Even the District of Columbia DMV was pretty good, and DC is not known for efficiency. When I got rid of my car, it didn't take very long to hand the plate to the guy, who marked it invalid. That was that. Comcast? I got charged after disconnecting, and the dispute is unresolved after two months.
In other words, "disconnecting" from the DC DMV was easier than disconnecting from Comcast.
The drug war is bad enough, but when the DEA waits until just before harvest to destroy fields they know about... really gripes my cookies. They let it consume all that water, *then* they destroy it. And of course they'll destroy small backyard grows that don't even push people into the next water usage tier. When Joe Sixplant's grow is pushed over, where does he buy weed? From big growers illegally diverting.
Someone who shall remain nameless once told me I looked so much better without glasses, I should get the surgery.
I place LASIK in the same category as nose-jobs, breast augmentation, etc. Unless you are truly freakish (e.g., Golf-ball shaped nose or something) I have a hard time justifying it. If you're normative in appearance, IMHO any ethical plastic surgeon should refer you to a psychiatrist but they generally don't because MONEY.
Anyway, totally not going to get a laser in my eye. Those ads for dry eye medicine you see? It's because of one of the most common complications. No thanks.
Glasses. Hundreds of years, reasonable outcomes. LASIK? Maybe it'll be proven as risk-free as glasses some day, but probably not until I'm long dead and buried. Vanity isn't worth the risk to me; but I understand others think differently.
Your analogy is unacceptable. You should have written it in Esperanto. Esperanto is the new standard for analogies from corporate. Also, you should have simultaneously posted it to your FaceBook account which you are required to have if you wish to perform analogy services on this network. Furthermore, you did not submit your prose to the grammar nazi trolls, or allocate time for analogy review in the scheduling program. Please rectify these discrepancies and I will get back to you during my appointed window for analogy review, Tuesdays from 2 to 4:20PM.
LOL, hate to feed the troll but I can't help but be reminded of this All in the Family scene. Would it make you feel any better if they were killed by private associations?
Ask someone from the entire central US. Yellowstone's "next to" is pretty large when you consider the projected ash fall from a major eruption. Aside from that, the knock-on effect on food supply and weather would have global consequences, so I guess we're all pretty "stupid".
The place I just moved from was a fine example of this. Bathtub clogs. Not just a bit. Full stop. Clogged. I tried vinegar+baking soda, hot water, no dice. Called the landlord, who calls the plumber.
Plumber is like... routine hair clog. Goes to work on it. No dice. After hacking for 10 minutes and getting nowhere (it's a master plumber and he's got an apprentice with him) they dive under the house to access from a different angle.
The real problem? It seems that ages ago the little brass dumb-bell that plugs the drain had broken off its chain. No problem. They just replaced it, leaving the old one in what they must have figured was a wider pipe. Perhaps it was, but over time it worked its way down to another section of pipe and just so happens it plugged nicely against the joint.
Only practical way to fix this problem was to cut the pipes with a killer saw. There were sparks flying and everything. The guy showed me that among other things, some guy had somehow sleeved one pipe over another, perhaps as some amateur way to stop leaks.
This was a 92 year old building. Like you say, weird things happen. Landlord was pretty pissed about the bill until I explained it. That's one nice thing about renting anyway--I didn't have to pay it.
I recently moved out of Comcast's service area and am in the process of trying to have improper charges removed. Fortunately I live within a reasonable drive of their SA, where there is a physical office. Thus, I was able to employ the tactic of actually meeting a rep face-to-face. Like I said, I'm still in process though. She said I'd get a check. Both of us were very polite, because of being in person. She even did as I asked and printed a screen capture of her terminal, gave me her name so I would be able to properly document this in case the check never arrives and/or the charges aren't cancelled.
It's sad that you have to do this. I pity those who can't drive back into the SA and employ this tactic. They will probably have a much harder time.
BTW, allegedly the first rep that I cancelled with only changed my address, didn't cancel the account. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to change address outside the SA without cancelling. (sarcasm).
According to another source (not sure if this is true) reps get a +1 when somebody signs up and a -1 when somebody cancels. If this is true, then it's easy to see how the rep would be tempted to just change the address so that their rating wouldn't be affected. These aren't sales people, they are just order-takers. Sales incentives like that have no place in such situations, since the best sales person in the world cannot provision outside the SA!
Well now, here's an actual legitimate use of the Commerce Clause; but Congress won't use it. Every podunk dealer that ever contributed to their campaigns would ring their phones off the hook, as well as actual corporate lobby from GM, etc.
See my post just prior to this one. It all hinges on the word "might" in my first post. I believe you improperly inferred that I was stating all alternatives *must* exist, as opposed to *might* exist. Yuck, I don't relish the thought of being in Nietsche's company. However, that's based on experiences with my peers when we were teenagers. They were just exasperating to talk to, and one of them actually went certifiably insane.
Let's cycle back to what I said in the first place:
That might not be too far from the one where I'm GWBM
Do you see the word might in there?
You and a lot of other people incorrectly read that as must, hence you are arguing against something I never said, namely that infinity necessitates all possibilities. I got caught up in it a bit myself, going off on how unconstrained infinity may include all possibilities until proven otherwise, which I maintain is true.
Fact is, this whole thread actually seems to be an inference problem. There was of course, no way I could have headeed it off at the pass, I must invoke my un-named "rule" at this point:
No I haven't. If we were discussing the set of prime numbers and I said "how about six" you could say, "No, because it's divisible by 2 and 3". The set of prime numbers is an infinite set with well known restrictions.
We're discussing alternative universes. If I say, "How about the one where I'm GWB?" You have nothing to say because this discussion started with the premise, and ONLY the premise that alternative universes are an infinite set. There were no other criteria specified. I submit that in the absence of such criteria not only may we speculate on all possibilities, we must.
OK, you've done a good job now of explaining what you mean; but my possibility is just as valid as yours. Maybe the multiverse has to include numbers beyond 1.0, and maybe it doesn't.
Maybe it's an infinite set full of bizarre possibilities, and maybe it's an infinite set full of subtle variations on our known theme. We just. Don't. Know.
What is your criterion for restricting the variations? Why are "Anonymous Coward" and "Anonymous Poster" possible, but not "XFFSF Poster" and GWB as an active Slashdot user?
Except in the one where you posted saying it wasn't, but were mistaken because it actually was. That might not be too far from the one where I'm GWB, a frequent Slashdot poster. It's interesting to ponder the concept of what "infinity" really means when you consider all the possibilities on some mundane thing like that.
I can't help but picture a sign on the door at the exit of an airport in Israel. It reads "Thank-you for not stirring up ancient inter-tribal conflict".
I think you're post will be as effective as such a hypothetical sign; but thanks for trying. X --+ (Don Quixote's lance and a windmill).
I see Virginia is listed. I wish there had been such a thing back in the 80s. I sat for what seemed like 5 minutes on rt. 50, waiting for a left turn arrow. It was mid-day so there was very little traffic (it's a parking lot during rush). I had at least 1/4 mile line of sight, maybe more. I honestly thought the signal was broken, and that's what I told the cop who was either behind me or camped under a tree where I didn't see him. There was no arguing on the spot, and it's the only time I ever went to traffic court, where the excuse didn't fly either. But hey, at least the 70 year old half-blind lady who caused an accident got to keep their license. I learned a lot of lessons that day.
To this day, I also wonder if that cop was dicking with the signals to make his quota.
Maybe at some point we'll regard this thing as being on a continuum from mis-folded proteins to intelligent life such as whales. In the meantime, people will argue about whether or not it's really a virus.
Business search is sadly broken in many ways. Whenever I google for a service that I actually need, there are dozens upon dozens of sites at the top of the results. No doubt they're all SEO'd there. When you follow the links, what do you get? A boiler-plate script along the lines of $foo is an experienced contractor in $bar who serves the $locality area. In fact, he does nothing of the sort if he even exists.
The surveillatizing industry does a fantastic job of tracking us and shoving shit-ads at us for stuff we don't want.
And yet, when I'm searching for a service that I ACTUALLY WANT TO PAY FOR, I have to deal with all this dreck.
I figure it must be click-bait, since I've clicked on it because it's misleading. I have a couple ad-blocking methods running concurrently, so I almost never see 3rd party ads there; but I can't imagine what other motive there would be to provide absolutely useless boilerplate like that.
BTW, I guess you could extend this out even further to say that many things other than searching for a business are broken by click-baiters.
Take any question, really. "Who won the 1950 World Series". And although I haven't tested this yet, I'm willing to wager somebody has a site out there that will tell you something like, "The 1950 World Series is available on eBay. Click here to learn more about 1950 World Series products, etc..."
The AI that does this shit is usually pretty smart, but sometimes you get gems like, "The best cleaning products for your World Series".
This business of the developers not knowing how it works. It reminds me of the question "How can God create a being that sins. Doesn't that make Him responsible?". One way to answer that is that God withdraws his authority within the a locus that we call the "soul". What happens there isn't his action. This implies that while knowingly taking actions that lead to wrong is immoral, withdrawing your power from a particular locus and opening things up to potential wrongs is not immoral.
It has nothing to do with intelligence though. The "soul" could be as dumb as a post.
On *NIX systems you will usually get a segfault. I'm not sure if you will *always* get a segfault. The term "segfault" is specific to *NIX. On Windows it was called "invalid page fault" and I don't know what old school Apple stuff called it. That's beside the point.
The truly heinous bugs don't come from accessing memory outside your allotted segments anyway. They come from accessing memory within your allotted segments in erroneous ways. This leads to stuff like, "Hey, the 2nd time I called that function the structure's 2nd element had a different value, even though I did nothing to the structure". You know the bug is someplace else, potentially anywhere in the program where you could have walked off the edge of the sidewalk.
Slashdot Mirror
Even the District of Columbia DMV was pretty good, and DC is not known for efficiency. When I got rid of my car, it didn't take very long to hand the plate to the guy, who marked it invalid. That was that. Comcast? I got charged after disconnecting, and the dispute is unresolved after two months.
In other words, "disconnecting" from the DC DMV was easier than disconnecting from Comcast.
The drug war is bad enough, but when the DEA waits until just before harvest to destroy fields they know about... really gripes my cookies. They let it consume all that water, *then* they destroy it. And of course they'll destroy small backyard grows that don't even push people into the next water usage tier. When Joe Sixplant's grow is pushed over, where does he buy weed? From big growers illegally diverting.
Someone who shall remain nameless once told me I looked so much better without glasses, I should get the surgery.
I place LASIK in the same category as nose-jobs, breast augmentation, etc. Unless you are truly freakish (e.g., Golf-ball shaped nose or something) I have a hard time justifying it. If you're normative in appearance, IMHO any ethical plastic surgeon should refer you to a psychiatrist but they generally don't because MONEY.
Anyway, totally not going to get a laser in my eye. Those ads for dry eye medicine you see? It's because of one of the most common complications. No thanks.
Glasses. Hundreds of years, reasonable outcomes. LASIK? Maybe it'll be proven as risk-free as glasses some day, but probably not until I'm long dead and buried. Vanity isn't worth the risk to me; but I understand others think differently.
Your analogy is unacceptable. You should have written it in Esperanto. Esperanto is the new standard for analogies from corporate. Also, you should have simultaneously posted it to your FaceBook account which you are required to have if you wish to perform analogy services on this network. Furthermore, you did not submit your prose to the grammar nazi trolls, or allocate time for analogy review in the scheduling program. Please rectify these discrepancies and I will get back to you during my appointed window for analogy review, Tuesdays from 2 to 4:20PM.
LOL, hate to feed the troll but I can't help but be reminded of this All in the Family scene. Would it make you feel any better if they were killed by private associations?
Ask someone from Seattle
Ask someone from the entire central US. Yellowstone's "next to" is pretty large when you consider the projected ash fall from a major eruption. Aside from that, the knock-on effect on food supply and weather would have global consequences, so I guess we're all pretty "stupid".
The place I just moved from was a fine example of this. Bathtub clogs. Not just a bit. Full stop. Clogged. I tried vinegar+baking soda, hot water, no dice. Called the landlord, who calls the plumber.
Plumber is like... routine hair clog. Goes to work on it. No dice. After hacking for 10 minutes and getting nowhere (it's a master plumber and he's got an apprentice with him) they dive under the house to access from a different angle.
The real problem? It seems that ages ago the little brass dumb-bell that plugs the drain had broken off its chain. No problem. They just replaced it, leaving the old one in what they must have figured was a wider pipe. Perhaps it was, but over time it worked its way down to another section of pipe and just so happens it plugged nicely against the joint.
Only practical way to fix this problem was to cut the pipes with a killer saw. There were sparks flying and everything. The guy showed me that among other things, some guy had somehow sleeved one pipe over another, perhaps as some amateur way to stop leaks.
This was a 92 year old building. Like you say, weird things happen. Landlord was pretty pissed about the bill until I explained it. That's one nice thing about renting anyway--I didn't have to pay it.
I recently moved out of Comcast's service area and am in the process of trying to have improper charges removed. Fortunately I live within a reasonable drive of their SA, where there is a physical office. Thus, I was able to employ the tactic of actually meeting a rep face-to-face. Like I said, I'm still in process though. She said I'd get a check. Both of us were very polite, because of being in person. She even did as I asked and printed a screen capture of her terminal, gave me her name so I would be able to properly document this in case the check never arrives and/or the charges aren't cancelled.
It's sad that you have to do this. I pity those who can't drive back into the SA and employ this tactic. They will probably have a much harder time.
BTW, allegedly the first rep that I cancelled with only changed my address, didn't cancel the account. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to change address outside the SA without cancelling. (sarcasm).
According to another source (not sure if this is true) reps get a +1 when somebody signs up and a -1 when somebody cancels. If this is true, then it's easy to see how the rep would be tempted to just change the address so that their rating wouldn't be affected. These aren't sales people, they are just order-takers. Sales incentives like that have no place in such situations, since the best sales person in the world cannot provision outside the SA!
Well now, here's an actual legitimate use of the Commerce Clause; but Congress won't use it. Every podunk dealer that ever contributed to their campaigns would ring their phones off the hook, as well as actual corporate lobby from GM, etc.
Ada and BeOS?
Tech 1: Lisp on a Lisa! What are they using???
Tech 2: Lisp on a Lisa.
Tech 1: Oh.
See my post just prior to this one. It all hinges on the word "might" in my first post. I believe you improperly inferred that I was stating all alternatives *must* exist, as opposed to *might* exist. Yuck, I don't relish the thought of being in Nietsche's company. However, that's based on experiences with my peers when we were teenagers. They were just exasperating to talk to, and one of them actually went certifiably insane.
Let's cycle back to what I said in the first place:
That might not be too far from the one where I'm GWBM
Do you see the word might in there?
You and a lot of other people incorrectly read that as must, hence you are arguing against something I never said, namely that infinity necessitates all possibilities. I got caught up in it a bit myself, going off on how unconstrained infinity may include all possibilities until proven otherwise, which I maintain is true.
Fact is, this whole thread actually seems to be an inference problem. There was of course, no way I could have headeed it off at the pass, I must invoke my un-named "rule" at this point:
Inference is broken
Obviously, this means war. And strip searches at bus stations. Problem solved.
You've still missed the point.
No I haven't. If we were discussing the set of prime numbers and I said "how about six" you could say, "No, because it's divisible by 2 and 3". The set of prime numbers is an infinite set with well known restrictions.
We're discussing alternative universes. If I say, "How about the one where I'm GWB?" You have nothing to say because this discussion started with the premise, and ONLY the premise that alternative universes are an infinite set. There were no other criteria specified. I submit that in the absence of such criteria not only may we speculate on all possibilities, we must.
OK, you've done a good job now of explaining what you mean; but my possibility is just as valid as yours. Maybe the multiverse has to include numbers beyond 1.0, and maybe it doesn't.
Maybe it's an infinite set full of bizarre possibilities, and maybe it's an infinite set full of subtle variations on our known theme. We just. Don't. Know.
What is your criterion for restricting the variations? Why are "Anonymous Coward" and "Anonymous Poster" possible, but not "XFFSF Poster" and GWB as an active Slashdot user?
Except in the one where you posted saying it wasn't, but were mistaken because it actually was. That might not be too far from the one where I'm GWB, a frequent Slashdot poster. It's interesting to ponder the concept of what "infinity" really means when you consider all the possibilities on some mundane thing like that.
I can't help but picture a sign on the door at the exit of an airport in Israel. It reads "Thank-you for not stirring up ancient inter-tribal conflict".
I think you're post will be as effective as such a hypothetical sign; but thanks for trying. X --+ (Don Quixote's lance and a windmill).
dead red laws
I see Virginia is listed. I wish there had been such a thing back in the 80s. I sat for what seemed like 5 minutes on rt. 50, waiting for a left turn arrow. It was mid-day so there was very little traffic (it's a parking lot during rush). I had at least 1/4 mile line of sight, maybe more. I honestly thought the signal was broken, and that's what I told the cop who was either behind me or camped under a tree where I didn't see him. There was no arguing on the spot, and it's the only time I ever went to traffic court, where the excuse didn't fly either. But hey, at least the 70 year old half-blind lady who caused an accident got to keep their license. I learned a lot of lessons that day.
To this day, I also wonder if that cop was dicking with the signals to make his quota.
Maybe at some point we'll regard this thing as being on a continuum from mis-folded proteins to intelligent life such as whales. In the meantime, people will argue about whether or not it's really a virus.
I had no trouble reading the sarcasm. I have a silver-braided VGA cable with platinum contacts.
Business search is sadly broken in many ways. Whenever I google for a service that I actually need, there are dozens upon dozens of sites at the top of the results. No doubt they're all SEO'd there. When you follow the links, what do you get? A boiler-plate script along the lines of $foo is an experienced contractor in $bar who serves the $locality area. In fact, he does nothing of the sort if he even exists.
The surveillatizing industry does a fantastic job of tracking us and shoving shit-ads at us for stuff we don't want.
And yet, when I'm searching for a service that I ACTUALLY WANT TO PAY FOR, I have to deal with all this dreck.
I figure it must be click-bait, since I've clicked on it because it's misleading. I have a couple ad-blocking methods running concurrently, so I almost never see 3rd party ads there; but I can't imagine what other motive there would be to provide absolutely useless boilerplate like that.
BTW, I guess you could extend this out even further to say that many things other than searching for a business are broken by click-baiters.
Take any question, really. "Who won the 1950 World Series". And although I haven't tested this yet, I'm willing to wager somebody has a site out there that will tell you something like, "The 1950 World Series is available on eBay. Click here to learn more about 1950 World Series products, etc..."
The AI that does this shit is usually pretty smart, but sometimes you get gems like, "The best cleaning products for your World Series".
This business of the developers not knowing how it works. It reminds me of the question "How can God create a being that sins. Doesn't that make Him responsible?". One way to answer that is that God withdraws his authority within the a locus that we call the "soul". What happens there isn't his action. This implies that while knowingly taking actions that lead to wrong is immoral, withdrawing your power from a particular locus and opening things up to potential wrongs is not immoral.
It has nothing to do with intelligence though. The "soul" could be as dumb as a post.
The AC system expels hot air through a small thermal exhaust port, about 2m wide. In order to access it, we'll have to drive really fast down Main St.
On *NIX systems you will usually get a segfault. I'm not sure if you will *always* get a segfault. The term "segfault" is specific to *NIX. On Windows it was called "invalid page fault" and I don't know what old school Apple stuff called it. That's beside the point.
The truly heinous bugs don't come from accessing memory outside your allotted segments anyway. They come from accessing memory within your allotted segments in erroneous ways. This leads to stuff like, "Hey, the 2nd time I called that function the structure's 2nd element had a different value, even though I did nothing to the structure". You know the bug is someplace else, potentially anywhere in the program where you could have walked off the edge of the sidewalk.