Here in California a lot of municipalities mandate diversion before the trash goes to the landfill. Here is the webpage of a company that I used to do some consulting for. I'm not sure what there actual diversion rate is but last I checked it was over 80%.
Here is another article that I came across today regarding a Ford diesel that they are only going to sell in Europe. They are claiming 65mpg. It's ridiculous that they won't offer this thing in the United States. I wonder who the hell does their market research for them. Americans will buy huge turbo diesel trucks that crappy gas mileage but they won't spend an extra $1500 for a 65mpg Ford diesel because it isn't a big enough improvement over a ~45mpg Toyota Prius to justify the extra $1500?!
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_37/b4099060491065.htm?chan=rss_topStories_ssi_5
Right now I drive a 1992 Volvo that gets ~25mpg. I put regular 87 octane in it. If I had a car that got twice as many miles per gallon, I could suck it up and spend the extra 30 cents per gallon when I fill it up.
Can you give some examples of how "local governments" are selling exclusive franchises? Last I checked the RBOCs were deregulated and they had to offer their lines to whoever wanted to resell them. Anyone and their mom can setup an ISP to resell DSL service. They might not be able to do it in a cost competitive manner, but they can do it.
Of course it sucks. I'm using it right now and it's so worthless that I have to use the Emulate IE7 functionality to get anything done. The point of a beta is to get it out there so that people can test it. If they didn't put it out there I'm sure there would be a bunch of articles whining about how Microsoft is being too secretive in their development and not letting the community participate in the process. I wonder of the tool who wrote the article that we are commenting about is going to write a follow up article when the final release comes out and runs just fine under XP on P4 2.8 with 512MB of RAM.
I think the real issue is with laptops. I finally caved in and bought a MacBook Pro. It has a 8600GT card. After about ten minutes of playing video games on it the case gets so hot that you can't even touch it. There isn't enough cooling capacity in the notebook to keep the card cool. I'm sure that the thing is going to fail. I spent an extra couple hundred bucks to get a three year extended warranty from Best Buy. I figure when the chip fails I can go trade in the laptop and get a new one.
If the issue has to do with unfair advantages due to drugs, they better ban ritalin and prozac and xanax and anything else that tweaks the dopamine, seratonin, or acetylcholine levels in the brain. In fact, I think if they're going to be really serious, they should make everyone fast for two days before they even let them into the convention hall. Then once they are there they are only allowed to drink water and eat soups and organic salads. I can honestly say that every "gamer" I know is on something. Either they're caffeine addicts, alcoholics or stoners. I don't associate with any tweakers but it wouldn't surprise me to find a couple of meth-addicts online at 4am racking up kills in whatever the FPS of the week is. If drug use is an issue in "professional" sports then video game playing will never be a professional sport. Or if it is, your champions are going to be seven and eight year olds who haven't ever visited a psychatrist for acting like a normal kid.
It relaxes the body and for some people actually increases their levels of concentration/ability to focus. The effects could be considered similar to Xanax or some other anti-anxiety drugs.
The blame should be shifted to the companies who lose the data. Hopefully doing that will get them to question their procedures of collecting the data in the first place. What really needs to happen is a serious reform in the way credit is issued. It's one thing to have a data breach. The real problem comes in when that data is then used to open accounts. The financial institutions need to do a better job of identifying the people who are asking for credit. If a company wants to give me $10,000 worth of credit, they should pay the expense of having someone come to my address on file and have me sign something saying that I really want the credit.
There has been a lot of hate and vitrol in this thread, but this guy didn't deserve to be labelled Flamebait. When you consider how quickly the PATRIOT Act was introduced into Congress after 9/11, it's obvious that it was written up long before 9/11 happened. There were people in the government who had been waiting to introduce legislation like that. Those same people were looking for a reason to establish a huge military footprint in the Middle East (see Iraq). I don't think that those people paid people to make 9/11 happen. However they definitely saw a serious incident coming and were ready to leverage it to further their agenda. It's just like when the Reichstagg caught on fire. Hitler didn't set the place on the fire but he didn't hesitate to pin the blame on his opponents.
I'm not sure why people waste so much energy on 9/11. 9/11 is way too vague and there are too many viable opinions on what happened. The War in Iraq is what people should be getting up in arms about if they're worried about an authoritarian government screwing them over. The evident is there in the news. There are quotes from Rumsfield, Bush, Cheney, Rice and the rest of the group talking about how Saddam was linked to al Qaeda, how Saddam had WMDs, how Saddam was building nukes, etc. etc. All of those claims proved to be false but none the less we're still wasting billions of dollars a month in Iraq while our economy is collapsing at home.
I agree that it helps to find happiness outside of work. In my case it is martial arts that I find real enjoyment from these days. Working in IT is a pretty unappreciated and invisible job in the grand scheme of things. A few months ago we had a yearly meeting where the entire organization (only about 200 people) came together in the auditorium. The director and some of the other big wigs got up and proceeded to give various departments kudos for doing different things for the organization. IT didn't get any recognition and I realized we never will. People don't care that they pick up the phone and get a dial tone. They don't care that they have an email/messaging/calendaring system that helps them communicate, makes sure that they get to their meetings and are able to keep everything organized. Most people simply don't realize that there is a lot of effort that goes into providing them with the tools that they take for granted. How does the head of finance know that they made budget? They trust the accounting system. How does the director of development know who to contact for donations? They use their contact lists, email application and the phone systems. How do they know if they made their numbers? They check the fund raising system.
I think that the IT industry in general tends to cater to those with "problem centric" perceptions. I noticed that the problem finding mindset helped me do a better job in IT. Being able to quickly identify what is wrong in any given situation is indepensible for troubleshooting. It is useful for project planning when you are able to present realistic "what if" scenarios that address potential design/implementation issues before they manifest.
That same mindset isn't always good for dealing with other aspects of life. Who wants to always be focused on solving problems in their relationships for example? In my case I had to realize the inclination to always find the "negative" aspect of a situation. Once I became able to realize it, I developed the ability to set aside my initial perception and focus on more positive ways of dealng with situations. For example instead of focusing on what is wrong, I appreciate what is working correctly. By identifying the positive aspects of any particular situation or system I'm better able to bring individuals and departments together. People respond a lot better to a presentation that effectively says, "These systems were implemented to do X, Y and Z. They've been doing them well enough. Lets consider how adjusting A and B will make them even more effective." A few years ago, my presentation would have been more along the lines of, "X, Y and Z are completely cluster fucked. The developers fucked up A and B, and didn't even bother to think of doing C. Now, lets fix this broken pile of shit."
Your understanding is the same as mine. When I first started getting online with DSL I noticed that my latency/ping times to game servers was always lower than the guys on cable. Sure, they were getting 1.5mb download speeds when I was stuck at about 400k, but I always had a smoother gaming experience because of the fact that I wasn't sharing a pipe with a bunch of other people. I guess some things haven't changed too much in the last decade.
That up to a certain speed brings up an interesting point. I've been using DSL since the late 1990s when I had a GTE 384k line. Right now I'm on Verizon with a crappy 1.5mb connection because of the distance my residence is from the CO. I've never had any problems with Verizon throttling or otherwise messing with my BT traffic despite running a client 24/7 on an extra box. How much of the issue with CABLE providers throttling traffic has to do with the fact that their connections are more or less wide open? With DSL, the connection is limited at the DSLAM and it's easy enough to capacity plan because you know how much bandwidth everyone can use. With cable, the connection is wide open and at any given point, someone can fire up a BT client and saturate the entire link.
The quest dialogues are well written. I think that the horde quest lines are better written and more well integrated with the world. My only big gripe is that since I haven't been playing the game since it first came out, a lot of the quest lines just kind of die. You level up to 58 and then head to Outland. Or you level up to around 60 and find that all of the quest lines disappear into prior "end-game" instances that nobody is running anymore. So if you really do read the quest lines like I do, you get to the point where you are ready to go fight some major badguys that have been built up in one way or another since level 1, and.... ooops, no nachos for you.
Hell, you think that's bad? Back in the day AT&T left a huge swath of their unallocated Divinity Audix systems open with the default mailbox setup on 200 with the password 200. They were also nice enough to leave them sitting all on an 800 number pool where you could just dial 800-##AUDIX. The ones at 800-AUDIX## were only slightly more secure. I miss those days of easy to find exploitable systems. Well, I guess those days are still here if you're dealing with the government.
The problem is that the loss of the job leads to a loss of spending power here in America. The American with the job was paying his rent/mortgage in America. He was buying gas in America. He was buying clothes and groceries and television sets and all sorts of other products that required interacting with and paying other Americans for.
The problem is that you need to broaden your perspective on the large scale effects of job loss in America.
The blame comes in when two people can do something equally well, but one person's time costs a whole lot less than the other's. Or in some situations where one person can do something extremely well, and the other person can do it well enough. The person who does it extremely well might cost more, but the company can get by with well enough so the extremely qualified person gets screwed.
In other words, it isn't as simple as "Let the best person do the job."
When one of them starts to nag you go to the other one. Nothing puts a woman in check faster than being willing AND able to leave her if/when she turns into a bitch.
That is a good point. They are also less scared about the potential consiquences of failing to land a trick and killing themselves. At twelve they are still feeling pretty invulnerable.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.communityrecycling.com/
Here is another article that I came across today regarding a Ford diesel that they are only going to sell in Europe. They are claiming 65mpg. It's ridiculous that they won't offer this thing in the United States. I wonder who the hell does their market research for them. Americans will buy huge turbo diesel trucks that crappy gas mileage but they won't spend an extra $1500 for a 65mpg Ford diesel because it isn't a big enough improvement over a ~45mpg Toyota Prius to justify the extra $1500?! http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_37/b4099060491065.htm?chan=rss_topStories_ssi_5 Right now I drive a 1992 Volvo that gets ~25mpg. I put regular 87 octane in it. If I had a car that got twice as many miles per gallon, I could suck it up and spend the extra 30 cents per gallon when I fill it up.
Can you give some examples of how "local governments" are selling exclusive franchises? Last I checked the RBOCs were deregulated and they had to offer their lines to whoever wanted to resell them. Anyone and their mom can setup an ISP to resell DSL service. They might not be able to do it in a cost competitive manner, but they can do it.
...all the ants on the planet screamed out in horror at the same time, then suddenly went silent.
Of course it sucks. I'm using it right now and it's so worthless that I have to use the Emulate IE7 functionality to get anything done. The point of a beta is to get it out there so that people can test it. If they didn't put it out there I'm sure there would be a bunch of articles whining about how Microsoft is being too secretive in their development and not letting the community participate in the process. I wonder of the tool who wrote the article that we are commenting about is going to write a follow up article when the final release comes out and runs just fine under XP on P4 2.8 with 512MB of RAM.
...are NOT belongs to U.S.!?!?!
I think the real issue is with laptops. I finally caved in and bought a MacBook Pro. It has a 8600GT card. After about ten minutes of playing video games on it the case gets so hot that you can't even touch it. There isn't enough cooling capacity in the notebook to keep the card cool. I'm sure that the thing is going to fail. I spent an extra couple hundred bucks to get a three year extended warranty from Best Buy. I figure when the chip fails I can go trade in the laptop and get a new one.
And they offset their losses with malware distribution and identity theft from compromised computers. ;)
If the issue has to do with unfair advantages due to drugs, they better ban ritalin and prozac and xanax and anything else that tweaks the dopamine, seratonin, or acetylcholine levels in the brain. In fact, I think if they're going to be really serious, they should make everyone fast for two days before they even let them into the convention hall. Then once they are there they are only allowed to drink water and eat soups and organic salads. I can honestly say that every "gamer" I know is on something. Either they're caffeine addicts, alcoholics or stoners. I don't associate with any tweakers but it wouldn't surprise me to find a couple of meth-addicts online at 4am racking up kills in whatever the FPS of the week is. If drug use is an issue in "professional" sports then video game playing will never be a professional sport. Or if it is, your champions are going to be seven and eight year olds who haven't ever visited a psychatrist for acting like a normal kid.
It relaxes the body and for some people actually increases their levels of concentration/ability to focus. The effects could be considered similar to Xanax or some other anti-anxiety drugs.
The blame should be shifted to the companies who lose the data. Hopefully doing that will get them to question their procedures of collecting the data in the first place. What really needs to happen is a serious reform in the way credit is issued. It's one thing to have a data breach. The real problem comes in when that data is then used to open accounts. The financial institutions need to do a better job of identifying the people who are asking for credit. If a company wants to give me $10,000 worth of credit, they should pay the expense of having someone come to my address on file and have me sign something saying that I really want the credit.
I'm not sure why people waste so much energy on 9/11. 9/11 is way too vague and there are too many viable opinions on what happened. The War in Iraq is what people should be getting up in arms about if they're worried about an authoritarian government screwing them over. The evident is there in the news. There are quotes from Rumsfield, Bush, Cheney, Rice and the rest of the group talking about how Saddam was linked to al Qaeda, how Saddam had WMDs, how Saddam was building nukes, etc. etc. All of those claims proved to be false but none the less we're still wasting billions of dollars a month in Iraq while our economy is collapsing at home.
I agree that it helps to find happiness outside of work. In my case it is martial arts that I find real enjoyment from these days. Working in IT is a pretty unappreciated and invisible job in the grand scheme of things. A few months ago we had a yearly meeting where the entire organization (only about 200 people) came together in the auditorium. The director and some of the other big wigs got up and proceeded to give various departments kudos for doing different things for the organization. IT didn't get any recognition and I realized we never will. People don't care that they pick up the phone and get a dial tone. They don't care that they have an email/messaging/calendaring system that helps them communicate, makes sure that they get to their meetings and are able to keep everything organized. Most people simply don't realize that there is a lot of effort that goes into providing them with the tools that they take for granted. How does the head of finance know that they made budget? They trust the accounting system. How does the director of development know who to contact for donations? They use their contact lists, email application and the phone systems. How do they know if they made their numbers? They check the fund raising system.
That same mindset isn't always good for dealing with other aspects of life. Who wants to always be focused on solving problems in their relationships for example? In my case I had to realize the inclination to always find the "negative" aspect of a situation. Once I became able to realize it, I developed the ability to set aside my initial perception and focus on more positive ways of dealng with situations. For example instead of focusing on what is wrong, I appreciate what is working correctly. By identifying the positive aspects of any particular situation or system I'm better able to bring individuals and departments together. People respond a lot better to a presentation that effectively says, "These systems were implemented to do X, Y and Z. They've been doing them well enough. Lets consider how adjusting A and B will make them even more effective." A few years ago, my presentation would have been more along the lines of, "X, Y and Z are completely cluster fucked. The developers fucked up A and B, and didn't even bother to think of doing C. Now, lets fix this broken pile of shit."
Your understanding is the same as mine. When I first started getting online with DSL I noticed that my latency/ping times to game servers was always lower than the guys on cable. Sure, they were getting 1.5mb download speeds when I was stuck at about 400k, but I always had a smoother gaming experience because of the fact that I wasn't sharing a pipe with a bunch of other people. I guess some things haven't changed too much in the last decade.
That up to a certain speed brings up an interesting point. I've been using DSL since the late 1990s when I had a GTE 384k line. Right now I'm on Verizon with a crappy 1.5mb connection because of the distance my residence is from the CO. I've never had any problems with Verizon throttling or otherwise messing with my BT traffic despite running a client 24/7 on an extra box. How much of the issue with CABLE providers throttling traffic has to do with the fact that their connections are more or less wide open? With DSL, the connection is limited at the DSLAM and it's easy enough to capacity plan because you know how much bandwidth everyone can use. With cable, the connection is wide open and at any given point, someone can fire up a BT client and saturate the entire link.
I wouldn't know anything about that kind of stuff. ;) "Welcome to Audix. For help at any time, press Star H." *70. "Mailbox?"
The quest dialogues are well written. I think that the horde quest lines are better written and more well integrated with the world. My only big gripe is that since I haven't been playing the game since it first came out, a lot of the quest lines just kind of die. You level up to 58 and then head to Outland. Or you level up to around 60 and find that all of the quest lines disappear into prior "end-game" instances that nobody is running anymore. So if you really do read the quest lines like I do, you get to the point where you are ready to go fight some major badguys that have been built up in one way or another since level 1, and.... ooops, no nachos for you.
Hell, you think that's bad? Back in the day AT&T left a huge swath of their unallocated Divinity Audix systems open with the default mailbox setup on 200 with the password 200. They were also nice enough to leave them sitting all on an 800 number pool where you could just dial 800-##AUDIX. The ones at 800-AUDIX## were only slightly more secure. I miss those days of easy to find exploitable systems. Well, I guess those days are still here if you're dealing with the government.
With that little bit of semantics out of the way, I wonder what system they were running. Audix perhaps?
Whoever moderated me Overrated has obviously never dealt with a high maintenance female. Or maybe they are a high maintenance female. Hmmmmmmm.
The problem is that you need to broaden your perspective on the large scale effects of job loss in America.
In other words, it isn't as simple as "Let the best person do the job."
When one of them starts to nag you go to the other one. Nothing puts a woman in check faster than being willing AND able to leave her if/when she turns into a bitch.
That is a good point. They are also less scared about the potential consiquences of failing to land a trick and killing themselves. At twelve they are still feeling pretty invulnerable.