I was actually a reluctant but fairly consistent condom user but I kept dating these women who generally wanted me to stop using a condom and "just pull out". It seems strange but I would say about 75% of the time it was the *women* who instigated the reckless birth control. Of course since it felt like 10000 times better, I went along with it.
One woman, who until she got on the pill a couple months after we started dating, was a fairly strong believer in the rhythm method. According to her explanation, which generally lines up with what I've read, it's harder than you think to get pregnant -- you basically have about a 48-72 hour window per month, otherwise it isn't going to happen. Of course it's not perfect, but it must account for a lot of the otherwise dumb luck myself and others have had.
While we're bitching, how about a network "profiles" place where we can switch our network settings between several different variations without having to just edit the live settings? Even if its just TCP/IP addressing info.
Right now that's actually the only thing keeping me away from the netbooks I've seen, until they have a better screen than my eight year-old Dell's 12" 1024x768 display, I'll stick with 'old high-end' rather than 'new low-end'.
That's like saying you'd stay away from an economy car because it doesn't have a 600hp engine. There's a reason netbooks are cheap -- they use lower end components. A netbook with a modern high resolution display wouldn't exactly be $299, either.
The election is over. You can't interfere in it after its over.
And since when has the US had a neutral opinion of the Iranian government? It hardly seems surprising that the State Department would do/say/support something -- like asking Twitter to delay maintenance -- that would seem to be disruptive of the existing government.
I had dinner with a guy who had his company's merger (in an obscure concrete-related industry) with a larger entity get reviewed by the FTC and turned down (all during Bush Jr's second term). He was understandably annoyed with the FTC, but his description of the FTC's operation was pretty stunning. Apparently they're pretty autonomous and aren't really accountable at all. He even had the backing of a household name Republican Senator with Bush connections and didn't get ANY traction.
My guess is that the FTC doesn't really give a shit about consumers and has their own agenda. There's probably legitimate reason to provide them insulation from political pressure, but probably not reason enough to prevent accountability.
This is true pretty much anywhere you have a section of property with a "rural" feel that really isn't rural. It's almost like a theme neighborhood whose uniqueness is its own value.
There's been a bit of conflict over rebuilding a road in Eden Prairie, MN that the neighbors love for its rural feel but that the city bureaucrats insist needs to be torn up and rebuilt per "modern" building standards (gutters, drainage, signage, curbing, etc). The suburb is pretty much totally built out and full of shopping centers and the usual ugliness of suburbia, so its not like some country town "resisting" urbanization.
I'm kind of torn. On one hand, I hate the idea of project-oriented city bureaucrats who feel the urge to standardize every last square inch with unnecessary building projects. On the other hand, I hate "we're special" local interest groups that think their little stretch is immune from the same rules everyone else has to follow (which often amounts to "we don't want the taxes" and "it makes my property more valuable").
It's hard to see where AT&T has any bargaining chips at all, since Apple has always had the ability to pull the pin on the exclusivity grenade and make the iPhone available to other carriers. All AT&T has to do is get a little too cute with Apple directly or with their rate structure for the iPhone users and Apple can open the floodgates to carrier transitions.
I was kind of thinking along the same lines. One of the problems with computers is that you CAN save every variation, every single edit of every file, everything, and it just seems to flow into a recursive save everything mindset that never ends and never saves enough.
Has anyone bothered saving the paper TTY output from the compiling (or worse -- line editing!) of these original UNIX items? What about that?
Ned Beatty taught us that it might be worthwhile for everyone in your party to carry a revolver and not just have one guy who can shoot a bow and arrow.
Don't get blinded by the habits of your life to the point where you think your job and the lifestyle it supports is worth more than your life.
If the media is to be believed at all*, the lifestyle which my job supports involves a reasonable mortgage on a reasonable house for a family of 3. I'm kind of hung up on a roof over my head, running water and heat in the winter.
* I sometimes wonder if "the media" is so influenced by their own life circumstances -- ie, the crumbling of network news, and the disintegration of the print media universe -- that the horrors of the current recession get way overplayed. While I believe it's generally true that the financial sector has been hit hard and that the housing market sucks, I had no problem refinancing my mortgage to a low 4.5% (purely to lower my payment) and a couple of houses on my block have sold within six months of being listed, and I've never been busier at my job, either (although my wife's business sucks, and its tied to housing).
It's not that things aren't economically worse than they have been, but is the extent being overplayed by the media because their most palpable universe sucks so bad?
There may be some supply manipulation going on. Either they expect a greater demand from "qualified" users holding out for this new phone than Apple can supply, or they are trying to limit the number of used 3G phones dumped into the marketplace that might tempt people looking at the cheap 8GB 3G phone otherwise.
I switched from Verizon to AT&T 3 weeks ago (my Motorola Q was dying, Verizon's phones suck) and got a 16GB iPhone.
My wife wanted a non-work-tied phone to develop some freelance business, and I also got her a cell number but no contract for her (sim card stuck in some used RAZR for the time being), with the idea that since "her" line had no contract associated with it, I could get a new 3GS iPhone and tie the contract to her number, and she could take my 16GB iPhone and I could take the 3GS iPhone.
Since she has no contract associated with her number and could easily port it over to another carrier, I suspect we will be able to get the pricing, as well as perhaps my relatively new AT&T status and that I want to add an additional iPhone to the account.
That's a great idea if we can rewind the calendar to 1790 and start over. The big problem is that re-thinking how we plan cities is that by and large our cities are already built and already have massive infrastructure investments already built and in use, with signficant economies built around the infrastructure arrangement.
What we need to do is think about how we can *adapt* our cities & infrastructure in incremental ways that increase energy efficiency, decrease congestion and provide better-service incentives to motivate people to use them.
Incrementalism is important because we can't afford to change overnight and we need to give time to both people and organizations to get in sync with the program.
It's also critical that the systems put in place provide *better* service than existing methods. The religious converts to environmentalism will put up with worse systems for their philosophical/moral value, but most other people won't, which often leads to either failure for projects or punitive changes that create political backlash.
Is Cisco actually designing the motherboards, or is it like many HP servers were, just badged boards from ServerWorks or the like?
I would guess whatever makes it special has nothing to do with system specs but has everything to do with software loaded either into the hardware or onto the hosts that drives networking.
Why do we keep having studies like this? It's like having more studies to prove that gravity will cause a rock to drop on the ground; it's pretty well understood without having to have yet another study remind us that given even the slightest chance to lie, cheat or steal, corporations will willingly and vigorously lie, cheat and steal.
While I'm not "old" I am, at 42, at the point where I just tune out anything a corporation tells me. It's all bullshit. All of it. And I often ask myself why I don't make every attempt to rip them off as often and as completely as I can -- just fuck off being honest, all you get is ripped off anyway. There is no "fair" or "middle ground", it's just "how badly do you want to get lied to/cheated/ripped off?"
In spite of this and in spite of my equally strong cynicism that government can "fix" this, why don't we treat these corporate fucks properly?
For so many of these frauds, jail just isn't good enough, or it doesn't provide the right life lesson. These people need to know just exactly what the shit end of the stick feels like. Here's a suitable punishment for corporate malfeasance:
1) Corporate thief *and* immediate family, including wives divorced after the initiation of fraud, stripped of ALL personal possessions, property, real estate and financial assets. YOU MAY NOT EVER PROFIT FROM YOUR CRIME NOR ENRICH YOUR FAMILY. YOU HAVE LOST EVERYTHING. FOREVER.
2) Forced to live a residence in a neighborhood with at least 50% of the population at or below the poverty line. POVERTY SUCKS.
3) All family members required to work at a job which pays no more than 2x the poverty wage for whatever size family they consist. Any money earned over this amount is forfeited. YOU WILL NEVER GET AHEAD OR EVEN CATCH UP.
4) No financial or material support of any kind from the outside, including support in-kind (free rent, forgiven debt, etc). AND NOBODY WILL HELP.
"There are very few things that are on the banned list in our household."
Do you suppose that cosmetic surgery is one of them?
While never pretty in any conventional sense, when she was younger she was kind of attractive in a bloodless, aristocratic sense. But that picture makes her start to look like a haggard old crone who could definitely use a tune up.
And the whole concept of "banning" iPhones and iPods in the Gates' home is kind of counter-productive. If the Gates clan actually was seen in public using iPhones it might be a GREAT way to motivate/humiliate Microsofties to abandon the corporate/marketing sludge and get something exciting out.
I couldn't agree more. I still run FreeBSD for CLI servers (Samba, Apache, BIND, Postfix, etc) but GUI support for UNIX takes the UNIX model of one-app-for-one-purpose past the breaking point. There's just too many components and too much 1970s configuration relative to Windows or MacOS.
Why can't the windowing manager and the display driver be merged together instead of seperate components? I guess many like it that way, but IMHO, it's just too much of a hack.
Just what exactly are you going to do with a plastic collapsible baton? Pretend to hurt someone?
I have a metal one that seems like it would benefit from another half pound or so of mass, I can't imagine how ineffective a plastic one would be unless the goal was just to make an attacker angry enough to shove the baton up your ass.
The problem with escorts-as-paid-companions is that if you *can* afford to shell out whatever these girls get for an evening on the town (4 hours?) -- say $1000 -- you want high class. Someone with at least a college education (a real one, not some BS community college degree in dental assisting), who can dress and carry herself in high class social situations without looking like a, well, a whore.
The pool of talent for this has to be vanishingly small (although perhaps larger in a down economy...), which means that the price would be even higher (I've seen so-called ads for women of this caliber who will also fuck -- $10k for a weekend anyone?) and frankly I don't see the demand all that high. If I wanted small talk and no sex, I'd stay home with my wife.
Even though I've never paid for it and probably never will, I don't have a problem with paid sex. There is something inherently pathetic about, but only if you're looking for anything other than a thrill out of it.
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It kind of mirrored my experiences.
I was actually a reluctant but fairly consistent condom user but I kept dating these women who generally wanted me to stop using a condom and "just pull out". It seems strange but I would say about 75% of the time it was the *women* who instigated the reckless birth control. Of course since it felt like 10000 times better, I went along with it.
One woman, who until she got on the pill a couple months after we started dating, was a fairly strong believer in the rhythm method. According to her explanation, which generally lines up with what I've read, it's harder than you think to get pregnant -- you basically have about a 48-72 hour window per month, otherwise it isn't going to happen. Of course it's not perfect, but it must account for a lot of the otherwise dumb luck myself and others have had.
While we're bitching, how about a network "profiles" place where we can switch our network settings between several different variations without having to just edit the live settings? Even if its just TCP/IP addressing info.
You might want to check my bank balance and a pic of my wife before you make that decision.
Maybe my bank access info?
Keys to my house?
Maybe a beaver shot of my wife?
Right now that's actually the only thing keeping me away from the netbooks I've seen, until they have a better screen than my eight year-old Dell's 12" 1024x768 display, I'll stick with 'old high-end' rather than 'new low-end'.
That's like saying you'd stay away from an economy car because it doesn't have a 600hp engine. There's a reason netbooks are cheap -- they use lower end components. A netbook with a modern high resolution display wouldn't exactly be $299, either.
The election is over. You can't interfere in it after its over.
And since when has the US had a neutral opinion of the Iranian government? It hardly seems surprising that the State Department would do/say/support something -- like asking Twitter to delay maintenance -- that would seem to be disruptive of the existing government.
"He was a man who knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing."
I had dinner with a guy who had his company's merger (in an obscure concrete-related industry) with a larger entity get reviewed by the FTC and turned down (all during Bush Jr's second term). He was understandably annoyed with the FTC, but his description of the FTC's operation was pretty stunning. Apparently they're pretty autonomous and aren't really accountable at all. He even had the backing of a household name Republican Senator with Bush connections and didn't get ANY traction.
My guess is that the FTC doesn't really give a shit about consumers and has their own agenda. There's probably legitimate reason to provide them insulation from political pressure, but probably not reason enough to prevent accountability.
This is true pretty much anywhere you have a section of property with a "rural" feel that really isn't rural. It's almost like a theme neighborhood whose uniqueness is its own value.
There's been a bit of conflict over rebuilding a road in Eden Prairie, MN that the neighbors love for its rural feel but that the city bureaucrats insist needs to be torn up and rebuilt per "modern" building standards (gutters, drainage, signage, curbing, etc). The suburb is pretty much totally built out and full of shopping centers and the usual ugliness of suburbia, so its not like some country town "resisting" urbanization.
I'm kind of torn. On one hand, I hate the idea of project-oriented city bureaucrats who feel the urge to standardize every last square inch with unnecessary building projects. On the other hand, I hate "we're special" local interest groups that think their little stretch is immune from the same rules everyone else has to follow (which often amounts to "we don't want the taxes" and "it makes my property more valuable").
It's hard to see where AT&T has any bargaining chips at all, since Apple has always had the ability to pull the pin on the exclusivity grenade and make the iPhone available to other carriers. All AT&T has to do is get a little too cute with Apple directly or with their rate structure for the iPhone users and Apple can open the floodgates to carrier transitions.
I was kind of thinking along the same lines. One of the problems with computers is that you CAN save every variation, every single edit of every file, everything, and it just seems to flow into a recursive save everything mindset that never ends and never saves enough.
Has anyone bothered saving the paper TTY output from the compiling (or worse -- line editing!) of these original UNIX items? What about that?
Ugh.
Ned Beatty taught us that it might be worthwhile for everyone in your party to carry a revolver and not just have one guy who can shoot a bow and arrow.
I'm sorry, but you misspelled "the money they're fleecing from the taxpayers."
Don't get blinded by the habits of your life to the point where you think your job and the lifestyle it supports is worth more than your life.
If the media is to be believed at all*, the lifestyle which my job supports involves a reasonable mortgage on a reasonable house for a family of 3. I'm kind of hung up on a roof over my head, running water and heat in the winter.
* I sometimes wonder if "the media" is so influenced by their own life circumstances -- ie, the crumbling of network news, and the disintegration of the print media universe -- that the horrors of the current recession get way overplayed. While I believe it's generally true that the financial sector has been hit hard and that the housing market sucks, I had no problem refinancing my mortgage to a low 4.5% (purely to lower my payment) and a couple of houses on my block have sold within six months of being listed, and I've never been busier at my job, either (although my wife's business sucks, and its tied to housing).
It's not that things aren't economically worse than they have been, but is the extent being overplayed by the media because their most palpable universe sucks so bad?
There may be some supply manipulation going on. Either they expect a greater demand from "qualified" users holding out for this new phone than Apple can supply, or they are trying to limit the number of used 3G phones dumped into the marketplace that might tempt people looking at the cheap 8GB 3G phone otherwise.
I'm wondering how my situation will work.
I switched from Verizon to AT&T 3 weeks ago (my Motorola Q was dying, Verizon's phones suck) and got a 16GB iPhone.
My wife wanted a non-work-tied phone to develop some freelance business, and I also got her a cell number but no contract for her (sim card stuck in some used RAZR for the time being), with the idea that since "her" line had no contract associated with it, I could get a new 3GS iPhone and tie the contract to her number, and she could take my 16GB iPhone and I could take the 3GS iPhone.
Since she has no contract associated with her number and could easily port it over to another carrier, I suspect we will be able to get the pricing, as well as perhaps my relatively new AT&T status and that I want to add an additional iPhone to the account.
Maybe we need to rethink the way we plan cities.
That's a great idea if we can rewind the calendar to 1790 and start over. The big problem is that re-thinking how we plan cities is that by and large our cities are already built and already have massive infrastructure investments already built and in use, with signficant economies built around the infrastructure arrangement.
What we need to do is think about how we can *adapt* our cities & infrastructure in incremental ways that increase energy efficiency, decrease congestion and provide better-service incentives to motivate people to use them.
Incrementalism is important because we can't afford to change overnight and we need to give time to both people and organizations to get in sync with the program.
It's also critical that the systems put in place provide *better* service than existing methods. The religious converts to environmentalism will put up with worse systems for their philosophical/moral value, but most other people won't, which often leads to either failure for projects or punitive changes that create political backlash.
Is Cisco actually designing the motherboards, or is it like many HP servers were, just badged boards from ServerWorks or the like?
I would guess whatever makes it special has nothing to do with system specs but has everything to do with software loaded either into the hardware or onto the hosts that drives networking.
Why do we keep having studies like this? It's like having more studies to prove that gravity will cause a rock to drop on the ground; it's pretty well understood without having to have yet another study remind us that given even the slightest chance to lie, cheat or steal, corporations will willingly and vigorously lie, cheat and steal.
While I'm not "old" I am, at 42, at the point where I just tune out anything a corporation tells me. It's all bullshit. All of it. And I often ask myself why I don't make every attempt to rip them off as often and as completely as I can -- just fuck off being honest, all you get is ripped off anyway. There is no "fair" or "middle ground", it's just "how badly do you want to get lied to/cheated/ripped off?"
In spite of this and in spite of my equally strong cynicism that government can "fix" this, why don't we treat these corporate fucks properly?
For so many of these frauds, jail just isn't good enough, or it doesn't provide the right life lesson. These people need to know just exactly what the shit end of the stick feels like. Here's a suitable punishment for corporate malfeasance:
1) Corporate thief *and* immediate family, including wives divorced after the initiation of fraud, stripped of ALL personal possessions, property, real estate and financial assets. YOU MAY NOT EVER PROFIT FROM YOUR CRIME NOR ENRICH YOUR FAMILY. YOU HAVE LOST EVERYTHING. FOREVER.
2) Forced to live a residence in a neighborhood with at least 50% of the population at or below the poverty line. POVERTY SUCKS.
3) All family members required to work at a job which pays no more than 2x the poverty wage for whatever size family they consist. Any money earned over this amount is forfeited. YOU WILL NEVER GET AHEAD OR EVEN CATCH UP.
4) No financial or material support of any kind from the outside, including support in-kind (free rent, forgiven debt, etc). AND NOBODY WILL HELP.
"There are very few things that are on the banned list in our household."
Do you suppose that cosmetic surgery is one of them?
While never pretty in any conventional sense, when she was younger she was kind of attractive in a bloodless, aristocratic sense. But that picture makes her start to look like a haggard old crone who could definitely use a tune up.
And the whole concept of "banning" iPhones and iPods in the Gates' home is kind of counter-productive. If the Gates clan actually was seen in public using iPhones it might be a GREAT way to motivate/humiliate Microsofties to abandon the corporate/marketing sludge and get something exciting out.
You just tipped your hand. "Government agency".
I couldn't agree more. I still run FreeBSD for CLI servers (Samba, Apache, BIND, Postfix, etc) but GUI support for UNIX takes the UNIX model of one-app-for-one-purpose past the breaking point. There's just too many components and too much 1970s configuration relative to Windows or MacOS.
Why can't the windowing manager and the display driver be merged together instead of seperate components? I guess many like it that way, but IMHO, it's just too much of a hack.
I figure the real benefit from research isn't the discoveries, its the economic benefit of decent, well-paying jobs in a pleasant park-like campus.
Just what exactly are you going to do with a plastic collapsible baton? Pretend to hurt someone?
I have a metal one that seems like it would benefit from another half pound or so of mass, I can't imagine how ineffective a plastic one would be unless the goal was just to make an attacker angry enough to shove the baton up your ass.
Any actual data to back that up?
The problem with escorts-as-paid-companions is that if you *can* afford to shell out whatever these girls get for an evening on the town (4 hours?) -- say $1000 -- you want high class. Someone with at least a college education (a real one, not some BS community college degree in dental assisting), who can dress and carry herself in high class social situations without looking like a, well, a whore.
The pool of talent for this has to be vanishingly small (although perhaps larger in a down economy...), which means that the price would be even higher (I've seen so-called ads for women of this caliber who will also fuck -- $10k for a weekend anyone?) and frankly I don't see the demand all that high. If I wanted small talk and no sex, I'd stay home with my wife.
Even though I've never paid for it and probably never will, I don't have a problem with paid sex. There is something inherently pathetic about, but only if you're looking for anything other than a thrill out of it.