Most of these bags were put in by body shops (and/or insurance companies) goosing their profit margin by using dodgy aftermarket parts. Very few of the people with these bags (save the idiots who bought them on eBay) actually went out and bought those parts; they were just put in as part of body work. It's not unreasonable for a consumer to expect a body shop to put in parts that are not a steaming pile of garbage.
You have a valid point, however if a customer is quoted $500 for an airbag and then the shop says "we can do it for $80 instead", they should be weary. After all we're not talking about a replacement rear view mirror here, we're talking about a critical safety device. Of course, it could be a case of the shop / insurance company being unscrupulous, in which case there was nothing the owner of the car could have done. But the shops are supposed to keep the records of all parts they install so that their customers can inspect them upon request. If a customer does not ask to do that, then they are partially at fault for accepting a crappy part - especially if there was no intentional deception from the shop.
After all, just because a lot of people have horror stories about getting screwed by immoral repair shops, that doesn't mean that they are all crooks.
A 2007 Hyundai Elantra with 50,000 miles in very good condition has a private party blue book in excess of $8,000. While I could (though would not want to) finance it, I most certainly don't have $8,000 sitting around doing nothing to frivolously spend on an underpowered and unenjoyable Korean sedan.
I can't afford any of the cars on that list - they either are too expensive on the used market at any age, or they are too new to be on the used market at an affordable price.
This suggests these counterfeit airbags will mostly kill wealthy people, or at least people who are wealthier than I am. If they were cheap enough to acquire a bogus bag, I have no pity for them.
That is some hardcore rationalization you have there....
That is a strange way to brush off reality.
I voted for Obama in 2008, and I will vote for him again in 2012 because he is less damaging to my career than Romney would be. However, the health care act he signed is a miserable piece of failure that indisputably did not reform health care.
Personally, I think he should have encouraged the democrats to just write their own bill and ignore the republicans while they had the majority in both houses. They should have known going in that the GOP would do everything they possibly could to prevent any reform from happening - which is exactly what the final outcome was. Hell there was plenty of partisan legislation that passed while GWB was in the white house with GOP majorities in both houses, so they didn't exactly have an established pattern of bipartisanship to stand on. Instead the democrats caved to the demands of the minority party and presented a mammoth bill that does not reform health care and instead makes the already too powerful health insurance companies even more powerful.
Obama wanted to reform health care, and that is what he should have done. Instead he allowed the conservatives to hijack the process and then was forced to sign this lousy bill as his only alternative was to do nothing at all.
Only alternative? Wow...just wow...
He couldn't reform health care by executive order. Line-item veto is not available. If he had done nothing the bill would have died in congress, if he had sent it back asking for a different bill it would have died in congress that way as well.
He knew full well that if the bill had died without being signed - once it had passed congress - he would have been exclusively blamed for its failure to be passed even though the republicans voted against it. That would have resulted in being labelled as a "do-nothing" president in the 2012 election cycle, which would have been terrible for his chances of a second term.
if you are aware of another choice he had at that time with regards to attempting to reform health care, please share it. A reply of "just wow" does not add anything of value to the discussion.
Just because Obama did not reform health care in the way that you or I would like it to be reformed does not mean it isn't a reform.
First of all, the bill he signed was not his own work. He signed the bill that was presented to him. Second - and more importantly - it did not reform health care in any meaningful way. We have the same idiotic system run by for-profit health insurance companies (some of whom have greased the wheels so effectively that they qualify for "non profit" tax status), we still have millions without access to care they can afford, we still have a lack of freedom for the customer that is imposed by the for-profits, and to make it worse now the for-profits have even more power as the bill forces people to buy a plan.
So no, the conservative bill you call "Obamacare" did not reform health care. Nor was it the work of Obama.
Why do you think a wealthy person couldn't bribe a cop to plant some evidence (seems drugs would be easiest) and arrest and jail anyone they like (or, rather, don't like) now? And given the state's courts will take the cop's word over their victim's, they wouldn't even need to bribe a judge; and the jury would baa right along.
That is slightly different only because of the types of crimes that wealthy people tend to go to prison for. Take Bernie Madoff, for example. Planting drugs on some other person would not have been very useful as his charges had nothing to do with drugs - really, planting evidence in any of the traditional ways would not have likely been effective.
However, if he wanted to give some random person $400k to sit in jail on his behalf for a few years, a lot of people would take that offer. Even worse a lot of politicians and pundits would applaud it.
That just sounds like the next logical step of American capitalism, really. Of course, under some peoples' dreams not only would the wealthy be able to pay someone to go to jail for them, but they would get to pick exactly who that person would be - whether that person wants to go or not.
I hear stories like this all the time, though they rarely pan out. Granted, it is slightly more likely at a warehouse club where you need a member ID to make a purchase, but it still doesn't seem that likely. I'm no particular fan of costco, but I would love to hear their side of the story.
Are you trying to tell me that the SEC has rules? That they enforce? I don't believe this. This does not reflect the US that I live in; are you perhaps talking about some other country with more reasonable laws about this kind of thing - maybe you meant to say it happened in Armenia, not America?
he did not cave on reforming health care. For good or bad, Obamacare is real.
You are about 1/3rd right on that statement. There is a bill that was signed into law, which conservatives derisively call "Obamacare". However, it is not health care reform. It is made by its (conservative) authors to look like health care reform, though what it actually did was reinforce the existing broken system. Previously the insurance companies had de facto power over consumers, now they have it as a legal right. This crappy bill now forces us to buy health insurance at whatever price the market tells us we should pay. Real health care reform would have at least made a single-payer option available for those who want it, or given more choices for those who have a plan but want to "shop around". This bill does neither of those. Obama wanted to reform health care, and that is what he should have done. Instead he allowed the conservatives to hijack the process and then was forced to sign this lousy bill as his only alternative was to do nothing at all.
When everyone in the world has an epiphany and decides to elect me president
Everyone in the world???? You do realize there is no "president of the world", right? Only US citizens vote for US president.
While Obama will be re-elected, he will subsequently show himself again to be President Lawnchair and cave in on the requirement (even though it won't matter until long after he's out of office). It will become another thing that he said he would do, but ultimately caved on; just like closing Guantanamo, ending the wars, reforming health care, or ending Bush Administration economic policies.
In middle school we had mandatory typing instruction - on C64's. I was bored out of my mind during the tedious typing drills that I finished in well under half the allotted time, so I eventually found that I could escape out of the program to the C64 prompt (and get back in if I wanted to) and do BASIC programming. I learned a little BASIC that way - really, just enough to annoy the teacher who would reboot my C64 when the class would break for lunch. That didn't matter since the remaining half hour after lunch was plenty of time to do both halves of the lesson.
Later in middle school we learned apple works on an Apple IIGS and claris works on a Mac LC-something-or-other. Not very exciting stuff; it really taught us more about how horrifically unreliable 3.5" floppy disks are, I had to redo more than a few assignments because my disks turned to useless mishmash before the semester was over.
High school was all self-taught for me from a CSci perspective. The notion of a dedicated graphics card was just catching on, and modems were getting faster than I could type (a nice change). I learned how to write really crazy batch files in DOS, and did four years of high school math and science in three so I could move on to university earlier. My high school was just starting to think about this "internet" thing, and our library may have had (what was then) a fairly high speed connection that was available on just a couple of dedicated systems.
At the university you could access the internet from your laptop if you had an ethernet card set for DHCP.
This is an important question that everyone should ask, regardless of how far they are moving. You mention graphics cards and hard drives that are not installed in computers - are they really worth transporting? I know this can be a hard question to answer but it is important. I would recommend looking at the cost per kilogram you are paying for transport, and then think seriously of which items that you are shipping are worth at least that much per kilogram on their own. Anything that doesn't meet that threshold should probably not be moved.
20 cents on $4 is only 5%. Being as California is probably paying a fair bit above $4, that would put the percentage even lower. I'm surprised they would make a big deal out of it if it one just one moment in time. If it was 5% in one day, for several days in a row, that would be more noticeable, but this is barely above the variance you'd likely find between two gas stations.
60GHz will be essentially unaffected by microwaves.
However, I note that my laptop (with 802.11g) works just fine on top of my operating microwave
I hope for your sake that isn't all sitting on your lap while operating. You might end up like this guy if you keep doing that for too long.
Link contains image of a South Park character with elephantitis of the testicles, wheeling his scrotum around in a wheelbarrow.
Obviously NSFW.
What else would I post in response to someone who might have a microwave and a laptop computer sitting on top of their lap? I don't know why anyone would be surprised that the image would be NSFW.
That said, at first glance it could just be some guy pushing a wheelbarrow of... giant cantaloupes? If you weren't looking closely - or familiar with that episode of South park - you might not know what it is.
It is not really that hard to find companies with manufacturing facilities where workers rights are protected
I wish that were as true as you may be trying to imply. Workers' rights are rapidly going the way of the dodo bird, especially in the USA. Meanwhile countries who actually respect their workers are facing economic instability due to our runaway unchecked capitalism and the fact that some arrogant bastards on wall street damn near broke the world. This leads to even higher unemployment in countries where workers rights were respected, as their (now former) employers go to places where 18 hour work days for near zero pay are considered acceptable practices.
802.11ad after 802.11ac could potentially be a sign that we will start following the alphabet for subsequent releases of 802.11 wifi standards. That on its own would be a good reason to adopt it - just to straighten out the alphabet soup that was previous wifi standards.
Really? You think keeping track of some people's dinner plans is the hardest IT problem on the planet? How about YouTube storing and serving truly ludicrous amounts of video. Web search? Watson?
Facebook is utterly trivial compared to many problems out there.
While I happen to agree with you, none of those other problems get daily front-page attention on slashdot. While facebook is one of the least interesting problems in computer science, it has been a staple of slashdot discussion ever since facebook became a staple of everyday conversation (or perhaps ever since the creator of facebook surpassed cmdrtaco in net worth).
The fact that your comment was modded up only shows just how many other paullowers there are on slashdot. You made a wild-assed and completely unsubstantiated claim:
- make a mental note that DHS treats Ron Paul supporters as 'terrorists'. Apparently at the minimum 15% of population of USA are on this terrorist list just according to this little fact.
And provided not one iota of evidence to support it. You linked to a bunch of biased youtube clips to somehow make an argument for your cult leader being the greatest thing since air itself.
And for that matter, even your claim of 15% of the US population being either on the terrorist list or supporters of ron paul is bullshit.
You are a disgrace to the ron paul campaign. He does actually have a few valid points but you twist it so severely that sometimes it looks like you are actually trying to discredit the campaign and make him look like a nutjob.
You deserved the terrible karma that you had earned earlier; how on earth you managed to get back to positive is anyone's guess. Did your sock puppets manage to score some mod points and push you back into the positive?
Slashdot Mirror
Most of these bags were put in by body shops (and/or insurance companies) goosing their profit margin by using dodgy aftermarket parts. Very few of the people with these bags (save the idiots who bought them on eBay) actually went out and bought those parts; they were just put in as part of body work. It's not unreasonable for a consumer to expect a body shop to put in parts that are not a steaming pile of garbage.
You have a valid point, however if a customer is quoted $500 for an airbag and then the shop says "we can do it for $80 instead", they should be weary. After all we're not talking about a replacement rear view mirror here, we're talking about a critical safety device. Of course, it could be a case of the shop / insurance company being unscrupulous, in which case there was nothing the owner of the car could have done. But the shops are supposed to keep the records of all parts they install so that their customers can inspect them upon request. If a customer does not ask to do that, then they are partially at fault for accepting a crappy part - especially if there was no intentional deception from the shop.
After all, just because a lot of people have horror stories about getting screwed by immoral repair shops, that doesn't mean that they are all crooks.
You can't afford a five year-old Hyundai Elantra?
A 2007 Hyundai Elantra with 50,000 miles in very good condition has a private party blue book in excess of $8,000. While I could (though would not want to) finance it, I most certainly don't have $8,000 sitting around doing nothing to frivolously spend on an underpowered and unenjoyable Korean sedan.
I can't afford any of the cars on that list - they either are too expensive on the used market at any age, or they are too new to be on the used market at an affordable price.
This suggests these counterfeit airbags will mostly kill wealthy people, or at least people who are wealthier than I am. If they were cheap enough to acquire a bogus bag, I have no pity for them.
That would only be about 60 years behind schedule...
That is some hardcore rationalization you have there....
That is a strange way to brush off reality.
I voted for Obama in 2008, and I will vote for him again in 2012 because he is less damaging to my career than Romney would be. However, the health care act he signed is a miserable piece of failure that indisputably did not reform health care.
Personally, I think he should have encouraged the democrats to just write their own bill and ignore the republicans while they had the majority in both houses. They should have known going in that the GOP would do everything they possibly could to prevent any reform from happening - which is exactly what the final outcome was. Hell there was plenty of partisan legislation that passed while GWB was in the white house with GOP majorities in both houses, so they didn't exactly have an established pattern of bipartisanship to stand on. Instead the democrats caved to the demands of the minority party and presented a mammoth bill that does not reform health care and instead makes the already too powerful health insurance companies even more powerful.
Obama wanted to reform health care, and that is what he should have done. Instead he allowed the conservatives to hijack the process and then was forced to sign this lousy bill as his only alternative was to do nothing at all.
Only alternative? Wow...just wow...
He couldn't reform health care by executive order. Line-item veto is not available. If he had done nothing the bill would have died in congress, if he had sent it back asking for a different bill it would have died in congress that way as well.
He knew full well that if the bill had died without being signed - once it had passed congress - he would have been exclusively blamed for its failure to be passed even though the republicans voted against it. That would have resulted in being labelled as a "do-nothing" president in the 2012 election cycle, which would have been terrible for his chances of a second term.
if you are aware of another choice he had at that time with regards to attempting to reform health care, please share it. A reply of "just wow" does not add anything of value to the discussion.
I am not 1/3 right. I am 3/3 right.
No, you are not.
Just because Obama did not reform health care in the way that you or I would like it to be reformed does not mean it isn't a reform.
First of all, the bill he signed was not his own work. He signed the bill that was presented to him. Second - and more importantly - it did not reform health care in any meaningful way. We have the same idiotic system run by for-profit health insurance companies (some of whom have greased the wheels so effectively that they qualify for "non profit" tax status), we still have millions without access to care they can afford, we still have a lack of freedom for the customer that is imposed by the for-profits, and to make it worse now the for-profits have even more power as the bill forces people to buy a plan.
So no, the conservative bill you call "Obamacare" did not reform health care. Nor was it the work of Obama.
Why do you think a wealthy person couldn't bribe a cop to plant some evidence (seems drugs would be easiest) and arrest and jail anyone they like (or, rather, don't like) now? And given the state's courts will take the cop's word over their victim's, they wouldn't even need to bribe a judge; and the jury would baa right along.
That is slightly different only because of the types of crimes that wealthy people tend to go to prison for. Take Bernie Madoff, for example. Planting drugs on some other person would not have been very useful as his charges had nothing to do with drugs - really, planting evidence in any of the traditional ways would not have likely been effective.
However, if he wanted to give some random person $400k to sit in jail on his behalf for a few years, a lot of people would take that offer. Even worse a lot of politicians and pundits would applaud it.
That just sounds like the next logical step of American capitalism, really. Of course, under some peoples' dreams not only would the wealthy be able to pay someone to go to jail for them, but they would get to pick exactly who that person would be - whether that person wants to go or not.
I hear stories like this all the time, though they rarely pan out. Granted, it is slightly more likely at a warehouse club where you need a member ID to make a purchase, but it still doesn't seem that likely. I'm no particular fan of costco, but I would love to hear their side of the story.
Are you trying to tell me that the SEC has rules? That they enforce? I don't believe this. This does not reflect the US that I live in; are you perhaps talking about some other country with more reasonable laws about this kind of thing - maybe you meant to say it happened in Armenia, not America?
he did not cave on reforming health care. For good or bad, Obamacare is real.
You are about 1/3rd right on that statement. There is a bill that was signed into law, which conservatives derisively call "Obamacare". However, it is not health care reform. It is made by its (conservative) authors to look like health care reform, though what it actually did was reinforce the existing broken system. Previously the insurance companies had de facto power over consumers, now they have it as a legal right. This crappy bill now forces us to buy health insurance at whatever price the market tells us we should pay. Real health care reform would have at least made a single-payer option available for those who want it, or given more choices for those who have a plan but want to "shop around". This bill does neither of those. Obama wanted to reform health care, and that is what he should have done. Instead he allowed the conservatives to hijack the process and then was forced to sign this lousy bill as his only alternative was to do nothing at all.
When everyone in the world has an epiphany and decides to elect me president
Everyone in the world???? You do realize there is no "president of the world", right? Only US citizens vote for US president.
While Obama will be re-elected, he will subsequently show himself again to be President Lawnchair and cave in on the requirement (even though it won't matter until long after he's out of office). It will become another thing that he said he would do, but ultimately caved on; just like closing Guantanamo, ending the wars, reforming health care, or ending Bush Administration economic policies.
Was your account hacked? This doesn't seem like something you would write, as it did not in any way praise ron paul or demonize barack obama.
In middle school we had mandatory typing instruction - on C64's. I was bored out of my mind during the tedious typing drills that I finished in well under half the allotted time, so I eventually found that I could escape out of the program to the C64 prompt (and get back in if I wanted to) and do BASIC programming. I learned a little BASIC that way - really, just enough to annoy the teacher who would reboot my C64 when the class would break for lunch. That didn't matter since the remaining half hour after lunch was plenty of time to do both halves of the lesson.
Later in middle school we learned apple works on an Apple IIGS and claris works on a Mac LC-something-or-other. Not very exciting stuff; it really taught us more about how horrifically unreliable 3.5" floppy disks are, I had to redo more than a few assignments because my disks turned to useless mishmash before the semester was over.
High school was all self-taught for me from a CSci perspective. The notion of a dedicated graphics card was just catching on, and modems were getting faster than I could type (a nice change). I learned how to write really crazy batch files in DOS, and did four years of high school math and science in three so I could move on to university earlier. My high school was just starting to think about this "internet" thing, and our library may have had (what was then) a fairly high speed connection that was available on just a couple of dedicated systems.
At the university you could access the internet from your laptop if you had an ethernet card set for DHCP.
This is an important question that everyone should ask, regardless of how far they are moving. You mention graphics cards and hard drives that are not installed in computers - are they really worth transporting? I know this can be a hard question to answer but it is important. I would recommend looking at the cost per kilogram you are paying for transport, and then think seriously of which items that you are shipping are worth at least that much per kilogram on their own. Anything that doesn't meet that threshold should probably not be moved.
20 cents on $4 is only 5%. Being as California is probably paying a fair bit above $4, that would put the percentage even lower. I'm surprised they would make a big deal out of it if it one just one moment in time. If it was 5% in one day, for several days in a row, that would be more noticeable, but this is barely above the variance you'd likely find between two gas stations.
60GHz will be essentially unaffected by microwaves.
However, I note that my laptop (with 802.11g) works just fine on top of my operating microwave
I hope for your sake that isn't all sitting on your lap while operating. You might end up like this guy if you keep doing that for too long.
Link contains image of a South Park character with elephantitis of the testicles, wheeling his scrotum around in a wheelbarrow.
Obviously NSFW.
What else would I post in response to someone who might have a microwave and a laptop computer sitting on top of their lap? I don't know why anyone would be surprised that the image would be NSFW.
... giant cantaloupes? If you weren't looking closely - or familiar with that episode of South park - you might not know what it is.
That said, at first glance it could just be some guy pushing a wheelbarrow of
It is not really that hard to find companies with manufacturing facilities where workers rights are protected
I wish that were as true as you may be trying to imply. Workers' rights are rapidly going the way of the dodo bird, especially in the USA. Meanwhile countries who actually respect their workers are facing economic instability due to our runaway unchecked capitalism and the fact that some arrogant bastards on wall street damn near broke the world. This leads to even higher unemployment in countries where workers rights were respected, as their (now former) employers go to places where 18 hour work days for near zero pay are considered acceptable practices.
Maybe it's time to trade your oshkosh b'gosh for grown-up pants? You're a big kid now.
As opposed to 93-pocket cargo pants, which make people really look mature.
60GHz will be essentially unaffected by microwaves.
However, I note that my laptop (with 802.11g) works just fine on top of my operating microwave
I hope for your sake that isn't all sitting on your lap while operating. You might end up like this guy if you keep doing that for too long.
802.11ad after 802.11ac could potentially be a sign that we will start following the alphabet for subsequent releases of 802.11 wifi standards. That on its own would be a good reason to adopt it - just to straighten out the alphabet soup that was previous wifi standards.
Really? You think keeping track of some people's dinner plans is the hardest IT problem on the planet? How about YouTube storing and serving truly ludicrous amounts of video. Web search? Watson?
Facebook is utterly trivial compared to many problems out there.
While I happen to agree with you, none of those other problems get daily front-page attention on slashdot. While facebook is one of the least interesting problems in computer science, it has been a staple of slashdot discussion ever since facebook became a staple of everyday conversation (or perhaps ever since the creator of facebook surpassed cmdrtaco in net worth).
Here's the breakdown.
- make a mental note that DHS treats Ron Paul supporters as 'terrorists'. Apparently at the minimum 15% of population of USA are on this terrorist list just according to this little fact.
And provided not one iota of evidence to support it. You linked to a bunch of biased youtube clips to somehow make an argument for your cult leader being the greatest thing since air itself.
And for that matter, even your claim of 15% of the US population being either on the terrorist list or supporters of ron paul is bullshit.
You are a disgrace to the ron paul campaign. He does actually have a few valid points but you twist it so severely that sometimes it looks like you are actually trying to discredit the campaign and make him look like a nutjob.
You deserved the terrible karma that you had earned earlier; how on earth you managed to get back to positive is anyone's guess. Did your sock puppets manage to score some mod points and push you back into the positive?