Posts by Armando 123 1116 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Aug 2011
AC@08:53
Not only that, but a lot of the costs are for retirees who, however you slice it, are not producing today and are not helping the bottom line.
Back in 2007 the UAW and GM were negotiating a new contract. 48% of the UAW members in Indiana were retired AND voted on the contract. So you can guess how much retiree benefits got reduced.
'Alternatively, two white dwarfs might collide like vast hypermassive billiard balls leading to a cataclysmic blast."
I thought that the theory was that when two white dwarfs collided, they formed an R CorBor star. Then again, my astronomy knowledge was founded long ago and I haven't kept up with the more esoteric theoretical developments.
I thought about that, as a bloody Yank, no less. I'm never for fleecing us taxpayers (*), wherever they are, and it seems that citizens of the UK who pay a license fee should get the free ... or at most at a quite minimal price to help cover the costs of conversions, servers, etc.
(*) With certain exceptions like those at the IRS. At this time of year. I admit that I'm too bitter to be objective on that point.
If I told it opened with 9 minutes of driving scenes in West Texas, was written, produced, and directed by an El Paso fertilizer salesman (who also starred in it), had long periods of no acting or dialogue or sense, and implied paedophilia at the end, you still have no idea how bad this film is. Even Mystery Science Theatre 3000 couldn't do anything with it. Even "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes", trying to be bad, couldn't get anywhere near this bad.
It could only have been worse if Adam Sandler had been in it. And barely.
I know some people involved with the police and emergency services here in Indianapolis. Knowing I'm an IT geek, they let me see the op center they had for the Super Bowl.
Congratulations, London. You are now at least three decades less sophisticated than Indianapolis. No wonder so many British drivers try to come over here.
It's been known for a while that, at the end of the Cretaceous, things were going poorly for the dinosaurs. There were fewer species in the big-herbivore and big carnivore niches; species were disappearing faster than they were appearing. This is certainly true in North America; the Hell Creek formations in Montana show this pretty conclusively. There may have been multiple reasons for this: changing climate, disease, new plants arising, etc. The asteroid that hit the Yucatan might have been a coup de gras, but the dinosaurs were fading well before then. That a mammal was 'stepping up' at this time isn't surprising, but it does show that the dinosaurs were indeed not doing well; that a therapsid/mammal was getting bigger after tens of millions of years of being marginalized shows just how things were changing.
You are not, and it's been going on for a century. Twain and Mencken wrote about their days in journalism where "charity beggars" would try to pull all sorts of things to get their charities' names in print ... and thus keep their cushy charity gigs.
Mencken had a rule when he edited The Smart Set and American Mercury. He would only publish anything from a charity if said charity sent him information on membership, salaries of the ten highest-paid employees, names of the top ten contributors and their level of donation, a budget breakdown to show how much money actually went to what the charity claimed to be doing, etc, and have it sent via the US Mail. He insisted on the latter, because to provide fraudulent information via the mail system for purposes of obtaining money or commerce was a federal offense.
And shockingly, not one charity in 20+ years agreed to it.
And he started this before WWI.
Seriously? This has been pretty well-documented; check out http://http://www.apple-history.com/gui and /http://www.apple-history.com/gui_discussion for comments and rebuttals from those who were there.
Apple may have had one or two ideas that came from PARC, but they were working on a GUI more or less independently. (A lot of people got hired among a set of companies and ideas and concepts tended to move with people. Nowadays there is more of an understanding of "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas", though I'm not so naive as to think that this doesn't still go on.)
No, we would be told to install certain software, then we'd ask for licensing info, etc, and the civil servants would tell us, in a deniable-in-court-way, that the government shouldn't have to pay for software.
This was in DC, where the entitlement attitude is admittedly quite high.
When I was a US government contractor, the contractors worried about licensing, paying for things, etc. The civil servants thought it would be okay just to grab stuff without paying for it.
The idea of PAYING for something worth paying for was a foreign concept to them. Oddly enough, the military seemed to get this more than ... other government institutions. You wouldn't think the military as being the best observer of private property or property rights among the bureaucracy, but there y'are.
MS is showing that they don't quite get this. I was leery of Apple saying that they were going to pull interface features from iOS into the OS X desktop. However, they didn't do a whole-hog-smoosh, which would have been bad, and they didn't take away the established methods. Where an iOS feature made sense to add, they added it. Where they didn't they left it out. This made the desktop OS X a better interface, and I considered it superior to other GUIs before that.
Metro, however, ... I'm far from convinced that MS are doing this right.
Go and study radiative transfer theory and post under your own name.
Seriously, I studied radiative transfer theory for my master's thesis. This was before the politicization of studying the climate. Solar activity was the best indicator of climate change. Increase the activity in the sun, the earth warms. Drop the activity and earth cools.
This is true in recorded human history and in the geological record.
"No, it isn't a larger effect than that caused by global warming."
Uh huh. So the effect of the sun's variability is less than we pathetic primates'? Seriously, do the math.
Besides, we all know warming is inversely proportional to pirate activity.
We got our AppleTV as a Christmas gift and we thought "Oh, okay." We're not into tv or movies, but it did let us watch youtube and stream music ... and now we can stream Netflix and we're hooked. In fact, I just found that Cosmos is on Netflix and I'm going to watch it BILlyunz and BILlyunz of times.
Mine's the one with the Vangelis 8-track in the pocket.
In 2010 I worked at an ISO (they monitor the grid, provide a neutral marketplace for buying and selling electricity, provide a place to report planned and unplanned outages, etc) here in the states. We all knew that, with government subsidies, electricity from wind cost -$.20 per kw. No one ever said what it cost without those subsidies.
Just sayin'; they weren't sayin', and you know what that says.
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