What we have is a repressive social environment for female sexuality and a female sex drive with subtle yet profound differences from the male sex drive. Sprinkle on a little fear of getting pregnant (when you're the one that actually has to carry the baby) along with perhaps some tertiary fear of STDs. And of course none of this even starts to cover the vast emotional territory associated with sexuality, "romance" (for lack of a better word) and the dynamics of an intimate relationship.
What you end up with is a weird situation where women have a high degree of internal conflict about sex (empowered? slut? love? like? pregnant? disease? good? bad?) and a tacit agreement among couples that stated "no" is seldom emphatic and often has many other meanings that change as circumstances change.
The reason he's a repeat offender and the reason they won't work very hard to catch him are the same -- it's catch and release policing.
The prisons are full with "priority" offenders (like aging hippies growing pot for personal consumption) and consequently low-level burglaries, muggings, car break-ins and other small-time property crimes are almost universally plead down to gross misdemeanors and given "time served" jail sentences and some kind of probation.
This one will probably be solved due to the publicity associated with it (an enemy will phone in a hot tip that gets him arrested), but generally speaking they won't bother tracking this guy down for what amounts to 30 days in county jail.
Burglaries only really get "solved" when they evolve into a regional pattern and the police invest resources in catching the burglars in action.
Iran with nukes is like a poker player with just enough chips to intimidate the other players, but not enough to go all-in and force other players to fold and leave the game.
For example, Iran could attack shipping in the Straits of Hormuz (with conventional weapons), knowing that any counter-attack could escalate to nuclear conflict. They know they can't win an all-out exchange, but they also know that their possession of nuclear weapons makes a conventional counter-attack much less likely.
Missing from this discussion is the scope of "profiling" -- I would not advocate stopping people on the street based on their race or religion, but that's because I'm opposed to stopping people on the street if they have not committed a crime. I'm referring most specifically to security checks at airports, where we have developed a ridiculous security regime that inefficiently wastes resource on the majority of travelers who are not participants in a war against Western society.
While "5 people" (I think it was closer to 12 people, 3 per flight, 4 flights on 9/11 -- two that downed the Twin Towers, one that went into the Pentagon, and the other that went down in Pennsylvania) may have crashed those planes, what's missing here is the question: "What is the nature of this conflict?"
This conflict is very nearly exclusively a war between Middle Eastern Islamic actors on one side and predominately white Western populations on the other. I'll grant there have been aberrations -- the odd white Westerner who has converted to Islam, like John Walker Lindh, but even in that case he joined the Taliban and was captured in Afghanistan, not attempting terrorist acts against the West in the West.
But I think those ARE aberrations, especially statistically and sociologically, and that profiling the population most likely and historically most associated with terrorist acts only makes sense. Obviously it would be no security if this is ALL we did, but I think it would be a far better use of our resources to intensively scrutinize non-white Muslims traveling on airplanes.
And it doesn't have to be torture in closed rooms -- it could be as simple as answering questions from a trained person prior to leaving airport security and heading to a boarding gate, more intensive imaging of luggage than given the 'non-threat' population.
If, and when, 50-something white women from the Midwest start bombing planes we can alter our strategy, but thus far that hasn't happened and the causes, beliefs and practices of Middle Eastern Islamists seem unlikely to find support among Whites of a Judeo-Christian background in the near future.
I think the US Government and the media have gone to great lengths to make these conflicts about abstract issues with easy good/bad guys ("terrorists") while glossing over the obvious nature of the conflict (largely, radical Arab Muslims angry at the West) and I think it has warped our view of the conflict and made us believe that there are legions of White Islamists in our own back yards.
As for white radicals accepting non-whites, from what I've seen, I'd say the majority of white groups generally aren't "supremacists", they seem to have more generally adopted a separatist philosophy. IIRC, there was even a meeting between a white power group and the Nation of Islam where they both agreed they wanted seperate, racially segregated homelands. But by and large, these groups aren't really to be taken seriously and are generally more closely associated with prison gangs and low-level criminality than serious political advocates.
Richard Reid is non-white and attempted to bomb a passenger airplane in pursuit of al-Qaeda's Islamist agenda; racial profiling may likely have uncovered him.
Of the remaining domestic terrorists individually listed, all are white but none of their terrorist actions required them to go through any kind of screening at all, rendering any debate about the utility of racial profiling moot in these cases unless you would advocate security screening for posting packages, renting trucks and buying fertilizer, or flying small aircraft.
I will note that you include "...every other member of any US right-wing militia group, such as the Hutaree" which is either political profiling or likely a case of implied racial profiling, which is unusual considering your opposition to profiling.
I will also note that none of the Hutaree have been convicted of any crimes and despite the protests of the prosecution in their cases, a Federal judge has released all of them without bail, saying the government has failed to demonstrate that they pose any threat.
Your other wide-ranging list of evil white terrorists? The IRA was involved in a political dispute over territory in Ireland and for the last 20 years has been more interested in extortion, loan sharking and drug dealing than anything remotely resembling international terrorism, and even when most active as a terrorist organization they were almost exclusively focused on a specific regional conflict, not terrorism directed generally at Western populations.
The same is true of the other "white" terrorist organizations -- ETA, FLNC, etc are exclusively in conflict over regional political autonomy, not engaged in a broader conflict with Western society nor do they generally target the public as a whole by trying to bomb passenger airliners or fly them into buildings.
Executive offices are fairly astonishing in size. Part of it is due to tabulatory gigantism -- the need to have the largest possible desk, despite the fact that many don't even "work at a desk". This latter aspect drives a lot of the large executive office syndrome; they "don't work at a desk" therefore they need the space for a living room setup, complete with a big leather couch, designer table, and a couple of chairs and a large flat screen TV & entertainment setup.
They also need a kitchenette setup (Keurig coffee machine, fridge for beer/pop, liquor, glasses, ice) and in many cases a private bathroom, because they want to be able to offer refreshments and a restroom for them and their guests.
One of the major ironies about all this space being devoted to them is that it stands empty much of the time due to their extensive travel requirements (cf. justification for Netjets/company airplane).
I sometimes wonder why they don't skip all the executive suites and instead build a small hotel on corporate campuses and hire a hotel company to manage it. The executives could be given a generic "large" office (of the type generally assigned to on-site senior working managers; large enough for a desk, conference table and four chairs, but not the big suites) and a group of suites in the hotel could be set aside for executives involved in meetings for which their "living room" setup would be required; the hotel's concierge and other staff could be used for food/beverage and other conveniences.
The side benefit would be a functional hotel that could be used for out of town employees, vendors and others needing accommodations and working on campus.
Blocking ads instead of scripts & Flash is like having your airport security block brown people instead of terrorists. It's ineffective and - now I'm getting into moral stuff - harmful.
You are getting moral and ignoring facts. How many cases of terrorism have been implemented in the U.S. or elsewhere that did not involve "brown" people? AFAIK, it has been exclusively "brown" people in the US and elsewhere.
I'd agree that as an absolute measure of security, racial profiling doesn't work, but in the case of Islamic extremism it would be extremely effective even on its own. There's some question as to whether it would contribute to racial hostility, but in my mind that's a reasonable trade-off versus treating all people like common criminals when they are not remotely part of the group staging attacks.
If you can find one without dings in the junk yard that matches your color.
Half the reason these things end up in the junk yard to begin with is they get into some kind of accident which generally screws up the bumpers. And due to exposure differences you get different paint fade characteristics which cause color matches to look like color mismatches.
But I appreciate your over-simplified fix it yourself mindset.
What we need is a highly regulated (electric & gas utility style) monopoly that runs the towers & backhaul. They will sell their minutes at a tarrif-regulated price, in bulk, to the resellers who actually provide dial tone, voice mail, customer service and whatever other bullshit data features they want to sell (VZW Apps, media, etc).
In some ways it'd be like Apple's iPhone and the app store relative to AT&T -- Apple is the reseller of those items, AT&T kind of just provides backhaul for the apps.
And if you sell the phone, knowing you contractually have to return it, it could, indeed, be actual theft by conversion.
I don't think anyone "rents" cell phones with the expectation that they will be returned. I think car rental places used to do it when roaming was expensive and many people didn't already have a mobile phone, but generally speaking I think phones are "sold" in the sense that the physical item is never actually expected to be returned for all the practical reasons one would assume about a cell phone (inexpensive, fragile, rapid obsolescence, etc).
If there is some kind of *legal* language about cell phone rental/leasing, its probably more about a gotcha clause or some other legalism, and not because the lessor has a real intent to make that phone available again for rent.
But if it is an honest-to-goodness rental/lease arrangement where the hardware is returned and honestly re-sold or re-purposed by the lessor in some legitimate way (not thrown in a bin and kept for tax/business purposes until the bin is full) and you're selling it off, well, that probably is fraudulent.
I mean, I'm all for freedom, but running off with a phone that you signed a contract to pay off over the next two years is theft.
No, it's a breach of contract for which the carriers have manifold legal remedies, including civil court, collections and so on. Essentially you are in debt to the carrier and your contract with them is basically an agreement to repay them. You owe them money, more or less.
It's incorrect to criminalize this debt, since it basically asks the police to be the enforcers of whatever poor contracts the seller originally used.
There are cases where you could claim fraud or other misrepresentation, but if you're just buying packages at retail and the seller *hopes* their existing technical configuration is limitation enough to enforce their contract it's not really fraud or misrepresentation as the "promise" to use your service to repay their equipment subsidy is implied, not agreed.
Fascism was actually approached as a political philosophy prior to its more common association with the dictatorial regimes of Germany and Italy.
Differing from conventional capitalist democracies, and socialist dictatorships, it considered the "state" and the "people" at it's core. The people were the source of the state's power, and the state was the protector of the people.
The book I read on the topic was a long time ago, but at the time there was serious interest in a "third way" philosophy that allowed for some of the benefits of socialism AND capitalism while trying to minimize the troubles inherent in both systems, the essential tyranny of socialism's lack of respect for private property and the individual, and the inequalities and injustices of capitalism.
In such an ideal "fascist" state, it's not hard to see the government rebuking big business over many current practices as being a threat to the people.
Germany and Italy both cultivated their big business entities for financial and political support and as necessary for their military build-ups, although the early days of "National Socialism" had a fair mount of worker support, which was fairly consistent with Fascism as an ideology.
This is one of (if not the) oldest hydroelectric power stations in the U.S. It's also a pretty cool bit of architecture on the river.
I toured it about 15 years ago during a motorcycle trip and the guy said that they originally transmitted DC power and that they still did to a metal smelter downriver in Missouri as it was more efficient (no conversion losses) and the long-time customer was still setup to use it.
It sounds science fiction-ish, but it's not hard to imagine a future economy where you "go to work" on some kind of computer based simulator that feels a lot like a game but where you are actually performing real work.
I could imagine the "realism" of the actual work/gameplay -- how much it relates to the actual work being done -- might vary. For example, "recaptcha" puzzles during signup/signin to web sites has nothing to do with what you're doing but you're actually contributing "work" to some project.
I can see where you'd have a FPS game that used real data from high resolution mapping satellites and the "work" you do during gameplay is rendering this data into 3D terrain as you explore it, and unusual features you "discover" are game elements that get tagged on maps for experts to evaluate. To you, it's just a game, but you're actually doing "work" rendering data that's too big/too complex to render all at once or searching aerial photography in a way that's difficult for a human to do (think about scanning 1/4 meter satellite photos for signs of missle launchers, etc).
In other cases, the "game" may actually be more related to the work -- ie, a stock market game that uses real stock market data but fake money could be used by an investment bank as a kind of real-time monte carlo simulation.
And I can see where you could be doing real, direct work via simulation -- airline pilot or drone pilot, where the simulation is just to keep humans from doing the work in real space, but where the "game" is actually happening in real time and in real life (ie, Predator drone pilots).
I thought this was pretty old news, too. I've stashed laptops, access points and even SFF desktops in desks, cabinets and above ceiling tiles, enabling all manner of access long after I had physical access to the facility.
It was generally legitimate (ie, I was network manager) subterfuge to do troubleshooting at remote facilities, but there was one place that was a "sister company" that I was required to support but wouldn't give me any remote access. Those people got the old laptop above the ceiling tile.
It'd be more impressive if they had managed to hack an HP Jetdirect interface to *host* their remote system while still supporting printing features. From what I've seen, most modern JetDirect cards can support a web site, which is probably quite a few KB of space to start with.
As long as the functionality of the card wasn't audited, it would seem that you could probably fit a fair amount of functionality into firmware while still leaving basic LPR printing enabled.
You could probably do even more if the card could be physically hacked to support a larger amount of flash memory.
If you could reverse-engineer the JetDirectPrinter interface and replace the JetDirect card with a complete single board PC (way better CPU, more memory, etc) you could probably fool even people familiar with JetDirect cards essentially forever, especially if you could accept and fake JetDirect firmware flashes.
That's news to me as there have been several records for sniping set in the last several years, including many with our own 7.62x51 in the M14. They were well over 1000 yards.
Sniping is not what the entire combat force does. We don't field an army of snipers. A squad of men with M14s is totally outgunned by an equal-sized squad of men with AK-47s, which is one of the reasons we don't issue M14s as a general issue weapon and why it was rapidly replaced in Viet Nam.
They didn't "rush" anything to production. The rifle was already being designed as a replacement when Vietnam started. The only bureaucratic problem it had was the penny pinchers changing the powder used in the ammunition to save a few dollars, which is what caused the corrosion and function problems.
Sure we did. Major rush. M14s weren't cutting it against AKs in the jungle. Wooden stocks swelled, the gun was heavy, troops couldn't carry enough ammo. Panic. There was no good design or replacement process, it all happened in the span a few short years, and there were a ton of problems.
Powder was one of them, but so were corroding, unchromed barrels and bores (many men died in Viet Name when their own rifles blew up on them), bad magazines, soft brass which stuck in chambers, no cleaning kits or instructions. Some of this was the fault of the Pentagon, some of it was Colt profiteering.
I own an "M4 style" Ar-15 and I've always been curious about the "can't shoot through 5 layers of clothing" stories. My own experience with milsurp M193 ammo has it punching through pretty much anything I've shot it at -- multiple layers of plywood, sheet metal and steel barrels. I have a hard time relating that first hand experience to apocryphal stories of failing to penetrate very soft materials like wool or leather. I buy that with a.38 special round, but not a rifle round.
The 7.62x51 was a dead design at birth. The Germans figured out in the late 30s that fielding a long-range, high powered rifle wasn't tactically effective. Aimed fire at a 1000 yards was a dream of the mid 19th century tacticians, the reality of effective combat was massed fire from automatic weapons. This was proven conclusively in WW I and the carnage of the Somme and other battles where thousands were wiped out by machine gun fire.
Automatic fire from heavy rifle rounds (8mm Mauser, 7.62x54R, 30.06 Springfield, 7.62x51) work well in heavy machine guns, but is impractical to field for individual soldiers due to the weight of the weapon, parts and ammunition. Almost all machine guns in that caliber are crew served.
What the Germans did was cut down the 8mm Mauser round and create the 8mm Kurz ("short") and then build what we now call the assualt rifle, the Sturmgewehr. The Russians were on the same track, and aside from the commie propaganda surrounding Kalashnikov, ultimately copied this for their own medium rifle round, the 7.62x39, and created the Kalashnikov (which still required Hugo Schmeisser to show them how to mass-produce).
With the medium rifle round, individual soldiers could produce massed automatic weapons fire, carry more rounds for the same weight in a smaller, lighter weapon.
The 7.62x51 was "born" because short-sighted Americans had a generally good experience with the Garand in WWII and figured they'd improve on this. What they ended up with was a rifle nearly twice as heavy as the AK-47, almost uncontrollable on full auto and carrying 10 less rounds in the magazine. Once the US started mixing it up with AK-wielding NVA in Viet Nam, the US rushed the closest thing they could find that compared into production, the M16.
Of course, this rush to service had all the attendant problems we can expect from a bureaucracy. The troops weren't trained to care for them, Colt didn't figure out the need to chrome the bore and chamber, and the guns initially performed poorly, although most believe that these things were fixed by about 1971.
This unfortunately legacy is what causes many to cling to the 7.62x51 and the M14. It's a great rifle (with a synthetic stock) if you are sniping, but its a terrible tactical disadvantage as a primary infantry weapon.
You KNOW why she was selected. She was a woman who backed Obama over Hilary, and from a state with an active international border, with at least as much weight placed on the former as the latter.
It's really all political.
What I find so amazing about this is the Obama administration's willingness to embrace such naked totalitarian behavior without so much as a flinch, although Pistole's tone and manner are only making the problem worse. They need a kinder, gentler voice selling this nonsense, Pistole is the kind of bureaucrat everyone loves to hate -- stern and inflexible. Hopefully he's getting PAID for falling under the bus for this one.
Volvo stereos are deeply integrated into the car system. My 2007 S80's stereo display and buttons are also used for informational display (park assist, climate control) and for accessing the car menu system.
I had the dealer add the Volvo iPod connector* and it was pretty insane what had to be done to make it work (download software into main computer to authorize iPod connector on car computer bus, along with a patch for my specific VIN series). I don't think you could replace the stereo on this car at all without fucking the car to the point where it wouldn't run.
I have the Dynaudio package and while I wouldn't want another stereo from a sound perspective, I wouldn't mind a touchscreen display instead with GPS and better iPod menu navigation.
* I think the iPod integration is better with '07 and up models. While it isn't cheap, I get complete song/artist/playlist navigation on-screen. There is some brain damage (navigation is slow, browsing to an artist and then album and then playing a song "resets" browsing back to the top of the hierarchy, which makes song-surfing frustrating). But it beats the crap out of the "integration" I've seen on a late-model Mercedes CLK230.
The car stereo is deeply integrated into the car; the stereo display shows the climate control settings as well as being the interface to the car's menu system which changes features of the car (door lock behavior, etc).
The computer network in this car is also fairly complicated and interfaces with pretty much everything. I can't even begin to imagine the clusterfuck that would be involved in replacing it outright and replacing it. You'd completely lose the ability change car settings and possibly fuck the computer network to the point where the car wouldn't run at all.
Now I can see how you could add a completely seperate stereo system and maybe wire it into the existing speaker system, but I can't see the value add in this.
...to ask honest questions (even if top-level, not "do my job for me" detailed).
It is the place, however, to get pilloried by experts who exclaim if you had only used the right search terms in Google, written a small kernel patch, rolled your own Linux distribution with it, and installed it on every server and PC in the company over the holiday weekend, your problem would have been easily & trivially solved in time to come up from the basement and join mom and dad for Thanksgiving dinner.
Amazon is a great business. They do everything you can imagine with their retail infrastructure, including reselling access to about all of it to other people that want to use it (cloud infrastructure, distribution centers, payment processing, used merchandise).
I'm not sure I've had many bad experiences with Amazon products bought from amazon or anyone else (got a $1 bill inserted in a used CD when the owner realized he overcharged me by mistake!) up to and including buying huge products (Weber Summit grill, $100s off of retail).
I don't doubt that _running_ them is more eco-conscious; I'm concerned about _making_ them.
If an electric car needs, say, 10 pounds of rare earths for high-performance motors, batteries, and extra electronics above and beyond what goes into cars these days, there's an environmental impact just *making* a car like that as you need extensive mining and processing facilities to mine the rare earths and refine them, along with the lithium for batteries, and so on.
Are the rare earths needed for the motors, electronics and the batteries, along with the lithium or other metals used in the batteries a net energy cost to mine, refine and manufacture versus the savings from the reduced gasoline consumption?
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What we have is a repressive social environment for female sexuality and a female sex drive with subtle yet profound differences from the male sex drive. Sprinkle on a little fear of getting pregnant (when you're the one that actually has to carry the baby) along with perhaps some tertiary fear of STDs. And of course none of this even starts to cover the vast emotional territory associated with sexuality, "romance" (for lack of a better word) and the dynamics of an intimate relationship.
What you end up with is a weird situation where women have a high degree of internal conflict about sex (empowered? slut? love? like? pregnant? disease? good? bad?) and a tacit agreement among couples that stated "no" is seldom emphatic and often has many other meanings that change as circumstances change.
The reason he's a repeat offender and the reason they won't work very hard to catch him are the same -- it's catch and release policing.
The prisons are full with "priority" offenders (like aging hippies growing pot for personal consumption) and consequently low-level burglaries, muggings, car break-ins and other small-time property crimes are almost universally plead down to gross misdemeanors and given "time served" jail sentences and some kind of probation.
This one will probably be solved due to the publicity associated with it (an enemy will phone in a hot tip that gets him arrested), but generally speaking they won't bother tracking this guy down for what amounts to 30 days in county jail.
Burglaries only really get "solved" when they evolve into a regional pattern and the police invest resources in catching the burglars in action.
Iran with nukes is like a poker player with just enough chips to intimidate the other players, but not enough to go all-in and force other players to fold and leave the game.
For example, Iran could attack shipping in the Straits of Hormuz (with conventional weapons), knowing that any counter-attack could escalate to nuclear conflict. They know they can't win an all-out exchange, but they also know that their possession of nuclear weapons makes a conventional counter-attack much less likely.
Missing from this discussion is the scope of "profiling" -- I would not advocate stopping people on the street based on their race or religion, but that's because I'm opposed to stopping people on the street if they have not committed a crime. I'm referring most specifically to security checks at airports, where we have developed a ridiculous security regime that inefficiently wastes resource on the majority of travelers who are not participants in a war against Western society.
While "5 people" (I think it was closer to 12 people, 3 per flight, 4 flights on 9/11 -- two that downed the Twin Towers, one that went into the Pentagon, and the other that went down in Pennsylvania) may have crashed those planes, what's missing here is the question: "What is the nature of this conflict?"
This conflict is very nearly exclusively a war between Middle Eastern Islamic actors on one side and predominately white Western populations on the other. I'll grant there have been aberrations -- the odd white Westerner who has converted to Islam, like John Walker Lindh, but even in that case he joined the Taliban and was captured in Afghanistan, not attempting terrorist acts against the West in the West.
But I think those ARE aberrations, especially statistically and sociologically, and that profiling the population most likely and historically most associated with terrorist acts only makes sense. Obviously it would be no security if this is ALL we did, but I think it would be a far better use of our resources to intensively scrutinize non-white Muslims traveling on airplanes.
And it doesn't have to be torture in closed rooms -- it could be as simple as answering questions from a trained person prior to leaving airport security and heading to a boarding gate, more intensive imaging of luggage than given the 'non-threat' population.
If, and when, 50-something white women from the Midwest start bombing planes we can alter our strategy, but thus far that hasn't happened and the causes, beliefs and practices of Middle Eastern Islamists seem unlikely to find support among Whites of a Judeo-Christian background in the near future.
I think the US Government and the media have gone to great lengths to make these conflicts about abstract issues with easy good/bad guys ("terrorists") while glossing over the obvious nature of the conflict (largely, radical Arab Muslims angry at the West) and I think it has warped our view of the conflict and made us believe that there are legions of White Islamists in our own back yards.
As for white radicals accepting non-whites, from what I've seen, I'd say the majority of white groups generally aren't "supremacists", they seem to have more generally adopted a separatist philosophy. IIRC, there was even a meeting between a white power group and the Nation of Islam where they both agreed they wanted seperate, racially segregated homelands. But by and large, these groups aren't really to be taken seriously and are generally more closely associated with prison gangs and low-level criminality than serious political advocates.
Richard Reid is non-white and attempted to bomb a passenger airplane in pursuit of al-Qaeda's Islamist agenda; racial profiling may likely have uncovered him.
Of the remaining domestic terrorists individually listed, all are white but none of their terrorist actions required them to go through any kind of screening at all, rendering any debate about the utility of racial profiling moot in these cases unless you would advocate security screening for posting packages, renting trucks and buying fertilizer, or flying small aircraft.
I will note that you include "...every other member of any US right-wing militia group, such as the Hutaree" which is either political profiling or likely a case of implied racial profiling, which is unusual considering your opposition to profiling.
I will also note that none of the Hutaree have been convicted of any crimes and despite the protests of the prosecution in their cases, a Federal judge has released all of them without bail, saying the government has failed to demonstrate that they pose any threat.
Your other wide-ranging list of evil white terrorists? The IRA was involved in a political dispute over territory in Ireland and for the last 20 years has been more interested in extortion, loan sharking and drug dealing than anything remotely resembling international terrorism, and even when most active as a terrorist organization they were almost exclusively focused on a specific regional conflict, not terrorism directed generally at Western populations.
The same is true of the other "white" terrorist organizations -- ETA, FLNC, etc are exclusively in conflict over regional political autonomy, not engaged in a broader conflict with Western society nor do they generally target the public as a whole by trying to bomb passenger airliners or fly them into buildings.
Executive offices are fairly astonishing in size. Part of it is due to tabulatory gigantism -- the need to have the largest possible desk, despite the fact that many don't even "work at a desk". This latter aspect drives a lot of the large executive office syndrome; they "don't work at a desk" therefore they need the space for a living room setup, complete with a big leather couch, designer table, and a couple of chairs and a large flat screen TV & entertainment setup.
They also need a kitchenette setup (Keurig coffee machine, fridge for beer/pop, liquor, glasses, ice) and in many cases a private bathroom, because they want to be able to offer refreshments and a restroom for them and their guests.
One of the major ironies about all this space being devoted to them is that it stands empty much of the time due to their extensive travel requirements (cf. justification for Netjets/company airplane).
I sometimes wonder why they don't skip all the executive suites and instead build a small hotel on corporate campuses and hire a hotel company to manage it. The executives could be given a generic "large" office (of the type generally assigned to on-site senior working managers; large enough for a desk, conference table and four chairs, but not the big suites) and a group of suites in the hotel could be set aside for executives involved in meetings for which their "living room" setup would be required; the hotel's concierge and other staff could be used for food/beverage and other conveniences.
The side benefit would be a functional hotel that could be used for out of town employees, vendors and others needing accommodations and working on campus.
Blocking ads instead of scripts & Flash is like having your airport security block brown people instead of terrorists. It's ineffective and - now I'm getting into moral stuff - harmful.
You are getting moral and ignoring facts. How many cases of terrorism have been implemented in the U.S. or elsewhere that did not involve "brown" people? AFAIK, it has been exclusively "brown" people in the US and elsewhere.
I'd agree that as an absolute measure of security, racial profiling doesn't work, but in the case of Islamic extremism it would be extremely effective even on its own. There's some question as to whether it would contribute to racial hostility, but in my mind that's a reasonable trade-off versus treating all people like common criminals when they are not remotely part of the group staging attacks.
If you can find one without dings in the junk yard that matches your color.
Half the reason these things end up in the junk yard to begin with is they get into some kind of accident which generally screws up the bumpers. And due to exposure differences you get different paint fade characteristics which cause color matches to look like color mismatches.
But I appreciate your over-simplified fix it yourself mindset.
What we need is a highly regulated (electric & gas utility style) monopoly that runs the towers & backhaul. They will sell their minutes at a tarrif-regulated price, in bulk, to the resellers who actually provide dial tone, voice mail, customer service and whatever other bullshit data features they want to sell (VZW Apps, media, etc).
In some ways it'd be like Apple's iPhone and the app store relative to AT&T -- Apple is the reseller of those items, AT&T kind of just provides backhaul for the apps.
And if you sell the phone, knowing you contractually have to return it, it could, indeed, be actual theft by conversion.
I don't think anyone "rents" cell phones with the expectation that they will be returned. I think car rental places used to do it when roaming was expensive and many people didn't already have a mobile phone, but generally speaking I think phones are "sold" in the sense that the physical item is never actually expected to be returned for all the practical reasons one would assume about a cell phone (inexpensive, fragile, rapid obsolescence, etc).
If there is some kind of *legal* language about cell phone rental/leasing, its probably more about a gotcha clause or some other legalism, and not because the lessor has a real intent to make that phone available again for rent.
But if it is an honest-to-goodness rental/lease arrangement where the hardware is returned and honestly re-sold or re-purposed by the lessor in some legitimate way (not thrown in a bin and kept for tax/business purposes until the bin is full) and you're selling it off, well, that probably is fraudulent.
I mean, I'm all for freedom, but running off with a phone that you signed a contract to pay off over the next two years is theft.
No, it's a breach of contract for which the carriers have manifold legal remedies, including civil court, collections and so on. Essentially you are in debt to the carrier and your contract with them is basically an agreement to repay them. You owe them money, more or less.
It's incorrect to criminalize this debt, since it basically asks the police to be the enforcers of whatever poor contracts the seller originally used.
There are cases where you could claim fraud or other misrepresentation, but if you're just buying packages at retail and the seller *hopes* their existing technical configuration is limitation enough to enforce their contract it's not really fraud or misrepresentation as the "promise" to use your service to repay their equipment subsidy is implied, not agreed.
Fascism was actually approached as a political philosophy prior to its more common association with the dictatorial regimes of Germany and Italy.
Differing from conventional capitalist democracies, and socialist dictatorships, it considered the "state" and the "people" at it's core. The people were the source of the state's power, and the state was the protector of the people.
The book I read on the topic was a long time ago, but at the time there was serious interest in a "third way" philosophy that allowed for some of the benefits of socialism AND capitalism while trying to minimize the troubles inherent in both systems, the essential tyranny of socialism's lack of respect for private property and the individual, and the inequalities and injustices of capitalism.
In such an ideal "fascist" state, it's not hard to see the government rebuking big business over many current practices as being a threat to the people.
Germany and Italy both cultivated their big business entities for financial and political support and as necessary for their military build-ups, although the early days of "National Socialism" had a fair mount of worker support, which was fairly consistent with Fascism as an ideology.
I, for one, welcome are new arsenic-based overlords.
This is one of (if not the) oldest hydroelectric power stations in the U.S. It's also a pretty cool bit of architecture on the river.
I toured it about 15 years ago during a motorcycle trip and the guy said that they originally transmitted DC power and that they still did to a metal smelter downriver in Missouri as it was more efficient (no conversion losses) and the long-time customer was still setup to use it.
It sounds science fiction-ish, but it's not hard to imagine a future economy where you "go to work" on some kind of computer based simulator that feels a lot like a game but where you are actually performing real work.
I could imagine the "realism" of the actual work/gameplay -- how much it relates to the actual work being done -- might vary. For example, "recaptcha" puzzles during signup/signin to web sites has nothing to do with what you're doing but you're actually contributing "work" to some project.
I can see where you'd have a FPS game that used real data from high resolution mapping satellites and the "work" you do during gameplay is rendering this data into 3D terrain as you explore it, and unusual features you "discover" are game elements that get tagged on maps for experts to evaluate. To you, it's just a game, but you're actually doing "work" rendering data that's too big/too complex to render all at once or searching aerial photography in a way that's difficult for a human to do (think about scanning 1/4 meter satellite photos for signs of missle launchers, etc).
In other cases, the "game" may actually be more related to the work -- ie, a stock market game that uses real stock market data but fake money could be used by an investment bank as a kind of real-time monte carlo simulation.
And I can see where you could be doing real, direct work via simulation -- airline pilot or drone pilot, where the simulation is just to keep humans from doing the work in real space, but where the "game" is actually happening in real time and in real life (ie, Predator drone pilots).
I thought this was pretty old news, too. I've stashed laptops, access points and even SFF desktops in desks, cabinets and above ceiling tiles, enabling all manner of access long after I had physical access to the facility.
It was generally legitimate (ie, I was network manager) subterfuge to do troubleshooting at remote facilities, but there was one place that was a "sister company" that I was required to support but wouldn't give me any remote access. Those people got the old laptop above the ceiling tile.
It'd be more impressive if they had managed to hack an HP Jetdirect interface to *host* their remote system while still supporting printing features. From what I've seen, most modern JetDirect cards can support a web site, which is probably quite a few KB of space to start with.
As long as the functionality of the card wasn't audited, it would seem that you could probably fit a fair amount of functionality into firmware while still leaving basic LPR printing enabled.
You could probably do even more if the card could be physically hacked to support a larger amount of flash memory.
If you could reverse-engineer the JetDirectPrinter interface and replace the JetDirect card with a complete single board PC (way better CPU, more memory, etc) you could probably fool even people familiar with JetDirect cards essentially forever, especially if you could accept and fake JetDirect firmware flashes.
That's news to me as there have been several records for sniping set in the last several years, including many with our own 7.62x51 in the M14. They were well over 1000 yards.
Sniping is not what the entire combat force does. We don't field an army of snipers. A squad of men with M14s is totally outgunned by an equal-sized squad of men with AK-47s, which is one of the reasons we don't issue M14s as a general issue weapon and why it was rapidly replaced in Viet Nam.
They didn't "rush" anything to production. The rifle was already being designed as a replacement when Vietnam started. The only bureaucratic problem it had was the penny pinchers changing the powder used in the ammunition to save a few dollars, which is what caused the corrosion and function problems.
Sure we did. Major rush. M14s weren't cutting it against AKs in the jungle. Wooden stocks swelled, the gun was heavy, troops couldn't carry enough ammo. Panic. There was no good design or replacement process, it all happened in the span a few short years, and there were a ton of problems.
Powder was one of them, but so were corroding, unchromed barrels and bores (many men died in Viet Name when their own rifles blew up on them), bad magazines, soft brass which stuck in chambers, no cleaning kits or instructions. Some of this was the fault of the Pentagon, some of it was Colt profiteering.
I own an "M4 style" Ar-15 and I've always been curious about the "can't shoot through 5 layers of clothing" stories. My own experience with milsurp M193 ammo has it punching through pretty much anything I've shot it at -- multiple layers of plywood, sheet metal and steel barrels. I have a hard time relating that first hand experience to apocryphal stories of failing to penetrate very soft materials like wool or leather. I buy that with a .38 special round, but not a rifle round.
The 7.62x51 was a dead design at birth. The Germans figured out in the late 30s that fielding a long-range, high powered rifle wasn't tactically effective. Aimed fire at a 1000 yards was a dream of the mid 19th century tacticians, the reality of effective combat was massed fire from automatic weapons. This was proven conclusively in WW I and the carnage of the Somme and other battles where thousands were wiped out by machine gun fire.
Automatic fire from heavy rifle rounds (8mm Mauser, 7.62x54R, 30.06 Springfield, 7.62x51) work well in heavy machine guns, but is impractical to field for individual soldiers due to the weight of the weapon, parts and ammunition. Almost all machine guns in that caliber are crew served.
What the Germans did was cut down the 8mm Mauser round and create the 8mm Kurz ("short") and then build what we now call the assualt rifle, the Sturmgewehr. The Russians were on the same track, and aside from the commie propaganda surrounding Kalashnikov, ultimately copied this for their own medium rifle round, the 7.62x39, and created the Kalashnikov (which still required Hugo Schmeisser to show them how to mass-produce).
With the medium rifle round, individual soldiers could produce massed automatic weapons fire, carry more rounds for the same weight in a smaller, lighter weapon.
The 7.62x51 was "born" because short-sighted Americans had a generally good experience with the Garand in WWII and figured they'd improve on this. What they ended up with was a rifle nearly twice as heavy as the AK-47, almost uncontrollable on full auto and carrying 10 less rounds in the magazine. Once the US started mixing it up with AK-wielding NVA in Viet Nam, the US rushed the closest thing they could find that compared into production, the M16.
Of course, this rush to service had all the attendant problems we can expect from a bureaucracy. The troops weren't trained to care for them, Colt didn't figure out the need to chrome the bore and chamber, and the guns initially performed poorly, although most believe that these things were fixed by about 1971.
This unfortunately legacy is what causes many to cling to the 7.62x51 and the M14. It's a great rifle (with a synthetic stock) if you are sniping, but its a terrible tactical disadvantage as a primary infantry weapon.
You KNOW why she was selected. She was a woman who backed Obama over Hilary, and from a state with an active international border, with at least as much weight placed on the former as the latter.
It's really all political.
What I find so amazing about this is the Obama administration's willingness to embrace such naked totalitarian behavior without so much as a flinch, although Pistole's tone and manner are only making the problem worse. They need a kinder, gentler voice selling this nonsense, Pistole is the kind of bureaucrat everyone loves to hate -- stern and inflexible. Hopefully he's getting PAID for falling under the bus for this one.
Volvo stereos are deeply integrated into the car system. My 2007 S80's stereo display and buttons are also used for informational display (park assist, climate control) and for accessing the car menu system.
I had the dealer add the Volvo iPod connector* and it was pretty insane what had to be done to make it work (download software into main computer to authorize iPod connector on car computer bus, along with a patch for my specific VIN series). I don't think you could replace the stereo on this car at all without fucking the car to the point where it wouldn't run.
I have the Dynaudio package and while I wouldn't want another stereo from a sound perspective, I wouldn't mind a touchscreen display instead with GPS and better iPod menu navigation.
* I think the iPod integration is better with '07 and up models. While it isn't cheap, I get complete song/artist/playlist navigation on-screen. There is some brain damage (navigation is slow, browsing to an artist and then album and then playing a song "resets" browsing back to the top of the hierarchy, which makes song-surfing frustrating). But it beats the crap out of the "integration" I've seen on a late-model Mercedes CLK230.
The car stereo is deeply integrated into the car; the stereo display shows the climate control settings as well as being the interface to the car's menu system which changes features of the car (door lock behavior, etc).
The computer network in this car is also fairly complicated and interfaces with pretty much everything. I can't even begin to imagine the clusterfuck that would be involved in replacing it outright and replacing it. You'd completely lose the ability change car settings and possibly fuck the computer network to the point where the car wouldn't run at all.
Now I can see how you could add a completely seperate stereo system and maybe wire it into the existing speaker system, but I can't see the value add in this.
...to ask honest questions (even if top-level, not "do my job for me" detailed).
It is the place, however, to get pilloried by experts who exclaim if you had only used the right search terms in Google, written a small kernel patch, rolled your own Linux distribution with it, and installed it on every server and PC in the company over the holiday weekend, your problem would have been easily & trivially solved in time to come up from the basement and join mom and dad for Thanksgiving dinner.
Amazon is a great business. They do everything you can imagine with their retail infrastructure, including reselling access to about all of it to other people that want to use it (cloud infrastructure, distribution centers, payment processing, used merchandise).
I'm not sure I've had many bad experiences with Amazon products bought from amazon or anyone else (got a $1 bill inserted in a used CD when the owner realized he overcharged me by mistake!) up to and including buying huge products (Weber Summit grill, $100s off of retail).
I don't doubt that _running_ them is more eco-conscious; I'm concerned about _making_ them.
If an electric car needs, say, 10 pounds of rare earths for high-performance motors, batteries, and extra electronics above and beyond what goes into cars these days, there's an environmental impact just *making* a car like that as you need extensive mining and processing facilities to mine the rare earths and refine them, along with the lithium for batteries, and so on.
And the environmental costs?
Are the rare earths needed for the motors, electronics and the batteries, along with the lithium or other metals used in the batteries a net energy cost to mine, refine and manufacture versus the savings from the reduced gasoline consumption?