Only because we're fighting the war in a half-assed manner. I'm an opponent of the war, but if you are going to fight, do so from a position of overwhelming force. How many troops do we have there, 135,000? We should have went in with 400,000 and crushed all hopes of a rebellion. Send in a huge amount of troops, and do what has to be done (a little torture or mass murder, whatever) and come out as victors. The whole hearts and mind bullshit fucked up the war effort because we weren't allowed to kill people. Of course, the whole problem is that the war was started and maintained under false pretenses. If Iraq had something to do with 9/11, we could have just ignored the Iraqi people and said that we were there for vengeance. But Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 so we have to be all nice and PC about it.
You are absolutely correct that stopping past infringement doesn't stop it from being infringement. As a practical matter, however, if you refuse to audit your own systems and got into compliance (by moving to Linux, etc.) then they would be hard-pressed to prove there was any infringement.
The ruling of that "subpoena the RAM" case is widely misconstrued. A guy was subpoenaed for IP logs, and he said that since he didn't log IPs, all the IPs were transitory and in RAM. The court said that he could be forced to log IPs, because the RAM already contained the information, it did not require the party to create evidence (in a legal sense). Basically, the wording of the ruling was meant as a side-step around civil procedure rules.
You need to hire a lawyer. Part of my job includes crafting software licensing contracts. In your services contract, define levels of bugginess--mission critical all the way down to insignificant. Set acceptable turn-around periods for each level of bugginess: two weeks for mission-critical to months for bugs that you can work-around. (These are just examples; I'm not providing legal advice; hire your own counsel.)
News like this is actually great for the US military. Instead of being cast as incompetents, they are the victims of post-Cold-War era politicans who have forgotten what military readiness means. Clinton cut the military and now our national defense posture is suffering. Time to spend more money on more stealth submarines! The air force did the same thing when they vastly over-estimated the abilities of the MIG-25 to get funding for the F-15, and when they "showed" that the SU-27 would dominate the F-15 to get funding for the F-22.
But the problems you stated with the Phalanx CIWS (a big gun) are well-known and has lead to its replacement with Standard Missiles.
In your scenario, where China had a chance to win by dropping the nuclear bomb and spare hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers from dying, as a Chinese general, I don't know how you can't drop the bomb. You represent your people. Sometimes we are willing to die to accomplish a goal but at some point, it is too much and we drop our ideals and go with the practical.
Mike Murphy was recently awarded the Medal of Honor. He was shot in the head in the mountains of Afghanistan after the position of he and his men were discovered. Earlier, three Afghan sheepherders had stumbled upon their position. Knowing that there was a good chance these sheepherders were sympathetic to the Taliban, and would report the presence of American troops in the mountains, Murphy took a vote amongst his men as to whether to kill the herders. Knowing the risks, the soldiers voted not to do so and released the sheepherders. By the end of the day, nineteen American soldiers were dead. But they had done the right thing. This is the American spirit in a microcosm. We worry about these things that other countries would do as a matter of course.
But when the stakes are higher, you abandon your ideals. Would any country in the world sacrifice five hundred thousand of their youngest, fittest men out of idealism? Only in America would anyone even think about this idea seriously. If the roles were reversed, I'd rather not get nuked. I'd surrender. But if America didn't surrender, I'd fully understand if the Chinese nuked us into compliance.
Your interpretation of history is heartbreakingly naive and incomplete. You are correct that it is not only the bombs that kill in wartime but also starvation, lack of medication, and disease. Ending the war promptly saved the Japanese civilians and the civilians under Japanese captivity (basically the forced slave laborers) from starving to death and rotting from disease. America could have blockaded Japan for a few years until they starved away but that would have been more disastrous to Japanese civilians (and again, all the civilians under Japanese dominion) than the nukes. Furthermore, Japan would have definitely killed Allied POWs. If there's no food for your citizens, are you really going to feed POWs?
More importantly, you severely underestimate the Japanese will in that period. Japanese CIVILIANS were trained to fight the invasion of their mainland to the last man, woman, and child. Girls were given bamboo sticks to stab invading GIs with; they were taught to aim for the groin and stomach because the Allies were taller. Don't forget that in Okinawa and Tarawa, almost all the Japanese civilians committed suicide, at times throwing their families off the cliffs into the jagged rocks below, rather than fall to the Allies. Hell, the Japanese executed the civilians on those islands who refused to kill themselves. The same fanaticism was still alive in the fall of 1945. The entire country of Japan was willing to fight and die to prevent America from invading. The nuclear bombs, as horrible as it may sound, saved the Japanese from themselves.
The moral compass you desire assumes that everyone is the same. But the Japanese started the war. They surprised-attacked us. They were running around lopping heads off, cannabilizing US troops, testing biological weapons on civilian population, running forced labor camps, and committing all these horrible atrocities. The Japanese people were perfectly fine with this. In short, they were wrong and we were right. Our cause was just. Call it hindsight bias, or winners writing history, but I'm goddamn happy we beat Japan. You disagree with the operating theory that "We're Americans, they're the enemy, so they don't count." I don't see why you would disagree. The Japanese civilians may be innocent, but the American soldiers who were forced to fight after their country was attacked and threatened with invasion were even more innocent. They were not aggressors; they were defending their way of life from Japanese aggression started, continued, and financed by the Japanese civilians.
And make no mistake; the Allies had no better alternatives: it was either take 500K casualties storming the volcanic beaches of southern Japan, starving a fanatical country until they surrendered, or dropping the nuclear bombs. If you can save the lives and livelihoods of five hundred thousand American boys in return for nuking two hundred thousand Japanese civilians, I don't know how you can not pull the trigger. And that's true of all countries. As a military leader, I can't write five hundred thousand "I regret to inform you" letters to save a few hundred thousand civilians of a foreign country that had started the war against us.
I am sick and tired of revisionists coming up with this tripe every time the nuclear bombings of Japan are discussed. It might be true that the Japanese were unable to continue their existence. After the war, debriefed Japanese leaders said that the mining of Japanese harbors as part of Operation Starvation was singlehandedly winning the war for the Allies. He said that if the Allies had continued the operation for another few months, the Japanese would had to have surrendered. But how many Japanese civilians would have died before the leadership would quit? The Japanese military leadership wanted to force an invasion that they were going to lose, so they could at least dictate some conditions of peace.
In spite of all this, the Allies were ready to invade Japan. After the nukes were dropped, they revised the plan to include "softening up" the beachheads with nukes three days before GIs would hit the shores. (They didn't know too much about fallout back then.) The plans were for deaths in the hundreds of thousands. The order for Purple Hearts, the military honor for being wounded in combat, in preparation for this invasion was so large that the supplies did not run out until recently in the new Iraq War. Despite what we now may know, Allied leaders were planning on invading Japan, and the nuclear bomb stopped this from happening, and saved many lives on both sides of the table. In the documentary "The War," an American infantryman that was going to be sent to Japan, when asked about the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, said that he was relieved and glad, and that he knew this was horrible, but that the news meant that he wouldn't have to die. The troops tasked to invade Japan had no illusions of getting out alive; they assumed there were going to die because the Japanese were ruthless soldiers who fought to the death and mistreated the few prisoners they took.
The Japanese were not innocent victims in World War II. They committed all sorts of atrocities such as vivisection, raping and pillaging, and testing biological weapons on civilian populations. Japanese soldiers in the Phillippines were actually cannabalizing American GIs. (Read "Flyboys.") The Japanese still had a dominion over a large civilian population in occupied territories at the time the nuclear bombs were dropped. The civilians there were dying at a very high rate due to Japanese mistreatment. And the Japanese had said they were going to execute all the POWs they held (about a hundred thousand or so) if there was an invasion.
The bombings saved lives. Even if it didn't, the Allied leaders thought that they were saving lives by dropping the bombs. Sixty years later, it's easy for us to sit back and second guess them. But the leaders truly believed Japan had to fall. No one planned for the Japanese to surrender peacefully, even if their situation was screwed. Everything else is revisionist history ignoring who started the war, who committed the true atrocities, and who refused to quit fighting a war they had lost.
WARF (Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation) is a huge patent-holder in the biotechnical arts. You can't do anything interesting in the field nowadays without hitting a WARF patent. Not saying that they're a patent troll, just saying they try to patent everything they might have innvented.
Each silicon wafer that goes through processing to become a bunch of microprocessor costs pretty much the same to make. Having a smaller die makes each chip on the wafer smaller, so you get more chips on each wafer that you process. This also increases your yield so you can sell more chips. Furthermore, the electrons on the chip has to take a shorter path, so there's less heat being evolved when the processor is run. Thus, the chip can be run at a higher clock frequency before heat becomes a problem. In conclusion, moving to a smaller process increases the yield, lowers the cost, and increases the performance. However, moving to 45 nm and smaller processes require updated fabrication plants, and is very hard to do and design for because quantum issues become significant. (For instance, quantum tunneling becomes not insignficant.)
Don't you love America, you socialist, treasonous liberal? We need torture to conduct our missions abroad! Why do you hate the soldiers so much--they're sacrificing so you can have your freedom of speech to complain about them! If people like you ran the country, we'd be Muslims by now!!! Why do you hate God so much?
Well, that's the BS I've been hearing from the war-mongers.
Timeline isn't a patent troll. It seemed to have created the inventions it owns the patents for. The company recently turned itself into a patent licensor (and closed its computer advising functions) probably because you can't compete with Microsoft.
Well, it's not racial profiling and that's just proof that it's stupid. The program is certainly MEANT to be profiling by race/religion/ethnicity but situations like yours, where non-Muslims shop at these stores, reduce it's effectiveness in discriminating on these bases. This entire thing is ridiculous and I hope the government has better ideas than this when they try to keep me alive.
Cancer treatments have gotten much better, CAT scans, MRIs, PET scans, paternity tests, pregnancy tests, emergency contraception, regular low-dose contraception, contact lenses, mechanical prosthetics, Prozac, we don't use electroshock treatment anymore, Dermabond for quick repairs of minor lacerations, Cipro, Oxycontin, laparoscopic knee replacements, dental implants, joint replacements at all, organ transplants, LASIK, and a whole bunch more.
We are so much better off medically in the last thirty years that we have gotten spoiled and we have taken all the advancements as givens.
Not to flame, but I have gotten much better value from console games, especially because lots of awesome games are exclusive to consoles. I bought an XBox 360 Pro Bundle for $350, and Halo 3 for $60. Lots of fun for years to come.
Wi-LAN is a bona-fide patent troll. From the front page of their website, all emphasis added:
Wi-LAN (TSX: WIN) is a leading technology licensing company. Our strong and growing patent portfolio applies to a full range of products in the communications and consumer electronics markets. Our experienced management team is implementing a two-pronged strategy: to sign licenses with every company who uses our patented technology and to acquire new, valuable patents to further strengthen our portfolio.
I hope they get their patents thrown out because of obviousness under KSR. They probably can't get any injunctions because they don't make any products. I hope they lose.
The cobalt dirty bomb was basically a bluff by the United States in a very Strangelovian manner. The military leadership was able to convince everyone that the Russians had a huge nuclear warhead advantage over the United States. Afraid that the Commies were going to destroy America, we said that we would end life on this planet if we were attacked. The nasty part about the device is that it's fallout had a half-life that was short enough so it could release its radiation in a sustained fatal dose (radioactive materials either burn long or burn bright), yet long enough to wait out any survivors who took refuge into bunkers.
However, a cobalt device has never been known to be built. The problem probably lies in obtaining enough cobalt to make a device large enough to cause the end of life on Earth. A cobalt-based doomsday device can't be dropped onto enemy territory--due to size constraints, it must be based on friendly territory. If you don't get enough bang to end life on Earth, you would just destroy your own country for no reason.
Making hydrogen bombs really big is not that hard after a certain point--just put more tritium into the device. It's also kind of pointless because you can't accurately drop that many of them onto a distant target. The way bunkers are built, such as into the sides of mountains, anything other than a direct hit would not destroy the facility. The harder and more useful feat is to make the device smaller so you can fit more into a reentry vehicle. For example, making a nuclear bomb with a oval-shaped mass of fissionable material is really hard, but allows for a warhead to fit into a smaller cone-shaped reentry vehicle. Then you can hit basically the same area again and again with nuclear bombs until you destroy it.
Or you're a law school student with a laptop you keep notes on and then you write a 50 page thesis on it and then drop it or lose it. This happens a lot too, dude.
Don't forget the two hundred dollars you will have to pay to restore all of your personal hard drive data. Oh, right, you're the magical Slashdotter who never makes a mistake, and who always backs up religiously.
No problem then! Go merrily along allowing an operating system to kill your hard drive because you're saving a few bucks.
The moral is that you overbooked, and you let your ego get in the way of customer service. You are not being honest when you write that your "hands were tied by company policy" because you write that you "could have given her a large chunk back, but she decided to bully me instead." So in response to what you perceived as bullying, you decided to retaliate by bullying her by making it your "mission to ensure she paid for those rooms." Your entire post reeks of the undeserved ego of minimum wage clerks. The only damage you describe--having to reject other guests at your expense--happened only because you overbooked.
One of the listed "benefits" of my card is guaranteed 30 day returns on purchases. It's right there on the contract. Most credit cards probably have this as well.
You won two out of three of the transactions, and that's without even knowing about the merits of your case. Sounds alright to me.
I currently use a personal American Express card that is tied to my corporate account. I rack up huge job-related expenses on a regular basis (about $3,000 a month) so in addition to racking up lots of cashback credit, American Express also treats me pretty well when I have a complaint. But to tell the truth, I never had a problem with MasterCard at all when I used it. The thing is that I would never abuse the system at all. My cases are always pretty straightforward--either I was double-charged, or the waiter gave himself a $50 tip on a $25 meal, or I have an e-mail from the CSR saying my account would be credited and it wasn't.
But overall, you're far better using a credit card than paying in cash for any transaction over $50. At this point, I use my credit card for anything over $20. It also helps me set my budget. With online banking, I can see exactly how much I've been spending so I can ease off for a while. With cash, it's hard to keep track of exactly where all your money went.
Slashdot Mirror
Only because we're fighting the war in a half-assed manner. I'm an opponent of the war, but if you are going to fight, do so from a position of overwhelming force. How many troops do we have there, 135,000? We should have went in with 400,000 and crushed all hopes of a rebellion. Send in a huge amount of troops, and do what has to be done (a little torture or mass murder, whatever) and come out as victors. The whole hearts and mind bullshit fucked up the war effort because we weren't allowed to kill people. Of course, the whole problem is that the war was started and maintained under false pretenses. If Iraq had something to do with 9/11, we could have just ignored the Iraqi people and said that we were there for vengeance. But Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 so we have to be all nice and PC about it.
You are absolutely correct that stopping past infringement doesn't stop it from being infringement. As a practical matter, however, if you refuse to audit your own systems and got into compliance (by moving to Linux, etc.) then they would be hard-pressed to prove there was any infringement.
The ruling of that "subpoena the RAM" case is widely misconstrued. A guy was subpoenaed for IP logs, and he said that since he didn't log IPs, all the IPs were transitory and in RAM. The court said that he could be forced to log IPs, because the RAM already contained the information, it did not require the party to create evidence (in a legal sense). Basically, the wording of the ruling was meant as a side-step around civil procedure rules.
You need to hire a lawyer. Part of my job includes crafting software licensing contracts. In your services contract, define levels of bugginess--mission critical all the way down to insignificant. Set acceptable turn-around periods for each level of bugginess: two weeks for mission-critical to months for bugs that you can work-around. (These are just examples; I'm not providing legal advice; hire your own counsel.)
News like this is actually great for the US military. Instead of being cast as incompetents, they are the victims of post-Cold-War era politicans who have forgotten what military readiness means. Clinton cut the military and now our national defense posture is suffering. Time to spend more money on more stealth submarines! The air force did the same thing when they vastly over-estimated the abilities of the MIG-25 to get funding for the F-15, and when they "showed" that the SU-27 would dominate the F-15 to get funding for the F-22.
But the problems you stated with the Phalanx CIWS (a big gun) are well-known and has lead to its replacement with Standard Missiles.
In your scenario, where China had a chance to win by dropping the nuclear bomb and spare hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers from dying, as a Chinese general, I don't know how you can't drop the bomb. You represent your people. Sometimes we are willing to die to accomplish a goal but at some point, it is too much and we drop our ideals and go with the practical.
Mike Murphy was recently awarded the Medal of Honor. He was shot in the head in the mountains of Afghanistan after the position of he and his men were discovered. Earlier, three Afghan sheepherders had stumbled upon their position. Knowing that there was a good chance these sheepherders were sympathetic to the Taliban, and would report the presence of American troops in the mountains, Murphy took a vote amongst his men as to whether to kill the herders. Knowing the risks, the soldiers voted not to do so and released the sheepherders. By the end of the day, nineteen American soldiers were dead. But they had done the right thing. This is the American spirit in a microcosm. We worry about these things that other countries would do as a matter of course.
But when the stakes are higher, you abandon your ideals. Would any country in the world sacrifice five hundred thousand of their youngest, fittest men out of idealism? Only in America would anyone even think about this idea seriously. If the roles were reversed, I'd rather not get nuked. I'd surrender. But if America didn't surrender, I'd fully understand if the Chinese nuked us into compliance.
Your interpretation of history is heartbreakingly naive and incomplete. You are correct that it is not only the bombs that kill in wartime but also starvation, lack of medication, and disease. Ending the war promptly saved the Japanese civilians and the civilians under Japanese captivity (basically the forced slave laborers) from starving to death and rotting from disease. America could have blockaded Japan for a few years until they starved away but that would have been more disastrous to Japanese civilians (and again, all the civilians under Japanese dominion) than the nukes. Furthermore, Japan would have definitely killed Allied POWs. If there's no food for your citizens, are you really going to feed POWs?
More importantly, you severely underestimate the Japanese will in that period. Japanese CIVILIANS were trained to fight the invasion of their mainland to the last man, woman, and child. Girls were given bamboo sticks to stab invading GIs with; they were taught to aim for the groin and stomach because the Allies were taller. Don't forget that in Okinawa and Tarawa, almost all the Japanese civilians committed suicide, at times throwing their families off the cliffs into the jagged rocks below, rather than fall to the Allies. Hell, the Japanese executed the civilians on those islands who refused to kill themselves. The same fanaticism was still alive in the fall of 1945. The entire country of Japan was willing to fight and die to prevent America from invading. The nuclear bombs, as horrible as it may sound, saved the Japanese from themselves.
The moral compass you desire assumes that everyone is the same. But the Japanese started the war. They surprised-attacked us. They were running around lopping heads off, cannabilizing US troops, testing biological weapons on civilian population, running forced labor camps, and committing all these horrible atrocities. The Japanese people were perfectly fine with this. In short, they were wrong and we were right. Our cause was just. Call it hindsight bias, or winners writing history, but I'm goddamn happy we beat Japan. You disagree with the operating theory that "We're Americans, they're the enemy, so they don't count." I don't see why you would disagree. The Japanese civilians may be innocent, but the American soldiers who were forced to fight after their country was attacked and threatened with invasion were even more innocent. They were not aggressors; they were defending their way of life from Japanese aggression started, continued, and financed by the Japanese civilians.
And make no mistake; the Allies had no better alternatives: it was either take 500K casualties storming the volcanic beaches of southern Japan, starving a fanatical country until they surrendered, or dropping the nuclear bombs. If you can save the lives and livelihoods of five hundred thousand American boys in return for nuking two hundred thousand Japanese civilians, I don't know how you can not pull the trigger. And that's true of all countries. As a military leader, I can't write five hundred thousand "I regret to inform you" letters to save a few hundred thousand civilians of a foreign country that had started the war against us.
I am sick and tired of revisionists coming up with this tripe every time the nuclear bombings of Japan are discussed. It might be true that the Japanese were unable to continue their existence. After the war, debriefed Japanese leaders said that the mining of Japanese harbors as part of Operation Starvation was singlehandedly winning the war for the Allies. He said that if the Allies had continued the operation for another few months, the Japanese would had to have surrendered. But how many Japanese civilians would have died before the leadership would quit? The Japanese military leadership wanted to force an invasion that they were going to lose, so they could at least dictate some conditions of peace.
In spite of all this, the Allies were ready to invade Japan. After the nukes were dropped, they revised the plan to include "softening up" the beachheads with nukes three days before GIs would hit the shores. (They didn't know too much about fallout back then.) The plans were for deaths in the hundreds of thousands. The order for Purple Hearts, the military honor for being wounded in combat, in preparation for this invasion was so large that the supplies did not run out until recently in the new Iraq War. Despite what we now may know, Allied leaders were planning on invading Japan, and the nuclear bomb stopped this from happening, and saved many lives on both sides of the table. In the documentary "The War," an American infantryman that was going to be sent to Japan, when asked about the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, said that he was relieved and glad, and that he knew this was horrible, but that the news meant that he wouldn't have to die. The troops tasked to invade Japan had no illusions of getting out alive; they assumed there were going to die because the Japanese were ruthless soldiers who fought to the death and mistreated the few prisoners they took.
The Japanese were not innocent victims in World War II. They committed all sorts of atrocities such as vivisection, raping and pillaging, and testing biological weapons on civilian populations. Japanese soldiers in the Phillippines were actually cannabalizing American GIs. (Read "Flyboys.") The Japanese still had a dominion over a large civilian population in occupied territories at the time the nuclear bombs were dropped. The civilians there were dying at a very high rate due to Japanese mistreatment. And the Japanese had said they were going to execute all the POWs they held (about a hundred thousand or so) if there was an invasion.
The bombings saved lives. Even if it didn't, the Allied leaders thought that they were saving lives by dropping the bombs. Sixty years later, it's easy for us to sit back and second guess them. But the leaders truly believed Japan had to fall. No one planned for the Japanese to surrender peacefully, even if their situation was screwed. Everything else is revisionist history ignoring who started the war, who committed the true atrocities, and who refused to quit fighting a war they had lost.
WARF (Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation) is a huge patent-holder in the biotechnical arts. You can't do anything interesting in the field nowadays without hitting a WARF patent. Not saying that they're a patent troll, just saying they try to patent everything they might have innvented.
Each silicon wafer that goes through processing to become a bunch of microprocessor costs pretty much the same to make. Having a smaller die makes each chip on the wafer smaller, so you get more chips on each wafer that you process. This also increases your yield so you can sell more chips. Furthermore, the electrons on the chip has to take a shorter path, so there's less heat being evolved when the processor is run. Thus, the chip can be run at a higher clock frequency before heat becomes a problem. In conclusion, moving to a smaller process increases the yield, lowers the cost, and increases the performance. However, moving to 45 nm and smaller processes require updated fabrication plants, and is very hard to do and design for because quantum issues become significant. (For instance, quantum tunneling becomes not insignficant.)
Don't you love America, you socialist, treasonous liberal? We need torture to conduct our missions abroad! Why do you hate the soldiers so much--they're sacrificing so you can have your freedom of speech to complain about them! If people like you ran the country, we'd be Muslims by now!!! Why do you hate God so much?
Well, that's the BS I've been hearing from the war-mongers.
Timeline isn't a patent troll. It seemed to have created the inventions it owns the patents for. The company recently turned itself into a patent licensor (and closed its computer advising functions) probably because you can't compete with Microsoft.
Well, it's not racial profiling and that's just proof that it's stupid. The program is certainly MEANT to be profiling by race/religion/ethnicity but situations like yours, where non-Muslims shop at these stores, reduce it's effectiveness in discriminating on these bases. This entire thing is ridiculous and I hope the government has better ideas than this when they try to keep me alive.
Cancer treatments have gotten much better, CAT scans, MRIs, PET scans, paternity tests, pregnancy tests, emergency contraception, regular low-dose contraception, contact lenses, mechanical prosthetics, Prozac, we don't use electroshock treatment anymore, Dermabond for quick repairs of minor lacerations, Cipro, Oxycontin, laparoscopic knee replacements, dental implants, joint replacements at all, organ transplants, LASIK, and a whole bunch more.
We are so much better off medically in the last thirty years that we have gotten spoiled and we have taken all the advancements as givens.
Not to flame, but I have gotten much better value from console games, especially because lots of awesome games are exclusive to consoles. I bought an XBox 360 Pro Bundle for $350, and Halo 3 for $60. Lots of fun for years to come.
Prior art has to be in the public domain or published. Even the best proof, if confidential, cannot be prior art. However, t
I hope they get their patents thrown out because of obviousness under KSR. They probably can't get any injunctions because they don't make any products. I hope they lose.
The automated gunship may also freak out and kill some innocent fishermen.
The cobalt dirty bomb was basically a bluff by the United States in a very Strangelovian manner. The military leadership was able to convince everyone that the Russians had a huge nuclear warhead advantage over the United States. Afraid that the Commies were going to destroy America, we said that we would end life on this planet if we were attacked. The nasty part about the device is that it's fallout had a half-life that was short enough so it could release its radiation in a sustained fatal dose (radioactive materials either burn long or burn bright), yet long enough to wait out any survivors who took refuge into bunkers.
However, a cobalt device has never been known to be built. The problem probably lies in obtaining enough cobalt to make a device large enough to cause the end of life on Earth. A cobalt-based doomsday device can't be dropped onto enemy territory--due to size constraints, it must be based on friendly territory. If you don't get enough bang to end life on Earth, you would just destroy your own country for no reason.
Making hydrogen bombs really big is not that hard after a certain point--just put more tritium into the device. It's also kind of pointless because you can't accurately drop that many of them onto a distant target. The way bunkers are built, such as into the sides of mountains, anything other than a direct hit would not destroy the facility. The harder and more useful feat is to make the device smaller so you can fit more into a reentry vehicle. For example, making a nuclear bomb with a oval-shaped mass of fissionable material is really hard, but allows for a warhead to fit into a smaller cone-shaped reentry vehicle. Then you can hit basically the same area again and again with nuclear bombs until you destroy it.
Or you're a law school student with a laptop you keep notes on and then you write a 50 page thesis on it and then drop it or lose it. This happens a lot too, dude.
Don't forget the two hundred dollars you will have to pay to restore all of your personal hard drive data. Oh, right, you're the magical Slashdotter who never makes a mistake, and who always backs up religiously.
No problem then! Go merrily along allowing an operating system to kill your hard drive because you're saving a few bucks.
The moral is that you overbooked, and you let your ego get in the way of customer service. You are not being honest when you write that your "hands were tied by company policy" because you write that you "could have given her a large chunk back, but she decided to bully me instead." So in response to what you perceived as bullying, you decided to retaliate by bullying her by making it your "mission to ensure she paid for those rooms." Your entire post reeks of the undeserved ego of minimum wage clerks. The only damage you describe--having to reject other guests at your expense--happened only because you overbooked.
I hope your hotel goes out of business.
One of the listed "benefits" of my card is guaranteed 30 day returns on purchases. It's right there on the contract. Most credit cards probably have this as well.
You won two out of three of the transactions, and that's without even knowing about the merits of your case. Sounds alright to me.
I currently use a personal American Express card that is tied to my corporate account. I rack up huge job-related expenses on a regular basis (about $3,000 a month) so in addition to racking up lots of cashback credit, American Express also treats me pretty well when I have a complaint. But to tell the truth, I never had a problem with MasterCard at all when I used it. The thing is that I would never abuse the system at all. My cases are always pretty straightforward--either I was double-charged, or the waiter gave himself a $50 tip on a $25 meal, or I have an e-mail from the CSR saying my account would be credited and it wasn't.
But overall, you're far better using a credit card than paying in cash for any transaction over $50. At this point, I use my credit card for anything over $20. It also helps me set my budget. With online banking, I can see exactly how much I've been spending so I can ease off for a while. With cash, it's hard to keep track of exactly where all your money went.