She's enrolling at the Madison Area Technical College, and couldn't be bothered to read the specs on a laptop she ordered? Sorry, made me chuckle. It's not as though Dell hides what OS comes with each laptop!
Kidding aside, Dell should have just allowed her to return it for a Windows model if that's what she wanted. She clearly did not have the technical prowess to figure out how to configure her internet access without the walkthrough software.
If I had mod points right now, I'd mod you up immediately for this.
Nothing pisses me off more than sitting in a turn lane behind some jackass on their phone. The light goes green, they don't move, everyone starts honking, and by the time the aforementioned jackass realizes what's going on, half of the light time has expired and only 3 vehicles make it through the intersection before the light changes.
There also seems to be a direct correlation between the shortness of the turn light/the length of time until that light goes green again & the amount of time the driver wastes going through the intersection. The shorter a light is, the more time people seem to waste not driving through it.
Great news about the music going DRM-free, but what about the rest of the iTunes store? It seems from this announcement that DRM will still be applicable on audiobooks, films, and TV shows, which is lousy.
Still, it's a step in the right direction, and I applaud the people over at Amazon (and everyone else selling music without DRM) for doing it first. Without that step, I'm willing to bet that Apple would have stayed with DRM on their music catalog. It looks like part of Defective By Design's Anti-DRM wishlist came true.
That said, Apple is also now charging if you want to get rid of your DRM (which means upgrading to 256 kbps tracks). From Apple.com:
You don't have to buy the song or album again. Just pay the 30 cents per song upgrade price. (Music video upgrades are 60 cents and entire albums can be upgraded for 30 percent of the album price.)
Yes, just $0.30 per song to get rid of the crap that we forced on you in the first place. Awful.
I'm far more familiar with the German & Japanese market, so I posted links to the cars I know about with those features; I was not trying to claim that they did it first or developed all the tech behind their implementation. A lot of it is akin to Apple using multi-touch on the iPhone, while most of the R&D was done by people like Jeff Han @ NYU.
Either way, I appreciate your post, thanks for the insight!:)
Why don't they just get on with the computer-driven cars already? All you need to do is look at the tech coming out of car companies to see where we're headed.
Mercedes introduced a radar Cruise Control system on its S-Class to automatically slow the car or stop it completely if the car in front is braking. (Adaptive CC is now on several German cars.)
So where does that leave us? We now have cars that will follow other cars to the point of stopping entirely, can park themselves, will stay in the lane on their own (to a point)...the obvious goal here is to remove more & more of human input from driving.
So can we just skip all of this crap and go right to the computer-driven car, so we never have to worry about insurance premiums, speeding tickets, drink-driving, falling asleep at the wheel, and all of the rest of the nonsense that goes along with cars?
On the flip side, if you're a sports-car enthusiast, this is likely to be the last generation where one can purchase a raw, loud, driver's car. We're going to wind up like the character in Rush's Red Barchetta before we know it.
That list is of countries not officially standardized on the metric system. In reality, it's far more detailed than that. England, for example, sells petrol by the litre, but has speed limits in miles per hour, not kilometers. People there still use stone & pound for their body mass, not the kilogram.
The US is not officially on the metric system, but it is too far there already to hold out much longer. Electricity is measured & billed in kilowatts. Bottled water/soda pop is metric, often being sold in 500 mL or 1,2, and 3 L bottles. So is most mouthwash now, Listerine & even the generic brands are in 250 mL, 500 mL, and 1 L sizes. My dental floss is 50 meters in length (with 54 yards in parens next to it on the packaging). Wine is sold in metric, 750 mL for a standard bottle, 375 mL for ice wine. (On the flip side of that, it's still very easy to find 20 ounces of soda or 40 ounces of beer.)
Much of what you do see in the US, however, is soft-metric, i.e. rounded metric units that are converted back to awkward US customary. A tin of Altoids mints is 50 grams, but they put 1.76 ounces in front of it.
It's a very weird mishmash of units here. My German car has Italian-made wheels that are exactly 457.2 mm, which means they are actually 18 inches. However, the bolt pattern on those wheels (distance between each bolt) is 5x112, meaning 5 bolts per wheel, 112 mm between each one. My car's fuel tank is 62 L exactly, but the car's manual says it's 16.4 US gallons, obviously rounded off from 16.378. The nightly news here actually shows the temperature in both Celsius & Fahrenheit, but that's far from common. Drugs are prescribed entirely in metric, i.e. 250 mg tablets, except for liquid doses that are sometimes still given in customary tea/tablespoon quantities instead of mL. Cough syrup often gives dosing in tsp.
All of the cited traditional units have some foundation in a theoretical human being's body, which makes them far from ideal for any real world usage, particularly as the human form can be drastically different sizes. For instance, I have long, slender fingers, my thumb is not an inch wide. One mouthful of liquor for me is not the same as mouthful of liquor for a larger man, but I'm sure far more than a petite woman. These are all arbitrary scales and have no real place left in a world that demands precision.
In reality, you wind up with fractions quite often using Imperial/US Customary units, as anyone who does wood working will tell you. Particularly as you deal with goods made elsewhere in the world to metric standards, you see the limitations of the Imperial system. For example, a millimeter is much easier to deal with than almost 4/100ths of an inch, which means if you design products using a metric scale, you never wind up with fractions or decimals at some point in the system. It can all come back to whole numbers as you shift the decimal point. (We've been using the base 10 decimal system with our money in the US ever since the introduction of the dollar over two hundred years ago, with 100 pennies to the dollar.)
Furthermore, just look at the absolutely insane number of units in your post! 13 units of different and unrelated names just to measure liquid volume? 9 just for distance? (And you left out link, pole, and perch...) That is not only asinine but also utterly pointless, and it means that a person has to remember not only the names of all of those units, but how to convert between them. Quickly, what's 61.5 inches in fathoms? How about a 3.25 hogsheads in cups? For comparison's sake, what's 61.5 cm in km? How about 16.75 liters in milliliters? Which one would be easier for the average person to remember/calculate? What about for a child? Even using the "common" US customary units can be difficult. Can most people explain the difference between a US dry and a US wet pint? What about the difference between a US & English pint?
Finally, let's not forget the convenient relation between volume density & mass that metric allows. A liter of water has a mass of 1 kilogram, which means 1 mL of water == 1 gram. (Of course, that assumes a constant water density.)
(Sorry for the double post, I don't know how my first copy wound up anon.)
Program preempting aside, my current favorite station to hate is BBC America. After years of begging and pleading, they finally decided to carry Top Gear in the US, starting in 2007.
In England, Top Gear is presented on BBC Two in an hour-long format, with no commercial breaks. The entire hour is filled from opening to ending credits, and each segment segues into the next. However, here in the US, it's presented into an hour-long block with commercials, which means that it's now pared down to roughly 39-41 minutes of content.
So for each episode, you lose the entire "News" segment they do in the middle (which usually segues into another bit), but that only makes up for about 8 minutes or so. Which means they also cut parts from car reviews, interactions with the audience, "the Cool Wall", and other bits & pieces (including chunks of power laps), plus they splice in these awful cut sequences made by BBCA. And if all of that weren't bad enough, the US airing is several seasons behind. The episodes they were airing in late 2007 I had seen back in the summer of 2005 while vacationing in Prague!
If TV stations don't want people turning to Bittorrent, then stop ruining our favorite programs! I'd forgo BBCA all together, if they simply offered the show on R1 DVDs uncut, but they don't do that either. So I download each & every episode instead, it's the only way I can stay current and discuss it with friends back in England. I'm literally sitting here, money in hand, ready to purchase box series of the show, and they won't offer them. Congrats, BBC, you made a downloader out of me.
Mod parent up. My current setup at work, which consists of two desktop machines (one Vista, one Ubuntu) and one laptop (OS X), takes 20 minutes to get everything up & running from being shut off.
It takes a lot of time to get them booted, load the various pieces of development software, open the projects up, find the pieces of code I need to work on, etc. Furthermore, the Vista PC (brand new Dell XPS) has annoying problems with being put to sleep; for example, when you wake it up, the audio stops working. Only a reboot fixes it, which means even more downtime.
And then there's Automatic Updates from Microsoft, that like to reboot your computer without your say in the matter...except that the Vista box doesn't reboot properly afterward.
Honestly, I'd love to hibernate them properly, but it doesn't work, and shutting them off is not an option.
Thank you. Not only is this not "News For Nerds", it's not news, period.
If the presidential choice of MP3 player seriously matters to you, kill yourself. With all of the problems facing the US and indeed the entire planet, this is the most trivial of matters, and people reporting on it should be ashamed of themselves.
Next we'll be hearing about Obama getting a hangnail. Just shut up.
Why in the hell would they choose a name that has no significance in that market? Japan has been metricated for a long time, and the burgers there are not measured out by the ounce, but by the gram. (Burgers are usually 100 grams there, if I recall correctly.)
I tried out Songbird, and it completely messed up the indexes on my iPod. After using it, iTunes says that all of my music is now 1 byte in size, and reports that I now have -1,875,109,059 bytes left on my iPod.
This results in iTunes giving me weird errors when I try to interact with the iPod. Everything added to it *after* I used Songbird shows up properly sized, but the other 65 gigs before it does not.
After 2 weeks of trying to fix it, I had no choice but to back everything up, wipe the iPod clean, and restore it all, a process that took literally 10+ hours.
That was just one of several bugs that I ran into while using it. It crashed repeatedly, it hung on my library (~70 gigs), it imported videos from iTunes but then wouldn't play them back...no thank you.
But saying Iraq had no ties to 9/11, while possibly technically true, does not mean there was no threat or possible justification.
It's not just technically true, it is true. Not one of the people involved in the attacks on 11 September were from Iraq. They weren't financed by or trained in Iraq. In fact, the large majority were from Saudi Arabia.
There may have well been a huge threat from Iraq, but they didn't attack US soil in 2001, and our evidence for going to war with them was specious at best.
I cringe even asking this, but please explain how exactly Iraq was tied to the Oklahoma City bombings! You know, the bombings carried out by a couple of rednecks pissed off about Waco...
As for the rest of your post, if Iraq was such a threat, then maybe we shouldn't have sent Rumsfeld there under the Reagan administration to give aid & arms to Hussein!
This is how it goes, the British were ripping off Mosaddeq in Iran in the 1950s, Mosaddeq didn't like it and threatened to cut off oil to the British. The British met with the US government, we labeled Mosaddeq a communist, carried out Operation Ajax, invaded Iran, and overthrew Mosaddeq.
Fast forward to the 70s and 80s, Iran is now violently anti-American and under rule of Ayatollah Khomeini. The US backs Hussein in Iraq because he was secular and didn't agree with the religious uprisings in Iran. Iran & Iraq go to war, Iraq starts to lose, and Reagan sends in Rumsfeld to meet with Hussein and promise him aid, weapons, etc.
Saddam Hussein was our ally. We propped him up and helped to keep him in power, right up until he invaded Kuwait. Then suddenly, overnight, he's bad guy #1 and we have to bomb Iraq, put up sanctions against him, and denounce him as the scum of the world.
I'm not saying he was a good person, he was a violent, awful man who killed thousands, no argument there. But we knew that even while we gave him weapons & money, because doing so was convenient to us at the time. Therefore, if Iraq was at the top of the US threat list, it's largely our own doing that put it there.
We Republicans did rig this election. You guys always look trying to think we're screwing up votes in Ohio but our strategy has always been to vote for the most radical Democratic candidate in all too many open primaries. Because Democrats have proportional representation, this strategy ALWAYS works.
I think you're giving yourself and the Republican party a bit too much credit. If you always voted for the most radical candidate, then how did the Democrats wind up with John Kerry in 2004?
A friend of mine got a notice from his life insurance firm saying that a laptop was stolen that probably had his records on it. Why it would be on a flippin LAPTOP I have no idea, something like that should be a server only accessible from the company's encrypted network (but I digress).
$10 says someone was either creating top-line reports or other such nonsense based on spreadsheets full of live data, and they brought it home/outside of the office to continue working on it past business hours.
I can't even tell you how many times I've seen people in insurance companies take live data home with them so they can whip up statistical reporting. People don't follow IT protocol when it becomes inconvenient for them to do so. (i.e. staying late at the office vs going home & working there.)
I had a similar thing happen with Sallie Mae when I paid off my student loans.
They erroneously billed me for interest even though my account was paid off, giving me a $0.81 balance. They wouldn't waive it. I tried to pay it online, but their site showed that I had a $0.00 balance (it won't show anything under $1.00). When I tried to pay the $0.81 exactly, it told me I couldn't pay less than $1.00. When I tried to pay $1.00, it told me I couldn't pay more than what I owed, the $0.81.
Even after calling them repeatedly, they wouldn't waive the fee and swore up and down that their website functioned properly. I actually had to waste a check on $0.81, plus an envelope and postage, and then they had to pay a human to process the damn thing. Absolutely unreal. They wasted who knows how much money trying to collect $0.81. Pure idiocy.
For Christmas in 1990, my dad bought me the Legoland pirate ship (#6285), as shown in the video, and a few other pirate sets. I put them together immediately and played with them for hours on end.
My dad died suddenly in early 1991. Those lego sets were the last thing he ever gave me.
Seeing that original box on the video made me feel 10 years old all over again. Thanks Gizmodo & Slashdot.
I want a fuel-efficient pickup/SUV/Crossover
That's your first problem. They are inherently fuel-inefficient vehicles, and are not at all aerodynamic. Plus the high center of gravity makes them less stable during high-speed maneuvering, more likely to roll-over, etc.
I like being able to see OVER traffic.
And I like being able to see down the road without some gigantic SUV blocking my view! If we extrapolate your logic, then what is the next person who wants to see over traffic supposed to do? Get a cargo van? Eventually you'd wind up with someone driving a bus just to see over the legions of people in SUVs.
GM is on the right path with the Hybrid Silverado they are making
A hybrid version of a gas-guzzler is like getting a diet coke with your Big Mac and fries. It also shows exactly why the US automakers are drowning in red ink.
I would like to see something a little smaller, along the lines of a Ranger or S-10/Sonoma (I LOVED the 1994 Sonoma I drove through college). Americans are going to buy small cars in the near future, but the REAL money will be made when we can drive larger SUV's and trucks that get 30+ MPG's.
You want something smaller, but the real money is when they let you drive larger SUVs? I'm confused.
Furthermore, 30 mpg is not very fuel efficient, seriously. We're going to see diesels hitting our market here in the next few months-year that will get 50-70 mpg.
Gas prices have jumped 150% in a little over 2 years, just imagine what the next 2 will be like. If gas prices are $7 USD per US gallon, then what?
The entire interior was far more sparse, one could almost blame the lack of rear leg room in the new model on the width of the new front seats compared to the old ones.
Now that the US finally has ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD), expect those cars to make it to market here very soon. The VW Jetta TDI for ULSD will be out later this summer as a 2009 model, and it gets fuel economy in the same range as a Prius, 4.5L/100km (~52 mpg).
And then, next year, expect the VW Polo. It's nearly as efficient as the old Lupo 3L, should get roughly 3L/100 km, that's a whopping 78 mpg.
That will really stick it to the US automakers who can't seem to get above 32 mpg; even my Mini does better than that.
Slashdot Mirror
She's enrolling at the Madison Area Technical College, and couldn't be bothered to read the specs on a laptop she ordered? Sorry, made me chuckle. It's not as though Dell hides what OS comes with each laptop!
Kidding aside, Dell should have just allowed her to return it for a Windows model if that's what she wanted. She clearly did not have the technical prowess to figure out how to configure her internet access without the walkthrough software.
If I had mod points right now, I'd mod you up immediately for this.
Nothing pisses me off more than sitting in a turn lane behind some jackass on their phone. The light goes green, they don't move, everyone starts honking, and by the time the aforementioned jackass realizes what's going on, half of the light time has expired and only 3 vehicles make it through the intersection before the light changes.
There also seems to be a direct correlation between the shortness of the turn light/the length of time until that light goes green again & the amount of time the driver wastes going through the intersection. The shorter a light is, the more time people seem to waste not driving through it.
Still, it's a step in the right direction, and I applaud the people over at Amazon (and everyone else selling music without DRM) for doing it first. Without that step, I'm willing to bet that Apple would have stayed with DRM on their music catalog. It looks like part of Defective By Design's Anti-DRM wishlist came true.
That said, Apple is also now charging if you want to get rid of your DRM (which means upgrading to 256 kbps tracks). From Apple.com:
Yes, just $0.30 per song to get rid of the crap that we forced on you in the first place. Awful.
In other news, I was getting my updates from MacRumorsLive.com, when their feed was cracked by 4Chan. The site crashed half-way through the keynote. Here are some screen caps for anyone interested:
http://www.realfx.com/images/macrumorslive_pwned.jpg
http://www.realfx.com/images/macrumorslive_pwned2.jpg
http://www.realfx.com/images/macrumorslive_pwned3.jpg
I'm far more familiar with the German & Japanese market, so I posted links to the cars I know about with those features; I was not trying to claim that they did it first or developed all the tech behind their implementation. A lot of it is akin to Apple using multi-touch on the iPhone, while most of the R&D was done by people like Jeff Han @ NYU.
:)
Either way, I appreciate your post, thanks for the insight!
So where does that leave us? We now have cars that will follow other cars to the point of stopping entirely, can park themselves, will stay in the lane on their own (to a point)...the obvious goal here is to remove more & more of human input from driving.
So can we just skip all of this crap and go right to the computer-driven car, so we never have to worry about insurance premiums, speeding tickets, drink-driving, falling asleep at the wheel, and all of the rest of the nonsense that goes along with cars?
On the flip side, if you're a sports-car enthusiast, this is likely to be the last generation where one can purchase a raw, loud, driver's car. We're going to wind up like the character in Rush's Red Barchetta before we know it.
That list is of countries not officially standardized on the metric system. In reality, it's far more detailed than that. England, for example, sells petrol by the litre, but has speed limits in miles per hour, not kilometers. People there still use stone & pound for their body mass, not the kilogram.
The US is not officially on the metric system, but it is too far there already to hold out much longer. Electricity is measured & billed in kilowatts. Bottled water/soda pop is metric, often being sold in 500 mL or 1,2, and 3 L bottles. So is most mouthwash now, Listerine & even the generic brands are in 250 mL, 500 mL, and 1 L sizes. My dental floss is 50 meters in length (with 54 yards in parens next to it on the packaging). Wine is sold in metric, 750 mL for a standard bottle, 375 mL for ice wine. (On the flip side of that, it's still very easy to find 20 ounces of soda or 40 ounces of beer.)
Much of what you do see in the US, however, is soft-metric, i.e. rounded metric units that are converted back to awkward US customary. A tin of Altoids mints is 50 grams, but they put 1.76 ounces in front of it.
It's a very weird mishmash of units here. My German car has Italian-made wheels that are exactly 457.2 mm, which means they are actually 18 inches. However, the bolt pattern on those wheels (distance between each bolt) is 5x112, meaning 5 bolts per wheel, 112 mm between each one. My car's fuel tank is 62 L exactly, but the car's manual says it's 16.4 US gallons, obviously rounded off from 16.378. The nightly news here actually shows the temperature in both Celsius & Fahrenheit, but that's far from common. Drugs are prescribed entirely in metric, i.e. 250 mg tablets, except for liquid doses that are sometimes still given in customary tea/tablespoon quantities instead of mL. Cough syrup often gives dosing in tsp.
All of the cited traditional units have some foundation in a theoretical human being's body, which makes them far from ideal for any real world usage, particularly as the human form can be drastically different sizes. For instance, I have long, slender fingers, my thumb is not an inch wide. One mouthful of liquor for me is not the same as mouthful of liquor for a larger man, but I'm sure far more than a petite woman. These are all arbitrary scales and have no real place left in a world that demands precision.
In reality, you wind up with fractions quite often using Imperial/US Customary units, as anyone who does wood working will tell you. Particularly as you deal with goods made elsewhere in the world to metric standards, you see the limitations of the Imperial system. For example, a millimeter is much easier to deal with than almost 4/100ths of an inch, which means if you design products using a metric scale, you never wind up with fractions or decimals at some point in the system. It can all come back to whole numbers as you shift the decimal point. (We've been using the base 10 decimal system with our money in the US ever since the introduction of the dollar over two hundred years ago, with 100 pennies to the dollar.)
Furthermore, just look at the absolutely insane number of units in your post! 13 units of different and unrelated names just to measure liquid volume? 9 just for distance? (And you left out link, pole, and perch...) That is not only asinine but also utterly pointless, and it means that a person has to remember not only the names of all of those units, but how to convert between them. Quickly, what's 61.5 inches in fathoms? How about a 3.25 hogsheads in cups? For comparison's sake, what's 61.5 cm in km? How about 16.75 liters in milliliters? Which one would be easier for the average person to remember/calculate? What about for a child? Even using the "common" US customary units can be difficult. Can most people explain the difference between a US dry and a US wet pint? What about the difference between a US & English pint?
Finally, let's not forget the convenient relation between volume density & mass that metric allows. A liter of water has a mass of 1 kilogram, which means 1 mL of water == 1 gram. (Of course, that assumes a constant water density.)
(Sorry for the double post, I don't know how my first copy wound up anon.)
Don't forget that the NBC is trying to make a US version of Top Gear with Adam F-ing Carolla as the host.
No. Just stop. I don't want Adam Carolla reviewing shitty American cars. I want Jeremy Clarkson reviewing Lambos, Bugattis, and Alfas.
Program preempting aside, my current favorite station to hate is BBC America. After years of begging and pleading, they finally decided to carry Top Gear in the US, starting in 2007.
In England, Top Gear is presented on BBC Two in an hour-long format, with no commercial breaks. The entire hour is filled from opening to ending credits, and each segment segues into the next. However, here in the US, it's presented into an hour-long block with commercials, which means that it's now pared down to roughly 39-41 minutes of content.
So for each episode, you lose the entire "News" segment they do in the middle (which usually segues into another bit), but that only makes up for about 8 minutes or so. Which means they also cut parts from car reviews, interactions with the audience, "the Cool Wall", and other bits & pieces (including chunks of power laps), plus they splice in these awful cut sequences made by BBCA. And if all of that weren't bad enough, the US airing is several seasons behind. The episodes they were airing in late 2007 I had seen back in the summer of 2005 while vacationing in Prague!
If TV stations don't want people turning to Bittorrent, then stop ruining our favorite programs! I'd forgo BBCA all together, if they simply offered the show on R1 DVDs uncut, but they don't do that either. So I download each & every episode instead, it's the only way I can stay current and discuss it with friends back in England. I'm literally sitting here, money in hand, ready to purchase box series of the show, and they won't offer them. Congrats, BBC, you made a downloader out of me.
Very true, it depends on the job role. :)
Mod parent up. My current setup at work, which consists of two desktop machines (one Vista, one Ubuntu) and one laptop (OS X), takes 20 minutes to get everything up & running from being shut off.
It takes a lot of time to get them booted, load the various pieces of development software, open the projects up, find the pieces of code I need to work on, etc. Furthermore, the Vista PC (brand new Dell XPS) has annoying problems with being put to sleep; for example, when you wake it up, the audio stops working. Only a reboot fixes it, which means even more downtime.
And then there's Automatic Updates from Microsoft, that like to reboot your computer without your say in the matter...except that the Vista box doesn't reboot properly afterward.
Honestly, I'd love to hibernate them properly, but it doesn't work, and shutting them off is not an option.
If the presidential choice of MP3 player seriously matters to you, kill yourself. With all of the problems facing the US and indeed the entire planet, this is the most trivial of matters, and people reporting on it should be ashamed of themselves.
Next we'll be hearing about Obama getting a hangnail. Just shut up.
Why in the hell would they choose a name that has no significance in that market? Japan has been metricated for a long time, and the burgers there are not measured out by the ounce, but by the gram. (Burgers are usually 100 grams there, if I recall correctly.)
Posts like this make me wish we could mod past +5. Bravo!
This results in iTunes giving me weird errors when I try to interact with the iPod. Everything added to it *after* I used Songbird shows up properly sized, but the other 65 gigs before it does not.
After 2 weeks of trying to fix it, I had no choice but to back everything up, wipe the iPod clean, and restore it all, a process that took literally 10+ hours.
That was just one of several bugs that I ran into while using it. It crashed repeatedly, it hung on my library (~70 gigs), it imported videos from iTunes but then wouldn't play them back...no thank you.
But saying Iraq had no ties to 9/11, while possibly technically true, does not mean there was no threat or possible justification.
It's not just technically true, it is true. Not one of the people involved in the attacks on 11 September were from Iraq. They weren't financed by or trained in Iraq. In fact, the large majority were from Saudi Arabia.
There may have well been a huge threat from Iraq, but they didn't attack US soil in 2001, and our evidence for going to war with them was specious at best.
I cringe even asking this, but please explain how exactly Iraq was tied to the Oklahoma City bombings! You know, the bombings carried out by a couple of rednecks pissed off about Waco...
As for the rest of your post, if Iraq was such a threat, then maybe we shouldn't have sent Rumsfeld there under the Reagan administration to give aid & arms to Hussein!
This is how it goes, the British were ripping off Mosaddeq in Iran in the 1950s, Mosaddeq didn't like it and threatened to cut off oil to the British. The British met with the US government, we labeled Mosaddeq a communist, carried out Operation Ajax, invaded Iran, and overthrew Mosaddeq.
Fast forward to the 70s and 80s, Iran is now violently anti-American and under rule of Ayatollah Khomeini. The US backs Hussein in Iraq because he was secular and didn't agree with the religious uprisings in Iran. Iran & Iraq go to war, Iraq starts to lose, and Reagan sends in Rumsfeld to meet with Hussein and promise him aid, weapons, etc.
Saddam Hussein was our ally. We propped him up and helped to keep him in power, right up until he invaded Kuwait. Then suddenly, overnight, he's bad guy #1 and we have to bomb Iraq, put up sanctions against him, and denounce him as the scum of the world.
I'm not saying he was a good person, he was a violent, awful man who killed thousands, no argument there. But we knew that even while we gave him weapons & money, because doing so was convenient to us at the time. Therefore, if Iraq was at the top of the US threat list, it's largely our own doing that put it there.
We Republicans did rig this election. You guys always look trying to think we're screwing up votes in Ohio but our strategy has always been to vote for the most radical Democratic candidate in all too many open primaries. Because Democrats have proportional representation, this strategy ALWAYS works.
I think you're giving yourself and the Republican party a bit too much credit. If you always voted for the most radical candidate, then how did the Democrats wind up with John Kerry in 2004?
A friend of mine got a notice from his life insurance firm saying that a laptop was stolen that probably had his records on it. Why it would be on a flippin LAPTOP I have no idea, something like that should be a server only accessible from the company's encrypted network (but I digress).
$10 says someone was either creating top-line reports or other such nonsense based on spreadsheets full of live data, and they brought it home/outside of the office to continue working on it past business hours.
I can't even tell you how many times I've seen people in insurance companies take live data home with them so they can whip up statistical reporting. People don't follow IT protocol when it becomes inconvenient for them to do so. (i.e. staying late at the office vs going home & working there.)
I had a similar thing happen with Sallie Mae when I paid off my student loans.
They erroneously billed me for interest even though my account was paid off, giving me a $0.81 balance. They wouldn't waive it. I tried to pay it online, but their site showed that I had a $0.00 balance (it won't show anything under $1.00). When I tried to pay the $0.81 exactly, it told me I couldn't pay less than $1.00. When I tried to pay $1.00, it told me I couldn't pay more than what I owed, the $0.81.
Even after calling them repeatedly, they wouldn't waive the fee and swore up and down that their website functioned properly. I actually had to waste a check on $0.81, plus an envelope and postage, and then they had to pay a human to process the damn thing. Absolutely unreal. They wasted who knows how much money trying to collect $0.81. Pure idiocy.
For Christmas in 1990, my dad bought me the Legoland pirate ship (#6285), as shown in the video, and a few other pirate sets. I put them together immediately and played with them for hours on end.
My dad died suddenly in early 1991. Those lego sets were the last thing he ever gave me.
Seeing that original box on the video made me feel 10 years old all over again. Thanks Gizmodo & Slashdot.
Point of note, since this article is all hidden-metric...
The real waist requirements for men: 85 cm (33.4645669 inches)
The real waist requirements for women: 90 cm (35.4330709 inches)
Japan doesn't use inches.
That's your first problem. They are inherently fuel-inefficient vehicles, and are not at all aerodynamic. Plus the high center of gravity makes them less stable during high-speed maneuvering, more likely to roll-over, etc.
I like being able to see OVER traffic.
And I like being able to see down the road without some gigantic SUV blocking my view! If we extrapolate your logic, then what is the next person who wants to see over traffic supposed to do? Get a cargo van? Eventually you'd wind up with someone driving a bus just to see over the legions of people in SUVs.
GM is on the right path with the Hybrid Silverado they are making
A hybrid version of a gas-guzzler is like getting a diet coke with your Big Mac and fries. It also shows exactly why the US automakers are drowning in red ink.
I would like to see something a little smaller, along the lines of a Ranger or S-10/Sonoma (I LOVED the 1994 Sonoma I drove through college). Americans are going to buy small cars in the near future, but the REAL money will be made when we can drive larger SUV's and trucks that get 30+ MPG's.
You want something smaller, but the real money is when they let you drive larger SUVs? I'm confused.
Furthermore, 30 mpg is not very fuel efficient, seriously. We're going to see diesels hitting our market here in the next few months-year that will get 50-70 mpg.
Gas prices have jumped 150% in a little over 2 years, just imagine what the next 2 will be like. If gas prices are $7 USD per US gallon, then what?
Yes, there is less rear leg room in the new Mini, just take a look at the inside of the old mini: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3f/Cutout_mini.jpg
The entire interior was far more sparse, one could almost blame the lack of rear leg room in the new model on the width of the new front seats compared to the old ones.
Now that the US finally has ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD), expect those cars to make it to market here very soon. The VW Jetta TDI for ULSD will be out later this summer as a 2009 model, and it gets fuel economy in the same range as a Prius, 4.5L/100km (~52 mpg).
And then, next year, expect the VW Polo. It's nearly as efficient as the old Lupo 3L, should get roughly 3L/100 km, that's a whopping 78 mpg.
That will really stick it to the US automakers who can't seem to get above 32 mpg; even my Mini does better than that.