A dog would have been a better choice than Bush. I am not kidding there. Having no functional president at all would been better than Bush. A random person selected off the street would have been better.
And that's somewhat a moot point, as the only WMDs he had were chemical weapons, and those aren't usable after about three years without careful storage, and about ten years with storage. It's the 'careful storage' sites that were easy to find, the 'buried in the desert and ignored' sites were impossible to find, but even assuming anyone knew where they were, the weapons wouldn't work.
Unless he was manufacturing chemical weapons, all he had were things that were much more likely to kill the people trying to use them than the people being hit with them. Leaking chemical weapons are no fun at all.
And the chemical weapons he had, mustard and sarin gas, can be defended against quite well by any military in the world. It's the danger to civilians that people worry about, and it was, in fact, his own civilians who were the actual victims of his chemical weapons.
How this posed any sort of threat to the US was never explained. Yes, in theory, he could have taken the leaky weapons and handed them to terrorist, who could carefully process them and make five working shells out of every ten shells, and ship them to the US and use them, but he never worked with terrorists, he wouldn't want to piss off the US, and mustard gas isn't that hard to make in the first place, so simply making it in the US would be a more clever plan. How, exactly, Saddam's mostly disfunct WMDs were a threat to us isn't clear.
Or just use something like phosgene, which is much easier to make and much less obvious. Release that in a subway.
The real failure of Saddam was nepotism. If he'd just kept his damn sons in line, or even better entirely out of the government, there would have been a lot less insanity going on in Iraq.
If you look at the history of how the governments of Iraq and the US interacted with each other, it is quite clearly the US that behaved in completely irrational and nonsensical ways. Saddam wasn't crazy when he thought the US would back him in Kuwait, the US merely had flipped its bipolar mind again and decided to defend Kuwait.
I lie. The US behaved in exactly whatever way whatever administration thought would be the best for the long term goals of the US, or at least the long term goals of their wallets. However, what these goals were and how to reach them changed almost randomly, whereas Saddam's goals didn't, except he gave up on some of them because they were clearly unreachable.
Saddam being a lunatic was always just PR, and was basically the only way to square the fact our 'friend' became our 'enemy' without changing at all. If anything, his interaction with the US had a moderating influence on him, where he at least paid lip service to human rights.
The leaders of Iran aren't lunatics, either, for future reference.
Kim Jong Il, OTOH, quite possibly, is a lunatic. He, however, isn't who we have to worry about in N. Korea. We have to worry about the military, who are not lunatics.
How about we have two military forces? One that the government can send off wherever the fuck they want for any reason, and one limited to actually defending the US from invasion and responding to attacks on it, with a draft enactable for the second.
Oh, wait. No one would join the first one.
Bush has basically destroyed our volunteer military. Not even because of the fact he's running it underfunded and overextended. Even if it was perfectly funded, there were people like me who had no problem with military service beforehand, but would never sign up now without a hell of a lot of safeguards on, you know, randomly invading places.
And I don't think very highly of people who choose to join at this point, either. If you were already in, well, you signed up for something noble that got perverted out from under you, and I can understand you're serving out your time until you can get out of it, instead of going to prison for 20 years. Just keep marking time and try not to get killed.
But joining up now...WTF are you thinking? You're goddamn cannon fodder being throw into the feed trough by moronic lunatics. Here's hope you won't accidently kill any innocent people because you've ended up in a guerilla insurgency on the losing side. Don't worry, soon your legs will get blown off and the military will completely ignore you. If you want to defend the county, wait until the lunatics in office have left or we're invaded.
Iran isn't going to deply nuclear weapons into the US, you stupid fuck. Stop repeating propogranda. Iran, unlike the US, isn't batshit insane and knows that making a war with the US nuclear is about the only possible way to lose it. They wouldn't use a nuke against the US because they don't need one. They could invade Iraq and we'd have no way to stop them, and they don't fucking want to invade the US. (An invasion of the US by Iran would go almost as poorly as the US invading Iran.)
They might nuke Irsael, but I seriously doubt it. That's the cause of all their nuke research, a nuclear Israel. If Israel wants to nuke them, they want to be able to nuke back.
I bought a copy of Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, then when I discovered it had Starforce, I warezed it instead.
Who doesn't do that? Honestly, I have 25 gigs free right now, out of 145 gigs, and at least 60 gigs is TV shows that are temporary. (Legal, captured-off-cable-with-the-TV-tuner shows in case anyone cares.) I wouldn't hesitate swap out the 30 gig drive for a 200 gig drive if I was even vaguely running low, they're nothing compared to the price of games.
Computer game makers know this, and have their games full-install, which is fine. The biggest game is one DVD, which is maybe eight gigs uncompressed. Those who don't...well, when I get a game, the very first thing I do is rip it to my hard drive, and then install from it, then unmount it and burn a backup copy. Then I launch it, and if the game wants the CD, I mount the rip. If it still wants the CD, I get a no-cd crack and see if it still wants the CD.
Because there's no way in hell I'm looking for a damn real CD every time I want to play the game. I keep my original CDs in a specific case high up on the shelves, safe, so they don't get damaged. I don't even like to keep locating the backup CD, although I've had a few games I did that before with.
It would be one thing if they offered to replace any broken media for me, or whatever. But I'm not screwing around with my 450 dollar DVD every time I want to fire up Call of Duty 2, or whatever, and I think there are a lot of people like me.
What I've never understood is why they don't put the copy protection on the install program. I'd be fine with having to install from the original CD. Yes, it means people could trade CDs back and forth, and run it on multiple computers, but it limits it to people they actually know and trust.
No, the mark that globalism leaves behind it is higher wages for the previously third world countries. Its already extant in India. So instead of lowering wages in first world countries, its increasing wages in poorer countries. Might take a while, but it gets there.
That works in free and democratic countries like India, where workers are free to do whatever they want. If we required the same safety standards and whatnot (1), and actually taxed companies there providing services here, just like they should tax companies here providing services there, there would be no problem. There are already huge areas that you can't tell apart from other first world countries, which means that manufacturers move to poorer areas, which raises them up, etc, etc... It's working fine, and in fifty years or so we'll have a fairly serious competitor in the world economy. We just need to make sure politicans don't operate India at the expense of the Indian people for American businesses, but considering we can't seem to stop them from operating the US that way, we're probably going to have to deal with that problem locally first.
However, that doesn't apply to China and other communist countries. What happened with Russia proves we shouldn't just ignore them, and trading and openness can be good, but if you think that enough money from the US gets passed to workers in China to raise their standard of living you have another think coming.
Workers in non-open countries are essentially, slave laborers. Your logic is like attempting to free pre-Civil War slaves by buying a lot of cotton from slave-owners, thus the slave's standard of living will go up and they will eventually be able to afford a better life. That doesn't make a lot of sense.
And, yes, we are not the only country in the world, and others could, indeed, trade with them. Pre-Stupid-War, we had some influence on the global community, but we can still offer other countries incentives,and a lot of places already don't want to trade with China or have such small economies it doesn't matter. Instead, we offer China incentives for...I have no idea.
1) Bhopalm India, was the site of the most horrific industrial accident ever, caused by an American company, United Carbine, due to cutting corners on their almost non-existent safety systems. And we've still refused to extradite the people responsible to India, and India is so deep in their pockets they aren't pressing the matter of 15,000 charges of manslaughter! If they'd killed Americans, the entire company would have been sued to the ground.
Banks won't accept checks for no money, at least not on purpose. By all legal definations, checks for no money do not 'exist', they're just a random piece of paper, and they'd no more accept it than your shopping list. (They might offer to shred it for you.)
Now, I'm sure their automated systems that suck in checks from businesses have managed to get no money checks inside the banking system, and I don't know what they do with them them once that happens.
Except in rare cases checks 'expire' after 60, 90, or 120 days.
The check may 'expire', but the amount owned doesn't. After about a year it's turned over to the state as unclaimed property.
And both of you are idiots. Large companies can't just magically make outstanding checks vanish from their books, even if they are two cents. That amount stayed on the books as an issued-but-not-cashed check until it was turned over to the state, at which point the accounting people would stop caring about it.
Ha. I love when they hook up cable and...forget about it. Then bitch at people for 'piracy', like we can magically make the cable coming into our house have a signal on it.
My mother's gotten HBO and Showtime, on her cable, for two decades. For free. They know about it. She's mentioned it a few time to them, they've gasped, acted all outraged like she didn't tell them. (Which, of course, she just did, and had done before.)
They've tried to get her to pay for it, and when she said she didn't want it, acted like they were going to send someone out immediately to disconnect it, I guess in a sort of 'punishment' for her not magically solving their mistake.
It's still there. She's stopped mentioning it, because, frankly, she's tried of them acting like it's her problem.
It's not some weird, broken-in-a-good-way cable box, either. Every TV and every VCR gets it. My original theory was that it had something with the neighbors, but most of neighbors have rotated at least twice, and some of them have moved to dish because Alltel cable is craptacular. Sometimes one of them goes bad for a year or two, and then comes back, and for a while we had The Movie Channel instead of Showtime. (Oddly enough, they don't even offer TMC.)
I have no idea how that system works, but can't you just buy the tickets direct from station to station, and piece them together how ever you want?
I mean, if you get off at your 'terminating station' on one ticket, and onto another train with an entirely new ticket, they can't very well bitch at you for that.
Or are these multiple tickets cheaper than single tickets?
That's the greatest scam ever. More and more companies are putting 'early termination' clauses in, and they trigger if you stop using the service, not, as would actually be sane and protect their investment, if you stop paying the bill.
Move your phone number? Have the physical phone lines switched over? Have the gas company to disconnect the gas pipeline because you're remodeling? Return a leased car early because you're moving and can't return the car from there? Nope, those are all 'early termination', even if you say 'I will continue to pay the bills you send me for the service I have rendered myself unable to us'.
In most cases, of course, the most sane thing is to let the contract expire on its own, which is why this crap is really catching on where the contract ties up some resource of yours, or involves something that it is physically or legally impossible for you to do, so have to get them to do it.(1)
At some point you're going to have take a car under warranty by the dealer to demonstrate it's usable every few months. If you've totalled it, you've obviously terminated the service contract and should be charged a termination fee.
We really a consumer protection law that says in no cases shall early termination ever cost more than the company would have made if you just paid your bills the rest of the contact cycle, regardless of how the company is trying to interpet the contract. In addition, when you terminate, they'd have to give you the option of asking for a bill for the entire rest of the contract at once, in addition to the option of you continuing the previous system of billing.
Wait a minute. What am I talking about? What's a 'consumer protection law'? Sorry, I confused this year with 1906 again, when the government actually passed laws to protect human beings from being harmed by companies.
1) Note I'm not talking about things they'd charge for regardless, like remove a sat dish from your roof. I'm talking about things like remove their gas lines or take back their stuff, stuff they don't charge for, but they count as 'cancellation' when they do it, and you can't actually do yourself.
Time Warner cable, the broadband service provider I cancelled over a year ago, sends me a bill notifying me of a $5 credit every month. Multiple calls to their hell desk and customer disservice inevitably result in 1) they can't find any such thing 2) Oh, there it is!
My phone company did that. I canceled my account (I moved) with Alltel for local phone service, sent them what they said I owed them. They send me what I think is a bill for something like ten dollars a month later, and I was confused until I noticed it was a credit. Well, cool.
I called them up, and they said, apparently, it was a 'deposit'. Despite me being told I didn't have to pay one. I guess they just secretly includes it in the 'installation fee', which consisted of charging me 50 dollars to flip a switch in a computer. They were holding it to make sure no long distance bills came in. Interesting concept, considering I hadn't made a single long distance call on that line, and they, being the phone company, should be aware of that fact, but whatever.
They send me another notice of the credit, a week later.
Two months pass. They send me yet another notice.
Another month passes. They send me another notice of the credit, and a check at the same time.
You know, they sure bitch and bitch if my payments are two days late, but they can, apparently, just fuck around for three months before sending me money.
Your second story is the reason I never do automated billing. It's not so much worries about them refusing to cancel something, it's that a lot of those systems are, apparently, completely stupid and try to bill any CC number you've given them, even if you've supposedly told them to stop and paid your bill in some other way.
Screw California. When did Puerto Rica stop being part of the US? They're citizens!
And, yeah, anyone who thinks immigrants will come in and take out identidy is either a racist or a moron. How many cultures have we chewed up and spit out, again?
Sure, they'll come here, and won't speak English. Their kids will grow up to be honor students and speak near-perfect English and whatever other language. Their kids won't speak the other languages, speak English with a local accent, roll their eyes when their grandparents talk about 'the old country', get married to someone their parents disapprove of, and generally be Americans. Their kids will speak of their 'heritage' and have no clue what they're talking about, imagining a sort of parody of that country gained from old movies.
In 100 years the country might be slightly browner. It might have a few more Spanish words, and it might have a few more Mexican food places.
It will still be America. It will probably have changed in unrecognizable ways, yes, but that will have nothing to do with immigration, legal or otherwise.
For a country that constantly influences the entire damn world's culture via movies and television, it seems rather egotistical to worry about a single culture, especially one that already 'invaded' the entire Southwest like 100 fucking years ago. It's like worrying about Italian influence, or English influence! Hey, that ship already sailed, dumbasses. We've sucked in so much of their culture we have real Mexican restaurants and fake Mexican restaurants, and 'Mexican' dishes in normal restaurants, just like Italian food.
I already said how to fix it. Have, in addition to 'Allow example.com', have 'Ignore example.com', and leave the warning and changed icon for sites I haven't marked as good or bad.
His interview section really shouldn't be compared to any other political TV show in the first place. It should be compared to Leno and Letterman and whatnot. Except he focuses on guest that are famous for political reason, and not entertainment reasons, and he's actually knowledgable with the topic they're talking about.
Which, frankly, is a little impressive. At least one, and sometimes two, guests a week are hawking books, and he always appears to at least have read parts of them.
It's actually nice to have a place where people with all sorts of political viewpoints can stand up and talk about random stuff without being attacked while speaking. (Of course they can, and have, been attacked the next day for what they said.) Yes, politicians already can do that with press conferences, but the press chops their words up, and no one else has that ability.
Anyone who accuses him of playing 'softball' at with any guest is an idiot who hasn't actually been paying attention to show, because the point of guests is to let them speak about whatever they want. The hardball interviews he's had are countable on one hand, and they're usually because he's got someone completely stupid on, and he asks obvious questions they can't answer because their position is completely inane. I seem to remember one with Bill Bennett.
The problem isn't how the presentation of facts works, really.
it's that for way too long the media has let politicians lie. They just get up there and say things they know aren't true, and then the media 'truthfully' says 'Politician X said blah blah' without bothering to mention it was a total lie.
Usually it's the Republicans. I don't know if that means they have more to lie about, or just have better liars. Sometimes it's the Democrats.
In short, BSD is for the benefit of developers and GNU is for the benefit of users.
Unless your users want to use GNU tools (QT, Cygwin, etc) in their commercial undertaking, of course.
If they use development tools to make their own software and sell it, guess what? They're developers, dumbass.
And they can use GNU tools just fine as long as they don't distribute them or distribute things that require the end users to use them.
Not that I actually believe the linking theory of the GPL. In my option, the GPL and the LGPL are the same thing, legally. But even if you believe them, you can still use the tools for free however you want, including developing commercial apps.
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Kerry was not a worse choice than Bush.
A dog would have been a better choice than Bush. I am not kidding there. Having no functional president at all would been better than Bush. A random person selected off the street would have been better.
He's never shot anyone in the face, which the Democrats do all the time, probably.
He knows how to read children's books, it's very impressive. In the past, presidents had to have their wives do that because they didn't know how.
He's taken more vacations by far than any president, which saves money spent at the White House.
Okay, I give up. He hasn't actually done a good job in any...wait, I have it:
He's protected our children from being seduced by teh gays.
Opens the newspaper
And that's somewhat a moot point, as the only WMDs he had were chemical weapons, and those aren't usable after about three years without careful storage, and about ten years with storage. It's the 'careful storage' sites that were easy to find, the 'buried in the desert and ignored' sites were impossible to find, but even assuming anyone knew where they were, the weapons wouldn't work.
Unless he was manufacturing chemical weapons, all he had were things that were much more likely to kill the people trying to use them than the people being hit with them. Leaking chemical weapons are no fun at all.
And the chemical weapons he had, mustard and sarin gas, can be defended against quite well by any military in the world. It's the danger to civilians that people worry about, and it was, in fact, his own civilians who were the actual victims of his chemical weapons.
How this posed any sort of threat to the US was never explained. Yes, in theory, he could have taken the leaky weapons and handed them to terrorist, who could carefully process them and make five working shells out of every ten shells, and ship them to the US and use them, but he never worked with terrorists, he wouldn't want to piss off the US, and mustard gas isn't that hard to make in the first place, so simply making it in the US would be a more clever plan. How, exactly, Saddam's mostly disfunct WMDs were a threat to us isn't clear.
Or just use something like phosgene, which is much easier to make and much less obvious. Release that in a subway.
The real failure of Saddam was nepotism. If he'd just kept his damn sons in line, or even better entirely out of the government, there would have been a lot less insanity going on in Iraq.
If you look at the history of how the governments of Iraq and the US interacted with each other, it is quite clearly the US that behaved in completely irrational and nonsensical ways. Saddam wasn't crazy when he thought the US would back him in Kuwait, the US merely had flipped its bipolar mind again and decided to defend Kuwait.
I lie. The US behaved in exactly whatever way whatever administration thought would be the best for the long term goals of the US, or at least the long term goals of their wallets. However, what these goals were and how to reach them changed almost randomly, whereas Saddam's goals didn't, except he gave up on some of them because they were clearly unreachable.
Saddam being a lunatic was always just PR, and was basically the only way to square the fact our 'friend' became our 'enemy' without changing at all. If anything, his interaction with the US had a moderating influence on him, where he at least paid lip service to human rights.
The leaders of Iran aren't lunatics, either, for future reference.
Kim Jong Il, OTOH, quite possibly, is a lunatic. He, however, isn't who we have to worry about in N. Korea. We have to worry about the military, who are not lunatics.
That's right, we've broken half the china in this china shop, and we're staying here until we've glued it all back together!
How about we have two military forces? One that the government can send off wherever the fuck they want for any reason, and one limited to actually defending the US from invasion and responding to attacks on it, with a draft enactable for the second.
Oh, wait. No one would join the first one.
Bush has basically destroyed our volunteer military. Not even because of the fact he's running it underfunded and overextended. Even if it was perfectly funded, there were people like me who had no problem with military service beforehand, but would never sign up now without a hell of a lot of safeguards on, you know, randomly invading places.
And I don't think very highly of people who choose to join at this point, either. If you were already in, well, you signed up for something noble that got perverted out from under you, and I can understand you're serving out your time until you can get out of it, instead of going to prison for 20 years. Just keep marking time and try not to get killed.
But joining up now...WTF are you thinking? You're goddamn cannon fodder being throw into the feed trough by moronic lunatics. Here's hope you won't accidently kill any innocent people because you've ended up in a guerilla insurgency on the losing side. Don't worry, soon your legs will get blown off and the military will completely ignore you. If you want to defend the county, wait until the lunatics in office have left or we're invaded.
Iran isn't going to deply nuclear weapons into the US, you stupid fuck. Stop repeating propogranda. Iran, unlike the US, isn't batshit insane and knows that making a war with the US nuclear is about the only possible way to lose it. They wouldn't use a nuke against the US because they don't need one. They could invade Iraq and we'd have no way to stop them, and they don't fucking want to invade the US. (An invasion of the US by Iran would go almost as poorly as the US invading Iran.)
They might nuke Irsael, but I seriously doubt it. That's the cause of all their nuke research, a nuclear Israel. If Israel wants to nuke them, they want to be able to nuke back.
Hehe. Who didn't turn into an arm's dealer in that game? I once had three whole bases operating as sweatshops. ;)
Sadly, if you completely ignored the aliens, you'd get closed down, otherwise you could have just played X-COM: Weapons Tycoon.
Erm, I meant my 50 dollar DVD. Call of Duty 2 is not 450 dollars. ;)
I bought a copy of Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, then when I discovered it had Starforce, I warezed it instead.
Who doesn't do that? Honestly, I have 25 gigs free right now, out of 145 gigs, and at least 60 gigs is TV shows that are temporary. (Legal, captured-off-cable-with-the-TV-tuner shows in case anyone cares.) I wouldn't hesitate swap out the 30 gig drive for a 200 gig drive if I was even vaguely running low, they're nothing compared to the price of games.
Computer game makers know this, and have their games full-install, which is fine. The biggest game is one DVD, which is maybe eight gigs uncompressed. Those who don't...well, when I get a game, the very first thing I do is rip it to my hard drive, and then install from it, then unmount it and burn a backup copy. Then I launch it, and if the game wants the CD, I mount the rip. If it still wants the CD, I get a no-cd crack and see if it still wants the CD.
Because there's no way in hell I'm looking for a damn real CD every time I want to play the game. I keep my original CDs in a specific case high up on the shelves, safe, so they don't get damaged. I don't even like to keep locating the backup CD, although I've had a few games I did that before with.
It would be one thing if they offered to replace any broken media for me, or whatever. But I'm not screwing around with my 450 dollar DVD every time I want to fire up Call of Duty 2, or whatever, and I think there are a lot of people like me.
What I've never understood is why they don't put the copy protection on the install program. I'd be fine with having to install from the original CD. Yes, it means people could trade CDs back and forth, and run it on multiple computers, but it limits it to people they actually know and trust.
No, the mark that globalism leaves behind it is higher wages for the previously third world countries. Its already extant in India. So instead of lowering wages in first world countries, its increasing wages in poorer countries. Might take a while, but it gets there.
That works in free and democratic countries like India, where workers are free to do whatever they want. If we required the same safety standards and whatnot (1), and actually taxed companies there providing services here, just like they should tax companies here providing services there, there would be no problem. There are already huge areas that you can't tell apart from other first world countries, which means that manufacturers move to poorer areas, which raises them up, etc, etc... It's working fine, and in fifty years or so we'll have a fairly serious competitor in the world economy. We just need to make sure politicans don't operate India at the expense of the Indian people for American businesses, but considering we can't seem to stop them from operating the US that way, we're probably going to have to deal with that problem locally first.
However, that doesn't apply to China and other communist countries. What happened with Russia proves we shouldn't just ignore them, and trading and openness can be good, but if you think that enough money from the US gets passed to workers in China to raise their standard of living you have another think coming.
Workers in non-open countries are essentially, slave laborers. Your logic is like attempting to free pre-Civil War slaves by buying a lot of cotton from slave-owners, thus the slave's standard of living will go up and they will eventually be able to afford a better life. That doesn't make a lot of sense.
And, yes, we are not the only country in the world, and others could, indeed, trade with them. Pre-Stupid-War, we had some influence on the global community, but we can still offer other countries incentives,and a lot of places already don't want to trade with China or have such small economies it doesn't matter. Instead, we offer China incentives for...I have no idea.
1) Bhopalm India, was the site of the most horrific industrial accident ever, caused by an American company, United Carbine, due to cutting corners on their almost non-existent safety systems. And we've still refused to extradite the people responsible to India, and India is so deep in their pockets they aren't pressing the matter of 15,000 charges of manslaughter! If they'd killed Americans, the entire company would have been sued to the ground.
Banks won't accept checks for no money, at least not on purpose. By all legal definations, checks for no money do not 'exist', they're just a random piece of paper, and they'd no more accept it than your shopping list. (They might offer to shred it for you.)
Now, I'm sure their automated systems that suck in checks from businesses have managed to get no money checks inside the banking system, and I don't know what they do with them them once that happens.
Except in rare cases checks 'expire' after 60, 90, or 120 days.
The check may 'expire', but the amount owned doesn't. After about a year it's turned over to the state as unclaimed property.
And both of you are idiots. Large companies can't just magically make outstanding checks vanish from their books, even if they are two cents. That amount stayed on the books as an issued-but-not-cashed check until it was turned over to the state, at which point the accounting people would stop caring about it.
That's nothing. Bellsouth keeps calling me up and trying to sell me long distance.
On my cell phone.
At a phone number that's always been a cell phone.
And right now is with Cingular. You know, that company that Bellsouth owns 50% of?
I finally, apparently, made them stop by threatening them with a lawsuit.
Ha. I love when they hook up cable and...forget about it. Then bitch at people for 'piracy', like we can magically make the cable coming into our house have a signal on it.
My mother's gotten HBO and Showtime, on her cable, for two decades. For free. They know about it. She's mentioned it a few time to them, they've gasped, acted all outraged like she didn't tell them. (Which, of course, she just did, and had done before.)
They've tried to get her to pay for it, and when she said she didn't want it, acted like they were going to send someone out immediately to disconnect it, I guess in a sort of 'punishment' for her not magically solving their mistake.
It's still there. She's stopped mentioning it, because, frankly, she's tried of them acting like it's her problem.
It's not some weird, broken-in-a-good-way cable box, either. Every TV and every VCR gets it. My original theory was that it had something with the neighbors, but most of neighbors have rotated at least twice, and some of them have moved to dish because Alltel cable is craptacular. Sometimes one of them goes bad for a year or two, and then comes back, and for a while we had The Movie Channel instead of Showtime. (Oddly enough, they don't even offer TMC.)
Can't you just merge it with your lot?
I don't know how you do that, but I do know that you can have your lot 'subparceled', so presumably you can have it, um, superparceled.
This is, of course, assuming they share a border at some point, but as you were talking about the placement of your house I assume they do.
You might have to go before a zoning committee, but they probably don't get a damn and will just rubberstamp it.
I have no idea how that system works, but can't you just buy the tickets direct from station to station, and piece them together how ever you want?
I mean, if you get off at your 'terminating station' on one ticket, and onto another train with an entirely new ticket, they can't very well bitch at you for that.
Or are these multiple tickets cheaper than single tickets?
That's the greatest scam ever. More and more companies are putting 'early termination' clauses in, and they trigger if you stop using the service, not, as would actually be sane and protect their investment, if you stop paying the bill.
Move your phone number? Have the physical phone lines switched over? Have the gas company to disconnect the gas pipeline because you're remodeling? Return a leased car early because you're moving and can't return the car from there? Nope, those are all 'early termination', even if you say 'I will continue to pay the bills you send me for the service I have rendered myself unable to us'.
In most cases, of course, the most sane thing is to let the contract expire on its own, which is why this crap is really catching on where the contract ties up some resource of yours, or involves something that it is physically or legally impossible for you to do, so have to get them to do it.(1)
At some point you're going to have take a car under warranty by the dealer to demonstrate it's usable every few months. If you've totalled it, you've obviously terminated the service contract and should be charged a termination fee.
We really a consumer protection law that says in no cases shall early termination ever cost more than the company would have made if you just paid your bills the rest of the contact cycle, regardless of how the company is trying to interpet the contract. In addition, when you terminate, they'd have to give you the option of asking for a bill for the entire rest of the contract at once, in addition to the option of you continuing the previous system of billing.
Wait a minute. What am I talking about? What's a 'consumer protection law'? Sorry, I confused this year with 1906 again, when the government actually passed laws to protect human beings from being harmed by companies.
1) Note I'm not talking about things they'd charge for regardless, like remove a sat dish from your roof. I'm talking about things like remove their gas lines or take back their stuff, stuff they don't charge for, but they count as 'cancellation' when they do it, and you can't actually do yourself.
Time Warner cable, the broadband service provider I cancelled over a year ago, sends me a bill notifying me of a $5 credit every month. Multiple calls to their hell desk and customer disservice inevitably result in 1) they can't find any such thing 2) Oh, there it is!
My phone company did that. I canceled my account (I moved) with Alltel for local phone service, sent them what they said I owed them. They send me what I think is a bill for something like ten dollars a month later, and I was confused until I noticed it was a credit. Well, cool.
I called them up, and they said, apparently, it was a 'deposit'. Despite me being told I didn't have to pay one. I guess they just secretly includes it in the 'installation fee', which consisted of charging me 50 dollars to flip a switch in a computer. They were holding it to make sure no long distance bills came in. Interesting concept, considering I hadn't made a single long distance call on that line, and they, being the phone company, should be aware of that fact, but whatever.
They send me another notice of the credit, a week later.
Two months pass. They send me yet another notice.
Another month passes. They send me another notice of the credit, and a check at the same time.
You know, they sure bitch and bitch if my payments are two days late, but they can, apparently, just fuck around for three months before sending me money.
Your second story is the reason I never do automated billing. It's not so much worries about them refusing to cancel something, it's that a lot of those systems are, apparently, completely stupid and try to bill any CC number you've given them, even if you've supposedly told them to stop and paid your bill in some other way.
Screw California. When did Puerto Rica stop being part of the US? They're citizens!
And, yeah, anyone who thinks immigrants will come in and take out identidy is either a racist or a moron. How many cultures have we chewed up and spit out, again?
Sure, they'll come here, and won't speak English.
Their kids will grow up to be honor students and speak near-perfect English and whatever other language.
Their kids won't speak the other languages, speak English with a local accent, roll their eyes when their grandparents talk about 'the old country', get married to someone their parents disapprove of, and generally be Americans.
Their kids will speak of their 'heritage' and have no clue what they're talking about, imagining a sort of parody of that country gained from old movies.
In 100 years the country might be slightly browner. It might have a few more Spanish words, and it might have a few more Mexican food places.
It will still be America. It will probably have changed in unrecognizable ways, yes, but that will have nothing to do with immigration, legal or otherwise.
For a country that constantly influences the entire damn world's culture via movies and television, it seems rather egotistical to worry about a single culture, especially one that already 'invaded' the entire Southwest like 100 fucking years ago. It's like worrying about Italian influence, or English influence! Hey, that ship already sailed, dumbasses. We've sucked in so much of their culture we have real Mexican restaurants and fake Mexican restaurants, and 'Mexican' dishes in normal restaurants, just like Italian food.
I wonder how much of this is anti-Catholic.
I already said how to fix it. Have, in addition to 'Allow example.com', have 'Ignore example.com', and leave the warning and changed icon for sites I haven't marked as good or bad.
His interview section really shouldn't be compared to any other political TV show in the first place. It should be compared to Leno and Letterman and whatnot. Except he focuses on guest that are famous for political reason, and not entertainment reasons, and he's actually knowledgable with the topic they're talking about.
Which, frankly, is a little impressive. At least one, and sometimes two, guests a week are hawking books, and he always appears to at least have read parts of them.
It's actually nice to have a place where people with all sorts of political viewpoints can stand up and talk about random stuff without being attacked while speaking. (Of course they can, and have, been attacked the next day for what they said.) Yes, politicians already can do that with press conferences, but the press chops their words up, and no one else has that ability.
Anyone who accuses him of playing 'softball' at with any guest is an idiot who hasn't actually been paying attention to show, because the point of guests is to let them speak about whatever they want. The hardball interviews he's had are countable on one hand, and they're usually because he's got someone completely stupid on, and he asks obvious questions they can't answer because their position is completely inane. I seem to remember one with Bill Bennett.
You are somewhat correct, and somewhat wrong.
The problem isn't how the presentation of facts works, really.
it's that for way too long the media has let politicians lie. They just get up there and say things they know aren't true, and then the media 'truthfully' says 'Politician X said blah blah' without bothering to mention it was a total lie.
Usually it's the Republicans. I don't know if that means they have more to lie about, or just have better liars. Sometimes it's the Democrats.
Also, that Windows XP Pro only comes with installation support.
Actually, he was talking about the OEM version of Windows, which doesn't have any support at all from Microsoft, not even installation.
In short, BSD is for the benefit of developers and GNU is for the benefit of users.
Unless your users want to use GNU tools (QT, Cygwin, etc) in their commercial undertaking, of course.
If they use development tools to make their own software and sell it, guess what? They're developers, dumbass.
And they can use GNU tools just fine as long as they don't distribute them or distribute things that require the end users to use them.
Not that I actually believe the linking theory of the GPL. In my option, the GPL and the LGPL are the same thing, legally. But even if you believe them, you can still use the tools for free however you want, including developing commercial apps.