And we all know how well they regulate themselves. Anything for higher ratings. And Janet's floppy boob got exactly that. Higher ratings and interest.
Actually, no it did not. The "boob" was unplanned and unscripted, thus no one knew it was coming. Well, maybe some behind the scenes did, but that can't translate into higher ratings unless they get the word out, which they did not.
My point is, the people who saw Janet's boob were already watching the Super Bowl. Nobody tuned in just to see Janet's boob, because it was live and unexpected. If the network had been advertising, "Watch the Half Time Show to see Janet Jackson's Boob!", then yes, it could be argued that it resulted in more ratings. But ratings are an instantaneous thing. The people who were already watching saw it, and those who weren't didn't.
You might try to make a case about all the Tivo replays, but that doesn't translate into higher ratings; at least, not of the kind networks can parlay into increased ad revenue.
I call shenanigans. I submit that there is not one single individual in the United States who holds a valid, accredited high school graduation certificate who is functionally illiterate.
I agree with the spirit of your post, but there's no need to exaggerate and throw out complete and obvious lies. It hurts your credibility, and detracts from the impact of your main point.
Just wanted to add that I think you're absolutely right. Why don't we ask the folks at Waco or Ruby Ridge how their "resistance" to what they perceived as a tyrannical government worked out? In order for a revolution to succeed, you'd need to organize folks en-masse, and that won't happen, because the government-controlled media channels will portray your movement as a fanatical religious organization, or a group of terrorists. Why would Suzy Soccer Mom point her Glock at the government when CNN is telling her that a bunch of "freedom-hating gun nuts in Texas" are fighting the BATF? She won't. No one will.
It's not "delusional self-importance" to worry about getting declared an "enemy combatant" and having your civil rights suspended.
Step back for a second and look at what you're saying. Put it in context. Honestly, do you really, truly believe that the government is out there, randomly selecting perfectly innocent (or heck, even simply moderately guilty) USAmerican citizens and shipping them offshore, stripping them of their civil rights? There's a word for that: paranoia.
This is not a theoretical event, it's actually happened to thousands of people, including a few U.S. citizens.
It happened to thousands of people who were trying to kill USAmerican soldiers who were there trying to help them. And the "U.S. citizens" it happened to were U. S. citizens by technicality only. They had long since renounced their ties to the USA spiritually, and were actively helping terrorist organizations. Specifically, they were trying to kill US soldiers. I'll cry no crocodile tears for their "plight."
I'll concede the point that the USPATRIOT act is a travesty of civil rights and constitutional due process. However, I still think you're making a huge, paranoid leap to conclude that the government has either the interest or the resources to be out there, randomly monitoring perfectly innocent, tax-paying citizens, and violating their civil rights left and right for no reason at all. That's just silly. There's no other word for it.
They have a long track record of coming down on people simply because they have "dangerous" views.
Really? Name 3. I'll even give you the first one: Jimmy Hoffa (and even that one is merely a highly controversial conspiracy theory).
If ones choice of reading matter is enough to put you under suspicion, people will be very careful what they read. Not something you want in a free society.
I call bullsh*t. People are reading and accessing more diverse and inflammatory information now than ever before. Do a Google search on "nuclear bombs." No agents in black suits will show up at your door. The information is out there, and lots of people are accessing it. Every time I go to my library to borrow "The Satanic Verses", someone else has it checked out, which belies your assumptions that the library would be too afraid to stock a copy, and that people would be too afraid to read it. Both are false.
This whole paranoid line of thinking is just pure bollocks.
I'm not sure where you got your information from but there's little cost involved. a court ordered subpoena to tivo for the records related to my customer# is all it takes. tivo then either faxes or emails the information back.
You just answered your own question. First, there's the initial investigating officer. Something you did caught his attention, and he's spent some time investigating you enough to determine that he wants to pull your Tivo records. Say he only spends a few (6?) hours investigating you to start off with. A conservative estimate for the loaded labour rate of a peace officer is, say $100/hour. Add in the cost of creating and processing the subpoena, getting it in front of a justice of the peace, arguing for it, having him/her sign off on it (their time, plus their admin's time, plus plus plus...), then it's sent to Tivo, who has their own people spend some hours handling it, it's passed to their IT guys who pull up the records (possibly from archive), bundle it up, making sure that the info is ONLY for the customer in question, and no other customers' data is accidentally included, then sent back to the officer.
We're talking DOZENS of people involved here, spending several HOURS of their time following through on this trivial investigation. Can't you see how this would easily and quickly escalate to, at a minimum, several thousand dollars in cost?
i don't want anyone to know what i'm doing at anytime. period. that holds for my wife
Are you serious? Holy crap, I give up, there's no hope for you. The only possible, reasonable explanation is that you're not married and have no idea what true love is like. In that case, I simply pity you, and will waste no more time educating you.
I, for one, am tired of buying products that i don't own.
Why? The world is full of perfectly legitimate examples. You rent apartments and cars/trucks. You lease cars/trucks. You pay a cable bill, a cell phone bill. You rent movies from the local Blockbuster. You pay admission to see a movie, an art exhibit, a concert, or a sporting event. You stay in hotel rooms and pay bus/taxi fare. In all these cases, you're paying money for the temporary use of something. You're paying money for something you don't get to "own" at the end of it. It's not wrong, it's not bad, it's perfectly normal. Why are you so concerned about it? Why is it such a bad thing to rent something?
It's a funny thing but I really hate the idea of law-enforcement or anyone else out there being able to see how many times I Tivo'd something.
It's a funny thing when people are so full of delusional self-importance that they think anybody out there gives a sh*t what TV shows they're watching or what books they're checking out of the library or what route they're taking to work.
You are not nearly as important as you think. Law enforcement agencies have far more important things to do than track some nobody like you out of sheer curiousity, or some clandestine random monitoring program. Get over yourself. Even if the government could track all your cell phone calls to 1-900 numbers, they wouldn't bother unless they were already watching you for some (most likely perfectly legitimate) reason.
"We in the US media wish to shield you from this world. We bring you only news stories from your own country, [...] Besides, who wants any real news about other countries? They don't even have NASCAR in those strange lands! Do you really care about what happens in a place without NASCAR"
NEWSFLASH! People care more about news that affects them than news that doesn't! Film at 11.
Your chances of dying of AIDS are much smaller than your chances of dying of Cancer yet the news should still cover AIDS stories right?
I don't get what your point is. There are far more news stories covering cancer than there are covering AIDS and HIV. It seems like nary a day goes by without a news outlet warning us of a new cancer risk recently discovered, or some new miracle medical technique that promises to cure cancer.
The only AIDS stories I hear are when somebody famous dies from it. And their death would have been newsworthy regardless of the cause.
I don't think anyone would be left would be saying that. I think 60 seconds after detonation the US would be in snapcount and about 33 minutes after that 45 MIRV's would do to the arabs what I just did to my neighbours windows XP system...
OK, first of all, the implicit link you just made between "terrorists" and "arabs" is insulting at best, and blatantly racist at worst. Secondly, the US would not wait for the incoming nuke(s) to detonate before retaliating on whoever the aggressor happened to be (Is North Korea full of Arabs now, hmm?) And finally, If the agressor happened to have more than one nuke, they could just keep on launching them in response to the US's response, unless you happen to hold the fantasy that the US can knock out a countrie's entire military arsenal with a single multi-ICBM nuclear strike. I guess in your mind, the US is the only nation with subs/ships/planes that can launch/drop nukes. I hope that misconception helps you sleep comfortably at night, but it also seems to be making you dangerously underestimate other countries abilities to defend themselves.
This is only dangerous if you inhale/ingest it. The first rainstorm would wash most of it into the ocean.
So all we'd have to do is stop breathing until it rained? Great, thanks! I feel much better now. I can't believe I was afraid of something that can only hurt me if I breathe.
Now I use it to report bad drivers and routinely see people get pulled over by cops cuz of it
Perhaps things are different in your neck of the woods, but around here (Ottawa, Canada), people are discouraged from calling 9-1-1 unless it is a "life-threatening emergency." If you see a dangerous/drunk driver, then by all means, feel free to call the police. They just want you to use their regular number, rather than tying up the life-and-death operators with your own brand of overzealous vigilante highway patrol.
For example, you see something like a strcpy to an unchecked char pointer somewhere deep in the code.
The problem is, as a couple studies have shown, nobody is actually looking at that code except those that are trying to find exploits. It's not like the vast armies of Open Source coders (guffaw) are constantly combing and re-reading 10-year-old code looking for things they can randomly improve. How many of those coders are actually skilled, experienced, and intelligent enough to both fully understand the vast quantities of code they are reading, and competent enough to actually modify the code without breaking anything else?
I think you underestimate the sheer quantity of open source code that ships with a Linux install, while simultaneously vastly overestimating the frequency with which established, working Open Source libraries are inspected and reviewed for bugs.
The truth is, the overwhelming majority of Open Source contributers are working on new projects. Projects which, for the most part, will never be finished. In reality, nobody is looking at the old code that already works satisfactorily. Nobody is going through the C framework, looking for unchecked pointers and array overruns, except people who are looking for something to exploit. In all honesty, there aren't really that many people working on maintaining the existing Open Source codebase that comprises the bulk of a default Linux install. There's a very active kernel group, but aside from that, it's much more stagnant than you might expect.
Did Benoit Mandelbrot 'draw' or 'create' the Mandelbrot set image? Of course not. It is intrinsic in the concept of number, even though it required powerful computers to render it in any detail. Is it art? Human beings respond to it as if it was art.
No, Mandelbrot fractals are not art. They are fascinating visual representations of a mathematical property. They are interesting to look at, but (and here is where an extremely important distinction is draw, please follow me) that is not enough to make it art.
Finding an image visually interesting is not enough to make it art. If we have a -25 degree Celcius night after a particularly mild and foggy day, then the next morning, all the trees have fascinating, delicate crystal structures on them. You could spend plenty of time marveling at the way they glisten and refract light in the sunrise. They are interesting to look at. But that doesn't make them art. They are simply a visually interesting product of the environment we live in. So are fractals.
The Mandelbrot set is art (and so are pictures automatically taken by the Hubble Telescope)
No, neither are "art." The Mandelbrot set is simply a visual representation of a set of numbers. If the image is art, then so must be the numbers from which the image was generated. Are factorials "art?" Are prime numbers "art?" No. They are interesting to study, but merely appreciating the interesting nature of an immutable mathematical concept does not make it "art." It just makes it interesting. Not everything interesting is art.
As for Hubble, it is merely taking clinical, sterile photos of constellations which have been hanging there for millenia. The photos are not taken to convey any meaning or emotion, but rather for scientific study. Sure, the photos are surreal and fascinating, and we like to look at them, but as I said before, not everything interesting is art. It's just "interesting." The galaxies were not arranged in any way to evoke emotion, they're just there. They'd be there even if we weren't looking. Indeed, given the way the universe has evolved, they could not be any other way other than how we perceive them when Hubble snaps the photo.
Photographers create art because they put thought and composition into their photos. Just walking around, randomly photographing inevitable elements of our environment is not art, unless the purpose of the exhibit was to present random elements of our environment (in which case, the exhibit itself is the art, not the individual photos).
Just a few thoughts from a casual photographic "artist.";)
Dang! I even skimmed the rest of the article looking for mention of something like that. Oh well, I sit corrected. A few people (those who received multimillion dollar rewards) are set to retire, if they want.
The question is, if the money is a motivation, then when you get your first multi-million dollar project bonus, you retire.
RTFA.
The first two Founders' Awards consisted of restricted stock that was worth $12 million when it was awarded in November to two teams of a dozen or so employees each.
So $12 million was divided amongst roughly 24 people, or half a million each. That's not enough to retire on.
The headline might imply that employees are getting "millions" each, but in actuality, a reward program worht "millions" is being dispersed among dozens (hundreds?) of employees. I don't think any individual employees have been rewarded with an award worth "millions."
Who somehow managed to get hired after three interviews. When they were hired, they were the greatest candidates available. Now suddenly they "aren't pulling their weight?" Hmm.
Yes, that's right. You apparently haven't noticed, but people change. That 22-year old hotshot who was enthusiastic and excited about working 10-hour days might now be 28 and married, expecting his first kid, with drastically different priorities than when he was hired. Maybe he's just "phoning it in" at work now, and doesn't really care about his job.
Yeah, maybe they should have lived in a refrigerator box and walked to work indefinitely because they will never EVER be able to depend on their job to support a mortgage.
*shrug* If I lost my job, we could still pay the mortgage for at least a year, using my savings. If we refinanced and extended the amortization, that could be turned into 3 years. And that's not even taking into account the fact that I'm married, and my wife works too. After that, if I still hadn't been able to find a job after 3 years, we'd sell the house. The equity we'd get from the sale would pay apartment rent for at least another 5 years at $1000/month. If after 8 years, I still hadn't found a job, then I'd be effectively back at $0, with no savings left. However, I would still have a line of credit, which would be good for another year and a half of apartment rent.
Do you see what I'm getting at? That's about a decade of survival with no job, just by being smart about how we manage our money. Sure, we'd be draining our savings, but it's not "living in a refrigerator box," like you suggested.
Let's see, the average price for a home around here is about $475K
Then move. Don't want to? Of course you don't. But it's a choice. Stop constructing these strawman arguments about how impossible it is to exist without a job because you refuse to make compromises. You have options. You may not like them, but they're there. You're constructing a false dichotomy. "Buy a $475K house or live in a refrigerator box" is not a rational argument.
It's called a mortgage. About 60% of people have one.
Yup, I have one. And as I just showed, I could manage for several years before I'd have to sell, just by using my savings, refinancing to a longer amortization, and possibly moving to a smaller/cheaper house, perhaps in a cheaper area.
This is the part where you say, "but if I move to ButtF**kNowhere, Iowa, where the land is cheap, there are no jobs." You don't have to move there. Move somewhere where high-tech is alive, but not absurd. Leave the Bay area. Try Raleigh, North Carolina. Or Dallas. Chicaco. Sure, those are expensive too, so you live outside the city, where the land is cheaper. A one-hour drive is too long, you say? Bullcrap. You'll only be driving into the city for interviews, so you can handle the travel time/gas once very couple of weeks until you land a job, then can afford to move into the city.
Stop blaming others and realize that sometimes, you have to make tough choices and sacrifices.
Slashdot Mirror
And we all know how well they regulate themselves. Anything for higher ratings. And Janet's floppy boob got exactly that. Higher ratings and interest.
Actually, no it did not. The "boob" was unplanned and unscripted, thus no one knew it was coming. Well, maybe some behind the scenes did, but that can't translate into higher ratings unless they get the word out, which they did not.
My point is, the people who saw Janet's boob were already watching the Super Bowl. Nobody tuned in just to see Janet's boob, because it was live and unexpected. If the network had been advertising, "Watch the Half Time Show to see Janet Jackson's Boob!", then yes, it could be argued that it resulted in more ratings. But ratings are an instantaneous thing. The people who were already watching saw it, and those who weren't didn't.
You might try to make a case about all the Tivo replays, but that doesn't translate into higher ratings; at least, not of the kind networks can parlay into increased ad revenue.
Haha, OK, I really did screw up my math. That should be "twice as many nipples as total people," not 4 times.
Which half of the population doesn't have nipples?
I'm confused, too. By my math, there are 4 times as many nipples as there are people. I must have forgotten to carry a 1 or something.
We [...] graduate young adults that can not read
I call shenanigans. I submit that there is not one single individual in the United States who holds a valid, accredited high school graduation certificate who is functionally illiterate.
I agree with the spirit of your post, but there's no need to exaggerate and throw out complete and obvious lies. It hurts your credibility, and detracts from the impact of your main point.
Just wanted to add that I think you're absolutely right. Why don't we ask the folks at Waco or Ruby Ridge how their "resistance" to what they perceived as a tyrannical government worked out? In order for a revolution to succeed, you'd need to organize folks en-masse, and that won't happen, because the government-controlled media channels will portray your movement as a fanatical religious organization, or a group of terrorists. Why would Suzy Soccer Mom point her Glock at the government when CNN is telling her that a bunch of "freedom-hating gun nuts in Texas" are fighting the BATF? She won't. No one will.
That's a bizarre coincidence. Mach-O binaries all begin with the sequence "FEED FACE."
All Java class files begin with "CAFE BABE."
Anyone got any others?
It's not "delusional self-importance" to worry about getting declared an "enemy combatant" and having your civil rights suspended.
Step back for a second and look at what you're saying. Put it in context. Honestly, do you really, truly believe that the government is out there, randomly selecting perfectly innocent (or heck, even simply moderately guilty) USAmerican citizens and shipping them offshore, stripping them of their civil rights? There's a word for that: paranoia.
This is not a theoretical event, it's actually happened to thousands of people, including a few U.S. citizens.
It happened to thousands of people who were trying to kill USAmerican soldiers who were there trying to help them. And the "U.S. citizens" it happened to were U. S. citizens by technicality only. They had long since renounced their ties to the USA spiritually, and were actively helping terrorist organizations. Specifically, they were trying to kill US soldiers. I'll cry no crocodile tears for their "plight."
I'll concede the point that the USPATRIOT act is a travesty of civil rights and constitutional due process. However, I still think you're making a huge, paranoid leap to conclude that the government has either the interest or the resources to be out there, randomly monitoring perfectly innocent, tax-paying citizens, and violating their civil rights left and right for no reason at all. That's just silly. There's no other word for it.
They have a long track record of coming down on people simply because they have "dangerous" views.
Really? Name 3. I'll even give you the first one: Jimmy Hoffa (and even that one is merely a highly controversial conspiracy theory).
If ones choice of reading matter is enough to put you under suspicion, people will be very careful what they read. Not something you want in a free society.
I call bullsh*t. People are reading and accessing more diverse and inflammatory information now than ever before. Do a Google search on "nuclear bombs." No agents in black suits will show up at your door. The information is out there, and lots of people are accessing it. Every time I go to my library to borrow "The Satanic Verses", someone else has it checked out, which belies your assumptions that the library would be too afraid to stock a copy, and that people would be too afraid to read it. Both are false.
This whole paranoid line of thinking is just pure bollocks.
I'm not sure where you got your information from but there's little cost involved. a court ordered subpoena to tivo for the records related to my customer# is all it takes. tivo then either faxes or emails the information back.
You just answered your own question. First, there's the initial investigating officer. Something you did caught his attention, and he's spent some time investigating you enough to determine that he wants to pull your Tivo records. Say he only spends a few (6?) hours investigating you to start off with. A conservative estimate for the loaded labour rate of a peace officer is, say $100/hour. Add in the cost of creating and processing the subpoena, getting it in front of a justice of the peace, arguing for it, having him/her sign off on it (their time, plus their admin's time, plus plus plus...), then it's sent to Tivo, who has their own people spend some hours handling it, it's passed to their IT guys who pull up the records (possibly from archive), bundle it up, making sure that the info is ONLY for the customer in question, and no other customers' data is accidentally included, then sent back to the officer.
We're talking DOZENS of people involved here, spending several HOURS of their time following through on this trivial investigation. Can't you see how this would easily and quickly escalate to, at a minimum, several thousand dollars in cost?
i don't want anyone to know what i'm doing at anytime. period. that holds for my wife
Are you serious? Holy crap, I give up, there's no hope for you. The only possible, reasonable explanation is that you're not married and have no idea what true love is like. In that case, I simply pity you, and will waste no more time educating you.
I, for one, am tired of buying products that i don't own.
Why? The world is full of perfectly legitimate examples. You rent apartments and cars/trucks. You lease cars/trucks. You pay a cable bill, a cell phone bill. You rent movies from the local Blockbuster. You pay admission to see a movie, an art exhibit, a concert, or a sporting event. You stay in hotel rooms and pay bus/taxi fare. In all these cases, you're paying money for the temporary use of something. You're paying money for something you don't get to "own" at the end of it. It's not wrong, it's not bad, it's perfectly normal. Why are you so concerned about it? Why is it such a bad thing to rent something?
It's a funny thing but I really hate the idea of law-enforcement or anyone else out there being able to see how many times I Tivo'd something.
It's a funny thing when people are so full of delusional self-importance that they think anybody out there gives a sh*t what TV shows they're watching or what books they're checking out of the library or what route they're taking to work.
You are not nearly as important as you think. Law enforcement agencies have far more important things to do than track some nobody like you out of sheer curiousity, or some clandestine random monitoring program. Get over yourself. Even if the government could track all your cell phone calls to 1-900 numbers, they wouldn't bother unless they were already watching you for some (most likely perfectly legitimate) reason.
"We in the US media wish to shield you from this world. We bring you only news stories from your own country, [...] Besides, who wants any real news about other countries? They don't even have NASCAR in those strange lands! Do you really care about what happens in a place without NASCAR"
NEWSFLASH! People care more about news that affects them than news that doesn't! Film at 11.
Why the hell would they ever stop? What are we going to do, leave town?
Ever hear of a little country called Argentina? Countries can go bankrupt too, you know.
Your chances of dying of AIDS are much smaller than your chances of dying of Cancer yet the news should still cover AIDS stories right?
I don't get what your point is. There are far more news stories covering cancer than there are covering AIDS and HIV. It seems like nary a day goes by without a news outlet warning us of a new cancer risk recently discovered, or some new miracle medical technique that promises to cure cancer.
The only AIDS stories I hear are when somebody famous dies from it. And their death would have been newsworthy regardless of the cause.
I don't think anyone would be left would be saying that.
I think 60 seconds after detonation the US would be in snapcount and about 33 minutes after that 45 MIRV's would do to the arabs what I just did to my neighbours windows XP system...
OK, first of all, the implicit link you just made between "terrorists" and "arabs" is insulting at best, and blatantly racist at worst. Secondly, the US would not wait for the incoming nuke(s) to detonate before retaliating on whoever the aggressor happened to be (Is North Korea full of Arabs now, hmm?) And finally, If the agressor happened to have more than one nuke, they could just keep on launching them in response to the US's response, unless you happen to hold the fantasy that the US can knock out a countrie's entire military arsenal with a single multi-ICBM nuclear strike. I guess in your mind, the US is the only nation with subs/ships/planes that can launch/drop nukes. I hope that misconception helps you sleep comfortably at night, but it also seems to be making you dangerously underestimate other countries abilities to defend themselves.
This is only dangerous if you inhale/ingest it. The first rainstorm would wash most of it into the ocean.
So all we'd have to do is stop breathing until it rained? Great, thanks! I feel much better now. I can't believe I was afraid of something that can only hurt me if I breathe.
Now I use it to report bad drivers and routinely see people get pulled over by cops cuz of it
Perhaps things are different in your neck of the woods, but around here (Ottawa, Canada), people are discouraged from calling 9-1-1 unless it is a "life-threatening emergency." If you see a dangerous/drunk driver, then by all means, feel free to call the police. They just want you to use their regular number, rather than tying up the life-and-death operators with your own brand of overzealous vigilante highway patrol.
At least it beats a lot of dead horse...
... nevermind.
Except in Soviet Russia, where the dead horse beats
For example, you see something like a strcpy to an unchecked char pointer somewhere deep in the code.
The problem is, as a couple studies have shown, nobody is actually looking at that code except those that are trying to find exploits. It's not like the vast armies of Open Source coders (guffaw) are constantly combing and re-reading 10-year-old code looking for things they can randomly improve. How many of those coders are actually skilled, experienced, and intelligent enough to both fully understand the vast quantities of code they are reading, and competent enough to actually modify the code without breaking anything else?
I think you underestimate the sheer quantity of open source code that ships with a Linux install, while simultaneously vastly overestimating the frequency with which established, working Open Source libraries are inspected and reviewed for bugs.
The truth is, the overwhelming majority of Open Source contributers are working on new projects. Projects which, for the most part, will never be finished. In reality, nobody is looking at the old code that already works satisfactorily. Nobody is going through the C framework, looking for unchecked pointers and array overruns, except people who are looking for something to exploit. In all honesty, there aren't really that many people working on maintaining the existing Open Source codebase that comprises the bulk of a default Linux install. There's a very active kernel group, but aside from that, it's much more stagnant than you might expect.
A telescope on the far side would pretty much be the only point in the universe with no EM interference from Earth.
Really? I'm pretty sure that if you traveled 400 trillion miles that way (pick any random direction at all), there'd be no EM interference from Earth.
Perhaps you meant to say "Solar System," rather than "Universe?"
Did Benoit Mandelbrot 'draw' or 'create' the Mandelbrot set image? Of course not. It is intrinsic in the concept of number, even though it required powerful computers to render it in any detail. Is it art? Human beings respond to it as if it was art.
;)
No, Mandelbrot fractals are not art. They are fascinating visual representations of a mathematical property. They are interesting to look at, but (and here is where an extremely important distinction is draw, please follow me) that is not enough to make it art.
Finding an image visually interesting is not enough to make it art. If we have a -25 degree Celcius night after a particularly mild and foggy day, then the next morning, all the trees have fascinating, delicate crystal structures on them. You could spend plenty of time marveling at the way they glisten and refract light in the sunrise. They are interesting to look at. But that doesn't make them art. They are simply a visually interesting product of the environment we live in. So are fractals.
The Mandelbrot set is art (and so are pictures automatically taken by the Hubble Telescope)
No, neither are "art." The Mandelbrot set is simply a visual representation of a set of numbers. If the image is art, then so must be the numbers from which the image was generated. Are factorials "art?" Are prime numbers "art?" No. They are interesting to study, but merely appreciating the interesting nature of an immutable mathematical concept does not make it "art." It just makes it interesting. Not everything interesting is art.
As for Hubble, it is merely taking clinical, sterile photos of constellations which have been hanging there for millenia. The photos are not taken to convey any meaning or emotion, but rather for scientific study. Sure, the photos are surreal and fascinating, and we like to look at them, but as I said before, not everything interesting is art. It's just "interesting." The galaxies were not arranged in any way to evoke emotion, they're just there. They'd be there even if we weren't looking. Indeed, given the way the universe has evolved, they could not be any other way other than how we perceive them when Hubble snaps the photo.
Photographers create art because they put thought and composition into their photos. Just walking around, randomly photographing inevitable elements of our environment is not art, unless the purpose of the exhibit was to present random elements of our environment (in which case, the exhibit itself is the art, not the individual photos).
Just a few thoughts from a casual photographic "artist."
Dang! I even skimmed the rest of the article looking for mention of something like that. Oh well, I sit corrected. A few people (those who received multimillion dollar rewards) are set to retire, if they want.
RTFA.
So $12 million was divided amongst roughly 24 people, or half a million each. That's not enough to retire on.
The headline might imply that employees are getting "millions" each, but in actuality, a reward program worht "millions" is being dispersed among dozens (hundreds?) of employees. I don't think any individual employees have been rewarded with an award worth "millions."
I've never seen paper money with braille on it,
Canada's does.
Who somehow managed to get hired after three interviews. When they were hired, they were the greatest candidates available. Now suddenly they "aren't pulling their weight?" Hmm.
Yes, that's right. You apparently haven't noticed, but people change. That 22-year old hotshot who was enthusiastic and excited about working 10-hour days might now be 28 and married, expecting his first kid, with drastically different priorities than when he was hired. Maybe he's just "phoning it in" at work now, and doesn't really care about his job.
Yeah, maybe they should have lived in a refrigerator box and walked to work indefinitely because they will never EVER be able to depend on their job to support a mortgage.
*shrug* If I lost my job, we could still pay the mortgage for at least a year, using my savings. If we refinanced and extended the amortization, that could be turned into 3 years. And that's not even taking into account the fact that I'm married, and my wife works too. After that, if I still hadn't been able to find a job after 3 years, we'd sell the house. The equity we'd get from the sale would pay apartment rent for at least another 5 years at $1000/month. If after 8 years, I still hadn't found a job, then I'd be effectively back at $0, with no savings left. However, I would still have a line of credit, which would be good for another year and a half of apartment rent.
Do you see what I'm getting at? That's about a decade of survival with no job, just by being smart about how we manage our money. Sure, we'd be draining our savings, but it's not "living in a refrigerator box," like you suggested.
Let's see, the average price for a home around here is about $475K
Then move. Don't want to? Of course you don't. But it's a choice. Stop constructing these strawman arguments about how impossible it is to exist without a job because you refuse to make compromises. You have options. You may not like them, but they're there. You're constructing a false dichotomy. "Buy a $475K house or live in a refrigerator box" is not a rational argument.
It's called a mortgage. About 60% of people have one.
Yup, I have one. And as I just showed, I could manage for several years before I'd have to sell, just by using my savings, refinancing to a longer amortization, and possibly moving to a smaller/cheaper house, perhaps in a cheaper area.
This is the part where you say, "but if I move to ButtF**kNowhere, Iowa, where the land is cheap, there are no jobs." You don't have to move there. Move somewhere where high-tech is alive, but not absurd. Leave the Bay area. Try Raleigh, North Carolina. Or Dallas. Chicaco. Sure, those are expensive too, so you live outside the city, where the land is cheaper. A one-hour drive is too long, you say? Bullcrap. You'll only be driving into the city for interviews, so you can handle the travel time/gas once very couple of weeks until you land a job, then can afford to move into the city.
Stop blaming others and realize that sometimes, you have to make tough choices and sacrifices.
I refuse to give my money to a company that gets away with the slave labor antics
Oh yeah? I bet you're wearing Nike shoes.