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User: Bob+the+Super+Hamste

Bob+the+Super+Hamste's activity in the archive.

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  1. Re:Doesn't the iPhone and AT&T prove this wron on Mobile Operators: Creating Artificial Demand For Capacity? · · Score: 1

    Congratulations you just discovered zone pricing. That has been going on for years in the gasoline industry so it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone but yet it still is.

  2. Re:Doesn't the iPhone and AT&T prove this wron on Mobile Operators: Creating Artificial Demand For Capacity? · · Score: 2
    There are some states where the minimum price of fuel is mandated by law. For example in Minnesota the minimum price at which gasoline can be sold is the daily average wholesale price at the terminal + taxes & fees + (the lesser of 6% of the whole sale price or $0.08 a gallon). Below is the relevant Minnesota state statutes:

    325D.71 UNLAWFUL GASOLINE SALES

    Any offer for sale of gasoline by a retailer by way of posted price or indicating meter that is below cost, as defined by section 325D.01, subdivision 5, clause (3), is a violation of section 325D.04, except that the criminal penalties in section 325D.071 do not apply. In addition to the penalties for violations and the remedies provided for injured parties set forth elsewhere in this chapter, the commissioner of commerce may use the authority under section 45.027 for the purpose of preventing violations of this section. A retailer who sells gasoline at the same or higher legally posted price of a competitor in the same market area, on the same day, is not in violation of this section.

    A retailer who offers gasoline for sale at a price below cost as part of a promotion at an individual location for no more than three days in any calendar quarter is not in violation of this section.
    325D.01 DEFINITIONS sub division 5 clause (3)

    (3) for purposes of gasoline offered for sale by way of posted price or indicating meter by a retailer, at a retail location where gasoline is dispensed into passenger automobiles and trucks by the consumer, "cost" means the average terminal price on the day, at the terminal from which the most recent supply of gasoline delivered to the retail location was acquired, plus all applicable state and federal excise taxes and fees, plus the lesser of six percent or eight cents.

    So here we have a case where the minimum price is mandated. Add in the zone pricing for delivery and individual stations have basically a fixed predictable minimum price, they could charge more but most don't as typically stations make very little on gasoline sales (probably 8-9 cents a gallon in Minnesota). They make most of their money on inside sales of things like pop, cigarettes, candy, coffee, ice, chips, etc as most of these are high margin items especially fountain pop and coffee which can easily exceed 90% margin. If you want to complain about gas prices it is not the individual stations you should be mad at, it is farther up the supply chain in the refiners, terminals, shippers, and oil producers. For the record I worked at a gas station for years in high school and college where I made my way up to assistant manager and thus got to see all the various invoices, zone maps, daily reports, monthly reports, and other stuff.

  3. Re:"health care" = "disease management" on Does Higher Health Care Spending Lead To Better Patient Outcomes? · · Score: 1

    That and they need to stop with the magnets, and homeopathic crap. They are great for getting your back and joints opened up (which can get rid of certain types of pain), some also do a fairly decent job with physical therapy but some of the crap they push is pretty bad.

  4. And I thought Bush was drunk with power on DHS Will Now Vet UK Air Passengers To Mexico, Canada, Cuba · · Score: 1

    And here I thought the Bush administration was drunk with power. I thought Obama was smarter than Bush and would at least know where US law was applicable, you would almost think Obama has the belief that American law is supreme across the globe.

  5. Re:Value on Canada To Stop Making Pennies · · Score: 2

    You have to go back to before Nixon if you want to blame a US president. It was FDR who took the first major steps in getting the US off a precious metal standard. What he did was worse than Nixon in that FDR did have people's gold confiscated and prevented US residents from owning gold coins or bullion (this wasn't changed until 1986). Under the FDR administration the dollar also went from $20.?? per ounce gold (I forget the exact value) to $35 per ounce of gold. Later in the 60s under Kennedy and Johnson administrations the other precious metal standard ended when silver certificates were no longer redeemable for real (90% pure silver) silver dollars and later not even redeemable for silver. All Nixon did was close the international gold window which removed the last semblance of the US being on a precious metal standard as the silver standard (the US was a bi-metallic standard) was ended during the previous administration.

  6. Re:Is there anything wrong with that? on Canada To Stop Making Pennies · · Score: 1

    Well inflation isn't a consequence of a perpetually growing economy, it is a consequence of a perpetually growing money supply when the number of goods and services can't keep up. This is a problem created by central banks (or if your country doesn't have one then the government's treasury directly). Mild inflation is generally considered good from a government's perspective as it means they can spend money today and pay it back with money that is worth less later. From an individual's perspective the mild inflation slowly eats away a persons savings unless they can receive a return greater than the rate of inflation. Rampant inflation is just bad all around, just ask Zimbabwe. Deflation has similar issues but the roles tend to be reversed.

  7. Re:I'll own up to it...I throw them away on Canada To Stop Making Pennies · · Score: 1

    I save the quarters for the DIY car wash place but the rest of the change gets dumped in the donation bin at Wendy's for the Dave Thomas Foundation. I usually only get fast food a couple of times a year so it ends up being a few fistfuls of change that I dump in there.

  8. Re:They're mostly Zinc on Canada To Stop Making Pennies · · Score: 1

    The 1982 ones are a mix of copper plated ones and non copper plated ones. The all copper ones are heavier than the copper plated ones and if you have a digital scale accurate to the 0.1 gram they are easy to find.

  9. Re:I'll own up to it...I throw them away on Canada To Stop Making Pennies · · Score: 2

    Better yet is hold one of the copper plated US pennies (all 1983 and newer and some 1982 ones) with a long pair of pliers, then take a propane brazing torch to it. Depending on how high you have it turned up you either create zinc splatters on the ground or you end up setting the molten zing flowing out of it on fire.

  10. Re:Tape never died or lost its supremacy on After 60 Years, Tape Reinserts Itself · · Score: 1

    Strangely that sounds like some customers I have talked to. They are so paranoid about failure (with good reason given the industry I work in) that they sometimes come up with the most bizarre failure scenarios for the most minor things, as in 5 or 6 things failing all at once any one of which is more catastrophic than the loss of the minor functionality. My favorite response that I gave once was "If your network has completely failed, the local machine is out of memory, and out of disk space, are you really going to care if you no longer have working properly?". My favorite scenario that I ever got from a customer was "What if both the main and backup sites are smoking craters in the ground will still be functional?" which just shows how goofy some people can get when it comes to redundancy. These questions I tend to lump into the gibberish category of "What if the world blew up?", or as one of my coworkers classifies them "If cats had machine guns would dogs still chase them?"

  11. Re:Strongly worded letter on Judge Allows Bradley Manning Supporter To Sue Government Over Border Search · · Score: 1

    The English do seem to have mastered the art of rhetoric. I did enjoy watching one of the "discussion" in the British Parliament after Gordon Brown got back from one of the bailout meetings late last year when I was in Europe. It was dramatically different from what I have seen in the US in our congressional debates.

  12. How about ask your Wife's doctor on Ask Slashdot: Store Umbilical Cord Blood — and If So, Where? · · Score: 1

    My wife and I got a bunch of that crap when we had our kids. We didn't know what to make of it so we asked her OBGYN and basically got that they were all scams as there aren't treatments that have been developed that use it and the chances that your child might benefit from any treatment developed using it are slim to none (another poster mentioned that you would be better off buying lottery tickets with that money and giving them to the child). Also as another poster mentioned it is amazing how many pamphlets are in a doctors office, I figure that the companies pay to put them there as a form advertising. If you still feel the need to have it collected donate it to research as there it stands a better chance of doing some good.

  13. Re:What did he tweet? on Student Expelled From Indiana High School For Tweeting Profanity · · Score: 1
    That and the wonderful metaphors Shakespeare used. My personal favorite is from Antony and Cleopatra:

    He ploughed her, and she cropt

  14. Re:precedents have been established on Student Expelled From Indiana High School For Tweeting Profanity · · Score: 1

    Schools do care about offending people and those who might take offense. If you wanted to see a public school administrator go bat shit crazy have a white student spew racial epitaphs at minority students (I use this example because I don't know of any really offensive ones for white people) as political correctness runs rampant in schools.

  15. Re:precedents have been established on Student Expelled From Indiana High School For Tweeting Profanity · · Score: 2

    They probably wouldn't be able to lower their operating costs as most of them are fairly fixed (i.e. building, power, heat, cooling, salaries for staff, and staff benefits) so if a large fraction were expelled over this then their funding source would dry up (money based off the the number of student days) and they couldn't correct for it until the next school year. This really would hurt the school.

  16. Re:It's their network on Student Expelled From Indiana High School For Tweeting Profanity · · Score: 1

    Besides, public schools are a branch of the government, and thus shouldn't have the right to circumvent the First Amendment.

    Did you even go to public school? Public schools might as well be constitution free zones with the stuff that they pull. It seems the only thing they care about is prayer, in school.

  17. Re:Crack your iPhone? on Cops Can Crack an iPhone In Under Two Minutes · · Score: 1

    I doubt it. Now a days, there is very little hope of winning when it comes to your word against theirs.

    It has worked in the past and probably still is. Additionally there was this bit on /. a while back about the number of bits used when doing the A to D conversion was too low (12 bit A-D converter where only 4 bits were used) which basically showed the values to be to course to be of any value on the low end.

  18. Re:Catch-22 on House Kills Effort To Stop Workplace Requests For Facebook Passwords · · Score: 1

    Sweet, then I am demanding the username and password for every member of congress.

  19. Re:Was anyone suprised? on House Kills Effort To Stop Workplace Requests For Facebook Passwords · · Score: 1

    Probably not under the original intent of the constitution.
    Definitely not with the current set of justices on the court.

    Basic reason is that the constitution deals with what the government can and cannot do and is silent on what individuals/corporations can and cannot do. This type of thing may go against existing federal labor law, state constitutions, or state labor law but I doubt I could ever be familiar with that Byzantine mess.

  20. Re:How is that relevant? on Counterterrorism Agents Were Told They Could Suspend the Law · · Score: 1

    Thanks for pointing out another government screw up. Truth is they would have gone out of business if not for the government stepping in. We can bicker and argue if what the government bailout was overall better than just letting the fail, but let's not pretend that what happened was free market capitalism. The same could be said about any of the government bailouts, subsidies, or mandates.

  21. Re:What kind of congress is that? on Congress Capitulates To TSA; Refuses To Let Bruce Schneier Testify · · Score: 1

    Have you seen the size of the current US code. I wouldn't be surprised by that number.

  22. Re:Violating the 4th Amendment? on Congress Capitulates To TSA; Refuses To Let Bruce Schneier Testify · · Score: 1

    People have tried but frequently courts have ruled they don't have standing. Although the man is nuts former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura has tried to bring a case but it was tossed out because he didn't have standing.

  23. Re:Jury Nullification? No need to go that far... on Congress Capitulates To TSA; Refuses To Let Bruce Schneier Testify · · Score: 1

    It has been my (limited) experience that they don't want you to consider "facts" and evidence not brought up in court. The judge and lawyers are the ones who get to decide what the "facts" and evidence are. Having someone with outside knowledge that is relevant to the case (engineering knowledge or detailed knowledge of vehicles in this case) allows information to be introduced to the rest of the jury that the lawyers didn't present. For some cases it seems they try to find the dumbest people but it didn't seem that way on the jury I served on, but then it basically was a slam dunk for the defendant, and was a civil case over an auto accident to assign blame. Afterwards the judge sat with the jury to answer any questions we had as most people had never been to court before and we asked a number of them, the biggest was why that case made it to a jury as it was so clear. The judge pointed out that every case can be heard by a jury if one of the parties wants it and thus frivolous cases sometimes to make it to a jury, he didn't know exactly why this one made it as far as it did as he also thought it was a waste of time and resources.

  24. Re:Why now? on Comcast Not Counting Their Video Service Against Bandwidth Cap · · Score: 1

    It hasn't been in the news cycle for a while and most people aren't paying attention as the biggest news headlines are ObamaCare at the Supreme court and shooting of the 17 year old in Flordia.

  25. Re:Doesn't violate network neutrality? on Comcast Not Counting Their Video Service Against Bandwidth Cap · · Score: 1

    I would accept that if all bandwidth usage that stays on their network didn't count, but highly doubt that. Let's assume that my neighbor and I both have Comcast as our ISP and we decide for shits and giggles to pipe output from /dev/urandom on out machines across the network to each other continuously. I doubt that traffic wouldn't count towards the cap.