Indeed. A friend of mine died instantly when someone ran a red light (and there were witnesses, unfortunately for the witnesses) and she went over the handlebars, breaking her neck and killing her instantly.
Of course in Canada, between 30-50 percent of a person's pay ends up back in government coffers, between income tax, sales tax, and other hidden taxes in the various industries
That's no different than here. In fact considering how people here whine about how taxes will go up so much if we instituted a sane health care policy like yours It's surprising that yours isn't higher.
I stand corrected, haven't read the books in quite some time. My daugher bough the omnibus edition for me at Christmas, with all of the novels in it, and just got past Marvin facing down the battle tank in the Restaraunt volume.
I also discovered that I got the quote wrong in my sig...
Wikipedia says your minimum wage is almost twice our Federal (although most states have higher minimum wages) depending on where in Canada you live, and besides that our minimum wage workers have no health care at all! Minimum wage jobs here don't provide health insurance.
65% of workers earning minimum wage work part time
That's irrelevant to the 35% who work full time.
Half of people earning minimum are under 25
So the father who is old enought to drink doesn't deserve to support his family? The HALF (by your numbers) who are over 25 don't deserve to support theirs? I was 35 before I had kids, but most folks have their first child before age 25. What is the signifigance of the age of 25?
Food service provides the largest chunk of these minimum wage jobs. But, these jobs generally aren't "minimum wage" in that a lot of them are tipped positions.
That's right. Wait staff earn LESS than the minimum wage, often after tips.
22% are married. A minimum wage job is a secondary source of income.
1. Unmarried people often have families 2. Married ones are working minimum wage because their minimum-working wage spouse can't support the family. So they have babysitters raising their children. IMO that's a very bad thing.
Minimum wage does not work.
True in the US (but not in Europe), because it's FAR TOO LITTLE to live on. It does work in countries (which is nearly everyone else) whose minimum wages are high enough.
The overwhelming majority of people earning it are not impoverished
Untrue. You don't get food stamps unless you are impoverished, and you don't get the Earned Income tax refund unless you are both impoverished and employed.
fixing the food stamps program would be a better use of our congresscritter's time
Food stamps subsidize business, not the poor. I shouldn't be supporting your employees, YOU should. They're YOUR employees.
maybe we could look at reforming our public education system and at further subsidization of student loans.
I agree. And not just loand, but restore the Pell grants to what they were when I went to college.
That's why after splitting my vote between the Rs and the Ds, I now split my vote between the Ls and the Gs along with a very few Rs and Ds that seem to rise to the top of the toilet.
Hmm. where did I see that sentiment expressed before? Oh yeah, about thirty five years ago.
Every politician is frightened of the possibility that the non-voting 40% suddenly becomes angry enough to vote, and vote for some other party.
As for the hippie defamation, well. The international pro-marijuana movement has done pretty well changing the image. Everyone up here either smokes or has friends who do: they know that these people aren't in fact "supporting communism" any more than the guy who grows petunias in his walk-in closet does. Several countries have MPs who've come out, saying that there is nothing wrong with marijuana.
Yeah, one country legalized and more decriminalized, but...
Because religious beliefs ARE a person's values, whethere they're Christians, Muslims, even Athiests ("I believe there is no god" is a belief about religion, making it a religious belief).
The trouble is, most politicans and many preachers and some churchgoers don't really share those values (e.g., "the love of money is the root of all evil") but only give lip service to them. You can't judge what is in a person's heart, only what they express.
The idea that religious people are all stupid is incredibly ignorant. The idea that all southerners (and I'm not one) are stupid is equally ignorant. He (you?) was lucky his post wasn't modded "flamebait".
NKB checked for this OT post, as you should have when you checked PA.
How many really good Operating systems are out there?
For the x886 alone I can think of a dozen offhand. How many do you need?
How many programs as good as Photoshop, Autocad, or even Office?
IMO these are all very poor examples. I've used them (except autocad), and they SUCK. I did use a very good drafting program back in the early 1990s, a shareware program.
The talent and work to make programs of that quality is scarce
No, the world is teeming with programmers. There are hundreds of thousands of open source programmers, let alone closed source programmers.
This load of dung is simply a want for free stuff that others work hard to make.
There are those (perhaps even the fellow you were responding to) who think the idea of copyright is bad, but there are fare more of us who think copyright law has become stupidly draconian. If the copyright law was as it was when it was first instituted in the US, few would have any problem with it, and software companies would be forced to upgrade at least every 14 years.
has been true about books for around 200 years
Wikipedia says You're a hundred years shy of the mark. "England's Statute of Anne (1710) is widely regarded as the first copyright law."
This load of dung is simply a want for free stuff that others work hard to make.
That statement is flamebait and untrue as well, and I won't say more about it. The metamoderators may, though (little chance I'll see it when I metamoderate but you never know).
Then your (our, really) problem is not the agreements but your dickless administration.
Is your dick dickless?
These people are supreme pricks, ultimate dicks! Unlike your elected officials, ours don't give a rat's ass about their country (don't look at today's "mcgrew journal", it might set your monitor on fire).
And that fact hasn't deterred the Government from the 'War on Drugs' either.
The war on (some) drugs has actually caused the very same problems it was designed to prevent! "Think of the children!!! Pot is illegal so the kids can't get it!!" But ask any high school kid if you can buy pot in his school - any kid can, any day. But you can't buy beer, a legal "non-war" drug, in school.
"It leads to harder drugs!" No, the laws against it do. The people selling the pot also sell the "harder drugs." If the dealer is out of pot, or greedy, he may well try to sell you the very dangerous and highly addictive crack cocaine. The liquor store guy won't.
"It causes violent crime!" No, the artificial value of this easily grown weed causes the gang wars between the various factions selling it. You had gang wars and bloody violence over alcohol during alcohol prohibition, but that violence ended with the prohibition.
Likewise, the "war on illegal file sharing" may ironically kill the very industries that are screaming for those laws. The RIAA should ignore file sharing and do what they've done for a century - sell records. Not ethereal strings of ones and zeros, but physical manifestations of them - CDs.
File sharing no more hurts the record industry than the VCR ("is to Hollywood what the Boston Strangler was to women") hurt the movie industry.
Unfortunately, this trade agreement....will pretty much do just that, it will unify laws to what the US, and the other top IP countries want.
In THHGTTG trilogy, there is the "third ark" ship with its hairdressers, fashion designers, telephone sanitizers, and other useless members of Golgafrinchan society who crash land on prehistoric Earth. They decide to use tree leaves as money, making all of them incredibly wealthy. However, it causes a huge inflation problem, which the Golgafrinchans solve by burning down the forests.
A digital file is like a tree leaf. They cost nothing. To pay for one is madness, to try to use them as a medium of exchange (trade for other goods) is even greater madness. The only sane use of digital sales is sale of the physical medium the file is stored on - like a CD or DVD.
For a country to base their entire economy on digital files is supreme madness, as stupid as the Golgafrinchans' use of tree leaves as money.
The heavy handed attempts to stop the sharing of something that is entirely cost-free to everyone is as stupid as the Golgafrinchans' torching of the forests.
MP3s didn't and couldn't kill CD sales, but the switch from CDs to "selling" DRM-infested downloads instead of physical media certainly might.
My legislators are morons and my country is on its way down.
It is, in fact, a retail copy I bought at Circut City back when my daugher installed Sony's XCP rootkit (that'll teach her to trust a multinational corporation!). I haven't bought a whole computer since about 1989 when I bought a used IBM XP, from then on all I bought was parts. I've paid retail for several MS OSes. I swore 98 was going to be the last, now I only hope XP will be.
I need to DL a new Linux distro, the only thing that keeps XP on the computer at all is the fact that my version of Mandriva thinks Windows subdirectories on the second drive (Windows' D:) are files. I haven't updated it in several years, so I may now.
Thanks for the encouragement, I was ready to write it up as a "wasted" hundred bucks (not really wasted as I've used it for a couple of years now).
Not hardly. My PC recently died (I mentioned it in the other thread today) and I dragged an even older one from the basement. Now, I'd like to put my hard drives, wireless mouse and keyboard, video card with its S-Video so I can plug the TV as a monitor, etc in it.
XP is going to say that it's a different computer and refuse to run more than 30 days. It has a EULA that slashdotters say is a legal document (although I never signed anything) to back it up.
I fail to see how this court ruling benefits the user. As Agent Smith said to Neo, "what good is a phone call if you're unable to speak?"
There are some jobs which will never, ever provide you (or a family!) with a decent standard of living.
Then why, as wikipedia says, do 90% of all counties have the minimum wage? But I don't think that the minimum wage is supopsed to provide a DECENT standard of living, I think it's supposed to keep you from being homeless and starving.
If your employees get food stamps or the earned income tax creadit, they're not the ones living off the government's teat, YOU are.
caps started to expand and break their 'plus sign' seals on the top of their cans
Once as a teenaged soldering-iron hacker/nerd, I wanted to see if a cheap nine volt transistor radio would survive a twelve volt car battery.
I hooked it up, and there was a flash and a pop. Two little can capacitors had blown up.
To this day, forty years later, I still can't understand why that radio worked afterwards, but it did, for several years.
Of course, for all I know after the caps exploded, whenever Led Zeppelin came on the radio every ham radio operator in a ten mile radius cursed me. I still wonder what those capacitors were for.
Hmm, I think (well, I sincerely HOPE) you hit the nail on the head. It should be incredibly easy to test the on-off switches (there are two), just short them out. If it's one of the switches it's a zero-cost fix! Thanks!
Since it's plugged into a power strip that all the other junk the PC needs (wireless keyboard/moste, powered speakers, amplifier for the big JBL speakers, etc) and the power strip gets shut off after the PC is shut down anyway, it doesn't really need an on/off switch, let alone two of them.
Slashdot Mirror
IMO, This invention offers a great chance to be wearing road rash
A wearable computer game? Cool!
Indeed. A friend of mine died instantly when someone ran a red light (and there were witnesses, unfortunately for the witnesses) and she went over the handlebars, breaking her neck and killing her instantly.
Three wheeled motorcycles are tricycles, but if a bike or trike has a motor, it's a motorcycle.
Of course in Canada, between 30-50 percent of a person's pay ends up back in government coffers, between income tax, sales tax, and other hidden taxes in the various industries
That's no different than here. In fact considering how people here whine about how taxes will go up so much if we instituted a sane health care policy like yours It's surprising that yours isn't higher.
I stand corrected, haven't read the books in quite some time. My daugher bough the omnibus edition for me at Christmas, with all of the novels in it, and just got past Marvin facing down the battle tank in the Restaraunt volume.
I also discovered that I got the quote wrong in my sig...
It's dual boot. I shouldn't have to use less than legitimate means to use an item I purchesed legitimately!
As soon as I find the distro that knows that the subdirectories on my D: drive (which holds the data) aren't files, Windows is gone from my system.
Wikipedia says your minimum wage is almost twice our Federal (although most states have higher minimum wages) depending on where in Canada you live, and besides that our minimum wage workers have no health care at all! Minimum wage jobs here don't provide health insurance.
65% of workers earning minimum wage work part time
That's irrelevant to the 35% who work full time.
Half of people earning minimum are under 25
So the father who is old enought to drink doesn't deserve to support his family? The HALF (by your numbers) who are over 25 don't deserve to support theirs? I was 35 before I had kids, but most folks have their first child before age 25. What is the signifigance of the age of 25?
Food service provides the largest chunk of these minimum wage jobs. But, these jobs generally aren't "minimum wage" in that a lot of them are tipped positions.
That's right. Wait staff earn LESS than the minimum wage, often after tips.
22% are married. A minimum wage job is a secondary source of income.
1. Unmarried people often have families
2. Married ones are working minimum wage because their minimum-working wage spouse can't support the family. So they have babysitters raising their children. IMO that's a very bad thing.
Minimum wage does not work.
True in the US (but not in Europe), because it's FAR TOO LITTLE to live on. It does work in countries (which is nearly everyone else) whose minimum wages are high enough.
The overwhelming majority of people earning it are not impoverished
Untrue. You don't get food stamps unless you are impoverished, and you don't get the Earned Income tax refund unless you are both impoverished and employed.
fixing the food stamps program would be a better use of our congresscritter's time
Food stamps subsidize business, not the poor. I shouldn't be supporting your employees, YOU should. They're YOUR employees.
maybe we could look at reforming our public education system and at further subsidization of student loans.
I agree. And not just loand, but restore the Pell grants to what they were when I went to college.
That's why after splitting my vote between the Rs and the Ds, I now split my vote between the Ls and the Gs along with a very few Rs and Ds that seem to rise to the top of the toilet.
Hmm. where did I see that sentiment expressed before? Oh yeah, about thirty five years ago.
Every politician is frightened of the possibility that the non-voting 40% suddenly becomes angry enough to vote, and vote for some other party.
As for the hippie defamation, well. The international pro-marijuana movement has done pretty well changing the image. Everyone up here either smokes or has friends who do: they know that these people aren't in fact "supporting communism" any more than the guy who grows petunias in his walk-in closet does. Several countries have MPs who've come out, saying that there is nothing wrong with marijuana.
Yeah, one country legalized and more decriminalized, but...
WHY was parent modded FUNNY?
Because religious beliefs ARE a person's values, whethere they're Christians, Muslims, even Athiests ("I believe there is no god" is a belief about religion, making it a religious belief).
The trouble is, most politicans and many preachers and some churchgoers don't really share those values (e.g., "the love of money is the root of all evil") but only give lip service to them. You can't judge what is in a person's heart, only what they express.
The idea that religious people are all stupid is incredibly ignorant. The idea that all southerners (and I'm not one) are stupid is equally ignorant. He (you?) was lucky his post wasn't modded "flamebait".
NKB checked for this OT post, as you should have when you checked PA.
How many really good Operating systems are out there?
For the x886 alone I can think of a dozen offhand. How many do you need?
How many programs as good as Photoshop, Autocad, or even Office?
IMO these are all very poor examples. I've used them (except autocad), and they SUCK. I did use a very good drafting program back in the early 1990s, a shareware program.
The talent and work to make programs of that quality is scarce
No, the world is teeming with programmers. There are hundreds of thousands of open source programmers, let alone closed source programmers.
This load of dung is simply a want for free stuff that others work hard to make.
There are those (perhaps even the fellow you were responding to) who think the idea of copyright is bad, but there are fare more of us who think copyright law has become stupidly draconian. If the copyright law was as it was when it was first instituted in the US, few would have any problem with it, and software companies would be forced to upgrade at least every 14 years.
has been true about books for around 200 years
Wikipedia says You're a hundred years shy of the mark. "England's Statute of Anne (1710) is widely regarded as the first copyright law."
This load of dung is simply a want for free stuff that others work hard to make.
That statement is flamebait and untrue as well, and I won't say more about it. The metamoderators may, though (little chance I'll see it when I metamoderate but you never know).
Corporations get away with murder in giving themselves special privledges to endlessly protect 'copyrighted works'
They not only figuratively get away with murder, they LITERALLY get away with murder.
Information wants to be free!
No it doesn't. Information wants to be paid for. See? That knife cuts both ways.
Actually inormation doesn't want anything. But when information isn't free, neither are you.
Then your (our, really) problem is not the agreements but your dickless administration.
Is your dick dickless?
These people are supreme pricks, ultimate dicks! Unlike your elected officials, ours don't give a rat's ass about their country (don't look at today's "mcgrew journal", it might set your monitor on fire).
-mcgrew
And that fact hasn't deterred the Government from the 'War on Drugs' either.
The war on (some) drugs has actually caused the very same problems it was designed to prevent! "Think of the children!!! Pot is illegal so the kids can't get it!!" But ask any high school kid if you can buy pot in his school - any kid can, any day. But you can't buy beer, a legal "non-war" drug, in school.
"It leads to harder drugs!" No, the laws against it do. The people selling the pot also sell the "harder drugs." If the dealer is out of pot, or greedy, he may well try to sell you the very dangerous and highly addictive crack cocaine. The liquor store guy won't.
"It causes violent crime!" No, the artificial value of this easily grown weed causes the gang wars between the various factions selling it. You had gang wars and bloody violence over alcohol during alcohol prohibition, but that violence ended with the prohibition.
Likewise, the "war on illegal file sharing" may ironically kill the very industries that are screaming for those laws. The RIAA should ignore file sharing and do what they've done for a century - sell records. Not ethereal strings of ones and zeros, but physical manifestations of them - CDs.
File sharing no more hurts the record industry than the VCR ("is to Hollywood what the Boston Strangler was to women") hurt the movie industry.
Unfortunately, this trade agreement....will pretty much do just that, it will unify laws to what the US, and the other top IP countries want.
In THHGTTG trilogy, there is the "third ark" ship with its hairdressers, fashion designers, telephone sanitizers, and other useless members of Golgafrinchan society who crash land on prehistoric Earth. They decide to use tree leaves as money, making all of them incredibly wealthy. However, it causes a huge inflation problem, which the Golgafrinchans solve by burning down the forests.
A digital file is like a tree leaf. They cost nothing. To pay for one is madness, to try to use them as a medium of exchange (trade for other goods) is even greater madness. The only sane use of digital sales is sale of the physical medium the file is stored on - like a CD or DVD.
For a country to base their entire economy on digital files is supreme madness, as stupid as the Golgafrinchans' use of tree leaves as money.
The heavy handed attempts to stop the sharing of something that is entirely cost-free to everyone is as stupid as the Golgafrinchans' torching of the forests.
MP3s didn't and couldn't kill CD sales, but the switch from CDs to "selling" DRM-infested downloads instead of physical media certainly might.
My legislators are morons and my country is on its way down.
It is, in fact, a retail copy I bought at Circut City back when my daugher installed Sony's XCP rootkit (that'll teach her to trust a multinational corporation!). I haven't bought a whole computer since about 1989 when I bought a used IBM XP, from then on all I bought was parts. I've paid retail for several MS OSes. I swore 98 was going to be the last, now I only hope XP will be.
I need to DL a new Linux distro, the only thing that keeps XP on the computer at all is the fact that my version of Mandriva thinks Windows subdirectories on the second drive (Windows' D:) are files. I haven't updated it in several years, so I may now.
Thanks for the encouragement, I was ready to write it up as a "wasted" hundred bucks (not really wasted as I've used it for a couple of years now).
Not hardly. My PC recently died (I mentioned it in the other thread today) and I dragged an even older one from the basement. Now, I'd like to put my hard drives, wireless mouse and keyboard, video card with its S-Video so I can plug the TV as a monitor, etc in it.
XP is going to say that it's a different computer and refuse to run more than 30 days. It has a EULA that slashdotters say is a legal document (although I never signed anything) to back it up.
I fail to see how this court ruling benefits the user. As Agent Smith said to Neo, "what good is a phone call if you're unable to speak?"
There are some jobs which will never, ever provide you (or a family!) with a decent standard of living.
Then why, as wikipedia says, do 90% of all counties have the minimum wage? But I don't think that the minimum wage is supopsed to provide a DECENT standard of living, I think it's supposed to keep you from being homeless and starving.
If your employees get food stamps or the earned income tax creadit, they're not the ones living off the government's teat, YOU are.
caps started to expand and break their 'plus sign' seals on the top of their cans
Once as a teenaged soldering-iron hacker/nerd, I wanted to see if a cheap nine volt transistor radio would survive a twelve volt car battery.
I hooked it up, and there was a flash and a pop. Two little can capacitors had blown up.
To this day, forty years later, I still can't understand why that radio worked afterwards, but it did, for several years.
Of course, for all I know after the caps exploded, whenever Led Zeppelin came on the radio every ham radio operator in a ten mile radius cursed me. I still wonder what those capacitors were for.
Hmm, I think (well, I sincerely HOPE) you hit the nail on the head. It should be incredibly easy to test the on-off switches (there are two), just short them out. If it's one of the switches it's a zero-cost fix! Thanks!
Since it's plugged into a power strip that all the other junk the PC needs (wireless keyboard/moste, powered speakers, amplifier for the big JBL speakers, etc) and the power strip gets shut off after the PC is shut down anyway, it doesn't really need an on/off switch, let alone two of them.
We don't live in a sane world, we live in a corporate-funded asylum. Hints:
-as a bumper stiker I saw today says, they pass a "PATRIOT act - protecting your rights by taking them away"
giving money to both major candidates in a political race isn't a bribe
an oil company in Britain can increase its profits by having its employees going on strike
a group of people, half of whom attempt suicide, call themselves "gay"
Companies sue dead people (RIAA labels)
Companies sue their best customers (ibid)
A human lifetime plus seventy five years is "a limited time" (US copyright)
Silica gel that comes with electronics to keep moisture out is labeled "do not eat"
An automobile company claims "we build excitement" (bad brakes and shitty handling?), another claims their cars are like rocks (Chevy)
A non-violent drug offender goes to prison while a man who threatens and tries to kill another man with a butcher knife spends two weeks in the county jail
...and you wonder why if the bank screws up, you have to pay? Welcome to Bizarro World, also known as "the twenty first century".
Apparently not Todd Davis.
Or fat bottomed girls.