I'm sure they can argue that you chose to open the web site (just like you chose the tv channel or opened the magazine).

However- unlike a magazine, the ads can be very abusive of bandwidth. It shouldn't be fair that because you go to a page that they send you a gigabyte of data.

I use adblock and noscript myself and prefer giving small ($5, $10) donations to sites myself.

Because the current rules are written specifically to favor the incumbents.

It's what all businesses do - break the lower rungs of the ladder they climbed up.

Why can't a customer decide to buy a car without a dealer? Once it's 2 minutes old, they can purchase the same car from a private individual.

In texas, the oil executive sued to prevent fracking. His stated reason was that the water towers would lower his property values and ruin the view.

What about everyone else's property values and views?

I got them from the Congressional Budget Office.

Here is a 2009 document that shows the top quintile then was 218,800
http://www.cbo.gov/sites/defau...

Okay- I see that while it's not as low as you are saying, I did make a mistake using the average. Here is a breakdown by smaller pieces from the same document.
81st to 90th Percentiles 125,800
91st to 95th Percentiles 169,800
96th to 99th Percentiles 266,200
Top 1 Percent 1,219,600

But keep in mind these figures are from 5 years ago. On the same 2013 version of the document, the average was 234k instead of 219k The 81th to 90th percentiles was higher in 2012 (I vaguely recall that it was 131k) and so on.

Anyone can send an email. I'm not sure how they know for certain gop sent the email and not some random 13 year old with bad english skills.

It would certainly be a great way to discredit gop too. Just have someone send an over the line email claiming to be gop. The fbi, a private contractor, etc.

Not really.

Coders are expected to perform in a dynamic deadline oriented environment while maintaining a positive, can do attitude.

They need to be self-starters who also comply well with bureaucratic documentation requirements of up to 6-8 signed off documents and meeting schedules of 4-6 meetings before they can do the project.

They need to be good and completing projects in a week doing "what ever it takes" after the executives sat on a project for 6 weeks after the requests were submitted early because "it is what it is."

I already posted this in another thread but...

CBO 2010 income quintiles.
Lowest Quintile 8,100
Second Quintile 30,700
Middle Quintile 54,800
Fourth Quintile 87,700
Highest Quintile 234,400 --- this is where people should be exempt from overtime unless they are a manager.

I could see the argument you are making for managers but they were always expected to work overtime in return for a shot at being a vice president, president, CEO or chairman of the board.

Special rules were passed in the 1980's exempting computer professionals and engineers from labor law protections already in place. These days the exceptions even applies to people who simply install software on computers.

Your figure is way off.

53k is the middle income amount..

Here are the 2010 figures from the CBO
Lowest Quintile 14,200
Second Quintile 30,700
Middle Quintile 54,800
Fourth Quintile 87,700
Highest Quintile 234,400 --Here is where people should be exempt from overtime rules.

Most people in IT are in the lower end to the middle of the fourth quartile making $60,000 to $110,000 (and above $100k your odds of being let go/replaced every couple years skyrocket).

Lol.

Nailed it. Only they didn't fix anything. As far as we could tell, many of the $150 to $200 per hour consultants were training on our dime. About 90% of them. The other 10% were very good and worth every dime. So we were covering about 60 people who were about as good as we were and 6 people who were solid gold and worth every penny.

but not first post.

Hurts me tsu much.

Exempt status used to be reserved for highly paid professionals (doctors, lawyers, managers).

At my last company, they made people work 72 hours a week for months. We had multiple heart attacks- and several divorces. They took advantage of the bad job market created partly by the fact that companies can work IT people 72 hours a week.

Anything over 45 hours a week should be overtime until you hit the top 20% of income or you are supervising, hiring, firing, and making pay decisions over at least a few other people.

Any work on actual holidays should be double time.

Conditions in many IT shops in the united states are horrific now.

Electric companies have a huge investment in their current physical plant.

Any plant built in the last 10 years won't be paid off for another 10 to 20 years.

Solar and wind power combined with durable, inexpensive batteries has the potential to be "cheap enough" that people will avoid electrical companies and the "network effect" that benefits them will be lost.

You see it with AT&T now. When everyone had a landline, prices were lower. As fewer people have a landline, the per customer cost of maintaining the physical lines goes up.

I.e. if the fixed cost of serving an area is 1 million a year (for workers and materials) (either electrical or telephone) and 100,000 people in the area use your service, the cost per customer is $10. Your utility bill is $50 in the winter and $150 in the summer. If that drops to 50,000 customers- the fixed cost is up to $20. If that drops to 25,000 customers- the fixed cost is up to $40.

Where you "rolled in" the fixed cost before-- now you either need to raise rates or raise your fixed cost.

But as your rates increase to $90 in the winter and $180 in the summer-- it makes more sense for people to go to solar and wind power. As you drop to 10,000 customers in the same geographical area-- you are up to $100 per customer in fixed costs and now the monthly bill is $150 to $250 and it really makes sense to go to solar.

add to that the fact that solar has dropped from 10x the cost of generated power to 4x the cost of generated power in about the last 12 years alone and the future trend is solar power fundamentally cheaper than generated power. Plus there is already 2x cost solar panels-- it's just that germany has bought current and future production two years out for their industrial scale solar plants.

And yes- electrical utilities are starting to lobby very hard against solar. Removing subsidies, adding costs, adding regulations to make it more expensive to go solar, and altering laws so they can break out the fixed cost so grid tied solar customers will pay their full share of the fixed costs (which are currently partially held in the variable rates).

Semi Hard SF for the win... again. Read this when I was very young.

http://quillandkeyboard.blogsp...

Quote:
Mutant 59 is an excellent example of the British specialty; the quiet catastrophe. By altering one small part of the normal world, removing plastic, Pedler and Davis set into motion a series of events that wreck ever-expanding circles of devastation. As plastic insulation vanishes, wires spark and fires break out. Airliners crash or explode in midair. Submarines vanish. Gas leaks from sealless lines. The entire infrastructure of London literally decays. It's a truly frightening scenario that makes one realise just how the failure of something we take for granted can imperil our entire civilisation.

Using every tool in the tool box seems objectively better than only using one tool in the tool box.

If someone wrote a C++ or Java program only using "if then" statements with no objects and ignored objects, case statements, while statements, for loops with conditional exits, etc., I would judge their code to be worse and their mastery of the language to be lower on an objective basis.

If someone writes an adventure with a tool kit that has 7 tools and they only use the one tool over and over, I objectively judge their mastery to be lower. I agree that whether the adventure they create is fun or not is subjective.

A wider use of tools is more likely to result in a better scenario however. I say that from experience writing adventure scenarios for decades.

I can't see how you come to the conclusion that a richer experience would be a more boring game. Your statement here seems biased to me. You might want to reconsider it.

I agree with your comments on the article. Someone posted just above here that the actual results were more what I would have expected to see from past experience.

* Worst was a boy.
* Average of girls was better than the average of boys.
* Best was a boy.

---

They also posted the actual triggers above too.

When the player arrives in area
When someone says a line
When someone gets and item
When someone is killed
When something walks into trigger
When something walks out of trigger
Every six seconds

I think several of them would make for a more interesting game. In the scenarios I write, I use...

When a player is in an area, when someone gets an item, when someone is killed, when someone walks into a trigger, When someone walks out of a trigger, and every X seconds. My X varies from 8 seconds to 90 seconds. I don't use "when someone says a line" because minecraft isn't amenable to that or I haven't learned how to do that yet if there is a way.