I was at an Old Navy with my wife and son. We stood as a group, bantering with each other and the clerks while we were checked out (there were almost no other customers, IIRC).
As we left, my wife and son got waylaid for some reason or other and I ended up about 15 feet ahead of them. When I walked out the exit, the anti-theft alarm went off.
A clerk by the door walked up and I said "my wife back there has all our stuff, I don't have any of it."
She looked at me and said "did you put any of it in your pocket?" and I replied "no" and she said "well it must have gone off for a reason".
By this time I was annoyed and said "Maybe it was all the metal in this?" -- and I opened my fleece vest and showed her my holstered handgun.
She looked bug-eyed and just said "Oh, yeah, probably" and we walked out to the car and drove away. That was even better than just walking away.
About two months ago I replaced a 42" 2003-vintage Sony LCD RP with a 70" Sharp LCD (1080p, 240hz).
As much as I admired the picture in store with HD content, I was a little concerned with picture quality on a much larger screen when using SD/DVD content. And I had always found that DVD content on the Sony was very good and not really distinguishable from HD content on the same set.
That being said, I have been blown away by the improvement in picture quality when watching Bluray discs. Much better than HD TV content (which always seems overcompressed or a cut-rate resolution) and way better than what I had been used to before.
Anyway, the bar was raised and now even good HD isn't quite as good as Bluray and I'd imagine that even on a similar or larger screen the detail improvement at 4k or 8k resolution would actually be noticable and easy to get used to.
I get the idea, but gut flora seems less cause than effect. You can't really choose a gut flora composition, all you can do is alter what you eat.
Further, humans have been eating cooked food for a long time, even pre-agriculture, which ought to nullify most of the living organisms in it, making it harder to select for gut flora via food consumption, other than via raw consumption.
You might have been doing it wrong -- it's not a high *protein* diet, it's really a high *fat* diet, where carbs are basically traded out for fat. Protein should remain relatively constant at about 25% of the total caloric intake.
I'll admit it wasn't an easy dietary transition -- kicking carbs is kind of like kicking cigarettes (been there, done that); you feel kind of shitty for about two weeks. I know I was kind of sick to my stomach a little (our house had a bout with an intestinal bug in the middle of it, which I'm sure was part of it). I'd be hungry and sit down to eat but be unable to eat much quantity and then feel a weird mix of both fullness and hunger (you want to eat, but you just can't stomach any more).
Part of it is psychological, you get hunger cravings and you want to satisfy your cravings with familiar foods. Part of it is physiological, your body does kind of get hooked on the dopamine response that comes from binging on carbohydrates, especially simple carbohydrates, and your digestive system isn't really accustomed to the change in nutritional balance.
And part of it is quite frankly *practical* -- in the west, we live in a dietary world dominated by carbohydrates. I would go to a familiar restaurant and order a bacon cheeseburger, thinking -- I'll just eat the burger and not the bun or the fries. Well, when you take it all apart, you realize it shouldn't be called a "burger joint" it should be called a "starch joint" -- from a volume and possibly even a caloric perspective, they're really just feeding you a small amount of meat and a large amount of starch -- huge bun, big load of fries.
I've kind of adjusted and will often find myself asking for substitutions -- veggies for starches, and in some cases, ordering two entrees' worth of meat at some places. What's also surprising is that your food costs go up -- if the entire low-carb paradigm is true, it's validated by capitalism -- the highest fat meats are the most expensive (ie, USDA Prime); there's a hidden value associated with fat that makes it more expensive to consume that carbohydrates.
Even portion size can be less of an issue if you are eating 20% or fewer calories in carbohydrates. Fat intake will produce a leptin response, making you feel full and not wanting to eat any more.
Carbohydrates, especially fructose (as Dr. Lustig points out in "Bitter Truth) suppresses the leptin response -- you don't feel full, the metabolization process of simple carbs just locks away the energy as fat accumulation and preventing you from using it for energy, making you even more hungry.
I went low carb about 8 months ago and I took the idea of "eat until you were full" seriously, thinking maybe I could knock back a couple of steaks at a time. I couldn't; I lost all interest in eating once the full feeling kicked in.
Humans don't take antibiotics every day, but when my son was very young (under three years of age) he was frequently on antibiotics due to recurring ear infections. We wouldn't even know about it (they didn't produce the kinds of crying or ear-tugging that is supposedly symptomatic) until we went to the pediatrician for other reasons and he said "wow, his ear is really infected" and gave us more antibiotics.
Ultimately we ended up getting tubes put in his ears, which largely cleared up the chronic ear infections, but it's not hard for me to believe that very young developing children could be on antibiotics frequently enough to make some kind of difference.
Personally I think the massive volumes of sugar and refined carbohydrates we feed our kids has more to do with obesity than an esoteric gut flora question.
Followed very closely by a diet heavy in carbohydrates, thanks to a failed and scientifically baseless "low fat" dietary guidelines that promote a "low fat" diet high in carbohydrates.
It staggers me to watch fellow parents pour gallons of sugar down their kids throats -- "look, it's low fat and free from high fructose corn syrup!!!!" despite the fact that it contains apple juice as a "natural" ingredient, which is just injected for its fructose content -- it's like HFCS without the corn syrup.
If you don't want your kids to get fat, feed them eggs and sausage. If you want them to get fat, feed them juice, soda, and lots of grains and watch them swell like cows in a feedlot.
We need a two-tier cell phone service system in the US.
Tier I would be the tower infrastructure, run the same way that many electrical utilities are run -- as a state-sanctioned but highly regulated monopoly given a fixed profit margin with strict public oversight. This would be coupled with FCC regulation requiring a common radio standard for all cell phones.
Tier II would be the retail providers who sell cellular services to end users. Tier II providers would buy cellular service in bulk from Tier I (the only provider) and sell them via whatever scheme they decide is most competitive, including value-added services such as voicemail.
Tier I, through regulation, would be required to limit the money it can spend on operations not related to infrastructure operations (ie, no outrageous executive salaries and bonuses). It should, through volume buying, be able to get competitive deals on backhaul from existing wireline carriers and possibly granted the ability to build its own fiber networks where it makes sense -- the idea isn't to take over the wireline/fiber data industry. Regulations should also be in place mandating cellular service levels meet some basic level for data and signal quality.
Since all Tier II vendors would be buying the same network access from the same vendor at regulated prices, Tier II vendors would have to compete on customer service and innovative add-ons versus coming up with new ways to charge 3 or 4 times for the same MB of data. Consumers would be able to easily switch vendors because all phones would support the common radio standards. Since Tier II vendors merely buy access, there's no limit to entry of the cellular retail business, meaning slothful or greedy vendors would never last.
It doesn't make practical or economic sense for there to be four major cellular carriers building four overlapping cellular networks with only minor technology variations; it's no wonder two carriers can barely compete and the two others occasionally struggle to keep up with demand.
None of the carriers are really technology innovators; LTE, GSM and all the networking technologies aren't really carrier "innovations" at all, so arguments about "lack of innovation" due to a fixed-margin monopoly at Tier I wouldn't make any sense, and the regulation of Tier I would ensure that new technology standards could be implemented over time, vs. the foot-dragging we endure now.
It's all a bunch of mental gymnastics by the anti-abortion crowd to justify total bans on abortion.
What they want is a total ban on abortion in any circumstances, but politically even they are rational enough to know that total bans on abortions have a chance somewhere between 0% and 0% without exceptions for the health of the mother and cases of rape or incest.
IMHO I think they would give on health of the mother or at least make some kind of fuzzy exception involving emergency surgery or something so that they can claim that no woman would die on the operating table.
The rape & incest exception drives them nuts because it creates a loophole that would theoretically allow any woman to get an abortion because all they would need to do is claim they were raped.
The "legitimate rape" angle is one they love and really want to believe in because it provides a way to claim that women won't get pregnant if they are raped so thus they don't need an exception for it. All the women who DO claim they are pregnant and were raped, well, "they weren't really raped, it was just another of those girls who decided she didn't want it after she got it." is the thinking.
Needless to say, banning abortion is just another one of those hopeless political causes, like banning guns or banning drugs. Unlikely to ever be implemented (or if implemented, unjust and ineffective) due to private demand in spite of public claims to the contrary; everyone's against violence, but a.38 in the closet is kind of reassuring; drugs are bad, but a couple of puffs on a joint isn't so bad, and I would never want an abortion, but if my daughter was raped, my girlfriend got pregnant, it sure would be nice to have that option..
You can find one or two, but it's curious that a Google search for "Amazon S3 client comparison" turns up links from 2009 and 2010.
More curious is the fact that Dropbox, SugarSync, the MS solution, Google's new solution etc seem to be thriving and providing exactly the kind of services that you'd expect third party S3 clients to provide.
I'm not saying these clients don't exist, but I don't seem to find them very easily compared to other cloud storage options, and you'd kind of expect people to come up with lots of crazy storage solutions.
I always wondered if this wasn't at least partly done to capture the customer's audio system spending.
Car makers traditionally have been way behind the times in terms of car audio, and even simple upgrades were always really expensive due to the highway robbery prices they charged (since they were nearly always a dealer add-on).
So you bought the base model radio and then went to Best Buy or wherever and bought a better model, speakers, power amp for less money than the car maker wanted.
At first car makers seemed to resist buy going double-DIN, but the carmakers fixed that with brackets, double-DIN stereos and other faceplate doodads.
Now with the integration, you can't do squat. My 2007 Volvo S80 uses the stereo for the car's menu system; even the dash stuff would be hard to work around; it's not a typical double-DIN setup. Even the speakers are used as part of the safety systems and backup sensor.
If you really wanted aftermarket audio, I think you'd almost need a completely remote system (maybe controlled by smartphone or some other touchscreen mounted separately like an aftermarket GPS or phone holder). And then there's the whole speaker issue...
I work with a guy like this. I don't know what weirdness he has in his past, but he's married with kids but his wife and kids lived in Canada (the weirdness part comes in that he couldn't visit or live with them in Canada for some reason).
Anyway, he lived in a house with 5 single guys and all he does is drink Monster Enegergy Drink and work. I would get emails from him all the time between 11 PM and 1 AM.
I worked with him on a project (I was the lead) and told him explicitly that unless I approved it, no work was permitted on the project past 6 PM. He complained about all the stuff he could get done and I said "Well, I have to get stuff done too, like mow the fucking lawn and take my kid to soccer practice."
Fortunately his wife and kids moved back into town and he's been forced to dial it back tremendously.
As bad as the US may be vs. how it used to be and/or what it claims to be, do you really think that FBI rises to the level of the NKVD or that Robert Mueller rises to the level of Lavrentiy Beria?
If you can arrange for 30 days of potable water, you'll probably end up with a lot of usable "long term" food. I think the biggest survival problem will be clean drinking water.
You might be in good shape after a week, but desperation will make people drink dirty water that will make them sick, so it could take up to a month for lack of water to thin the herd.
Isn't this the "old school" way of laundering money?
Either through outright purchase or, more commonly, strongarm, gain control of a business that does a lot of cash transactions -- bars, restuarants (cheap ones now), vending companies, taxis, anyplace people spend cash. Also gain control or create a business that acts as a vendor to that business on a regular basis (food wholesaler or other supplier).
The dirty money goes in as revenue to the cash-heavy business as bogus sales. Some money comes out "clean" as the business profits, but probably more of it comes out "clean" as payments to the suppliers. This allows you to offset your fake sales revenue (which is dirty cash input) with fake supplier sales so you don't have to account for, say, a million cans of coca cola or a couple of tons a beef a week.
Anyway, I've always been told that this is why the mob has been big in vending.
It gets even better. I was at a "liberal" party with a friend of mine who was gay and worked for an AIDS advocacy organization. We were making party conversation with a woman when I noticed a dog walking down the street on a leash.
The woman made some comment about how it was cruel to leash dogs and how she was for animal rights. I made a comment about something I had read about monkey testing being critical for AIDS research.
She objected and said this was total cruelty. Needless to say my friend got really upset and asked her why humans that are HIV+ have less rights than animals -- was she really asking for a death sentence for millions of people to protect animals?
It was a laugh riot as far as I was concerned. You can always line up issue zealots from within the same political wing and exploit their issues for amusement.
Ha, we don't know how often LEO does or doesn't shake people down for cash/drugs/sex. My guess is it happens much more than anyone is willing to admit.
And there's the percentage of people with non-US life experiences where getting shaken down for bribes is part of the system.
You're being made an offer you can't refuse. Buy the latest tender of a trillion dollars in bonds at face value, or we'll sell you the same amount for $500 billion and just cut the other $500 billion off the top of what we owe you.
We'll be back in six months with a new load of bonds, this time two trillion, only this time the offer is buy them all or we cut 4 trillion off what we owe you.
I hear so many mixed messages about iPhone security.
On one hand, with later models using full-disk encryption it seems like there are some aspects of the phone that are encrypted well enough that you might not be able to get into them easily. I have one app that even advertises its ability to encrypt data stored in the app providing the phone was full-disk encrypted (pre-iOS4 3GS devices upgraded to iOS4 didn't have full disk by default; you had to blank them and restore to get it).
On the other hand, we hear about third-party forensics tools that claim to be able to snarf data simply through a local connection, and then there's all the jailbreaking, etc. which would seem to bypass or at least make some of that security questionable.
I'm not sure anyone has any "hard' statistics, but after 25 years of working in IT in government, academia and industry my experience has certainly been that IT attracts a lot of people with weak social skills.
I don't think that you can narrow it down to specifically opposite sex interactions, either, as it seems to be just generally poor social skills. Conflict management, negotiation, communication, and so on.
I think it's probably worse in IT fields where there's less social interaction, but that stands to reason since people with weak social skills probably do better in jobs where they can hide in the corner and not deal with people.
As a consultant, I see these kinds in smaller companies with smaller IT staffs more than big companies; large companies tend to be a little more selective of personality than big companies, probably because of some HR screening process.
You see it much less in newish kinds of IT or IT-related jobs that involve websites, content management, and that sort of thing because those jobs often involve a lot of non-technical organization and geeks just do poorly there.
Why try to fix his percieved moderation now? As the parent poster notes, there's little reason to appeal to the social right at this point. Anyone with any skin in the game on taxes, religion issues, gun control or other hot button conservative topics was aleady voting against Obama no matter what.
There's been loose talk about religious conservatives "sitting this one out" due to Romney being a Mormon and not towing their line, but really? They have everything to lose from not voting.
Further, the blue blood business conservatives are already likely Romney voters because of Romney's history in the financial sector and business experience vs. Obama, although Obama has demonstarted a surprising (and frustrating) amount of restraint with the financiall sector.
Personally I think Romney should have gone with Rubio instead. It would have given him broader appeal and shifted the attention away from highly divisive issues. A female candidate would have been even more appealing in many ways. I think he's boxed himself in on the right and won't have the cross-over appeal he needs.
100g sugar is 50g fructose, and fructose is metabolized by the liver in a biochemical process nearly identical to alcohol (search YouTube for Dr. Robert Lustig's lecture "Sugar: The Bitter Truth"; he walks through the biochemistry in detail).
Although 50g fructose isn't really a super outrageous amount considering that it's about two 20 oz cokes worth.
But the deal is, whoever owns my house gets free electricity, in any amount they want to use (as a Minnesotan, I can see the value of a heated driveway & sidewalks).
I always thought they should have done something like that when building a new nuke plant. To make nice with the neighbors, all residents within an X mile radius get electricity at a sharp discount (aka wholesale prices).
Slashdot Mirror
I was at an Old Navy with my wife and son. We stood as a group, bantering with each other and the clerks while we were checked out (there were almost no other customers, IIRC).
As we left, my wife and son got waylaid for some reason or other and I ended up about 15 feet ahead of them. When I walked out the exit, the anti-theft alarm went off.
A clerk by the door walked up and I said "my wife back there has all our stuff, I don't have any of it."
She looked at me and said "did you put any of it in your pocket?" and I replied "no" and she said "well it must have gone off for a reason".
By this time I was annoyed and said "Maybe it was all the metal in this?" -- and I opened my fleece vest and showed her my holstered handgun.
She looked bug-eyed and just said "Oh, yeah, probably" and we walked out to the car and drove away. That was even better than just walking away.
About two months ago I replaced a 42" 2003-vintage Sony LCD RP with a 70" Sharp LCD (1080p, 240hz).
As much as I admired the picture in store with HD content, I was a little concerned with picture quality on a much larger screen when using SD/DVD content. And I had always found that DVD content on the Sony was very good and not really distinguishable from HD content on the same set.
That being said, I have been blown away by the improvement in picture quality when watching Bluray discs. Much better than HD TV content (which always seems overcompressed or a cut-rate resolution) and way better than what I had been used to before.
Anyway, the bar was raised and now even good HD isn't quite as good as Bluray and I'd imagine that even on a similar or larger screen the detail improvement at 4k or 8k resolution would actually be noticable and easy to get used to.
I get the idea, but gut flora seems less cause than effect. You can't really choose a gut flora composition, all you can do is alter what you eat.
Further, humans have been eating cooked food for a long time, even pre-agriculture, which ought to nullify most of the living organisms in it, making it harder to select for gut flora via food consumption, other than via raw consumption.
You might have been doing it wrong -- it's not a high *protein* diet, it's really a high *fat* diet, where carbs are basically traded out for fat. Protein should remain relatively constant at about 25% of the total caloric intake.
I'll admit it wasn't an easy dietary transition -- kicking carbs is kind of like kicking cigarettes (been there, done that); you feel kind of shitty for about two weeks. I know I was kind of sick to my stomach a little (our house had a bout with an intestinal bug in the middle of it, which I'm sure was part of it). I'd be hungry and sit down to eat but be unable to eat much quantity and then feel a weird mix of both fullness and hunger (you want to eat, but you just can't stomach any more).
Part of it is psychological, you get hunger cravings and you want to satisfy your cravings with familiar foods. Part of it is physiological, your body does kind of get hooked on the dopamine response that comes from binging on carbohydrates, especially simple carbohydrates, and your digestive system isn't really accustomed to the change in nutritional balance.
And part of it is quite frankly *practical* -- in the west, we live in a dietary world dominated by carbohydrates. I would go to a familiar restaurant and order a bacon cheeseburger, thinking -- I'll just eat the burger and not the bun or the fries. Well, when you take it all apart, you realize it shouldn't be called a "burger joint" it should be called a "starch joint" -- from a volume and possibly even a caloric perspective, they're really just feeding you a small amount of meat and a large amount of starch -- huge bun, big load of fries.
I've kind of adjusted and will often find myself asking for substitutions -- veggies for starches, and in some cases, ordering two entrees' worth of meat at some places. What's also surprising is that your food costs go up -- if the entire low-carb paradigm is true, it's validated by capitalism -- the highest fat meats are the most expensive (ie, USDA Prime); there's a hidden value associated with fat that makes it more expensive to consume that carbohydrates.
Even portion size can be less of an issue if you are eating 20% or fewer calories in carbohydrates. Fat intake will produce a leptin response, making you feel full and not wanting to eat any more.
Carbohydrates, especially fructose (as Dr. Lustig points out in "Bitter Truth) suppresses the leptin response -- you don't feel full, the metabolization process of simple carbs just locks away the energy as fat accumulation and preventing you from using it for energy, making you even more hungry.
I went low carb about 8 months ago and I took the idea of "eat until you were full" seriously, thinking maybe I could knock back a couple of steaks at a time. I couldn't; I lost all interest in eating once the full feeling kicked in.
Humans don't take antibiotics every day, but when my son was very young (under three years of age) he was frequently on antibiotics due to recurring ear infections. We wouldn't even know about it (they didn't produce the kinds of crying or ear-tugging that is supposedly symptomatic) until we went to the pediatrician for other reasons and he said "wow, his ear is really infected" and gave us more antibiotics.
Ultimately we ended up getting tubes put in his ears, which largely cleared up the chronic ear infections, but it's not hard for me to believe that very young developing children could be on antibiotics frequently enough to make some kind of difference.
Personally I think the massive volumes of sugar and refined carbohydrates we feed our kids has more to do with obesity than an esoteric gut flora question.
Followed very closely by a diet heavy in carbohydrates, thanks to a failed and scientifically baseless "low fat" dietary guidelines that promote a "low fat" diet high in carbohydrates.
It staggers me to watch fellow parents pour gallons of sugar down their kids throats -- "look, it's low fat and free from high fructose corn syrup!!!!" despite the fact that it contains apple juice as a "natural" ingredient, which is just injected for its fructose content -- it's like HFCS without the corn syrup.
If you don't want your kids to get fat, feed them eggs and sausage. If you want them to get fat, feed them juice, soda, and lots of grains and watch them swell like cows in a feedlot.
We need a two-tier cell phone service system in the US.
Tier I would be the tower infrastructure, run the same way that many electrical utilities are run -- as a state-sanctioned but highly regulated monopoly given a fixed profit margin with strict public oversight. This would be coupled with FCC regulation requiring a common radio standard for all cell phones.
Tier II would be the retail providers who sell cellular services to end users. Tier II providers would buy cellular service in bulk from Tier I (the only provider) and sell them via whatever scheme they decide is most competitive, including value-added services such as voicemail.
Tier I, through regulation, would be required to limit the money it can spend on operations not related to infrastructure operations (ie, no outrageous executive salaries and bonuses). It should, through volume buying, be able to get competitive deals on backhaul from existing wireline carriers and possibly granted the ability to build its own fiber networks where it makes sense -- the idea isn't to take over the wireline/fiber data industry. Regulations should also be in place mandating cellular service levels meet some basic level for data and signal quality.
Since all Tier II vendors would be buying the same network access from the same vendor at regulated prices, Tier II vendors would have to compete on customer service and innovative add-ons versus coming up with new ways to charge 3 or 4 times for the same MB of data. Consumers would be able to easily switch vendors because all phones would support the common radio standards. Since Tier II vendors merely buy access, there's no limit to entry of the cellular retail business, meaning slothful or greedy vendors would never last.
It doesn't make practical or economic sense for there to be four major cellular carriers building four overlapping cellular networks with only minor technology variations; it's no wonder two carriers can barely compete and the two others occasionally struggle to keep up with demand.
None of the carriers are really technology innovators; LTE, GSM and all the networking technologies aren't really carrier "innovations" at all, so arguments about "lack of innovation" due to a fixed-margin monopoly at Tier I wouldn't make any sense, and the regulation of Tier I would ensure that new technology standards could be implemented over time, vs. the foot-dragging we endure now.
It's all a bunch of mental gymnastics by the anti-abortion crowd to justify total bans on abortion.
What they want is a total ban on abortion in any circumstances, but politically even they are rational enough to know that total bans on abortions have a chance somewhere between 0% and 0% without exceptions for the health of the mother and cases of rape or incest.
IMHO I think they would give on health of the mother or at least make some kind of fuzzy exception involving emergency surgery or something so that they can claim that no woman would die on the operating table.
The rape & incest exception drives them nuts because it creates a loophole that would theoretically allow any woman to get an abortion because all they would need to do is claim they were raped.
The "legitimate rape" angle is one they love and really want to believe in because it provides a way to claim that women won't get pregnant if they are raped so thus they don't need an exception for it. All the women who DO claim they are pregnant and were raped, well, "they weren't really raped, it was just another of those girls who decided she didn't want it after she got it." is the thinking.
Needless to say, banning abortion is just another one of those hopeless political causes, like banning guns or banning drugs. Unlikely to ever be implemented (or if implemented, unjust and ineffective) due to private demand in spite of public claims to the contrary; everyone's against violence, but a .38 in the closet is kind of reassuring; drugs are bad, but a couple of puffs on a joint isn't so bad, and I would never want an abortion, but if my daughter was raped, my girlfriend got pregnant, it sure would be nice to have that option..
Where are all the good end-user tools for S3 now?
You can find one or two, but it's curious that a Google search for "Amazon S3 client comparison" turns up links from 2009 and 2010.
More curious is the fact that Dropbox, SugarSync, the MS solution, Google's new solution etc seem to be thriving and providing exactly the kind of services that you'd expect third party S3 clients to provide.
I'm not saying these clients don't exist, but I don't seem to find them very easily compared to other cloud storage options, and you'd kind of expect people to come up with lots of crazy storage solutions.
I always wondered if this wasn't at least partly done to capture the customer's audio system spending.
Car makers traditionally have been way behind the times in terms of car audio, and even simple upgrades were always really expensive due to the highway robbery prices they charged (since they were nearly always a dealer add-on).
So you bought the base model radio and then went to Best Buy or wherever and bought a better model, speakers, power amp for less money than the car maker wanted.
At first car makers seemed to resist buy going double-DIN, but the carmakers fixed that with brackets, double-DIN stereos and other faceplate doodads.
Now with the integration, you can't do squat. My 2007 Volvo S80 uses the stereo for the car's menu system; even the dash stuff would be hard to work around; it's not a typical double-DIN setup. Even the speakers are used as part of the safety systems and backup sensor.
If you really wanted aftermarket audio, I think you'd almost need a completely remote system (maybe controlled by smartphone or some other touchscreen mounted separately like an aftermarket GPS or phone holder). And then there's the whole speaker issue...
I work with a guy like this. I don't know what weirdness he has in his past, but he's married with kids but his wife and kids lived in Canada (the weirdness part comes in that he couldn't visit or live with them in Canada for some reason).
Anyway, he lived in a house with 5 single guys and all he does is drink Monster Enegergy Drink and work. I would get emails from him all the time between 11 PM and 1 AM.
I worked with him on a project (I was the lead) and told him explicitly that unless I approved it, no work was permitted on the project past 6 PM. He complained about all the stuff he could get done and I said "Well, I have to get stuff done too, like mow the fucking lawn and take my kid to soccer practice."
Fortunately his wife and kids moved back into town and he's been forced to dial it back tremendously.
As bad as the US may be vs. how it used to be and/or what it claims to be, do you really think that FBI rises to the level of the NKVD or that Robert Mueller rises to the level of Lavrentiy Beria?
If you can arrange for 30 days of potable water, you'll probably end up with a lot of usable "long term" food. I think the biggest survival problem will be clean drinking water.
You might be in good shape after a week, but desperation will make people drink dirty water that will make them sick, so it could take up to a month for lack of water to thin the herd.
Isn't this the "old school" way of laundering money?
Either through outright purchase or, more commonly, strongarm, gain control of a business that does a lot of cash transactions -- bars, restuarants (cheap ones now), vending companies, taxis, anyplace people spend cash. Also gain control or create a business that acts as a vendor to that business on a regular basis (food wholesaler or other supplier).
The dirty money goes in as revenue to the cash-heavy business as bogus sales. Some money comes out "clean" as the business profits, but probably more of it comes out "clean" as payments to the suppliers. This allows you to offset your fake sales revenue (which is dirty cash input) with fake supplier sales so you don't have to account for, say, a million cans of coca cola or a couple of tons a beef a week.
Anyway, I've always been told that this is why the mob has been big in vending.
It gets even better. I was at a "liberal" party with a friend of mine who was gay and worked for an AIDS advocacy organization. We were making party conversation with a woman when I noticed a dog walking down the street on a leash.
The woman made some comment about how it was cruel to leash dogs and how she was for animal rights. I made a comment about something I had read about monkey testing being critical for AIDS research.
She objected and said this was total cruelty. Needless to say my friend got really upset and asked her why humans that are HIV+ have less rights than animals -- was she really asking for a death sentence for millions of people to protect animals?
It was a laugh riot as far as I was concerned. You can always line up issue zealots from within the same political wing and exploit their issues for amusement.
Ha, we don't know how often LEO does or doesn't shake people down for cash/drugs/sex. My guess is it happens much more than anyone is willing to admit.
And there's the percentage of people with non-US life experiences where getting shaken down for bribes is part of the system.
I can see where there are probably not an insignificant number of people who might want to use one as a phone.
You're being made an offer you can't refuse. Buy the latest tender of a trillion dollars in bonds at face value, or we'll sell you the same amount for $500 billion and just cut the other $500 billion off the top of what we owe you.
We'll be back in six months with a new load of bonds, this time two trillion, only this time the offer is buy them all or we cut 4 trillion off what we owe you.
Thanks for shopping with the Treasury.
Heh, which way do I point the antenna again?
I hear so many mixed messages about iPhone security.
On one hand, with later models using full-disk encryption it seems like there are some aspects of the phone that are encrypted well enough that you might not be able to get into them easily. I have one app that even advertises its ability to encrypt data stored in the app providing the phone was full-disk encrypted (pre-iOS4 3GS devices upgraded to iOS4 didn't have full disk by default; you had to blank them and restore to get it).
On the other hand, we hear about third-party forensics tools that claim to be able to snarf data simply through a local connection, and then there's all the jailbreaking, etc. which would seem to bypass or at least make some of that security questionable.
Which is it?
I'm not sure anyone has any "hard' statistics, but after 25 years of working in IT in government, academia and industry my experience has certainly been that IT attracts a lot of people with weak social skills.
I don't think that you can narrow it down to specifically opposite sex interactions, either, as it seems to be just generally poor social skills. Conflict management, negotiation, communication, and so on.
I think it's probably worse in IT fields where there's less social interaction, but that stands to reason since people with weak social skills probably do better in jobs where they can hide in the corner and not deal with people.
As a consultant, I see these kinds in smaller companies with smaller IT staffs more than big companies; large companies tend to be a little more selective of personality than big companies, probably because of some HR screening process.
You see it much less in newish kinds of IT or IT-related jobs that involve websites, content management, and that sort of thing because those jobs often involve a lot of non-technical organization and geeks just do poorly there.
Why try to fix his percieved moderation now? As the parent poster notes, there's little reason to appeal to the social right at this point. Anyone with any skin in the game on taxes, religion issues, gun control or other hot button conservative topics was aleady voting against Obama no matter what.
There's been loose talk about religious conservatives "sitting this one out" due to Romney being a Mormon and not towing their line, but really? They have everything to lose from not voting.
Further, the blue blood business conservatives are already likely Romney voters because of Romney's history in the financial sector and business experience vs. Obama, although Obama has demonstarted a surprising (and frustrating) amount of restraint with the financiall sector.
Personally I think Romney should have gone with Rubio instead. It would have given him broader appeal and shifted the attention away from highly divisive issues. A female candidate would have been even more appealing in many ways. I think he's boxed himself in on the right and won't have the cross-over appeal he needs.
100g sugar is 50g fructose, and fructose is metabolized by the liver in a biochemical process nearly identical to alcohol (search YouTube for Dr. Robert Lustig's lecture "Sugar: The Bitter Truth"; he walks through the biochemistry in detail).
Although 50g fructose isn't really a super outrageous amount considering that it's about two 20 oz cokes worth.
But the deal is, whoever owns my house gets free electricity, in any amount they want to use (as a Minnesotan, I can see the value of a heated driveway & sidewalks).
I always thought they should have done something like that when building a new nuke plant. To make nice with the neighbors, all residents within an X mile radius get electricity at a sharp discount (aka wholesale prices).