's where big-name directors and big stars could experiment, and produce art that was also extremely entertaining (rather than dreary and narcissistic, like the current art house crap).
'60s and '70s? Fist full of dollars, Dirty Harry, Fritz the Cat, Star Wars, 2001, Rocky, True Grit.
Now? Avatar, The Matrix, LOTR, Fried Green Tomatos, The Green Mile, No Country for Old Men, Private Ryan, and, er, True Grit.
2001 was great in1969. Bought the DVD and watched it for the first time since I was young, and... wow, that movie's slow. Kubrick could have cut 45 minutes and nobody would miss it. True Grit? The 2010 movie was a completely different move and IMO, far better than the 1969 version.
The difference? In 1969 some of the movies made now would not have been possible (LOTR and Matrix), and it was impossible for something like Star Wreck - In The Pirkinning to be made by amateurs. It's far better than the best of B movies, and cost a couple thousand bucks to "film".
offtopic to the slashdot coders: <ol> no longer works in FireFox, and a whole lot of stuff broke in IE7. I HATE the new JE interface.
I don't want to out her here without asking her, but she has pretty much seen her ability to survive as a musician destroyed. She was never getting rich, but 5 thousand CDs sold *at least* paid for the time and money spent to make them. Now they are selling a couple hundred and everyone else gets it free.
You're making the same false assumption the RIAA is. If she's been doing it since the eighties, her audience is now in their forties. Most middle aged people don't buy a lot of music, and the younger generation that does probably just doesn't like her style. How is her audience at live shows?
Study after study shows that pirates spend more on music than non-pirates, so she should be looking at other reasons her sales are down, like the fact that the economy is worse than any time since before WWII. Everybody's sales of everything are down.
BTW, 5k CDs @ $5 retail (fan's price) will net her about 3K after expenses.
Piracy is a crime...
True
There's no evidence of that whatever.
I'm not the target demographic, either, even though I'm in the US. I live alone and seldom have more than 3 devices sending/receiving data and have unlimited plans for both wired internet and mobile. But the concept is worth discussing, just as stuff BT pulls is.
Do you mean to say that you think if the EPA is disbanded, there will be no method of filing federal lawsuits to correct misconduct?
Do you mean that if the local police force is disbanded there's no way for the bank to sue the bank robbers? It's exactly the same thing. The EPA are the cops that enforce environmental law. If your fairy tale scenario actually worked, rivers wouldn't have been catching fire in the sixties.
Before Nixon signed the clean air act you literally could not breathe while driving past the Monsanto plant. It didn't work then, what on earth makes you think it will work now?
If I had Rority's timeship I'd take you to the Sauget Monsanto plant in the sixties. You would become an instant environmentalist. Things were really BAD. The EPA was and still is necessary; nay, crucial.
Actually, GNOME was the reason I stayed away from Ubuntu. I never did like GNOME, been using KDE since Mandrake. On kubuntu now, I'm not even trying Unity. Coincidentally, I'm posting a ten year old journal that mentions learning a new OS.
it's pretty clear that you aren't in anyone's purchasing demographic.
Quite true.
Nurse! My pills!
I'm not THAT old yet. Maybe in thirty years, I'm only 60 (in a couple of months).
And unless one is of the opinion that one's own evil deeds should escape punishment, then getting vengeance is compatible with the golden rule.
Ah, but escaping one's own evil deeds is the bedrock of Christianity. Your sins are forgiven, paid in blood by the world's only innocent man. How can you be forgiven if you refuse to forgive others? That is the difference between Christianity and all other religions.
The goal is not to turn assholes into non-assholes. It's to punish them and to set an example to other would-be assholes - do they want the carrot or the stick?
You can't change people. Assholes will be assholes and there's nothing you or I can do about it. There's no cure for sociopathy.
This was the interpretation of Christianity I had in my youth, the doormat version of Christianity. This was one of the reasons I decided it was not for me. However, to get a correct assessment I would probably have to study everything as an adult and come to my own conclusions.
Studying it as an adult is logical. And rather than being a doormat, you just say "no". Ripped me off? Not getting back in the house again. Didn't pay back the money I loaned? Don't ask for more. Reward good deeds, forgive evil deeds but don't let the evil be rewrded. It isn't easy and nobody can do it well.
Yes, same here. 20/400 vision all my life, wore thick lenses. I was 50 when I got contacts and needed reading glasses with them, since you can't focus contacts by pulling them down your nose. If you have the CrystaLens, try building the focus muscles up. Start with the smallest type you can read without glasses and work your way down. Ask your eye doctor.
Oh, bad news if you were extremely nearsighted; the shape of the nearsighted eye makes it in danger of a detached retina. The surgery for that is NOT fun.
Thanks, it does make it much more readable.
That's the trouble with world-wide free trade -- labor is cheap in places where rent is thirty bucks a month, or there's a repressive political regime. Neither American nor European workers can compete with workers in an impoverished country.
Except that in the real world today, vendors typically do fix it and take a hit, even if the fault is entirely that of the customer.
Example? Seems to me you're wearing rose colored glasses; I see companies covering up design flaws, software bugs, even in dangerous items like cars and drugs.
I don't think I'd want to ride in ANY vehicle with "doom" in the name.
ThunderDoom or X11X? I'll take the second flight, please.
No, if he was a geezer he wouldn't have been suspended or gotten detension, he'd have gotten swats.
But that's NOT the golden rule. The golden rule doesn't say treat people how they treat you, or be nice as long as everyone else is. The rule is that you treat people like you would like to be treated because you're suppose to love your neighbor as much as you love yourself, even if your neighbor is the world's biggest asshole.
If you treat an asshole like he treats you, then you're an asshole, too. You're not going to turn many assholes into non-assholes, period, but you certainly wo't get them to stop assholish behavior by being one. Fighting fire with fire only results in a huge fire; you need water, not gasoline.
And besides, everybody is an asshole some time or another. But some people are born sociopaths, nothing will change them. The trick is avoiding them completely.
The whole philosophy is, unhappily, the antithesis of America. Blessed are the meek? Yeah. Blessed are the poor??? (banker laughs his ass off). If someone sues you for your cloak, give him your coat as well? Sure, uh huh. In America? LOL!
Someone yesterday said Christians are weird. He's right, we are.
You pay for what you get? SWEET! Wanna buy a Rolex? Only fifty bucks. You're paying for a Rolex, but you're getting a broken one. Fool.
You usually pay for what you get, but you don't always get what you pay for. When you buy an analgesic, what are you paying for? Pain relief. But generic naproxin sodium is 1/3 the price of Alieve. If you buy Alieve, you do NOT get what you pay for. If you buy Alieve, you're a fool.
Never ever believe anything a salesman says. "You get what you pay for" and "there's no such thing as a free lunch" are lies.
LOL! The only product I've ever seen from Microsoft that was in any way superior to anything else on the market is Excel. They got a big head start on Linux, and Microsoft still can't match Linux's features, let alone Apple's.
I'll never have a Windows phone because I've been using MS products for almost 30 years, and they've gotten steadly worse over time. Take Win 7 vs XP -- little extra I like, lots extra I hate, and muich of what I liked gone completely.
Plus, I don't want to have to learn a new interface every time MS upgrades its OS. Sheesh, just last night I was tagging oggs on the notebook I've been too lazy to upgrade to Linux, and got a picture of the Smothers Brothers Purple Onion album. I opened it in Paint, and there was no right-click copy. No "edit" menu. They put "copy" under "file"; WTF is wrong with them? I get the impression they hate users!
What was worse was after I copied the image, I couldn't paste it into Winamp. I had to copy it from OpenOffice's program to do that.
Microsoft with the best platform? BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! God there are some real comedians here!
Practical applications for new materials and other discoveries are seldom apparent at first. Even new inventions. Fifteen years ago everyone was asking me "why on earth do you have a computer?" When Edison invented voice recording, there were no practical applications for that, either, until Bell turned the wax cylinder into a shellack disk and people started listening to records.
And what's wrong for discovery for the sake of discovery? I'll bet you think astronomy is a wasted science and never should be funded, too.
It boggles the mind that a comment like that would show up on slashdot, of all places. WTF???
My daughter works at a GameStop, and she wouldn't touch an Xbox just because of how many of them come back with the same problems.
I think you just got lucky. I had a Chevy Vega that lasted years with no problems, too. Just because my Vega was a good one doesn't mean that 75% of what came from the assembly line wasn't crap.