My home is now worth slightly less than the mortgage balance. I have lost 35% value, wiping out my equity, in the past 3 years. My best friend's home he bought a year after I did mine. His lost about 40% value, and he now owes about 20% more than it's worth today. We both have the same mortgage payments we did when we purchased our homes, +/- variables such as taxes and insurance. We are still making the payments because we planned on making the payments.
If I lose my job, it wil be much harder to get another one in the current economic situation. But I was always at risk of losing my home if I was out of work for too long. The current economy makes that more dangerous, but it's nto a new danger.
I know several people who suffered. One of my tenants bailed on a house in 2007 when the mortgage payment was adjusting from $1600/mo to $4700/mo. He got caught at the end of 2006 unable to Refinance because even then the Phoenix area market was diving down fast. He had to walk away. Now he's just starting to get work (self-employed) after a 3 month lull in commercial construction work - lull that meant for him NO work at all. We're being patient with him, though he is coming up on 3 months rent due again. If he could, he would. We may have to let him go. I hate to though.
I've been in debt most of my life. Yes, and it's painful, but I've done what a lot of people have done, and roll the dice. Some people, and I know of specific examples, speculated that they would be able to flip their house in a year and cash in. That is never prudent. You deserve your circumstances in those cases. I know of others that suffer bad timing. If I were in a different position where I work now, I would likely be gone now. Our department got hit hard, and I know some of those people will lose their homes. I'm not unaware of the pain, but there are others that deliberately overextended themselves. And ultimately, if our government will step in and make good on our bad choices, even our unfortunate ones, the question is no longer IF the government will help. It's how much will I pay for those?
Or more precisely, did we learn nothing from the S&L fiasco in the 80s? Apparently not. We are going to bail out even the banking weasels.
So when do we tell the shareholders they lost it all? Wait, we really can't do that, just because so many people reply on their investments for their income. Do we tell the executives to fork over their ill-gotten pay? That's a pittance in the grand scheme. Do we pretend America needs to be saved from a depression at any cost? Do we bail out the auto industry which has (or very damned well should have known for nearly two years) that they were failing, and the money would run out fast fast fast? Do we accept that there are some American *industries* that are so fragile that they cannot survive a 10% drop in sales? And that they need to be 'saved'? Too big to function any more, not too big to fail. Too slow to adapt. Dinosaurs, literally and figuratively. Where's Fat Lou Gerstner when you need him? America is a lot like IBM in the 80s. We have lost our focus. This has been going on, IMHO, since about 1996. Strange coincidence.
I think you are telling me that like it or not, we have to spend the money and saddle me with more debt, to save the losers. Because there is no alternative.
The alternative, sadly, is incredibly painful.
You make the point that some people will not be able to get credit, since the banks won't touch them no matter what. Perhaps there is a lesson in that. Credit is not a substitute for earned income. You live on credit at your peril.
Not all of us yet understand that. But the credit treadmill is so ingrained now in the American economy that we are using it as the lever to start our economy going again. We need to be careful about that. Cranking up consumer spending so we can buy more things made in China, for example, doesn't serve us well at all. How about cranking up industrial production in t
He DID already know. The torrents have been waiting for a few days now.
He usually eschews his mother's soups, preferring delivery pizza or the rare foray out for sushi or more likely 'chinese' buffet. He eats soup when he is sick, which is too often lately.
It will be 12+ hours before he is hungry enough to eat anything. The Red Bull stash will pull him through. You only need carbs and caffeine to hack, and carbs are optional for short bursts of a few days.
No further character development, such as the ankle-deep detrius of Starbucks, ramen bowls, gum wrappers, and ruined rolling papers. No mention of the pile of fresh laundry at the foot of the stairs, or the drawer off the tracks on his bureau, the one from his grade school days. Or the one picture on the wall. But SHE will never be spoken of again. Remembered, but never, ever spoken of again. Neither will the motorcycle, or his so-called best friend, or the scholarship to UICU.
Or it could go in another direction - he could bounce up on Monday morning and flail his way through the subway system to a real job, grinding data into digestible chunks for his boss to use in extracting more money from an unsuspecting public.
Interesting. Truthfully, though, we are well on our way here in America to letting people avoid the consequences of bad decisions:
- Much talk about 'forgiving' the excess amount on mortgages, that is writing them down to the home's current value. Among the problems with this; The U.S. taxpayer gets to pay the difference, but doesn't get anything much. The homeowner gets out of a bad deal. The bank gets made whole. Whose error caused this? Unscrupulous lenders? Overly optimistic borrowers? Greedy banks? Investors thinking they got in on a 'sure thing' without understanding the risks and/or falsehoods involved? All of them. Quick question - why am *I*, as a taxpayer, paying for this? Oh, and paying my mortgage as well, thank you.
- People get overextended on credit pretty regularly. This is not new, so why not extend this caution to current payment methods? Oh, that would mean the U.S. economy would have to retract by the amount of 'credit/fake' income we spend on our cards etc. Some estimates are that we have been overspending in the U.S. by up to 6% a year for a decade. The bill is due.
- The objection that cell phone payments will encourage people to 'spend more' is probably true. So let's ban some advertising, pop-up/pop-under ads, etc. Sheesh.
I won't be doing that at work. My Corporate IT overlords are not amused by clever subversion of their security measures. This includes running 'portable' apps in an attempt to avoid detection. BTW, here they don't avoid detection, and I would get hammered for trying. My offshore dev teams can and do use Firefox to develop IE-specific apps, and are VPN'd into our network, but they have different rules. and apparently they also get paid by the bug only if reported out of warranty. But I'm not complaining. I'm working.
ps- Not so annoying as getting Infoworld on my G1. Waiting while the ads load just to unload. Pus.
The OS is probably XP. Win2K would be older. Hardly 'old'. And what hardware would you recommend that would not be 'obsolete' by the half-way point of a Presidential term? A PIII-700 is still good enough to run Office 2003 and any email client. The dis of Bush-era IT in the White House is neither unique nor particularly clever. More bashing for its own sake.
""It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs."
Yeah. Not a good sign. If you were given a choice, which would you want your employees to be using, an Atari or an XBox?
Hint - what word processing software would you be running on the XBox?
I was expecting better mataphors from the Obama administration. Stick to the rotary-dial comparisons. They make more sense, even if they are still fairly out of touch with the reality.
Oh, and I want Facebook to be a prime app in the White House? NOT. Keep the network clean, guys. Update your Facebook pages on your iPhones. At least, try not to consort with known virus and malware sites, k?
Maine is known, among other things, for the blueberry crop. This used to be picked mostly by Micmac Indians from Maine and Canada, and high-schoolers (like me) and other locals that would do what is by any measure back-breaking work for pretty good pay. I made $600 a week for a month in 1970-1972. Not bad for a student. The majority of the crop was picked that way through the 80's.
Today, maybe a fifth is picked by hand, and most of that by Hispanic migrants. The Micamcs mostly pick on an Indian reservation farm.
The reality is that the major producers prefer migrant workers from away for several reasons. The one I hear the most is 'lower pay'. Just the way it is.
I hear a complaint sometimes that migrants, illegals, etc. take jobs Americans won't do. Mostly, I suspect this is because we 'Americans' don't want to do some jobs for the pay some employers want to pay. Not the same thing as 'not wanting' a job. How did toilets get cleaned before we had a serious illegal immigrant problem?
But the H1-B problem is a particularly nasty slap in the face. There are so many stories of qualified citizens not able to find work in fields where H1-B workers were being recruited that I'm not going to list any. Not hard to find.
I work for a company that uses both H1-B and other immigrants liberally for many sorts of IT work. Many of us are at a loss to explain how they can claim there are no US citizens available for the wor, the skill set is not unique, and neither is the workload.
One clever way around that they use is to contract with an offshore firm. No justification needed. the biggest number of these offshore workers are part of, you guessed it - IBM.
This link has a little fun at W's expense, but doesn't quite state that he didn't use email at all.
More interesting, and IMHO more realistic, is that the President really can't use e-mail for much at all. National security pretty much dictates that. Remember, there are few email clients that aren't easily compromised or subverted to deliver malware. The Pentagon can't keep the bad stuff out. The White House must adhere to an even higher standard of information security. Archiving is a somewhat different discussion.
But the allegation that Obama will be the *first* President to make full use of Internet communication is a little bit of the general hysteria and history-bending that is going on, and predictably so. Let's just remember that despite our fondest wishes, the truth is what it is, not what we wanted it to be.
"The nature of the [breach] is such that card-not-present transactions are actually quite difficult for the bad guys to do because one piece of information we know they did not get was an address."
Hah.
Addresses in card-not-present transactions can in fact be gotten, and if they use AVS then at the least the AVS data is readily available.
In other words, you're getting pwned even if it was card-not-present.
For those not in the know, most Internet transactions, phone orders, mail orders, and eBay/PayPal transcations are card-not-present. In fact, virtually all of the above.
- Google Streets is caught in several *countries* employing photomappers so zealous that they ignore 'No Trespassing' signs, drive up into peoples' back yards, and generally trample on privacy in an alarming and unacceptable way.
- Got a problem with GMail, or even your Google home page? Quick, call Google Customer Service. 'nuff said.
- Heck, I own a G-Phone. Last week Google enforced the user agent redirection and I can only get the Mobile page when I ask for my iGoogle home page. Their reasoning included wanting all phone browser users to have a consistent experience. And I bought this phone because it had a more capable browser. I DON'T WANT THE SAME EXPERIENCE A LAMER MOTO RAZR USER HAS, I WANT THE EXPERIENCE I PAID FOR ON MY MORE CAPABLE PHONE DAMMIT!!! Whew. That felt good. I won't get this fixed for a while though, so I use Steel for my browser now - set the user agent to 'Desktop'. I have to 'hack' Google? Anyways, nuff of that rant.
- Google keeps most everything in 'beta'. Sure makes it easier to excuse downtime. Wait, since much isn't a paid service, most users may not get the idea that they have very little leverage when downtime occurs.
- Got a problem with your AdWords? Who ya gonna call?
Google is failing to deliver on their 'do no evil' pledge, and it was inevitable.
I lost my first record collection, just shy of 1,000, when it failed to materialize along with the rest of the second crate of household belongings the U.S. military attempted to deliver from my base in England to my home in Maine, back in 1975. If you happen to know where it is, I'd go get it. Really.
My second collection, well over 1,500, I gave up when it was just not worth it to go back in that house. It just wasn't.
My current CD collection is around 3,000 and is growing very slowly. I tend to buy artist collections, and I'm saddled with probably 3 copies of every classic rock band's releases, between the initial releases, boxed sets, remasters, UK releases, cut-outs, LP singles, etc. It's all on a server now, the discs are packed away. Backing up the collection and changing servers now and then is in fact easier than boxes, cases, stands, all the hassle of physical media.
But would I buy most of the stuff I have downloaded over the years? Yes and no. I bought FSOL-ISDN after hearing it on an old radio show, and then have bought everything they've done and more. But no amount of downloading Britney Spears ever would have gotten me to *buy* a single track...
FM Radio at one time was the original peer-to-peer network. WABE in Atlanta used to play whole sides of albums late at night, usually new releases. I heard Dark Side of the Moon for the first time that way, and they prefaced the presentation with warnings, a nice announcer's "And now...", and a full 3 seconds of silence. My Revox reel-to-reel was cued on time. I listened to that tape for two months before I could buy the album. Napster just made it so much more convenient.
But large collections were the norm in vinyl days. My old DJ buddy had a collection of over 25,000 LPs from the disco era, most promos and cut-outs from the labels. He was a professional. Over 25,000 means closer to 45,000 we think. It was donated after his death to a NYC DJ, when his mother asked if any of us wanted 'this crap'. She had a container coming over to throw out his stuff. Not just the records, but turntables, videos (U-Matic mostly!), clothes of course. We had the makings of a terrific disco museum, and it went here and there. I wish I had those SL-1200MkIIs today.
- Like the unfortunate Federation officers that get stuck in 'phase' after a transporter accident. And all they can successfully interact with is the deck. They go through ceilings, walls, equipment, even Mr. Spock, but not the deck. And of course, they are fortunate to still be able to breath the air, despite not being able to actually move any of it sufficiently to wave at fellow crewmembers and cause them wonderment at the drafts...
- Or the ghosts that also can walk about on Earth, but sadly cannot help falling through walls, etc. No, I would not walk through a wall for Demi Moore. well, maybe after she got her boobs for Stiptease. No, but for Jennifer Connelly I might, even though hers really are fake.
Yes, the complexities of time travel would, in a real world, include navigation to the point in relative space where you wanted to be at the desired time.
I guess that's why it's so damned hard in real life. That and getting a DeLorean that runs for more than a month straight.
My wife's mom is 89 years old. She is working with her eeePC just fine, thank you despite having only these resources:
- A neighbor who had one - her neighbor is not a tech-savvy geek, but someone who's 55 herself and happens to live upstairs. And taught herself how to use the eee... Scary, but she did.
- Never, repeat NEVER used a keyboard before. Voicemail on her cellphone scared her somewhat.
- Never even *saw* the Internet unless one of her daughters brought their notebook over to show her pictures of the great-grandkids.
Since her apt complex put in WiFi, several other residents have gotten various machines. How she manages with the eee is beyond me, but she pecks away at it, and I get emails from her. She even gets the whole video thing. We may have started something....
No one is too old. That's beyond bogus. Stupid knows no age.
Note - I do not aspire to leadership within my church. I am unworthy. I pray for each of these examples and more, that they are lead to repentance, and that others do not follow their own desires to sin. And I'm at least as guilty as anyone. But to claim that Christians condone failure in their 'leaders'? We forgive them.
One solid whack with a 7lb splitting maul should do the trick. Bent platters, ruined PCB, getting the case fragments out of the platters alone should keep the NSA busy for a few days. Leave it out in the rain if you need total security.
You need the exercise anyways.
Substitute a dull axe for the maul.
One whack to wipe them all and in the darkness hide them...
ps- If you're the type to take the case off to get at the platters, consider a degausser. Make one. Not too hard. Though I like the belt sander trick. Let them try and reassemble your bits from the dust in the driveway. Riiiight...
This is where it breaks down so badly for Christians:
"Homosexuality is mentioned briefly in the same early books of law that are largely ignored for their lack of relevance in a modern world. Divorce however is mentioned numerous times in the Bible as disrespect to the sacrament of marriage."
If you want to offer the Bible as the arbiter of Christian thought regarding marriage and homosexuality, please be consistent, or leave the Bible out of it.
Homosexuality is mentioned in the Bible as 'detestable' (Leviticus 20:13). It is this that guides many Christans view of homosexuality, though most do not go further and reach out to the gay community, offering understanding and acceptance despite their sin. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Good advice now as then.
However, loving the sinner doesn't mean permitting their sinful ways to go unchallenged. If the gay community wants the legal and social advantages of marriage, there is probably a way to accomplish that. If they want their coupling to be called a 'marriage', they ask many of us to change our definition of that in a way we do not want to. Again, if they want the legal protections associated with marriage, perhaps that is the fight to be fought. Changing the definition of words is something else I think, though I could be wrong about this.
Moses permitted Jews to give their wives a certificate of divorce, not because divorce was acceptable, but because the men's 'hearts were hard'. The commentary in Mathhew 19:3-11 could lead one to believe that divorce in Jesus' time was more prevalent than my Sunday School teachers let on. Just because God permits it, don't think He likes it. Genesis and Exodus are full of examples where God lets people do terrible things, and He did so to let them fully complete their depravity. Perhaps this is why such wicked men rise to positions of influence in the church, and then are exposed, eh?
But back to the point; "On what grounds may you ask? On the grounds that the Bible labels it a sin. They're specifically calling for legislation by dogmatic law".
No. When these issues are raised in our society, we are called to decide on them using our best judgement and hopefully honesty and fairness. If I'm a Christian, why should I be expected to set aside my moral and ethical underpinning and decide a question by *your* values? Similarly, why should I ask you to set aside your values and use mine? I recognize that in these issues, one view will prevail, so one of us will see our values upheld and the other see theirs discarded. Christians are pretty familiar with this, as the past two decades have seen American cast aside many Christian ethics and become more 'enlightened'. Our Post-Modern world is turning away from the Judeo-Christian bases for law and adopting something else.
As a Christian, I struggle to make good decisions based on what I know and believe, and now how I've been wronged and diminished. Ain't easy.
- You will have to deposit the funds into a merchant account. Be assured they will come calling when your fraud rate goes sky-high. Your bank also.
- Most terminals need to be programmed correctly. This includes merchant-specific data. The attempt, if it is caught, will identify the merchant, and the previous advice kicks in.
- While banks aren't as diligent in tracking ATM fraud, the crdit card processors and issuing banks do take cc fraud seriously, and you will need to move the money very quickly. Which the bad guys do do...
I guess my re-install of XP will include a VM and Ubuntu in there. Can't be too sure.
Here in the Phoenix area, February is a GREAT month to be up on the roof adjusting your antenna. Change the deadline to July, and I'll be asking you to come down and try out the dry heat.
It depends on where you live. Can't please everyone...
Of course, I can get a usable signal in some parts of town here with a paper clip stuck in the antenna jack. Other places I had to use a length of speaker wire, tinned on one end. The fringes and inner city need something more sophisticated, but a rooftop yagi? Seems overkill. Yes, DTV isn't all it's cracked up to be, is it?
Gee, after I RTFA, I think this is still optional. Yes, your option is the old paper trail, a Hobson's choice if you like.
I'm assuuming a great deal here, such as the practical reality that at least some foreign nationals will not have access to the Internet to complete the online forms, nor any way to receive any communication from State, INS, DHS, ICE, or whatever. So opting out means sticking with paper.
Slashdot Mirror
The only EFI I deal with is on Itanium servers. Not your typical "system where you don't know what the hardware may be".
My home is now worth slightly less than the mortgage balance. I have lost 35% value, wiping out my equity, in the past 3 years. My best friend's home he bought a year after I did mine. His lost about 40% value, and he now owes about 20% more than it's worth today. We both have the same mortgage payments we did when we purchased our homes, +/- variables such as taxes and insurance. We are still making the payments because we planned on making the payments.
If I lose my job, it wil be much harder to get another one in the current economic situation. But I was always at risk of losing my home if I was out of work for too long. The current economy makes that more dangerous, but it's nto a new danger.
I know several people who suffered. One of my tenants bailed on a house in 2007 when the mortgage payment was adjusting from $1600/mo to $4700/mo. He got caught at the end of 2006 unable to Refinance because even then the Phoenix area market was diving down fast. He had to walk away. Now he's just starting to get work (self-employed) after a 3 month lull in commercial construction work - lull that meant for him NO work at all. We're being patient with him, though he is coming up on 3 months rent due again. If he could, he would. We may have to let him go. I hate to though.
I've been in debt most of my life. Yes, and it's painful, but I've done what a lot of people have done, and roll the dice. Some people, and I know of specific examples, speculated that they would be able to flip their house in a year and cash in. That is never prudent. You deserve your circumstances in those cases. I know of others that suffer bad timing. If I were in a different position where I work now, I would likely be gone now. Our department got hit hard, and I know some of those people will lose their homes. I'm not unaware of the pain, but there are others that deliberately overextended themselves. And ultimately, if our government will step in and make good on our bad choices, even our unfortunate ones, the question is no longer IF the government will help. It's how much will I pay for those?
Or more precisely, did we learn nothing from the S&L fiasco in the 80s? Apparently not. We are going to bail out even the banking weasels.
So when do we tell the shareholders they lost it all? Wait, we really can't do that, just because so many people reply on their investments for their income. Do we tell the executives to fork over their ill-gotten pay? That's a pittance in the grand scheme. Do we pretend America needs to be saved from a depression at any cost? Do we bail out the auto industry which has (or very damned well should have known for nearly two years) that they were failing, and the money would run out fast fast fast? Do we accept that there are some American *industries* that are so fragile that they cannot survive a 10% drop in sales? And that they need to be 'saved'? Too big to function any more, not too big to fail. Too slow to adapt. Dinosaurs, literally and figuratively. Where's Fat Lou Gerstner when you need him? America is a lot like IBM in the 80s. We have lost our focus. This has been going on, IMHO, since about 1996. Strange coincidence.
I think you are telling me that like it or not, we have to spend the money and saddle me with more debt, to save the losers. Because there is no alternative.
The alternative, sadly, is incredibly painful.
You make the point that some people will not be able to get credit, since the banks won't touch them no matter what. Perhaps there is a lesson in that. Credit is not a substitute for earned income. You live on credit at your peril.
Not all of us yet understand that. But the credit treadmill is so ingrained now in the American economy that we are using it as the lever to start our economy going again. We need to be careful about that. Cranking up consumer spending so we can buy more things made in China, for example, doesn't serve us well at all. How about cranking up industrial production in t
He DID already know. The torrents have been waiting for a few days now.
He usually eschews his mother's soups, preferring delivery pizza or the rare foray out for sushi or more likely 'chinese' buffet. He eats soup when he is sick, which is too often lately.
It will be 12+ hours before he is hungry enough to eat anything. The Red Bull stash will pull him through. You only need carbs and caffeine to hack, and carbs are optional for short bursts of a few days.
No further character development, such as the ankle-deep detrius of Starbucks, ramen bowls, gum wrappers, and ruined rolling papers. No mention of the pile of fresh laundry at the foot of the stairs, or the drawer off the tracks on his bureau, the one from his grade school days. Or the one picture on the wall. But SHE will never be spoken of again. Remembered, but never, ever spoken of again. Neither will the motorcycle, or his so-called best friend, or the scholarship to UICU.
Or it could go in another direction - he could bounce up on Monday morning and flail his way through the subway system to a real job, grinding data into digestible chunks for his boss to use in extracting more money from an unsuspecting public.
Interesting. Truthfully, though, we are well on our way here in America to letting people avoid the consequences of bad decisions:
- Much talk about 'forgiving' the excess amount on mortgages, that is writing them down to the home's current value. Among the problems with this; The U.S. taxpayer gets to pay the difference, but doesn't get anything much. The homeowner gets out of a bad deal. The bank gets made whole. Whose error caused this? Unscrupulous lenders? Overly optimistic borrowers? Greedy banks? Investors thinking they got in on a 'sure thing' without understanding the risks and/or falsehoods involved? All of them. Quick question - why am *I*, as a taxpayer, paying for this? Oh, and paying my mortgage as well, thank you.
- People get overextended on credit pretty regularly. This is not new, so why not extend this caution to current payment methods? Oh, that would mean the U.S. economy would have to retract by the amount of 'credit/fake' income we spend on our cards etc. Some estimates are that we have been overspending in the U.S. by up to 6% a year for a decade. The bill is due.
- The objection that cell phone payments will encourage people to 'spend more' is probably true. So let's ban some advertising, pop-up/pop-under ads, etc. Sheesh.
Really.
I knew where Ukraine was before I knew about Risk.
American public education wasn't always such a failure.
But it's "Ukraine", not "The Ukraine".
At least, that's what Ukrainians say.
Just sayin... And that's what the Ukrainian rocket scientist I know says also.
My job includes "other tasks as required".
In between, I do what is not required.
I won't be doing that at work. My Corporate IT overlords are not amused by clever subversion of their security measures. This includes running 'portable' apps in an attempt to avoid detection. BTW, here they don't avoid detection, and I would get hammered for trying. My offshore dev teams can and do use Firefox to develop IE-specific apps, and are VPN'd into our network, but they have different rules. and apparently they also get paid by the bug only if reported out of warranty. But I'm not complaining. I'm working.
ps- Not so annoying as getting Infoworld on my G1. Waiting while the ads load just to unload. Pus.
The OS is probably XP. Win2K would be older. Hardly 'old'.
And what hardware would you recommend that would not be 'obsolete' by the half-way point of a Presidential term?
A PIII-700 is still good enough to run Office 2003 and any email client.
The dis of Bush-era IT in the White House is neither unique nor particularly clever. More bashing for its own sake.
Fromthis article comes a cute little tidbit.
""It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs."
Yeah. Not a good sign. If you were given a choice, which would you want your employees to be using, an Atari or an XBox?
Hint - what word processing software would you be running on the XBox?
I was expecting better mataphors from the Obama administration. Stick to the rotary-dial comparisons. They make more sense, even if they are still fairly out of touch with the reality.
Oh, and I want Facebook to be a prime app in the White House? NOT. Keep the network clean, guys. Update your Facebook pages on your iPhones. At least, try not to consort with known virus and malware sites, k?
We're gonna hear more of this, you bet.
Not quite.
Maine is known, among other things, for the blueberry crop. This used to be picked mostly by Micmac Indians from Maine and Canada, and high-schoolers (like me) and other locals that would do what is by any measure back-breaking work for pretty good pay. I made $600 a week for a month in 1970-1972. Not bad for a student. The majority of the crop was picked that way through the 80's.
Today, maybe a fifth is picked by hand, and most of that by Hispanic migrants. The Micamcs mostly pick on an Indian reservation farm.
The reality is that the major producers prefer migrant workers from away for several reasons. The one I hear the most is 'lower pay'. Just the way it is.
I hear a complaint sometimes that migrants, illegals, etc. take jobs Americans won't do. Mostly, I suspect this is because we 'Americans' don't want to do some jobs for the pay some employers want to pay. Not the same thing as 'not wanting' a job. How did toilets get cleaned before we had a serious illegal immigrant problem?
But the H1-B problem is a particularly nasty slap in the face. There are so many stories of qualified citizens not able to find work in fields where H1-B workers were being recruited that I'm not going to list any. Not hard to find.
I work for a company that uses both H1-B and other immigrants liberally for many sorts of IT work. Many of us are at a loss to explain how they can claim there are no US citizens available for the wor, the skill set is not unique, and neither is the workload.
One clever way around that they use is to contract with an offshore firm. No justification needed. the biggest number of these offshore workers are part of, you guessed it - IBM.
We'll be dealing with this soon enough, won't we?
This link has a little fun at W's expense, but doesn't quite state that he didn't use email at all.
More interesting, and IMHO more realistic, is that the President really can't use e-mail for much at all. National security pretty much dictates that. Remember, there are few email clients that aren't easily compromised or subverted to deliver malware. The Pentagon can't keep the bad stuff out. The White House must adhere to an even higher standard of information security. Archiving is a somewhat different discussion.
But the allegation that Obama will be the *first* President to make full use of Internet communication is a little bit of the general hysteria and history-bending that is going on, and predictably so. Let's just remember that despite our fondest wishes, the truth is what it is, not what we wanted it to be.
He might have worked for Lockheed.
Or any number of contenders.
"The nature of the [breach] is such that card-not-present transactions are actually quite difficult for the bad guys to do because one piece of information we know they did not get was an address."
Hah.
Addresses in card-not-present transactions can in fact be gotten, and if they use AVS then at the least the AVS data is readily available.
In other words, you're getting pwned even if it was card-not-present.
For those not in the know, most Internet transactions, phone orders, mail orders, and eBay/PayPal transcations are card-not-present. In fact, virtually all of the above.
The quote from Heartland was just weasel-talk.
Of course they are. They have to be.
- Google Streets is caught in several *countries* employing photomappers so zealous that they ignore 'No Trespassing' signs, drive up into peoples' back yards, and generally trample on privacy in an alarming and unacceptable way.
- Got a problem with GMail, or even your Google home page? Quick, call Google Customer Service. 'nuff said.
- Heck, I own a G-Phone. Last week Google enforced the user agent redirection and I can only get the Mobile page when I ask for my iGoogle home page. Their reasoning included wanting all phone browser users to have a consistent experience. And I bought this phone because it had a more capable browser. I DON'T WANT THE SAME EXPERIENCE A LAMER MOTO RAZR USER HAS, I WANT THE EXPERIENCE I PAID FOR ON MY MORE CAPABLE PHONE DAMMIT!!! Whew. That felt good. I won't get this fixed for a while though, so I use Steel for my browser now - set the user agent to 'Desktop'. I have to 'hack' Google? Anyways, nuff of that rant.
- Google keeps most everything in 'beta'. Sure makes it easier to excuse downtime. Wait, since much isn't a paid service, most users may not get the idea that they have very little leverage when downtime occurs.
- Got a problem with your AdWords? Who ya gonna call?
Google is failing to deliver on their 'do no evil' pledge, and it was inevitable.
Now, let's keep at them.
Not a great argument...
I lost my first record collection, just shy of 1,000, when it failed to materialize along with the rest of the second crate of household belongings the U.S. military attempted to deliver from my base in England to my home in Maine, back in 1975. If you happen to know where it is, I'd go get it. Really.
My second collection, well over 1,500, I gave up when it was just not worth it to go back in that house. It just wasn't.
My current CD collection is around 3,000 and is growing very slowly. I tend to buy artist collections, and I'm saddled with probably 3 copies of every classic rock band's releases, between the initial releases, boxed sets, remasters, UK releases, cut-outs, LP singles, etc. It's all on a server now, the discs are packed away. Backing up the collection and changing servers now and then is in fact easier than boxes, cases, stands, all the hassle of physical media.
But would I buy most of the stuff I have downloaded over the years? Yes and no. I bought FSOL-ISDN after hearing it on an old radio show, and then have bought everything they've done and more. But no amount of downloading Britney Spears ever would have gotten me to *buy* a single track...
FM Radio at one time was the original peer-to-peer network. WABE in Atlanta used to play whole sides of albums late at night, usually new releases. I heard Dark Side of the Moon for the first time that way, and they prefaced the presentation with warnings, a nice announcer's "And now...", and a full 3 seconds of silence. My Revox reel-to-reel was cued on time. I listened to that tape for two months before I could buy the album. Napster just made it so much more convenient.
But large collections were the norm in vinyl days. My old DJ buddy had a collection of over 25,000 LPs from the disco era, most promos and cut-outs from the labels. He was a professional. Over 25,000 means closer to 45,000 we think. It was donated after his death to a NYC DJ, when his mother asked if any of us wanted 'this crap'. She had a container coming over to throw out his stuff. Not just the records, but turntables, videos (U-Matic mostly!), clothes of course. We had the makings of a terrific disco museum, and it went here and there. I wish I had those SL-1200MkIIs today.
Transporter accidents occured in most of the series. the most common accident was being rematerialized partially, I think.
- Like the unfortunate Federation officers that get stuck in 'phase' after a transporter accident. And all they can successfully interact with is the deck. They go through ceilings, walls, equipment, even Mr. Spock, but not the deck. And of course, they are fortunate to still be able to breath the air, despite not being able to actually move any of it sufficiently to wave at fellow crewmembers and cause them wonderment at the drafts...
- Or the ghosts that also can walk about on Earth, but sadly cannot help falling through walls, etc. No, I would not walk through a wall for Demi Moore. well, maybe after she got her boobs for Stiptease. No, but for Jennifer Connelly I might, even though hers really are fake.
Yes, the complexities of time travel would, in a real world, include navigation to the point in relative space where you wanted to be at the desired time.
I guess that's why it's so damned hard in real life. That and getting a DeLorean that runs for more than a month straight.
Uh, no.
My wife's mom is 89 years old. She is working with her eeePC just fine, thank you despite having only these resources:
- A neighbor who had one - her neighbor is not a tech-savvy geek, but someone who's 55 herself and happens to live upstairs. And taught herself how to use the eee... Scary, but she did.
- Never, repeat NEVER used a keyboard before. Voicemail on her cellphone scared her somewhat.
- Never even *saw* the Internet unless one of her daughters brought their notebook over to show her pictures of the great-grandkids.
Since her apt complex put in WiFi, several other residents have gotten various machines. How she manages with the eee is beyond me, but she pecks away at it, and I get emails from her. She even gets the whole video thing. We may have started something....
No one is too old. That's beyond bogus. Stupid knows no age.
I had to come back and read this.
Which of any of serveral sins do you think are excused universally by Christians?
Greed?
Divorce?
Pride?
Would you like other examples?
Note - I do not aspire to leadership within my church. I am unworthy. I pray for each of these examples and more, that they are lead to repentance, and that others do not follow their own desires to sin. And I'm at least as guilty as anyone. But to claim that Christians condone failure in their 'leaders'? We forgive them.
One solid whack with a 7lb splitting maul should do the trick. Bent platters, ruined PCB, getting the case fragments out of the platters alone should keep the NSA busy for a few days. Leave it out in the rain if you need total security.
You need the exercise anyways.
Substitute a dull axe for the maul.
One whack to wipe them all and in the darkness hide them...
ps- If you're the type to take the case off to get at the platters, consider a degausser. Make one. Not too hard. Though I like the belt sander trick. Let them try and reassemble your bits from the dust in the driveway. Riiiight...
This is where it breaks down so badly for Christians:
"Homosexuality is mentioned briefly in the same early books of law that are largely ignored for their lack of relevance in a modern world. Divorce however is mentioned numerous times in the Bible as disrespect to the sacrament of marriage."
If you want to offer the Bible as the arbiter of Christian thought regarding marriage and homosexuality, please be consistent, or leave the Bible out of it.
Homosexuality is mentioned in the Bible as 'detestable' (Leviticus 20:13). It is this that guides many Christans view of homosexuality, though most do not go further and reach out to the gay community, offering understanding and acceptance despite their sin. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Good advice now as then.
However, loving the sinner doesn't mean permitting their sinful ways to go unchallenged. If the gay community wants the legal and social advantages of marriage, there is probably a way to accomplish that. If they want their coupling to be called a 'marriage', they ask many of us to change our definition of that in a way we do not want to. Again, if they want the legal protections associated with marriage, perhaps that is the fight to be fought. Changing the definition of words is something else I think, though I could be wrong about this.
Moses permitted Jews to give their wives a certificate of divorce, not because divorce was acceptable, but because the men's 'hearts were hard'. The commentary in Mathhew 19:3-11 could lead one to believe that divorce in Jesus' time was more prevalent than my Sunday School teachers let on. Just because God permits it, don't think He likes it. Genesis and Exodus are full of examples where God lets people do terrible things, and He did so to let them fully complete their depravity. Perhaps this is why such wicked men rise to positions of influence in the church, and then are exposed, eh?
But back to the point; "On what grounds may you ask? On the grounds that the Bible labels it a sin. They're specifically calling for legislation by dogmatic law".
No. When these issues are raised in our society, we are called to decide on them using our best judgement and hopefully honesty and fairness. If I'm a Christian, why should I be expected to set aside my moral and ethical underpinning and decide a question by *your* values? Similarly, why should I ask you to set aside your values and use mine? I recognize that in these issues, one view will prevail, so one of us will see our values upheld and the other see theirs discarded. Christians are pretty familiar with this, as the past two decades have seen American cast aside many Christian ethics and become more 'enlightened'. Our Post-Modern world is turning away from the Judeo-Christian bases for law and adopting something else.
As a Christian, I struggle to make good decisions based on what I know and believe, and now how I've been wronged and diminished. Ain't easy.
There are some limitations to that scam:
- You will have to deposit the funds into a merchant account. Be assured they will come calling when your fraud rate goes sky-high. Your bank also.
- Most terminals need to be programmed correctly. This includes merchant-specific data. The attempt, if it is caught, will identify the merchant, and the previous advice kicks in.
- While banks aren't as diligent in tracking ATM fraud, the crdit card processors and issuing banks do take cc fraud seriously, and you will need to move the money very quickly. Which the bad guys do do...
I guess my re-install of XP will include a VM and Ubuntu in there. Can't be too sure.
Here in the Phoenix area, February is a GREAT month to be up on the roof adjusting your antenna. Change the deadline to July, and I'll be asking you to come down and try out the dry heat.
It depends on where you live. Can't please everyone...
Of course, I can get a usable signal in some parts of town here with a paper clip stuck in the antenna jack. Other places I had to use a length of speaker wire, tinned on one end. The fringes and inner city need something more sophisticated, but a rooftop yagi? Seems overkill. Yes, DTV isn't all it's cracked up to be, is it?
Gee, after I RTFA, I think this is still optional. Yes, your option is the old paper trail, a Hobson's choice if you like.
I'm assuuming a great deal here, such as the practical reality that at least some foreign nationals will not have access to the Internet to complete the online forms, nor any way to receive any communication from State, INS, DHS, ICE, or whatever. So opting out means sticking with paper.