SCO is not in the position to buy back their shares but they do have a very simple option, a reverse split. Although it isn't common and often has a negative effect on the market capitalization of a firm because it is a sign of weakness in the market it will have the needed results. It is quite simple to do, legal, and only requires the board of directors to execute. Shareholders don't even have to agree, although most would if it means the difference between being listed or going the way of an OTC stock.
You are 100% correct. They will most certainly do a reverse split. On March 14, 2002 they did a 1 for 4 reverse split. I would guess a similar 1 for 4 or even 1 for 5 split just to buy them some time. Since so many people are still convinced that this stock has some value based on its non-zero price, I doubt that a reverse split will hurt much. Those who wanted to get out have already done so and the hard core people who think SCOX might have a case will hang on until the very bitter end. A reverse split will prop up SCOX enough that they can avoid delisting and apparently limp along in their business for another couple of years perhaps.
That's what you get for working from memory. There is a long story I won't go into about something Groucho Marx supposedly said on the TV version of _You Bet Your Life_ (for youngsters, it's an old game show he used to host) that, according to the story, was so risque that it immediately got the show cancelled on the spot or some such nonsense. I read a bio of Groucho and the only thing the author could find was that Groucho did a radio show of _You Bet Your Life_ prior to the TV show and this show was only broadcast on the radio. In a warmup that was NOT broadcast, he said something similar to the comment he supposedly said on TV. There is no history of this incident ever occuring on TV. Websites have debunked it as an urban legend. Yet 10 years ago I worked with 2 different guys who swore they saw a rerun where Groucho said it. When I told one that the bio said it wasn't true, he just shrugged his shoulders and said he remembered seeing it. There's a Wikipedia story on it at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Bet_Your_Life Scroll down to the "cigar" headline. Note that despite the claims of some to have seen it, no one has ever produced a copy or any evidence other than memory that it happened and Groucho himself denied it.
Given that for reasons others have given that CDs can't be written to, I think your memory may be wrong. Now I did once see a cheap device that uses a needle like an old (think Thomas Edison old) grammophone to record grooves into the LABEL side of a CD as a kid's toy to show how grammophones used to work, but that's the only thing I can think of that even comes to this.
Why doesn't he government provide online tax processing website?
Because one of the mantras of a Republican controlled US government (remember, that the Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress from 2001 until this January) is that private industry always does a better job. Another mantra, which also applies, is that the free market solves all ills. That's why Uncle Sam doesn't do what you suggest.
Last I checked, other then HD/BR DVD players, and normal DVD players that upscale to 1080p, there are no sources from cable or satellite that broadcast in anything other then 720, so its kind of a moot point. I have heard rumours verizon fios tv will have a few 1080p channels in a few months, but nothing substantial... and last I checked, there boxes do not do 1080p (I could be wrong about the boxes statement though)
Wow, this is wrong. Since you mentioned Verizon, you must live in the USA. NBC and CBS both broadcast in 1080i right now. Discovery HD and Universal HD do too. Those come to mind fairly quickly. I'm sure there are others. By the way, I wouldn't hold my breath about 1080p TV broadcasts. The ATSC definition for high def TV used in the USA doesn't support it at this time because the bandwidth requirements to do this are enormous.
Why bother planning for the next 100 years when the rapture is immanent? Instead, they should be teaching the Bible in schools like we do here, so that they might be saved when Jesus returns.
It will no doubt shock you to know this, but the majority of Christians in the world do not believe in the rapture and quite a few of us really have no desire at all for the Bible to be taught in schools. Churches and parents can do the Bible teaching quite nicely on their own. The problem is that the people who do believe in the rapture and want the Bible to be taught in school make an awful lot of noise and while they are in very large numbers in the USA, they are not in the majority in other places. Catholics, Orthodox and other Christian groups totally reject the idea of the rapture as a misunderstanding of the Bible. But I suppose you probably think we all spend our spare time bombing abortion clincs too, don't you?
Smart people are unable to go to college because of lack of funds, and congress wants to waist money earmarked for education doing the RIAA's bidding.
Would you happen to be one of those "smart people" who couldn't go to college because of lack of funds? The reason I'm asking is that you think the word is waist instead of waste .
I'm not sure what strategy they're pursuing, but it's not working. One wonders why member companies continue funding an organization that frequently acts against their membership's best interests and frequently paints them in a bad light. It's just astounding to me how poorly RIAA performs their task and how ineffective in achieving their objectives. And they don't seem to learn anything from past failures. It's like a corporate version of the Bush administration.
I'd say it's because they're always been opposed to new ways of doing business because they're not smart enough to see new opportunities as a way to make money. To them, change=bad. People that run record labels are rarely all that bright. Clive Davis, who people think is some kind of genius I guess because he kind of ran Whitney Houston's career in the 80s, is a perfect example. He ran Arista Records at one time. Arista was the home of The Monkees. At the time of the Monkees revival in 1986 when they became popular all over again, the only LP/CD/tape available of their recordings were a couple of compilations. Their original LP releases had been out of print for over a decade because Davis and his cronies thought nobody would buy them. Rhino Records had the foresight to license (and eventually buy outright) the rights to re-issue the old LPs and they made multi-millions of dollars on them as almost all the re-issues entered the LP charts. These are the kinds of people you are dealing with in the recording industry. These are the people the RIAA represents. So it doesn't surprise me at all that the RIAA acts in ways that are against the members best interests because the members aren't bright enough to even know what their best interests are anyway. Record companies were opposed to radio playing records in the 1940s because "then nobody will buy records". Then they opposed audio cassettes ("nobody will buy LPs - everyone will just copy them") and so on.
Even fewer countries which claim to be democratic still practise it, such as...the USA.
For what it's worth, Japan does too.
For me, however, the anger comes at the fact they *did* extradite him to the USA, clearly in violation of the rules and laws of that country and the EU. If the USA wanted him so badly, they could abolish the death penalty. speaking of which, if I'm not mistaken, some more progressive non-bible-belt states in the USA already have forbidden such practises, as any civilised society would do. Or does it ultimately remain a federal decision? Maybe some US slashdotters can fill me in on this.
I'll bite. I'm a pro death penalty kind of guy living in a state with captial punishment. I don't see abolition of the death penalty ever happening here. Maybe fewer states will have it, but I don't think it will ever go away. The blunt truth, which you probably won't like to hear, is that the EU is notorious for its rather weak ideas of punishment. Good grief man, Italy seems to be convinced that victims are to blame for what criminals do as Italy can't release people soon enough from jail. The EU extradites people to the US because they generally know that their own laws are too weak to lock up the really bad people, so they send them us to do their dirty work for them. I love Europe, I really do, and I don't have a problem per se if they are opposed to the death penalty, but you guys really need to get tough with killers and lock them up for life instead of putting them in jail for 5 years and feeling sorry for them. Even Japan is pretty weak compared to the US. I remember a few years ago when some US servicemen got "very long sentences" for raping a Japanese woman, ranging from 5 to 7 years. Crap man, here in the US we can lock you up for LIFE for doing that.
We don't really care all that much when we have to make deals about "no capital punishment" to get people extradited here. At least if WE lock them up, they stay locked up. They don't get out on work release or similar nonsense after a few years because the system felt sorry for the poor little criminal. If there was ever a country that probably could use capital punishment, I would vote for Brazil. Their weak "we can't punish anyone for long no matter what" legal system, which is a direct result of the abuses of the military dictatorship in the past, has completely failed the country.
Simply put firefly fans were fanatical enough about firefly that they earned themselves a movie. When this movie came about, even though it wasn't as good as the series, they had so much personally invested that they continued to push it every chance they got. I'd suspect that a good portion of those firefly fans who voted for Serenity realize, and would even admit that Serenity isn't the greatest science fiction movie ever. But they perceive an attack on Serenity as an attack on their community, and therefore themselves, and thus feel the need to defend it.
This entire post is the most insightful thing I've seen on Slashdot in months. It just seems that being unable to rate it beyond 5 points is somehow cheating it, but at least it was correctly modded as high as possible.
As a programmer, I'm amused by both. 4 and 4.0 are equal by value but not in precision. 4 has one significant digit, while 4.0 has two. This is important because multiplying it by 1200 (which has two significant digits), yields two scientifically different answers. 4*1200 yields 5000 (5 x 10^3) while 4.0*1200 yields 4800 (4.8 x 10^3).
I'm curious as to what broke piece of crap you are using that thinks that 4*1200 is 5000. Dude, that's just wrong and it has nothing to do with precision at all. I guess in your world 2 + 2 does equal 5 for sufficiently large values of 2, as the old joke goes.
I translate his Russian site and I get: "Where are your nuclear Wessles?"
Yeah, at the time the film came out, it was a funny joke and it's still funny, it's just not accurate. For those who don't know, the "w" sound doesn't exist in Russian at all. They would certainly say "vessels" if speaking English. "W" is most often transliterated as "v" into Russian, but they can sort of approximate the sound with something equivalent to the use of "ui" to replace "w". So I hate to burst your bubble, but this is a joke made by some writer who knew nothing of the Russian language.
Considering that R.E.M. essentially is a corporation, I think it's funny that here they are being portrayed as fighters for the independent musician against the corporate machine.
You obviously don't know their history or it would make perfect sense to you. R.E.M. got their start on I.R.S. Records, which was an independent label. It was a large and successful independent label, but this was largely through good management that signed a lot of really good bands at the time. R.E.M. was the kind of band that the majors wouldn't have touched in their early days, but they toured and built up a following on the college circuit and eventually signed a major label contract and became big stars. However, without I.R.S. Records, probably nobody outside of Athens would have ever heard of them.
Doesn't anyone else see this as a simple way to generate more income for the USPTO? It sure looks like it to me. More patents, more fees.
I think you're right. Years ago I worked for the US federal government and I think I have a pretty good idea of how this will work out. The feds are real good at protecting their own agencies. More patents is great for the USPTO. More patents means more fees. It also means more examiners have to be hired. More examiners means there is a need for more managers. More managers means there is a need for more mid-level managers to manage these new managers managing these new examiners and so on. The last thing the USPTO wants is a decrease in patent applications as it would reduce their income and headcount.
What on earth would you use a spaceport for? I don't think in terms of eighth grade pulp sci-fi these days (think Tek Jansen), so seriously, what would a spaceport be for?
Basically, it's so a special plane can take people up very very high off the ground just barely into what could be called "outer space" but without going into orbit or beyond. It's a way for tourists to go to "outer space" without having to have the months of training and the multi-millions of dollars required to hitch a ride with the Russians because you just barely get into what is known as "outer space". Whether such a ride would meet what most people would define as "being in outer space" is a very good question. The plane is nothing like the Space Shuttle and it certainly can't go to the International Space Station. I have no idea what the duration of such a ride would be, but I would make a guess at an hour or two at most. Maybe less.
A few years ago, there was a story here on Slashdot about a guy who wrote an insider account of working for either Gateway or Dell. I think it was Dell, but it could have been Gateway. Anyway, he told about how he had a co-worker who was considered a tech support genius because his average call length was something like 45 seconds. Every call this guy got, he told the customer "Sorry. You violated your warranty." followed by the click of him hanging up. If they called back and got someone else who actually cared, then that person could work the ticket. His job was to get the customer off the phone ASAP. Management took notice and made him a supervisor because they just assumed that what he was doing was fixing problems really quickly and they had no idea he was just saying the same "Sorry. Not our problem." speech to every customer he talked to. I can't rule out a similar thing happening here.
I see shipped. I'd like to know how many were sold. On an interesting sidenote, how many of those sold were to be played on PS3s?
This kind of reminds me how at one LPs were certified gold or platinum based on units shipped, not sales. This led to some interesting "gold" and "platinum" certifications where certain LPs were shipped by the boxcar and returned unsold by the boxcar. The Bee Gees and Peter Frampton (and others) soundtrack to the movie of _Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band_ is probably the most infamous example. I have a vague memory that actual sales weren't very impressive and it was returned unsold in very large quantities. The RIAA ended up changing the rule to only count LPs sold for gold or platinum certification because it became obvious that a few record companies were willing to ship in quantities large enough to get LPs certified as gold or platinum even though they knew that the product wouldn't sell enough on its own to meet the requirements.
Surely, I reasoned, with the amount of time they took to set up that scam and avoid authorities, they could have gotten a job like I have and done something good for even more cash--but, that's my naïve American attitude for you. The job market probably doesn't exist there where they live.
Good jobs exist in Ukraine, but many of the people there have a "live for today, screw tomorrow" mindset, which is why they do things like this. They have learned that tomorrow may never come, so you better get what you can ASAP. This is why they do things like this.
Ukrainians are good people, but like the rest of the ex-USSR (the Baltic States may be an exception), they have this weird sense of entitlement that you can't really understand unless you go there. They think that because somebody in the West has more money than them that they have a right to steal some of that money to improve their own lives. They have very unrealistic expectations for their society. As Jim Morrison sang once "We want the world and we want it now!" They expect to have the same standard of living as the Western EU now instead of having a more realistic goal of trying to encourage foreign investment and trying within 10 years to get to where, say, Poland is today. Most of the Ukrainian citizens want to be where the UK is today and it's just not realistic. This lack of realistic expectations and sense of entitlement leads to massive disappointment with reality and a willingness to scam and steal on the internet to try to get closer to where they perceive they should be.
Good jobs do exist, especially in Kiev, but millionaires and rich foreigners have ruined the Kiev property market, which is another problem that the Ukrainian government is going to have to deal with down the road. Imagine making, say, $800 US a month and living in a city where all around you every day are new buildings with condos that cost $500,000 US and you have an idea of the kind of insane economic disparity that goes on. Similar craziness can be found in Russia too and I wouldn't be surprised if Belarus had some of it as well.
Not to start another endless thread, but it's better now to say "Ukraine" in English and not "the Ukraine". It's a long story, but basically it was considered OK to use "the" when it was part of the USSR but not now that it's an independent country. Do a search for a Ukrainian embassy in your favorite English speaking country and you'll see that at their website they don't use "the" in the country name. It's just Ukraine. Those who argue passionately for the use of "the" are either speakers of some language other than Russian, Ukrainian and English (ie. the rules are different for French) or a native of the region who learned English grammar using an old Soviet era grammar book where it was argued that the use of "the" was correct.
It makes perfect sense. I have one of these DVD recorders, and I use it to do essentially the same thing. One DVD-RAM holds up to 8 hours of TV, so it works great for catching up on TV that runs late at night or when I'm too busy to watch it.
There's nothing magical about DVD-RAM. DVD-RAM discs have the same capacity as any single layer DVD disc. What this means is that your DVD recorder has the ability to record up to 8 hours of video on a single layer DVD-RAM disc. The bit rate required to do so would be well below VCD bitrates, which are generally considered low quality. I'm glad this is working OK for you to record 8 hours per disc, but I don't think I'd be real happy with the results. By the way, you forgot to mention that DVD-RAM discs are expensive and difficult to find in the USA, so I'd say it's arguable as to whether or not this would be a good solution for a lot of people.
If you're a boring old fart like me then 1967 was the great year for singles (Beatles and the Stones at their prime, the Motown glory days and the US west coast just beginning to wake up) and the top selling single in the UK in 1967 was Tears for Souvenirs by Ken Dodd, not exactly great music.
I read this and I thought "Holy Crap!" I was a very young child in 1967, but I loved the music of the 60s, I just discovered it in the late 70s. I know a lot about British pop music of this era and I have to admit I was just crushed to read that as I know nothing about Ken Dodd. Never heard of him. Thanks to Wikipedia I found List Of Best Selling Singles UK and I learned that: 1) The song is called "Tears" 2) It came out in 1965, but it was the top selling song of that year. Now I don't feel so bad that I didn't know about it. The top selling single in the UK in 1967 was "Release Me" by the "great" (LOL) Engelbert Humperdink.
I don't understand. Isn't there something out there that protects this sort of thing? He wasn't hateful, it was an artistic and political statement. I'm no obama supporter, but the video was very well done. Is obama against free speech?
The First Ammendment protects against going to jail for something you said (for sake of simplicity, I'm skipping the obvious "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" type arguments). It does not guarantee anything else. Employment is not a right guaranteed under the Constitution.
Obama's handlers have to officially play the outrage game because that's just how things are done in politics to avoid pissing off potential voters who are offended by such things. It also gives them grounds to complain if someone who loves Hillary makes a similar video against Obama.
It'll be interesting to watch SCOs share price now...
It's been under a dollar a share for a few days now. If it continues, it could lead to delisting. Look for SCOX if you want to track it on a ticker. However, in the past SCO did a reverse split and they could always do another one and convert 2 or 3 shares to 1 and get back over a dollar a share to avoid delisting. Then again, Wall Street has frankly been insane in supporting this stock and I wouldn't be surprised at all by Monday or even today (early trends are actually up for the stock today) for it to be worth over a dollar a share again. I'm hoping for a delisting as that would hurt SCO immensely, but I'm not holding my breath. A stock market that has believed against all rational thought for years that SCO has some value is unlikely to be smart enough to realize by now that the game is almost over and start getting out while they can.
I sincerely do not understand why, in this day and age, there are still schools that separate children based on their sex.
I suspect organized religion has done its deeds here as well.
Once again, another paranoid "Blame everything on religion" rant. Some parents send their girls to all girls schools in the (mistaken?) belief that girls are overlooked in public schools in favor of boys and going to an all girls school will remedy this. It could also be that the school in question might just have a really good reputation as an academic institution and the fact that it is an all girls school is incidental to that. Some parents send their girls to all girls schools to keep them away from boys because of promiscuous behavior by the girls, but this never works. They always find ways to meet boys outside of school.
So what if an early DST doesn't really have huge enery savings? Of course, this is a research paper by 2 students at the People's Republic of Berkeley, who no doubt must be the most completely objective sources on the planet. (sarcasm off) There are benefits such as being able to actually go outside and get some exercise after work or do yard work because it's not too dark, being able to drive home after work in daylight and so on. I love DST and I wish the government had moved it up years ago, but I'm glad it's already started.
AT&T (now Cingular, soon AT&T) - didn't work in THREE AIRPORTS, poor coverage in SE Ohio.
To be fair, you do need to specify if you had AT&T's GSM service or not, because they also sold an awful CDMA service for a while. My previous employer foolishly signed a long term deal with AT&T maybe 7 years ago or so and got put on AT&T's CDMA service. After AT&T got bought out by Cingular, they began to phase out the CDMA service, as well they should because it was awful. I lost track of how many times my phone would vibrate telling me that I "missed a call" when the phone was connected to my belt. I never understood how if they could send a "missed call" message to the phone that they couldn't have just sent the call in the first place, but this happened all the time. My former employer is still using the CDMA service. It's a long story, but basically even though Cingular/AT&T doesn't really and truly want them on the service and would prefer to have them on GSM, Cingular/AT&T has done nothing to make the transition easy, such as offering free GSM phones, so my former employer continues to pay AT&T for a cellular service that doesn't work very well because it's cheaper than paying more to move to GSM, which actually works extremely well in our city. Both AT&T and T-Mobile have excellent coverage where I live.
I just have one question. How can the EU seriously consider Turkey for membership when it 1) refuses to recognize a member of the EU (Cyprus) and 2) refuses to end its illegal occupation of that same member (the bogus "nation" of Northern Cyprus)? Does refusal to recognize an existing member somehow not matter? If it was me, I'd tell Turkey in no uncertain terms that until those issues are resolved, talks are meaningless because there can be no membership without resolution of both issues and both issues can only be resolved in a way that Turkey will never agree to. I suppose the EU has nothing better to do than waste everyone's time with this charade.
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SCO is not in the position to buy back their shares but they do have a very simple option, a reverse split. Although it isn't common and often has a negative effect on the market capitalization of a firm because it is a sign of weakness in the market it will have the needed results. It is quite simple to do, legal, and only requires the board of directors to execute. Shareholders don't even have to agree, although most would if it means the difference between being listed or going the way of an OTC stock.
You are 100% correct. They will most certainly do a reverse split. On March 14, 2002 they did a 1 for 4 reverse split. I would guess a similar 1 for 4 or even 1 for 5 split just to buy them some time. Since so many people are still convinced that this stock has some value based on its non-zero price, I doubt that a reverse split will hurt much. Those who wanted to get out have already done so and the hard core people who think SCOX might have a case will hang on until the very bitter end. A reverse split will prop up SCOX enough that they can avoid delisting and apparently limp along in their business for another couple of years perhaps.
That's what you get for working from memory. There is a long story I won't go into about something Groucho Marx supposedly said on the TV version of _You Bet Your Life_ (for youngsters, it's an old game show he used to host) that, according to the story, was so risque that it immediately got the show cancelled on the spot or some such nonsense. I read a bio of Groucho and the only thing the author could find was that Groucho did a radio show of _You Bet Your Life_ prior to the TV show and this show was only broadcast on the radio. In a warmup that was NOT broadcast, he said something similar to the comment he supposedly said on TV. There is no history of this incident ever occuring on TV. Websites have debunked it as an urban legend. Yet 10 years ago I worked with 2 different guys who swore they saw a rerun where Groucho said it. When I told one that the bio said it wasn't true, he just shrugged his shoulders and said he remembered seeing it. There's a Wikipedia story on it at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Bet_Your_Life
Scroll down to the "cigar" headline. Note that despite the claims of some to have seen it, no one has ever produced a copy or any evidence other than memory that it happened and Groucho himself denied it.
Given that for reasons others have given that CDs can't be written to, I think your memory may be wrong. Now I did once see a cheap device that uses a needle like an old (think Thomas Edison old) grammophone to record grooves into the LABEL side of a CD as a kid's toy to show how grammophones used to work, but that's the only thing I can think of that even comes to this.
Why doesn't he government provide online tax processing website?
Because one of the mantras of a Republican controlled US government (remember, that the Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress from 2001 until this January) is that private industry always does a better job. Another mantra, which also applies, is that the free market solves all ills. That's why Uncle Sam doesn't do what you suggest.
Last I checked, other then HD/BR DVD players, and normal DVD players that upscale to 1080p, there are no sources from cable or satellite that broadcast in anything other then 720, so its kind of a moot point. I have heard rumours verizon fios tv will have a few 1080p channels in a few months, but nothing substantial... and last I checked, there boxes do not do 1080p (I could be wrong about the boxes statement though)
Wow, this is wrong. Since you mentioned Verizon, you must live in the USA. NBC and CBS both broadcast in 1080i right now. Discovery HD and Universal HD do too. Those come to mind fairly quickly. I'm sure there are others. By the way, I wouldn't hold my breath about 1080p TV broadcasts. The ATSC definition for high def TV used in the USA doesn't support it at this time because the bandwidth requirements to do this are enormous.
Why bother planning for the next 100 years when the rapture is immanent? Instead, they should be teaching the Bible in schools like we do here, so that they might be saved when Jesus returns.
It will no doubt shock you to know this, but the majority of Christians in the world do not believe in the rapture and quite a few of us really have no desire at all for the Bible to be taught in schools. Churches and parents can do the Bible teaching quite nicely on their own. The problem is that the people who do believe in the rapture and want the Bible to be taught in school make an awful lot of noise and while they are in very large numbers in the USA, they are not in the majority in other places. Catholics, Orthodox and other Christian groups totally reject the idea of the rapture as a misunderstanding of the Bible. But I suppose you probably think we all spend our spare time bombing abortion clincs too, don't you?
Smart people are unable to go to college because of lack of funds, and congress wants to waist money earmarked for education doing the RIAA's bidding.
Would you happen to be one of those "smart people" who couldn't go to college because of lack of funds? The reason I'm asking is that you think the word is waist instead of waste .
I'm not sure what strategy they're pursuing, but it's not working. One wonders why member companies continue funding an organization that frequently acts against their membership's best interests and frequently paints them in a bad light. It's just astounding to me how poorly RIAA performs their task and how ineffective in achieving their objectives. And they don't seem to learn anything from past failures. It's like a corporate version of the Bush administration.
I'd say it's because they're always been opposed to new ways of doing business because they're not smart enough to see new opportunities as a way to make money. To them, change=bad. People that run record labels are rarely all that bright. Clive Davis, who people think is some kind of genius I guess because he kind of ran Whitney Houston's career in the 80s, is a perfect example. He ran Arista Records at one time. Arista was the home of The Monkees. At the time of the Monkees revival in 1986 when they became popular all over again, the only LP/CD/tape available of their recordings were a couple of compilations. Their original LP releases had been out of print for over a decade because Davis and his cronies thought nobody would buy them. Rhino Records had the foresight to license (and eventually buy outright) the rights to re-issue the old LPs and they made multi-millions of dollars on them as almost all the re-issues entered the LP charts. These are the kinds of people you are dealing with in the recording industry. These are the people the RIAA represents. So it doesn't surprise me at all that the RIAA acts in ways that are against the members best interests because the members aren't bright enough to even know what their best interests are anyway. Record companies were opposed to radio playing records in the 1940s because "then nobody will buy records". Then they opposed audio cassettes ("nobody will buy LPs - everyone will just copy them") and so on.
Even fewer countries which claim to be democratic still practise it, such as...the USA.
For what it's worth, Japan does too.
For me, however, the anger comes at the fact they *did* extradite him to the USA, clearly in violation of the rules and laws of that country and the EU. If the USA wanted him so badly, they could abolish the death penalty. speaking of which, if I'm not mistaken, some more progressive non-bible-belt states in the USA already have forbidden such practises, as any civilised society would do. Or does it ultimately remain a federal decision? Maybe some US slashdotters can fill me in on this.
I'll bite. I'm a pro death penalty kind of guy living in a state with captial punishment. I don't see abolition of the death penalty ever happening here. Maybe fewer states will have it, but I don't think it will ever go away. The blunt truth, which you probably won't like to hear, is that the EU is notorious for its rather weak ideas of punishment. Good grief man, Italy seems to be convinced that victims are to blame for what criminals do as Italy can't release people soon enough from jail. The EU extradites people to the US because they generally know that their own laws are too weak to lock up the really bad people, so they send them us to do their dirty work for them. I love Europe, I really do, and I don't have a problem per se if they are opposed to the death penalty, but you guys really need to get tough with killers and lock them up for life instead of putting them in jail for 5 years and feeling sorry for them. Even Japan is pretty weak compared to the US. I remember a few years ago when some US servicemen got "very long sentences" for raping a Japanese woman, ranging from 5 to 7 years. Crap man, here in the US we can lock you up for LIFE for doing that.
We don't really care all that much when we have to make deals about "no capital punishment" to get people extradited here. At least if WE lock them up, they stay locked up. They don't get out on work release or similar nonsense after a few years because the system felt sorry for the poor little criminal. If there was ever a country that probably could use capital punishment, I would vote for Brazil. Their weak "we can't punish anyone for long no matter what" legal system, which is a direct result of the abuses of the military dictatorship in the past, has completely failed the country.
Simply put firefly fans were fanatical enough about firefly that they earned themselves a movie. When this movie came about, even though it wasn't as good as the series, they had so much personally invested that they continued to push it every chance they got. I'd suspect that a good portion of those firefly fans who voted for Serenity realize, and would even admit that Serenity isn't the greatest science fiction movie ever. But they perceive an attack on Serenity as an attack on their community, and therefore themselves, and thus feel the need to defend it.
This entire post is the most insightful thing I've seen on Slashdot in months. It just seems that being unable to rate it beyond 5 points is somehow cheating it, but at least it was correctly modded as high as possible.
As a programmer, I'm amused by both.
4 and 4.0 are equal by value but not in precision. 4 has one significant digit, while 4.0 has two. This is important because multiplying it by 1200 (which has two significant digits), yields two scientifically different answers. 4*1200 yields 5000 (5 x 10^3) while 4.0*1200 yields 4800 (4.8 x 10^3).
I'm curious as to what broke piece of crap you are using that thinks that 4*1200 is 5000. Dude, that's just wrong and it has nothing to do with precision at all. I guess in your world 2 + 2 does equal 5 for sufficiently large values of 2, as the old joke goes.
I translate his Russian site and I get: "Where are your nuclear Wessles?"
Yeah, at the time the film came out, it was a funny joke and it's still funny, it's just not accurate. For those who don't know, the "w" sound doesn't exist in Russian at all. They would certainly say "vessels" if speaking English. "W" is most often transliterated as "v" into Russian, but they can sort of approximate the sound with something equivalent to the use of "ui" to replace "w". So I hate to burst your bubble, but this is a joke made by some writer who knew nothing of the Russian language.
Considering that R.E.M. essentially is a corporation, I think it's funny that here they are being portrayed as fighters for the independent musician against the corporate machine.
You obviously don't know their history or it would make perfect sense to you. R.E.M. got their start on I.R.S. Records, which was an independent label. It was a large and successful independent label, but this was largely through good management that signed a lot of really good bands at the time. R.E.M. was the kind of band that the majors wouldn't have touched in their early days, but they toured and built up a following on the college circuit and eventually signed a major label contract and became big stars. However, without I.R.S. Records, probably nobody outside of Athens would have ever heard of them.
Doesn't anyone else see this as a simple way to generate more income for the USPTO? It sure looks like it to me. More patents, more fees.
I think you're right. Years ago I worked for the US federal government and I think I have a pretty good idea of how this will work out. The feds are real good at protecting their own agencies. More patents is great for the USPTO. More patents means more fees. It also means more examiners have to be hired. More examiners means there is a need for more managers. More managers means there is a need for more mid-level managers to manage these new managers managing these new examiners and so on. The last thing the USPTO wants is a decrease in patent applications as it would reduce their income and headcount.
What on earth would you use a spaceport for? I don't think in terms of eighth grade pulp sci-fi these days (think Tek Jansen), so seriously, what would a spaceport be for?
Basically, it's so a special plane can take people up very very high off the ground just barely into what could be called "outer space" but without going into orbit or beyond. It's a way for tourists to go to "outer space" without having to have the months of training and the multi-millions of dollars required to hitch a ride with the Russians because you just barely get into what is known as "outer space". Whether such a ride would meet what most people would define as "being in outer space" is a very good question. The plane is nothing like the Space Shuttle and it certainly can't go to the International Space Station. I have no idea what the duration of such a ride would be, but I would make a guess at an hour or two at most. Maybe less.
A few years ago, there was a story here on Slashdot about a guy who wrote an insider account of working for either Gateway or Dell. I think it was Dell, but it could have been Gateway. Anyway, he told about how he had a co-worker who was considered a tech support genius because his average call length was something like 45 seconds. Every call this guy got, he told the customer "Sorry. You violated your warranty." followed by the click of him hanging up. If they called back and got someone else who actually cared, then that person could work the ticket. His job was to get the customer off the phone ASAP. Management took notice and made him a supervisor because they just assumed that what he was doing was fixing problems really quickly and they had no idea he was just saying the same "Sorry. Not our problem." speech to every customer he talked to. I can't rule out a similar thing happening here.
I see shipped. I'd like to know how many were sold. On an interesting sidenote, how many of those sold were to be played on PS3s?
This kind of reminds me how at one LPs were certified gold or platinum based on units shipped, not sales. This led to some interesting "gold" and "platinum" certifications where certain LPs were shipped by the boxcar and returned unsold by the boxcar. The Bee Gees and Peter Frampton (and others) soundtrack to the movie of _Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band_ is probably the most infamous example. I have a vague memory that actual sales weren't very impressive and it was returned unsold in very large quantities. The RIAA ended up changing the rule to only count LPs sold for gold or platinum certification because it became obvious that a few record companies were willing to ship in quantities large enough to get LPs certified as gold or platinum even though they knew that the product wouldn't sell enough on its own to meet the requirements.
Surely, I reasoned, with the amount of time they took to set up that scam and avoid authorities, they could have gotten a job like I have and done something good for even more cash--but, that's my naïve American attitude for you. The job market probably doesn't exist there where they live.
Good jobs exist in Ukraine, but many of the people there have a "live for today, screw tomorrow" mindset, which is why they do things like this. They have learned that tomorrow may never come, so you better get what you can ASAP. This is why they do things like this.
Ukrainians are good people, but like the rest of the ex-USSR (the Baltic States may be an exception), they have this weird sense of entitlement that you can't really understand unless you go there. They think that because somebody in the West has more money than them that they have a right to steal some of that money to improve their own lives. They have very unrealistic expectations for their society. As Jim Morrison sang once "We want the world and we want it now!" They expect to have the same standard of living as the Western EU now instead of having a more realistic goal of trying to encourage foreign investment and trying within 10 years to get to where, say, Poland is today. Most of the Ukrainian citizens want to be where the UK is today and it's just not realistic. This lack of realistic expectations and sense of entitlement leads to massive disappointment with reality and a willingness to scam and steal on the internet to try to get closer to where they perceive they should be.
Good jobs do exist, especially in Kiev, but millionaires and rich foreigners have ruined the Kiev property market, which is another problem that the Ukrainian government is going to have to deal with down the road. Imagine making, say, $800 US a month and living in a city where all around you every day are new buildings with condos that cost $500,000 US and you have an idea of the kind of insane economic disparity that goes on. Similar craziness can be found in Russia too and I wouldn't be surprised if Belarus had some of it as well.
Not to start another endless thread, but it's better now to say "Ukraine" in English and not "the Ukraine". It's a long story, but basically it was considered OK to use "the" when it was part of the USSR but not now that it's an independent country. Do a search for a Ukrainian embassy in your favorite English speaking country and you'll see that at their website they don't use "the" in the country name. It's just Ukraine. Those who argue passionately for the use of "the" are either speakers of some language other than Russian, Ukrainian and English (ie. the rules are different for French) or a native of the region who learned English grammar using an old Soviet era grammar book where it was argued that the use of "the" was correct.
It makes perfect sense. I have one of these DVD recorders, and I use it to do essentially the same thing. One DVD-RAM holds up to 8 hours of TV, so it works great for catching up on TV that runs late at night or when I'm too busy to watch it.
There's nothing magical about DVD-RAM. DVD-RAM discs have the same capacity as any single layer DVD disc. What this means is that your DVD recorder has the ability to record up to 8 hours of video on a single layer DVD-RAM disc. The bit rate required to do so would be well below VCD bitrates, which are generally considered low quality. I'm glad this is working OK for you to record 8 hours per disc, but I don't think I'd be real happy with the results. By the way, you forgot to mention that DVD-RAM discs are expensive and difficult to find in the USA, so I'd say it's arguable as to whether or not this would be a good solution for a lot of people.
If you're a boring old fart like me then 1967 was the great year for singles (Beatles and the Stones at their prime, the Motown glory days and the US west coast just beginning to wake up) and the top selling single in the UK in 1967 was Tears for Souvenirs by Ken Dodd, not exactly great music.
I read this and I thought "Holy Crap!" I was a very young child in 1967, but I loved the music of the 60s, I just discovered it in the late 70s. I know a lot about British pop music of this era and I have to admit I was just crushed to read that as I know nothing about Ken Dodd. Never heard of him. Thanks to Wikipedia I found List Of Best Selling Singles UK and I learned that:
1) The song is called "Tears"
2) It came out in 1965, but it was the top selling song of that year.
Now I don't feel so bad that I didn't know about it. The top selling single in the UK in 1967 was "Release Me" by the "great" (LOL) Engelbert Humperdink.
I don't understand. Isn't there something out there that protects this sort of thing? He wasn't hateful, it was an artistic and political statement. I'm no obama supporter, but the video was very well done. Is obama against free speech?
The First Ammendment protects against going to jail for something you said (for sake of simplicity, I'm skipping the obvious "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" type arguments). It does not guarantee anything else. Employment is not a right guaranteed under the Constitution.
Obama's handlers have to officially play the outrage game because that's just how things are done in politics to avoid pissing off potential voters who are offended by such things. It also gives them grounds to complain if someone who loves Hillary makes a similar video against Obama.
It'll be interesting to watch SCOs share price now...
It's been under a dollar a share for a few days now. If it continues, it could lead to delisting. Look for SCOX if you want to track it on a ticker. However, in the past SCO did a reverse split and they could always do another one and convert 2 or 3 shares to 1 and get back over a dollar a share to avoid delisting. Then again, Wall Street has frankly been insane in supporting this stock and I wouldn't be surprised at all by Monday or even today (early trends are actually up for the stock today) for it to be worth over a dollar a share again. I'm hoping for a delisting as that would hurt SCO immensely, but I'm not holding my breath. A stock market that has believed against all rational thought for years that SCO has some value is unlikely to be smart enough to realize by now that the game is almost over and start getting out while they can.
I sincerely do not understand why, in this day and age, there are still schools that separate children based on their sex.
I suspect organized religion has done its deeds here as well.
Once again, another paranoid "Blame everything on religion" rant. Some parents send their girls to all girls schools in the (mistaken?) belief that girls are overlooked in public schools in favor of boys and going to an all girls school will remedy this. It could also be that the school in question might just have a really good reputation as an academic institution and the fact that it is an all girls school is incidental to that. Some parents send their girls to all girls schools to keep them away from boys because of promiscuous behavior by the girls, but this never works. They always find ways to meet boys outside of school.
So what if an early DST doesn't really have huge enery savings? Of course, this is a research paper by 2 students at the People's Republic of Berkeley, who no doubt must be the most completely objective sources on the planet. (sarcasm off) There are benefits such as being able to actually go outside and get some exercise after work or do yard work because it's not too dark, being able to drive home after work in daylight and so on. I love DST and I wish the government had moved it up years ago, but I'm glad it's already started.
AT&T (now Cingular, soon AT&T) - didn't work in THREE AIRPORTS, poor coverage in SE Ohio.
To be fair, you do need to specify if you had AT&T's GSM service or not, because they also sold an awful CDMA service for a while. My previous employer foolishly signed a long term deal with AT&T maybe 7 years ago or so and got put on AT&T's CDMA service. After AT&T got bought out by Cingular, they began to phase out the CDMA service, as well they should because it was awful. I lost track of how many times my phone would vibrate telling me that I "missed a call" when the phone was connected to my belt. I never understood how if they could send a "missed call" message to the phone that they couldn't have just sent the call in the first place, but this happened all the time. My former employer is still using the CDMA service. It's a long story, but basically even though Cingular/AT&T doesn't really and truly want them on the service and would prefer to have them on GSM, Cingular/AT&T has done nothing to make the transition easy, such as offering free GSM phones, so my former employer continues to pay AT&T for a cellular service that doesn't work very well because it's cheaper than paying more to move to GSM, which actually works extremely well in our city. Both AT&T and T-Mobile have excellent coverage where I live.
I just have one question. How can the EU seriously consider Turkey for membership when it
1) refuses to recognize a member of the EU (Cyprus) and
2) refuses to end its illegal occupation of that same member (the bogus "nation" of Northern Cyprus)?
Does refusal to recognize an existing member somehow not matter? If it was me, I'd tell Turkey in no uncertain terms that until those issues are resolved, talks are meaningless because there can be no membership without resolution of both issues and both issues can only be resolved in a way that Turkey will never agree to. I suppose the EU has nothing better to do than waste everyone's time with this charade.