Re:This is actually a welcome initiative...
on
Big Mother Is Watching
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I agree with your problem-description, though not with the solution.
True. Obesity is a serious health-problem. Quite likely the combination of overweigth and too little physical exersize is the number one health-problem facing America today (and the next generation even more).
Thing is, I do not think you can teach someone to eat healthy and exersize enough by behaving like a control-freak. Kids can and will rebel against such, and even if you *do* manage to force your 12-year old to do as you demand, you'll likely only end up who hates eating healthy and takes every chance he/she gets to eat hamburgers.
People don't generally fall in love with stuff they are literally force-fed.
Want your kid to like healthy food ?
Eat varied healthy foods yourself at home.
Cook. Let your child help cooking. The finished stuff you buy is generally less healthy than what you can easily make yourself. It's perfectly possible to make a very tasty lasagne with half the fat and double the veggies from the stuff you get in the shop.
Stay in the real world. Nobody is supposed to live on pure springwater, carrots and spinach.
Don't force-feed your kid veggies or whatever. Serve varied good foods and let the kid discover for himself that a lot of this stuff is excellent.
Want your kid to enjoy using his/her body ?
Play soccer with him/her.
Bring a frisbee to the beach.
Go swimming.
Take her/him fishing.
Go rock-climbing.
Exersizing for the sake of exersizing tends to be mindnumbingly boring. I used to be a leader in the scouts however, and I've lost count of the kids that would claim they hate sports and sports are boring, only to have the day of their life participating in, for example;
Building a bridge over a river from 2 ropes. Cross repeatedly.
White-water rafting.
Rappelling
Catching and returning sheep to where they belong.
Building and operating a pedal-driven dishwashing-machine from parts of an old one, plus broken biycles etc
Running around like a madman literally *all* fucking day dressed up as a knigth, shooting authenthic middle-age bows, practicing sword-figthing, hauling rocks with the best of them for firing the ballista.
digging for hours in a snow-drift to make a snow-cave suitable for sleeping overnigth.
Kite-surfing on ski. Windsurfing in summer. Snorkeling.
I could literally add 100s of items to this list with no problem whatsoever. No, not all kids will enjoy all activities. So what ? But you'll have a *really* hard time finding a kid that enjoys none of this.
And you'll have acomplished *much* more than by forcing the kid to do some kind of exersize for the sake of exersize.
No kid will cherish spending another hour at the treadmill for the sake of it. (yeah yeah, I know I'm exxagerating, most parents aren't *that* bad) Most kids I know will *love* the idea of trying to conquer the surf at the beach using a inflatable rubber-boat, and see if daddy flips over more than 11 times this year. (his previous record)
You're missing that the typical comercial flash-module is built to withstand 1 million writes or more.
A 1GB flash-module bein written to *constantly* (24 hours a day, 365 days a year) with a sustained speed of 5MB/s would thus wear out sometime after 6.5 *YEARS* of continous operation.
I'm guessing you can see why this problem is purely hypothethical for 99.99% of all laptops out there. You don't write to disc *constantly* and even if you did, you don't typically use the laptop 24/365, and even if you did, having a laptop-drive fail after 6-7 years is normally not a showstopper.
If, more realistically, the laptop is used 8 hours/day 250 days/years, and writes to disc 10% of the time when turned on, then the 1 million writes to flash will get reached after aproximately 30 years.
Even these numbers are high -- my laptop is heavily used as a developer workstation, and it certainly does not write to disc 10% of the time it is turned on.
I was turning the knife in the wound deliberately. I agree --- a bastardly think to do. My apologies.
Reality is that Norway is fucking huge and has less than 5 million people. Which means infrastructure is expensive as hell.
The 100Mbit/s symmetric link is real, it's the standard delivered by BKK. (not that expensive either, $50/month or something) But there's a catch, that speed ain't available in all of Norway, but only in the bigger cities. (big by norwegian standard, say 50K people upwards)
1-3 Mbps ADSL is still the norm for most people here. True, a large fraction of the population has access to 10Mb+ links, but lots of people see no point in paying for those when 1Mbps will do for everything they need.
If you're smuggling illegal data, losing the data ain't even half as bad as having the data discovered. Losing them just means that that single smuggling-attempt was in vain, you'll have to try again. It's unlikely to be your only copy of the data anyway.
Secondly, you could just store the TrueCrypt volume on a DVD-R or similar. That way there's no way of overwriting the "unused" space in the filesystem.
Seriously, there's no way of stopping this other than making it illegal to carry *any* data into a country. Because even if you disallow only encrypted data (even where the encryption-key is public) then there's nothing stopping people from hiding the data steganographically anyways. A TrueCrypt volume stored in the LSB of a wav-file is indistinguishable from random noise for anyone who doesn't have the key.
I simply cannot fathom a purpose for 8 cores for any "desktop" application that isn't in the "workstation" class.
20 years ago, when I first started using computers my computer was a C64. Compared to my current (not even remotely high-end) computer is looks like this:
cpu frequency: 4Mhz vs 2Ghz, improvement 500x
Data-bus: 8 bit vs 64 bit, improvement 8x
Main memory: 64KB vs 2GB, improvement 32000x
Storage: 500GB vs 256KB(tape), improvement 64000x
Communication: 1200bps acoustic-coppler vs 16Mbps cable, improvement ca 12000x
It depends on how you slice it, but it's atleast not a stretch to claim my current computer has 5000 times the power of the C64. In 20 years.
Question is, if I'd asked you back then, would you have been able to "fathom" what to do with a computer *5000* times as powerful as the current norm ?
Is there a reason to think that the next 20 years will be much different ? Are you able to fathom what to do with a desktop-computer 1000 times as powerful as your current one ? If not, does that mean it won't happen ?
If you're storing a million songs online, then frankly, $10.000/month is a very small cost. If you sell these songs for an average of $0.69 then you need to, on the average, sell one copy of a song every 5 years or so to break even.
It's true, songs that sell less than 1 copy every 5 years don't turn a profit, but that's still very different from a record store. Try stacking a record-store with all songs that sell atleast 1 copy ever 5 years....
Besides, sysadmin-costs and so on do not go scale O(n) with the number of records stored. In other words, if you are already storing 100.000 songs that sell well, then adding a million songs that sell less will *NOT* multiply your costs by 10. It'll be more like a factor of 2.
Raw discspace is ridicolously cheap. About $1/GB *including* RAID, powersupply etc. (i.e. you can build a fileserver holding 3 terabytes in a RAID and pay $3000 for it) Given that the average song is on the order of 5MB, that means your 1penny/song budget is double the hardware-cost. Migth be realistic, when you factor in backups, sysadmins etc.
The storage is only going to get increasingly trivial too. Today storage costs on the order of $1/GB, so the storage of this million songs costs on the order of $5000. If capacity/cost continue to double every 18 months, then in 10 years the cost will be about $50. In other words, the entire collection will fit trivially in a home-computer bougth at Wal-Mart for $399.
Too much is nonfindable as it is. Where can I buy "Natural Tools" by "Weld" ? I had it once, and loved it. Alas, the CD went missing, and after that I've been unable to find *anywhere* to repurchase it.
I suspect a very large portion of copyrighted works become unavailable a LONG time before copyright expires.
The Mona Lisa is not art. The skill and imagination employed in painting the picture may have been art, but the picture itself, the finished product, clearly is not.
Unless you want to claim that the physical picture IS 'the use of skill and imagination in the creation of objects'
Which is nonsense.
Or perhaps you're claiming, if I hold a paintbrush and wiggle some muscles in such a way that a picture results, then it IS art. But if I hold a keyboard, and wiggle some muscles in such a way that a picture results, then it is NOT art.
There couldn't *possibly* be a difference between having electricity sent trough your tissues (as happens if you hold on to two bare ends of live wire) and having electricity flowing trough a wire in the proxomity of your tissues, thus subjecting said tissues to an electric field.
Now could there ?
Fact is, we've experimentally raised mice in literally 1000 times the field you'll ever experience -- with no measurable effect whatsoever. This ain't proof that there *is* no effect. But if it was hugely harmful, you'd expect to start seeing peer-reviewed experiments showing it by now. It's not as if living close to electrical wires is all that new a phenomenon anymore.
But in the end you're going to do yourself in with your attempts to protect yourself. If they can't get at your files to see that you're free of child porn, they're going to get upset, and they're going to make things difficult for you.
But with TrueCrypt that's not the case. It works like this:
They notice the encrypted partition.
They ask for the password to read it.
You give them the password for the outer filesystem.
They verify that it contains harmless but mildly embarassing emails to your girlfriend.
They have *NO* way of knowing that there even *IS* an inner filesystem in the unused part of the outer filesystem.
This works because even the *existence* of the inner filesystem can't be demonstrated without knowing the passphrase. Because encrypted, the filesystem looks like random noise, so there's no way of knowing that it is not, infact, random noise.
It's already here for much of the world. In Norway currently a liter of gas costs on the order of 12.50 nok which is pretty exactly $2. Converted to gallons that works out to $7.50/gallon.
Oh, I don't know. I live in Norway, and I can tell you, 2.5 Gb/s to the home is also here not available. I don't think USA is all that bad. We too have to make do with paltry 100Mbit/s connections. (they're symetrical, so it's full duplex, same speed up and down, which is some consolation.)
This is true -- *assuming* you could safely stop the burglar by use of less force.
Thing is, you generally can't. You don't know if the burglar is sane or not, if he has a weapon or not, or how he'll react to you pointing a gun at him and demanding surrender.
In certain situations, shooting the burglar is (for you and your family) the safest choice. Yes, it's possible he'd surrender and all would be well if you throw on the ligth, point a gun at him, and demand surrender. But you don't know that.
How large of a chance are you required to take in order to save the life of someone who just broke into your house ?
Yes. Actually it goes something like this:
You can't fly sir.
Why not ?
I'm afraid that's classified Sir.
Wait, I'm not on one of those lists, am I ?
I'm afraid that's classified.
Who maintains these lists ?
Classified.
Why am I on the list ?
Classified.
What are the general rules for adding people to the list ?
You're not allowed to know.
How can I get off the list ?
There's no procedure for challenging a wrong addition.
This is insane ! Who is responsible for this mess ? Who added me to the list ? On what grounds ?
That, Sir, is classified.
So. What are you going to do ? Accept that the credit-rating-companies run your life, and that your only choice is to pay any bill any company sends you, regardless of if you actually owe them money or not ?
First: Nonsense. Disputed charges should not count against you.
Second: Are you saying if ANY company for ANY reason, in the USA, CLAIM you owe them money, you have no other choice than bend over or suffer a bad credit-rating ? That's nuts. (but possible I guess, you guys *do* live in a Corporateocracy)
Third: Would you consider publishing written statements that person so-and-so does not pay his bills, despite having factual knowledge that infact, the situation is, that person disputes even *having* a valid bill to fit the definition of libel ?
Fourth: Whatever is with the US fixation on credit anyway ? I don't see any sensible reason you'll need credit for anything other than buying a house. For that, the mortgage is generally secured by the house anyway. (i.e., if you stop paying, they can take your house to cover the unpaid debt)
It is important that voting is anonymous. This prevents pressuring or paying people to vote in a certain way.
If you allow internet-voting. What is to stop someone from offering you cash if he can sit by your side and watch that you vote like he wants to ?
Today, he can still offer you cash. However, you could take the cash, and still vote differently than he wishes, and he'd never know. That is important.
Every country is not like that. I can tell from personal experience that Norway is not like that and Germany is not like that and Finnland is not like that.
However, atleast in Norway, you have the rigth to take time off from your job to go vote -- *without* suffering a pay-cut. I.e. your employer needs to pay you also for the 1 hour (or whatever) you need to go vote.
If it's a monopoly on essential infrastructure, it should have common carrier status and be prevented from holding customers ransom.
That's the case here (Norway) utilities that are monopolies can *not* on their own decide to cut (or refuse to offer) service. Cutting service or not is decided by a board that has consumer-protection representatives on it. (so in effect, you *will* get cut if you stop paying your electricity bill for example, but the power-company cannot decide this on their own, and you very very likely will *NOT* get cut if you've got a valid complaint about the bill that you didn't pay.)
Giving corporations the power to self-enforce is a fundamentally bad idea. And let's face it, cutting someones electricity, water, gas, telephone or internet is force, assuming there are no comparable alternative deliverers in the area.
It is not force in the "gun-to-your-head" sense. But it is force in the sense that the problems you'll have to endure if you insist on not paying a wrong bill is unproportionally larger than the bill itself.
Actually, you don't need to take any legal action against them.
They are claiming you owe them some sum of money. You dispute the claim. You don't pay. If they want their money, they will have to take legal action against you. And they'll need to demonstrate that you actually do owe them money.
Englisch spelling is bizarre. I've been told the main reason is conservatism; the spelling have changed rather little over the last 3 centuries or so, whereas the spoken language has changed a lot more. Thus in english you can *not* assume that the same written letter (or sillable) is always spoken in a certain way.
I seem to recall that a word ending in -ed can be pronounced 4 different ways.
The pronounciation-rule don't help me much. To a Norwegian, it sounds as if Americans pretty much say caw-pee-rait, the 'h' is silent, or close enough to silent to make little difference, thus the problems hearing where it's supposed to be.
Words like watchtower are no problem, that comes down to knowing how to spell 'tower' which is trivial. light is actually normally not pronounced 'lite' in english, that is just an instance of applying a different rule, that an ending -e does not imply an e, but instead implies that the i be pronounced 'a'.
'Elephant' starts with an e. 'if' starts with an 'i'. 'announce' starts with an 'a'. 'light' is pronounced more like 'lait', which is a no-go for spelling in english since you guys don't use diphthongs at all. (well, atleast seldom).
Norwegian will tend to look funny to english natives -- we regularily change the spelling of imported words to match our rules for spoken->written mappings. Combined with different pronounciation, this leads to funny-looking but sometimes vaguely recognizable words.
"juice" got imported, and turned into "jus"
"tape" turned into "teip"
"chaffeur" got imported (from french I guess) and turned into "sjåfør"
"skateboard" however, did this far not turn into 'skeitbård' which would be logical. perhaps it will once it settles down.
The oposite happens, but more seldom. The scandinawian word 'daskebord' got exported and turned into 'dashboard' which makes no sense. It is originally (on horsecarriages) a board, but it does not dash anywhere, not even walk actually.:-) The Scandinawian original however makes perfect sense, according to the function it used to have. (preventing the back-hooves of the horse from throwing mud up in the drivers face.)
Anyways, thanks for trying. English is fun, even though frequently mindboggling.
Sure. Going on a $35M holiday is mindbogglingly expensive. Most other things are definitely doable if your number one goal in life is being able to afford them, and you work your butt off.
Most educations can be finished by the time you're 25-30. Which gives you 30-35 years of saving before you're 60. Becoming a millionaire is almost trivial. Without interest you'd need to save around $30K/year which is hard for most people to do, but the magic of compound interest makes it significantly easier.
If you invest your savings in diversified stock, you'll probably make about 5% more than inflation pro year. Which lowers the amount you need to save to around $7000/year. That is doable with a normal salary.
It's much easier still to make sure your child ends up a millionaire. put $50K in diverse stocks the moment you learn you (or your partner, depending on your sex) is pregnant, and that's it. Or if you don't have that kind of cash on hand, save $7000/year until the child is 10.
It's possible if you're a foreigner and never really grasped the general idea behind english (seemingly, to me) more-or-less random spelling of th and ht. This despite in general having a fairly decent grasp of the language. (I like to think so anyway)
Is it light or ligth ? Wait, less me guess, both, depending on if you mean low-calorie or not-dark ? Is it weight (probably) or weigth ? right or rigth (now that you told me, I'm gonna go for ht)
When I spellcheck my english (which I don't bother doing for Slashdot) I get more th versus ht mistakes than all other mistakes combined.
So, I've asked multiple english teachers and multiple natives of english-speaking countries what method there is to this (to me) apparent randomness. Until now, alas, I've not received an explanation that made enough sense to me that I do it right (or rigth:-) in the general sense.
Feel free to offer an explanation if you think you have one.
I do know *some* general rules, but they don't cover all the cases. For example, a word tends to never start with 'ht' but often (not always) end with it. So even if the words wheren't common enough that I'd remember it anyway, this rule would let me get 'this' 'that' 'the' and such correct. (those you'd remember anyway since they're extremely frequent)
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True. Obesity is a serious health-problem. Quite likely the combination of overweigth and too little physical exersize is the number one health-problem facing America today (and the next generation even more).
Thing is, I do not think you can teach someone to eat healthy and exersize enough by behaving like a control-freak. Kids can and will rebel against such, and even if you *do* manage to force your 12-year old to do as you demand, you'll likely only end up who hates eating healthy and takes every chance he/she gets to eat hamburgers.
People don't generally fall in love with stuff they are literally force-fed.
Want your kid to like healthy food ?
Want your kid to enjoy using his/her body ?
Exersizing for the sake of exersizing tends to be mindnumbingly boring. I used to be a leader in the scouts however, and I've lost count of the kids that would claim they hate sports and sports are boring, only to have the day of their life participating in, for example;
I could literally add 100s of items to this list with no problem whatsoever. No, not all kids will enjoy all activities. So what ? But you'll have a *really* hard time finding a kid that enjoys none of this.
And you'll have acomplished *much* more than by forcing the kid to do some kind of exersize for the sake of exersize.
No kid will cherish spending another hour at the treadmill for the sake of it. (yeah yeah, I know I'm exxagerating, most parents aren't *that* bad) Most kids I know will *love* the idea of trying to conquer the surf at the beach using a inflatable rubber-boat, and see if daddy flips over more than 11 times this year. (his previous record)
A 1GB flash-module bein written to *constantly* (24 hours a day, 365 days a year) with a sustained speed of 5MB/s would thus wear out sometime after 6.5 *YEARS* of continous operation.
I'm guessing you can see why this problem is purely hypothethical for 99.99% of all laptops out there. You don't write to disc *constantly* and even if you did, you don't typically use the laptop 24/365, and even if you did, having a laptop-drive fail after 6-7 years is normally not a showstopper.
If, more realistically, the laptop is used 8 hours/day 250 days/years, and writes to disc 10% of the time when turned on, then the 1 million writes to flash will get reached after aproximately 30 years.
Even these numbers are high -- my laptop is heavily used as a developer workstation, and it certainly does not write to disc 10% of the time it is turned on.
Reality is that Norway is fucking huge and has less than 5 million people. Which means infrastructure is expensive as hell.
The 100Mbit/s symmetric link is real, it's the standard delivered by BKK. (not that expensive either, $50/month or something) But there's a catch, that speed ain't available in all of Norway, but only in the bigger cities. (big by norwegian standard, say 50K people upwards)
1-3 Mbps ADSL is still the norm for most people here. True, a large fraction of the population has access to 10Mb+ links, but lots of people see no point in paying for those when 1Mbps will do for everything they need.
Hi man, I owe you a beer if you're ever in my parts of the world. (Stavanger, Norway that is)
If you're smuggling illegal data, losing the data ain't even half as bad as having the data discovered. Losing them just means that that single smuggling-attempt was in vain, you'll have to try again. It's unlikely to be your only copy of the data anyway.
Secondly, you could just store the TrueCrypt volume on a DVD-R or similar. That way there's no way of overwriting the "unused" space in the filesystem.
Seriously, there's no way of stopping this other than making it illegal to carry *any* data into a country. Because even if you disallow only encrypted data (even where the encryption-key is public) then there's nothing stopping people from hiding the data steganographically anyways. A TrueCrypt volume stored in the LSB of a wav-file is indistinguishable from random noise for anyone who doesn't have the key.
20 years ago, when I first started using computers my computer was a C64. Compared to my current (not even remotely high-end) computer is looks like this:
It depends on how you slice it, but it's atleast not a stretch to claim my current computer has 5000 times the power of the C64. In 20 years.
Question is, if I'd asked you back then, would you have been able to "fathom" what to do with a computer *5000* times as powerful as the current norm ?
Is there a reason to think that the next 20 years will be much different ? Are you able to fathom what to do with a desktop-computer 1000 times as powerful as your current one ? If not, does that mean it won't happen ?
It's true, songs that sell less than 1 copy every 5 years don't turn a profit, but that's still very different from a record store. Try stacking a record-store with all songs that sell atleast 1 copy ever 5 years....
Besides, sysadmin-costs and so on do not go scale O(n) with the number of records stored. In other words, if you are already storing 100.000 songs that sell well, then adding a million songs that sell less will *NOT* multiply your costs by 10. It'll be more like a factor of 2.
Raw discspace is ridicolously cheap. About $1/GB *including* RAID, powersupply etc. (i.e. you can build a fileserver holding 3 terabytes in a RAID and pay $3000 for it) Given that the average song is on the order of 5MB, that means your 1penny/song budget is double the hardware-cost. Migth be realistic, when you factor in backups, sysadmins etc.
The storage is only going to get increasingly trivial too. Today storage costs on the order of $1/GB, so the storage of this million songs costs on the order of $5000. If capacity/cost continue to double every 18 months, then in 10 years the cost will be about $50. In other words, the entire collection will fit trivially in a home-computer bougth at Wal-Mart for $399.
I suspect a very large portion of copyrighted works become unavailable a LONG time before copyright expires.
The Mona Lisa is not art. The skill and imagination employed in painting the picture may have been art, but the picture itself, the finished product, clearly is not.
Unless you want to claim that the physical picture IS 'the use of skill and imagination in the creation of objects'
Which is nonsense.
Or perhaps you're claiming, if I hold a paintbrush and wiggle some muscles in such a way that a picture results, then it IS art. But if I hold a keyboard, and wiggle some muscles in such a way that a picture results, then it is NOT art.
But that seems a rather peculiar definition....
Now could there ?
Fact is, we've experimentally raised mice in literally 1000 times the field you'll ever experience -- with no measurable effect whatsoever. This ain't proof that there *is* no effect. But if it was hugely harmful, you'd expect to start seeing peer-reviewed experiments showing it by now. It's not as if living close to electrical wires is all that new a phenomenon anymore.
But with TrueCrypt that's not the case. It works like this:
This works because even the *existence* of the inner filesystem can't be demonstrated without knowing the passphrase. Because encrypted, the filesystem looks like random noise, so there's no way of knowing that it is not, infact, random noise.
Look into TrueCrypt.
Oh, I don't know. I live in Norway, and I can tell you, 2.5 Gb/s to the home is also here not available. I don't think USA is all that bad. We too have to make do with paltry 100Mbit/s connections. (they're symetrical, so it's full duplex, same speed up and down, which is some consolation.)
Thing is, you generally can't. You don't know if the burglar is sane or not, if he has a weapon or not, or how he'll react to you pointing a gun at him and demanding surrender.
In certain situations, shooting the burglar is (for you and your family) the safest choice. Yes, it's possible he'd surrender and all would be well if you throw on the ligth, point a gun at him, and demand surrender. But you don't know that.
How large of a chance are you required to take in order to save the life of someone who just broke into your house ?
Welcome to land of the free !
So. What are you going to do ? Accept that the credit-rating-companies run your life, and that your only choice is to pay any bill any company sends you, regardless of if you actually owe them money or not ?
Second: Are you saying if ANY company for ANY reason, in the USA, CLAIM you owe them money, you have no other choice than bend over or suffer a bad credit-rating ? That's nuts. (but possible I guess, you guys *do* live in a Corporateocracy)
Third: Would you consider publishing written statements that person so-and-so does not pay his bills, despite having factual knowledge that infact, the situation is, that person disputes even *having* a valid bill to fit the definition of libel ?
Fourth: Whatever is with the US fixation on credit anyway ? I don't see any sensible reason you'll need credit for anything other than buying a house. For that, the mortgage is generally secured by the house anyway. (i.e., if you stop paying, they can take your house to cover the unpaid debt)
It is important that voting is anonymous. This prevents pressuring or paying people to vote in a certain way.
If you allow internet-voting. What is to stop someone from offering you cash if he can sit by your side and watch that you vote like he wants to ?
Today, he can still offer you cash. However, you could take the cash, and still vote differently than he wishes, and he'd never know. That is important.
However, atleast in Norway, you have the rigth to take time off from your job to go vote -- *without* suffering a pay-cut. I.e. your employer needs to pay you also for the 1 hour (or whatever) you need to go vote.
Nope.
Similarly, your doctor requires that you sign a contract waiving the right to sue him for doing his job in the manner you expect him to.
Again, no.
It's nice that you go to such effort to, once again, demonstrate how completely FUCKED up the US contracts-and-litigate everything mentality is.
That's the case here (Norway) utilities that are monopolies can *not* on their own decide to cut (or refuse to offer) service. Cutting service or not is decided by a board that has consumer-protection representatives on it. (so in effect, you *will* get cut if you stop paying your electricity bill for example, but the power-company cannot decide this on their own, and you very very likely will *NOT* get cut if you've got a valid complaint about the bill that you didn't pay.)
Giving corporations the power to self-enforce is a fundamentally bad idea. And let's face it, cutting someones electricity, water, gas, telephone or internet is force, assuming there are no comparable alternative deliverers in the area.
It is not force in the "gun-to-your-head" sense. But it is force in the sense that the problems you'll have to endure if you insist on not paying a wrong bill is unproportionally larger than the bill itself.
They are claiming you owe them some sum of money. You dispute the claim. You don't pay. If they want their money, they will have to take legal action against you. And they'll need to demonstrate that you actually do owe them money.
I seem to recall that a word ending in -ed can be pronounced 4 different ways.
The pronounciation-rule don't help me much. To a Norwegian, it sounds as if Americans pretty much say caw-pee-rait, the 'h' is silent, or close enough to silent to make little difference, thus the problems hearing where it's supposed to be.
Words like watchtower are no problem, that comes down to knowing how to spell 'tower' which is trivial. light is actually normally not pronounced 'lite' in english, that is just an instance of applying a different rule, that an ending -e does not imply an e, but instead implies that the i be pronounced 'a'.
'Elephant' starts with an e. 'if' starts with an 'i'. 'announce' starts with an 'a'. 'light' is pronounced more like 'lait', which is a no-go for spelling in english since you guys don't use diphthongs at all. (well, atleast seldom).
Norwegian will tend to look funny to english natives -- we regularily change the spelling of imported words to match our rules for spoken->written mappings. Combined with different pronounciation, this leads to funny-looking but sometimes vaguely recognizable words.
The oposite happens, but more seldom. The scandinawian word 'daskebord' got exported and turned into 'dashboard' which makes no sense. It is originally (on horsecarriages) a board, but it does not dash anywhere, not even walk actually. :-) The Scandinawian original however makes perfect sense, according to the function it used to have. (preventing the back-hooves of the horse from throwing mud up in the drivers face.)
Anyways, thanks for trying. English is fun, even though frequently mindboggling.
Most educations can be finished by the time you're 25-30. Which gives you 30-35 years of saving before you're 60. Becoming a millionaire is almost trivial. Without interest you'd need to save around $30K/year which is hard for most people to do, but the magic of compound interest makes it significantly easier.
If you invest your savings in diversified stock, you'll probably make about 5% more than inflation pro year. Which lowers the amount you need to save to around $7000/year. That is doable with a normal salary.
It's much easier still to make sure your child ends up a millionaire. put $50K in diverse stocks the moment you learn you (or your partner, depending on your sex) is pregnant, and that's it. Or if you don't have that kind of cash on hand, save $7000/year until the child is 10.
Is it light or ligth ? Wait, less me guess, both, depending on if you mean low-calorie or not-dark ? Is it weight (probably) or weigth ? right or rigth (now that you told me, I'm gonna go for ht)
When I spellcheck my english (which I don't bother doing for Slashdot) I get more th versus ht mistakes than all other mistakes combined.
So, I've asked multiple english teachers and multiple natives of english-speaking countries what method there is to this (to me) apparent randomness. Until now, alas, I've not received an explanation that made enough sense to me that I do it right (or rigth :-) in the general sense.
Feel free to offer an explanation if you think you have one.
I do know *some* general rules, but they don't cover all the cases. For example, a word tends to never start with 'ht' but often (not always) end with it. So even if the words wheren't common enough that I'd remember it anyway, this rule would let me get 'this' 'that' 'the' and such correct. (those you'd remember anyway since they're extremely frequent)