No, it's definitely Big Paper and the Pulp Industry looking to take over the world with mind-control. You just don't recognize the signs! You and the sheeple are destined to be ruled by those who would have you call them by no title other than Master.
Two fairly prominent traits around here that I do not understand:
1. I am unable to see a use for it and it is not a perfect match for my needs, it is useless. 2. I do like/want/have it and there's no reason for anyone to have a different opinion than mine.
I think it's root is in chintz which is not actually tied to a racial epithet as far as I know. See chintzy - meaning cheap bauble I believe. I could try the dictionary and etymology but I'll toss this out and see what bounces back. They probably should have spelled it chintzed but I don't think that's actually a word.
Oddly, I don't mind my phone as a consumption device but I've yet to find a tablet that I've enjoyed. What you describe, with Lubuntu or Ubuntu installed, might be something that I'd enjoy. I'd be interested in something like that and would likely buy one. It may get handed off to a friend or relative but I'd likely buy one just to see if I enjoyed it. Going but what you describe, I'd say that $1400 might be a fair price, maybe $1200 would be okay.
Another feature would be having SIM cards and being able to use a cellular connection. Having that, built in even, would be a nice feature and I'd probably give it even more consideration.
For some reason, I just can't seem to enjoy the tablets. I've tried a whole bunch of them. It hasn't been as much fun as I'd hoped. I don't mind netbooks. I like laptops. I enjoy desktops most. I don't mind a phone. The tablet just seems, well, like it's good for nothing - with my use, and I'm mostly a passive consumer these days. Yes, I can get a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, that defeats the purpose. I did enjoy a Motion tablet, way back in the XP days, and I've had a convertible or two that I enjoyed.
This may make you want to hit me. I understand. Let me see if I can type this out properly.
Last spring, I bought an Axiom AutoRoute Pro (8 - I think?) along with the stand and a bunch of stuff to go with it. It's still sitting in its crate with a bunch of boxes of stuff that goes along with it. It comes with a stand, a giant tool box, and a bunch of other stuff.
I understand that there's a kit to do laser cutting and engraving and I think I might have that with it - I've never opened it. I seem to recall that there's an attachment to do 3-D printing with it but I did not buy that. I'm pretty sure that I got the laser cutter and the engraver heads. I think it was from Axiom. I could root through my email and find the order and figure it out. I should be able to access that from here.
*sighs*
No, I've never opened it. I've never taken it out of its crate. No, I'm not even sure why I bought it. Well, no... I know why I bought it. I want to do some engraving in wood with a laser 'cause it looks like fun and I had a project in mind.
It's still sitting in the crate and has boxes piled up around it. I don't know what I spent on it but it wasn't all that bad until I added a bunch of tools to go with it and the laser head. I'm pretty sure that's what I ordered. I either got the laser or I got the 3-D printer kit - I don't think I got both. I'm thinking that I'd have not ordered the 3-D printer because I can't think of anything to make with it.
Yes, yes I do stupid things with a remarkable regularity.
I've been to California. I'm inclined to agree with that sentiment. I must say, the fish are probably brighter and have better personalities. I assume that they also taste better.
I read at -1 and see them. They were a bit annoying at first but I mostly laugh at 'em now. No, really, I've actually laughed more than once. Well, snickered. I'm easily amused but this is what you get when you let everybody and anybody have a voice. It's awesome and retarded, all at the same time.
Heh. I should have scrolled down. You explained it much better than I and were able to take the time to find a link. I've no idea what the knob is called or how to refer to it so I didn't bother searching.
They can land sort of sideways. I don't remember the name but I've seen a documentary on them (in fact, I've seen a couple). One of their controls is a knob, they can turn this knob and it turns the wheels which enables you to come in at angles where the wind makes it so that the plane is not perpendicular to the runway. Don't count on this as being correct but I seem to recall one documentary saying that they could adjust the wheels up to an angle of 15 degrees. It was just a round knob with angle markings on it - as I recall.
No, I don't recollect which documentary this was. I watch a whole lot of 'em. I'm also assuming they're correct - considering that they showed the pilot turning it and them then landing it, they even showed some outside footage, I'm inclined to believe them. It was mentioned in a different documentary as well. I'm sure that I've seen it in at least two different documentaries, so there's that. I don't know what it's called, I'm not sure what to look for if I were to search for it, but your recollection is partially correct.
They're not, as I recall, like a shopping cart wheel. Those flow and flap free and go whichever way they go. This is something that they control with a round dial (like an old school radio knob) on the front of the control/instrument panel. I seem to recall that it was near the center of the plane, on the pilot's right, and that it was near the various control levers for the individual engine's power.
It's as if the OS does what it can to take any hardware improvements away from you. I remember booting used to be held up, mostly, by POST and sometimes not at all. There was also a time when one had to read a floppy into memory but even that was pretty speedy and you could put it on a HDD if you wanted.
There were computers that were pretty close to fully usable almost immediately. They weren't as general purpose, or at least not as easily so, but they were snappy in some areas.
I'd think that, with all these compute cycles and banks of RAM, we'd see greater improvements than we do. It's like they strive to use all the available resources. Oh, you've got a bigger hard drive and more RAM now? Well, we'll just take a much larger chunk of that.
I've used old Windows and old Linux versions in a VM and the change is amazing. With some work, I mean a lot of work, I got Windows 98SE running on a system from sometime around 2008. Admittedly, the vast majority of stuff didn't work right out of the box but I got a driver for the network card, could use the on-board video card with a VGA monitor, and the mouse and keyboard were fine once I found a couple that were't USB based. I don't think I ever got sound quite right but I seem to recall that I had full color. I think I might have ended up finding and putting in a smaller, older, HDD but this was all back in about 2008 so I don't really remember.
Another fun one is to take something like Puppy or DSL and install those on modern hardware. They're functional but not the greatest right out of the box and would take a lot of work for me to be happy with them but, on the other hand, they're pretty damned fast. One of the reasons that I like LXDE (and thus usually use Lubuntu) is because it's blazingly fast on new hardware. I've even installed it on some *very* old hardware just to test it and it's still usable on that hardware too.
that country achieved in a couple of decades what took other nations centuries
Your right. So didn't China. In fact, I dare say that even Cambodia did a pretty good job as well as the Vietnamese.
What did they all do? Well, in just a few short decades they killed more of their own populations than other countries could manage to kill in entire centuries.
Stalin, in just his term, was very efficient and effective. Just look at how many of his own countrymen he managed to kill. Those numbers are, by every definition of the word, impressive. You could even say the number of people he had killed is awesome in scope. Not one single other government has been able to even come close to that in modern history. Mao came close, Minh was pretty high on the scale, and Pol Pot did a pretty good job at trying to at least getting similar results on a per capita basis.
You're definitely right. They accomplished in decades what took other countries centuries. I'm not sure that is such a noble goal as to require others to emulate it or to use it as an example. If we really wanted to speculate, we could say that Pol Pot's method, clubbing them to death, was probably the most energy efficient. You could even say that he was using renewable resources to implement sweeping progressive changes to society and very efficient at it.
That said, I get have a certain affinity for Khrushchev, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin. I'm also a little fond of Peter the Great.
You probably consented when you read the documentation that came with the device, connected it to the 'net, and made use of it. I've yet to see anything that did that sort of thing that didn't specify it in your agreement. Your use constitutes both understanding and agreement. Your recourse is to not use it in the first place. Your best option is, if you wish to avoid it, not to buy one in the first place.
The onus is on you to read, understand, and agree to usage policies prior to use. You're probably not going to get anywhere with that in a court room. The odds of them not specifying this, in the absolute minimum legally allowed font size(s), are pretty low. It's a near certainty that one has agreed to these sorts of things in one manner or another.
This is not a claim that that situation is the right situation. It is, however, a statement of how things probably are and how they probably will be. There's some small chance that the vendor completely failed to mention this and still does this. They'd probably be in the wrong. I'd expect that every single one of the Smart TV manufacturers have taken the time to put a EULA somewhere and placed some mechanism to ensure that you've signaled your agreement of those policies. They've probably done so in the most legalese manner and with the absolute minimum font size but they'll be able to show that the user consented to the practice.
"By using this service you consent to having ____________."
It appears to be a pretty common thing. It's unfortunate but that's the way it is. Personally? I'd not allow my television to connect to the internet without some very heavy whitelisting policies done on a separate piece of hardware. Fortunately, I don't actually watch much television so this is not a major hassle on my end. I'd try avoiding the products entirely if one is actually concerned with their privacy.
For the sake of argument, it might be plausible to assert that a union is a small community and that their work is to give the employees some control of things like production numbers, pay rates, employee rights, and similar things. That could be stretched, probably not beyond the breaking point, to say that the unions are advocating community control of production.
Granted, it's a rather limited subset of the community but community has several definitions and size isn't a requirement. It's also not hard to say that they're striving to control production - by means of unifying as said community. That's hardly a stretch at all.
You might say that you're part of the GLBT community, open source community, Linux community, etc... The workers uniting, as a community, is very much an attempt to control production - that's certainly advocacy.
So, well... I'm pointing these out just for the sake of argument and to play Devil's Advocate. I don't actually have a problem with unions and I'm probably best labeled as a Socialist Libertarian. None of those terms are, combined or alone, a pejorative.
Them: "Unions are socialists!" Me: "Yeah, so? Is the idea of having someone fight to protect you from abuses as the hands of an employer considered a bad thing to you? If so, why?"
That makes more sense, thanks. I'd read it and I wasn't sure how they'd reached the conclusions they'd reached. My initial reading was that someone had concluded that you, an employee, could go right ahead and record inbound customer calls without it being company protocol to do so and without warning the customer that the call was being recorded.
A loser reading implied that the employee, in those circumstances, would be able to record proprietary things like that inbound telephone conversation and then be able to retain that recording as if it is personal property. It made no sense.
It seems rather generic to say "no overriding employer interest is present." Whole Foods could probably say something like, "In order to protect our assets, employee privacy, proprietary layout information, and guest privacy - all recordings are prohibited unless expressly granted." They just have to, from what I'm getting, demonstrate that there's some sort of overriding employer interest which is a rather vague concept and probably easily bypassed by providing some quasi-plausible reason for the policy.
Microsoft owned a good portion of Apple at one point. They sold their shares quite a number of years back. However, they had something like $1.5 million in shares at one point. It has been a while and my memory is fuzzy but I believe they ended up converting those shares to common shares (they were non-voting stock at first) and has since divested all of them and made a goodly sum of money doing so. If they'd held those shares then they'd be worth billions of dollars now. I want to say that they had something like 150,000 shares before the conversion and even more after that. I don't remember how much they made when they sold the shares but I seem to recall it was a decent amount of cash.
I'd not be surprised to find a holding company, owned in part or in whole by Microsoft, still had a significant number of shares - perhaps lying dormant in some umbrella corporation or perhaps just not commonly known. They did, however, own a bunch of Apple starting sometime in the late 1990s. I am not really sure what happened after that. We all thought it was pretty funny at the time.
Localized weather anomalies are not, by themselves, indicative of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming/Change. In fact, the most ardent supporters of the theory have been quite clear that they are not related and that localized fluctuations are not "climate."
This does not negate the theory. This is simply pointing out that anomalous weather is not, in and of itself, indicative of long-term changes.
That said, I'm kind of old and have noticed some weather patterns in my lifetime. One of the things that I've noticed is that Maine's winters are, generally, no longer what they were like from when I was but a wee lad and ended up coming to Maine to attend school. So, somewhere between the time when I was a teen in high school and today, the weather (not climate) seems to have changed as both summers and winters are much milder than I recollect.
That latter part comes with the caveat that I'm not a climate scientist and am not offering my anecdote as anything authoritative or necessarily significant. It is an observation, perhaps inaccurate, and not being submitted as an indicator of anything.
I'm not sure if I should share this but, well, I'd clicked the link and mistakenly thought I was in the Microsoft Writes a Selfie app thread. I've been reading down through and wondering what the hell you guys were talking about. The first comment, about someone having sold it, really threw me for a loop and then the rest devolved into a whole bunch of silliness. I was trying to figure out what Lucas had to do with it - it turns out that the refresh had changed the location and so I didn't actually notice this thread before.
I'm not even drunk or stoned! That's probably for the best as I'd have probably been even more confused.:/
I've not only been to Canada but I'm also a Canadian citizen by grace of heritage. I'm mostly Micmac.
That said, I suspect your test is going to have a lot of false negatives.;-)
I, for one, am Canadian (sort of) and I probably would have difficulty spelling it without spell check. Well, until now... Now I will probably remember it but until 2 minutes ago, not a chance. But, I've met some Canadians who probably aren't going to be able to spell that. Err... Quite a few of 'em, actually. Hell, I have relatives who might not even be able to spell Quebec and they live in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.;-) They're fun people though.
That's hilarious! Up-thread, I'd noticed some people talking about the desert and I'd *almost* said something (I had it typed out and clicked cancel) to the effect that we actually have someone here who knows what the hell they're talking about when it comes to deserts and the conditions there. Rather than opining and reaching some very odd conclusions, we can actually ASK him - instead of pretending they know what the hell they're talking about and drawing conclusions from that.
That someone was, of course, you. I figured it's your history, privacy, and story so I decided to click cancel. Given that our 'chats' are usually no longer on the first few pages, it's quasi-private in nature and thus I'd decided not to impose. Yet, as I scrolled down (wondering if you'd actually mention anything) I was able to spot your post. I chuckled...
At least the post you reply to wasn't making authoritative statements, unlike a few of the others. Still, 'tis good to be able to find and recollect people who have actual experience and weight their comments appropriately. As the date has already passed for you, Happy New Year.
No, not really. He said "Born Again Christians." I'd have had no qualms with it if he had said, "Some Born Again Christians" or similar. The two statements are wildly different. It's like saying "Jews are greedy." Sure, some are. In fact, some non-Jews are greedy too. "Blacks are criminals." Yup. Some are. They're all incorrect without a qualifier that indicates that they mean only a portion of them. That's how you end up with racists, sexists, homophobic people, etc... With the ease of access to vast treasure troves of information, it's hard to accept such parroting and not say something.
As an aside and not really important, I'd suspect that not even the majority of those who self-identify as Born Again Christians believe that the end is near. I have no data and haven't bothered to look for any but I've heard the lack of knowledge expressed far more often than I've heard people claim it was near. That may be because I actually am willing to speak with people and learn what it is that they believe, why they believe it, and how they practice their beliefs. It's not difficult but it does require some curiosity and a desire to learn.
You might think of it as something akin to, "Anonymous Cowards are pedophiles." Yup. It's quite likely, given the statistics and vast number of them. Presumably, you're not a pedophile and thus your presence makes the statement not only incorrect but one based on ignorance. With so many sources of information, it's hard to say if people are willfully ignorant or not. It's pretty easy to find a few Christians, each of different sects, and ask what they believe. A few short minutes on Google will show you how to create a poll in PHP, get free hosting, and even find you sources where they congregate so that you might ask for their participation.
It'd be easier just to think about what you're saying and not say stupid things to begin with but, well, that's a choice. Remaining ignorant is also a choice. They're free to do so, I'm free to scoff at them or otherwise see if they'd like to amend their statement.
At any rate, some seem to believe that the end is near. Some others predict that they know when it will be. So far, all of them have been wrong. My understanding, limited as it is, says that the Bible is a bit clear that nobody knows when Christ will return. I can't recollect the verse by memory and I'm too lazy to look but it's something about "I do not know my father's wishes." Something like that? Buggered if I know - I just know not all Christians believe that. I also know that I can use Google and find that information out if I feel like learning about it or if I'm going to make authoritative statements.
By "cloud" are you referencing only those that are not owned by the company themselves? I think they call them "internal clouds" where one uses the same services but one actually owns the hardware and provisions the service on that hardware themselves or by another department within the same company.
To my mind, the cloud is not much different than when we used to rent time on a mainframe and access it with dumb terminals. Hell, I still remember seeing terminals that didn't even have screens attached to them but simply had a printer attached. In fact, seeing such things was why I was initially a bit turned off from computers as they didn't match my expectations when I'd already used a slightly more functional (for my needs) computer back in school.
Err... I'm not 100% certain but I think that computer in school was called a HP 5100? It was really a fancy calculator that hooked up to a television, had mag strip cards, a punch reader, and a plotter. We had them in our physics and math classes. Then I saw these headless things and, well... I saw regular green-screen terminals. I basically saw them as a slow tool that took more effort than I wanted to invest. They grew on me, over time, but my initial impression was that they were fairly useless for many tasks that interested me.
My, how the times have changed - but I digress.
How is a business 'required' to use the cloud and, by cloud, do you mean one that is not in their control? I no longer own my business (long since explained time and time again) but we dealt with a great deal of proprietary information with customers who owned things like giant retail chains or municipalities or even some federal work. Their data was not our property and we were entrusted with it and had some pretty specific criteria to work with it. I can absolutely assure you that, and there is no doubt in my mind, were I still the leader of this company - we would not be utilizing the cloud. Our clients, the government, and I would not tolerate that loss of control.
Even our web portal, email, communications, etc... Those were all internally hosted and controlled. We were not, of course, our own bandwidth provider but that hardly counts as a cloud service unless I'm missing something in the definition. Had someone proposed that we move out proprietary information or the customer's proprietary data onto hardware that doesn't belong to us then I'd have done something drastic like giggle like a schoolgirl or fired them. Any vendor proposing such would have been escorted to the door and not allowed back. Any client (with one exception) that insisted we put our data on their hardware would have not been a client and their RFP/RFQ would have never received a bid from us.
The one exception, noted above, was when we had to work with data that was, for better or worse, considered classified material. In that case, we had to work on their hardware, on-site, and using specific security protocols after having gained clearance status and permissions. I'll opine that the data should have been FOUO and not TS but I am not a classifications specialist and my job was to work with it and not to judge its status. It's possible to infer what I was probably doing and, from that, you may have your own opinions on the classification status of that information but I'm pretty sure it should have been FOUO. The added expense, difficulty, and time were all rather unnecessary.
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No, it's definitely Big Paper and the Pulp Industry looking to take over the world with mind-control. You just don't recognize the signs! You and the sheeple are destined to be ruled by those who would have you call them by no title other than Master.
Two fairly prominent traits around here that I do not understand:
1. I am unable to see a use for it and it is not a perfect match for my needs, it is useless.
2. I do like/want/have it and there's no reason for anyone to have a different opinion than mine.
I am not a psychologist. I do not understand.
Ah...
We had a half ounce of weed, an 8-track of "A Child's Garden of Grass." quadraphonic stereo, and a Dodge Dart.
And it was awesome.
I think it's root is in chintz which is not actually tied to a racial epithet as far as I know. See chintzy - meaning cheap bauble I believe. I could try the dictionary and etymology but I'll toss this out and see what bounces back. They probably should have spelled it chintzed but I don't think that's actually a word.
Oddly, I don't mind my phone as a consumption device but I've yet to find a tablet that I've enjoyed. What you describe, with Lubuntu or Ubuntu installed, might be something that I'd enjoy. I'd be interested in something like that and would likely buy one. It may get handed off to a friend or relative but I'd likely buy one just to see if I enjoyed it. Going but what you describe, I'd say that $1400 might be a fair price, maybe $1200 would be okay.
Another feature would be having SIM cards and being able to use a cellular connection. Having that, built in even, would be a nice feature and I'd probably give it even more consideration.
For some reason, I just can't seem to enjoy the tablets. I've tried a whole bunch of them. It hasn't been as much fun as I'd hoped. I don't mind netbooks. I like laptops. I enjoy desktops most. I don't mind a phone. The tablet just seems, well, like it's good for nothing - with my use, and I'm mostly a passive consumer these days. Yes, I can get a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, that defeats the purpose. I did enjoy a Motion tablet, way back in the XP days, and I've had a convertible or two that I enjoyed.
Interesting... How do you prove it?
This may make you want to hit me. I understand. Let me see if I can type this out properly.
Last spring, I bought an Axiom AutoRoute Pro (8 - I think?) along with the stand and a bunch of stuff to go with it. It's still sitting in its crate with a bunch of boxes of stuff that goes along with it. It comes with a stand, a giant tool box, and a bunch of other stuff.
I understand that there's a kit to do laser cutting and engraving and I think I might have that with it - I've never opened it. I seem to recall that there's an attachment to do 3-D printing with it but I did not buy that. I'm pretty sure that I got the laser cutter and the engraver heads. I think it was from Axiom. I could root through my email and find the order and figure it out. I should be able to access that from here.
*sighs*
No, I've never opened it. I've never taken it out of its crate. No, I'm not even sure why I bought it. Well, no... I know why I bought it. I want to do some engraving in wood with a laser 'cause it looks like fun and I had a project in mind.
It's still sitting in the crate and has boxes piled up around it. I don't know what I spent on it but it wasn't all that bad until I added a bunch of tools to go with it and the laser head. I'm pretty sure that's what I ordered. I either got the laser or I got the 3-D printer kit - I don't think I got both. I'm thinking that I'd have not ordered the 3-D printer because I can't think of anything to make with it.
Yes, yes I do stupid things with a remarkable regularity.
I've been to California. I'm inclined to agree with that sentiment. I must say, the fish are probably brighter and have better personalities. I assume that they also taste better.
I read at -1 and see them. They were a bit annoying at first but I mostly laugh at 'em now. No, really, I've actually laughed more than once. Well, snickered. I'm easily amused but this is what you get when you let everybody and anybody have a voice. It's awesome and retarded, all at the same time.
Heh. I should have scrolled down. You explained it much better than I and were able to take the time to find a link. I've no idea what the knob is called or how to refer to it so I didn't bother searching.
They can land sort of sideways. I don't remember the name but I've seen a documentary on them (in fact, I've seen a couple). One of their controls is a knob, they can turn this knob and it turns the wheels which enables you to come in at angles where the wind makes it so that the plane is not perpendicular to the runway. Don't count on this as being correct but I seem to recall one documentary saying that they could adjust the wheels up to an angle of 15 degrees. It was just a round knob with angle markings on it - as I recall.
No, I don't recollect which documentary this was. I watch a whole lot of 'em. I'm also assuming they're correct - considering that they showed the pilot turning it and them then landing it, they even showed some outside footage, I'm inclined to believe them. It was mentioned in a different documentary as well. I'm sure that I've seen it in at least two different documentaries, so there's that. I don't know what it's called, I'm not sure what to look for if I were to search for it, but your recollection is partially correct.
They're not, as I recall, like a shopping cart wheel. Those flow and flap free and go whichever way they go. This is something that they control with a round dial (like an old school radio knob) on the front of the control/instrument panel. I seem to recall that it was near the center of the plane, on the pilot's right, and that it was near the various control levers for the individual engine's power.
Heh... You're older than I am. You old bastard!
It's as if the OS does what it can to take any hardware improvements away from you. I remember booting used to be held up, mostly, by POST and sometimes not at all. There was also a time when one had to read a floppy into memory but even that was pretty speedy and you could put it on a HDD if you wanted.
There were computers that were pretty close to fully usable almost immediately. They weren't as general purpose, or at least not as easily so, but they were snappy in some areas.
I'd think that, with all these compute cycles and banks of RAM, we'd see greater improvements than we do. It's like they strive to use all the available resources. Oh, you've got a bigger hard drive and more RAM now? Well, we'll just take a much larger chunk of that.
I've used old Windows and old Linux versions in a VM and the change is amazing. With some work, I mean a lot of work, I got Windows 98SE running on a system from sometime around 2008. Admittedly, the vast majority of stuff didn't work right out of the box but I got a driver for the network card, could use the on-board video card with a VGA monitor, and the mouse and keyboard were fine once I found a couple that were't USB based. I don't think I ever got sound quite right but I seem to recall that I had full color. I think I might have ended up finding and putting in a smaller, older, HDD but this was all back in about 2008 so I don't really remember.
Another fun one is to take something like Puppy or DSL and install those on modern hardware. They're functional but not the greatest right out of the box and would take a lot of work for me to be happy with them but, on the other hand, they're pretty damned fast. One of the reasons that I like LXDE (and thus usually use Lubuntu) is because it's blazingly fast on new hardware. I've even installed it on some *very* old hardware just to test it and it's still usable on that hardware too.
that country achieved in a couple of decades what took other nations centuries
Your right. So didn't China. In fact, I dare say that even Cambodia did a pretty good job as well as the Vietnamese.
What did they all do? Well, in just a few short decades they killed more of their own populations than other countries could manage to kill in entire centuries.
Stalin, in just his term, was very efficient and effective. Just look at how many of his own countrymen he managed to kill. Those numbers are, by every definition of the word, impressive. You could even say the number of people he had killed is awesome in scope. Not one single other government has been able to even come close to that in modern history. Mao came close, Minh was pretty high on the scale, and Pol Pot did a pretty good job at trying to at least getting similar results on a per capita basis.
You're definitely right. They accomplished in decades what took other countries centuries. I'm not sure that is such a noble goal as to require others to emulate it or to use it as an example. If we really wanted to speculate, we could say that Pol Pot's method, clubbing them to death, was probably the most energy efficient. You could even say that he was using renewable resources to implement sweeping progressive changes to society and very efficient at it.
That said, I get have a certain affinity for Khrushchev, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin. I'm also a little fond of Peter the Great.
You probably consented when you read the documentation that came with the device, connected it to the 'net, and made use of it. I've yet to see anything that did that sort of thing that didn't specify it in your agreement. Your use constitutes both understanding and agreement. Your recourse is to not use it in the first place. Your best option is, if you wish to avoid it, not to buy one in the first place.
The onus is on you to read, understand, and agree to usage policies prior to use. You're probably not going to get anywhere with that in a court room. The odds of them not specifying this, in the absolute minimum legally allowed font size(s), are pretty low. It's a near certainty that one has agreed to these sorts of things in one manner or another.
This is not a claim that that situation is the right situation. It is, however, a statement of how things probably are and how they probably will be. There's some small chance that the vendor completely failed to mention this and still does this. They'd probably be in the wrong. I'd expect that every single one of the Smart TV manufacturers have taken the time to put a EULA somewhere and placed some mechanism to ensure that you've signaled your agreement of those policies. They've probably done so in the most legalese manner and with the absolute minimum font size but they'll be able to show that the user consented to the practice.
"By using this service you consent to having ____________."
It appears to be a pretty common thing. It's unfortunate but that's the way it is. Personally? I'd not allow my television to connect to the internet without some very heavy whitelisting policies done on a separate piece of hardware. Fortunately, I don't actually watch much television so this is not a major hassle on my end. I'd try avoiding the products entirely if one is actually concerned with their privacy.
For the sake of argument, it might be plausible to assert that a union is a small community and that their work is to give the employees some control of things like production numbers, pay rates, employee rights, and similar things. That could be stretched, probably not beyond the breaking point, to say that the unions are advocating community control of production.
Granted, it's a rather limited subset of the community but community has several definitions and size isn't a requirement. It's also not hard to say that they're striving to control production - by means of unifying as said community. That's hardly a stretch at all.
You might say that you're part of the GLBT community, open source community, Linux community, etc... The workers uniting, as a community, is very much an attempt to control production - that's certainly advocacy.
So, well... I'm pointing these out just for the sake of argument and to play Devil's Advocate. I don't actually have a problem with unions and I'm probably best labeled as a Socialist Libertarian. None of those terms are, combined or alone, a pejorative.
Them: "Unions are socialists!"
Me: "Yeah, so? Is the idea of having someone fight to protect you from abuses as the hands of an employer considered a bad thing to you? If so, why?"
That makes more sense, thanks. I'd read it and I wasn't sure how they'd reached the conclusions they'd reached. My initial reading was that someone had concluded that you, an employee, could go right ahead and record inbound customer calls without it being company protocol to do so and without warning the customer that the call was being recorded.
A loser reading implied that the employee, in those circumstances, would be able to record proprietary things like that inbound telephone conversation and then be able to retain that recording as if it is personal property. It made no sense.
It seems rather generic to say "no overriding employer interest is present." Whole Foods could probably say something like, "In order to protect our assets, employee privacy, proprietary layout information, and guest privacy - all recordings are prohibited unless expressly granted." They just have to, from what I'm getting, demonstrate that there's some sort of overriding employer interest which is a rather vague concept and probably easily bypassed by providing some quasi-plausible reason for the policy.
Microsoft owned a good portion of Apple at one point. They sold their shares quite a number of years back. However, they had something like $1.5 million in shares at one point. It has been a while and my memory is fuzzy but I believe they ended up converting those shares to common shares (they were non-voting stock at first) and has since divested all of them and made a goodly sum of money doing so. If they'd held those shares then they'd be worth billions of dollars now. I want to say that they had something like 150,000 shares before the conversion and even more after that. I don't remember how much they made when they sold the shares but I seem to recall it was a decent amount of cash.
I'd not be surprised to find a holding company, owned in part or in whole by Microsoft, still had a significant number of shares - perhaps lying dormant in some umbrella corporation or perhaps just not commonly known. They did, however, own a bunch of Apple starting sometime in the late 1990s. I am not really sure what happened after that. We all thought it was pretty funny at the time.
Localized weather anomalies are not, by themselves, indicative of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming/Change. In fact, the most ardent supporters of the theory have been quite clear that they are not related and that localized fluctuations are not "climate."
This does not negate the theory. This is simply pointing out that anomalous weather is not, in and of itself, indicative of long-term changes.
That said, I'm kind of old and have noticed some weather patterns in my lifetime. One of the things that I've noticed is that Maine's winters are, generally, no longer what they were like from when I was but a wee lad and ended up coming to Maine to attend school. So, somewhere between the time when I was a teen in high school and today, the weather (not climate) seems to have changed as both summers and winters are much milder than I recollect.
That latter part comes with the caveat that I'm not a climate scientist and am not offering my anecdote as anything authoritative or necessarily significant. It is an observation, perhaps inaccurate, and not being submitted as an indicator of anything.
I'm not sure if I should share this but, well, I'd clicked the link and mistakenly thought I was in the Microsoft Writes a Selfie app thread. I've been reading down through and wondering what the hell you guys were talking about. The first comment, about someone having sold it, really threw me for a loop and then the rest devolved into a whole bunch of silliness. I was trying to figure out what Lucas had to do with it - it turns out that the refresh had changed the location and so I didn't actually notice this thread before.
I'm not even drunk or stoned! That's probably for the best as I'd have probably been even more confused. :/
I've not only been to Canada but I'm also a Canadian citizen by grace of heritage. I'm mostly Micmac.
That said, I suspect your test is going to have a lot of false negatives. ;-)
I, for one, am Canadian (sort of) and I probably would have difficulty spelling it without spell check. Well, until now... Now I will probably remember it but until 2 minutes ago, not a chance. But, I've met some Canadians who probably aren't going to be able to spell that. Err... Quite a few of 'em, actually. Hell, I have relatives who might not even be able to spell Quebec and they live in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. ;-) They're fun people though.
That's hilarious! Up-thread, I'd noticed some people talking about the desert and I'd *almost* said something (I had it typed out and clicked cancel) to the effect that we actually have someone here who knows what the hell they're talking about when it comes to deserts and the conditions there. Rather than opining and reaching some very odd conclusions, we can actually ASK him - instead of pretending they know what the hell they're talking about and drawing conclusions from that.
That someone was, of course, you. I figured it's your history, privacy, and story so I decided to click cancel. Given that our 'chats' are usually no longer on the first few pages, it's quasi-private in nature and thus I'd decided not to impose. Yet, as I scrolled down (wondering if you'd actually mention anything) I was able to spot your post. I chuckled...
At least the post you reply to wasn't making authoritative statements, unlike a few of the others. Still, 'tis good to be able to find and recollect people who have actual experience and weight their comments appropriately. As the date has already passed for you, Happy New Year.
Yeah, but in the desert you can remember your name ('cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain).
No, not really. He said "Born Again Christians." I'd have had no qualms with it if he had said, "Some Born Again Christians" or similar. The two statements are wildly different. It's like saying "Jews are greedy." Sure, some are. In fact, some non-Jews are greedy too. "Blacks are criminals." Yup. Some are. They're all incorrect without a qualifier that indicates that they mean only a portion of them. That's how you end up with racists, sexists, homophobic people, etc... With the ease of access to vast treasure troves of information, it's hard to accept such parroting and not say something.
As an aside and not really important, I'd suspect that not even the majority of those who self-identify as Born Again Christians believe that the end is near. I have no data and haven't bothered to look for any but I've heard the lack of knowledge expressed far more often than I've heard people claim it was near. That may be because I actually am willing to speak with people and learn what it is that they believe, why they believe it, and how they practice their beliefs. It's not difficult but it does require some curiosity and a desire to learn.
You might think of it as something akin to, "Anonymous Cowards are pedophiles." Yup. It's quite likely, given the statistics and vast number of them. Presumably, you're not a pedophile and thus your presence makes the statement not only incorrect but one based on ignorance. With so many sources of information, it's hard to say if people are willfully ignorant or not. It's pretty easy to find a few Christians, each of different sects, and ask what they believe. A few short minutes on Google will show you how to create a poll in PHP, get free hosting, and even find you sources where they congregate so that you might ask for their participation.
It'd be easier just to think about what you're saying and not say stupid things to begin with but, well, that's a choice. Remaining ignorant is also a choice. They're free to do so, I'm free to scoff at them or otherwise see if they'd like to amend their statement.
At any rate, some seem to believe that the end is near. Some others predict that they know when it will be. So far, all of them have been wrong. My understanding, limited as it is, says that the Bible is a bit clear that nobody knows when Christ will return. I can't recollect the verse by memory and I'm too lazy to look but it's something about "I do not know my father's wishes." Something like that? Buggered if I know - I just know not all Christians believe that. I also know that I can use Google and find that information out if I feel like learning about it or if I'm going to make authoritative statements.
Required? How so?
By "cloud" are you referencing only those that are not owned by the company themselves? I think they call them "internal clouds" where one uses the same services but one actually owns the hardware and provisions the service on that hardware themselves or by another department within the same company.
To my mind, the cloud is not much different than when we used to rent time on a mainframe and access it with dumb terminals. Hell, I still remember seeing terminals that didn't even have screens attached to them but simply had a printer attached. In fact, seeing such things was why I was initially a bit turned off from computers as they didn't match my expectations when I'd already used a slightly more functional (for my needs) computer back in school.
Err... I'm not 100% certain but I think that computer in school was called a HP 5100? It was really a fancy calculator that hooked up to a television, had mag strip cards, a punch reader, and a plotter. We had them in our physics and math classes. Then I saw these headless things and, well... I saw regular green-screen terminals. I basically saw them as a slow tool that took more effort than I wanted to invest. They grew on me, over time, but my initial impression was that they were fairly useless for many tasks that interested me.
My, how the times have changed - but I digress.
How is a business 'required' to use the cloud and, by cloud, do you mean one that is not in their control? I no longer own my business (long since explained time and time again) but we dealt with a great deal of proprietary information with customers who owned things like giant retail chains or municipalities or even some federal work. Their data was not our property and we were entrusted with it and had some pretty specific criteria to work with it. I can absolutely assure you that, and there is no doubt in my mind, were I still the leader of this company - we would not be utilizing the cloud. Our clients, the government, and I would not tolerate that loss of control.
Even our web portal, email, communications, etc... Those were all internally hosted and controlled. We were not, of course, our own bandwidth provider but that hardly counts as a cloud service unless I'm missing something in the definition. Had someone proposed that we move out proprietary information or the customer's proprietary data onto hardware that doesn't belong to us then I'd have done something drastic like giggle like a schoolgirl or fired them. Any vendor proposing such would have been escorted to the door and not allowed back. Any client (with one exception) that insisted we put our data on their hardware would have not been a client and their RFP/RFQ would have never received a bid from us.
The one exception, noted above, was when we had to work with data that was, for better or worse, considered classified material. In that case, we had to work on their hardware, on-site, and using specific security protocols after having gained clearance status and permissions. I'll opine that the data should have been FOUO and not TS but I am not a classifications specialist and my job was to work with it and not to judge its status. It's possible to infer what I was probably doing and, from that, you may have your own opinions on the classification status of that information but I'm pretty sure it should have been FOUO. The added expense, difficulty, and time were all rather unnecessary.