Not just Vegas, but Reno, Atlantic City, and all those Indian casinos. Now that you mention it, they must love 50-cent pieces. They're just the right size for gaming, and they're hard to counterfeit, and they don't have to be specially minted.
You're right, I never go near casinos. I don't have the memory for blackjack, the self-control for poker, or the self-destructiveness it takes to play purely random games.
Actually, it's not that hard to replace the dollar bills, since they generally wear out in a few years. Plus the Treasury has made a point of getting the older, easier-to-counterfeit designs out of circulation. If the U.S. has obsolete denominations in circulation, it has more to do with politics than anything.
I don't know anything about the Bank of Canada, but the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank has never been privately owned. It has a lot of autonomy (wouldn't do to have politicians fiddling with the money supply!) but ultimately it's an arm of the U.S. government.
Perhaps you're thinking of the Bank of England, the U.K.'s central bank. It was privately owned for most of its 300-year history, but has been government owned since 1946.
How quickly they forget! The UK used to be famous for its confusing assortment of coins. Then you guys went decimal back in the 70s, and got rid of all your shillings, half-crowns and what not. So you've only had about 30 years to accumulate obsolete coins that should be withdrawn.
I agree that getting rid of the penny is a good idea. But then we'd have to round all prices off to the nearest nickel. People aren't quite ready for that.
Sounds like your cash registers are the same as ours. But we have $1 bills and you don't. That frees up enough space for two new denominations of coins, $1 and $2. (Canada is the same.) We don't have $2 coins at all, and the $1 coins are rarely seen.
Cops don't need a warrant to respond to a complaint. Imagine the chaos if they did!
I'm tempted to correct your definition of "due process", but we'd just get hung up in legal terminology neither of us is qualified to debate. Suffice to say that law enforcement would not be practical if cops weren't allowed to exercise a certain amount of judgment. Which means that inevitably some cops will exercise bad judgment. Not good, but judges aren't immune to bad judgment either.
Well, on the one hand, it's been 20 years or so since I've even seen a 50-cent piece. On the other hand, did it even occur to that cashier to look at the coin?
A sidebar on coins and currency. When I was a kid, you saw a lot of denominations you no longer see, even though they're still officially in circulation. I believe this is mainly due to the domination of retail by big chains, which don't like to deal with more denominations than will fit easily in a standard cash register. (If you run one cash register, dealing with fifty-cent pieces is a small nuisance. If you run millions of them, dealing with fifty-cent pieces subtracts big bucks from your bottom line.) So they put the "odd" denominations in the bank, and never give them out as change. That's why dollar coins will never catch on, unless and until Congress makes room for them by withdrawing dollar bills.
What scares me... is that this guy made it all the way to the county lock-up on the suspicions of one cashier.
That cashier didn't get him arrested all by himself. Somebody had to convince the cops that they guy was up to no good. I doubt if a single cashier can do that. So we have to spread the blame to the store manager and the cop making the arrest. Not to mention that nobody in the store or cop shop knew enough to point out that there are $2 bills!
Not "finally". Americans have been ignorant for a long time. You know why one particular state issues license plates that say "USA" on them? Because before they did that, their residents couldn't drive in other states without being pulled over and asked for their passports!
If you are caught in a DNSBL block, change hosting providers.
You are paying an ISP that supports spammers, and hence supporting the spammer indirectly.
Simply not true. An honestly anti-spam hosting provider might rent rack space in the same facility as a "pro spammer" company, and thus share its address block. And even if the company itself earned the blacklisting, it might very well be unfair.
I once worked for a colo company where the Abuse guy was too busy fighting flame wars with his opposite numbers at the vigilante orgs to convince them that we were actively seeking out and terminating spammers. Which we were. So our customers were getting screwed, as well as their customers, by having legitimate email blocked. The only people not screwed were the spammers themselves, who just switched providers every time we terminated them.
I doubt if Sprint or Nextel has special inside-building towers. More likely they just happen to have a tower that's close enough to the various building you go into, and Verizon doesn't.
One sad thing about the U.S. cell system is that all there are so many incompatible cell protocols and systems. You get a phone that handles 3 or 4 different protocols, you worry about "roaming" charges -- and you still often find yourself in places where your particular provider just can't serve you.
The Europeans did the right thing when they agreed that all their providers would have to use GSM, so everybody's phone would work with everybody's network. U.S. providers complain that GSM doesn't use bandwidth efficiently. But from the consumer point of view, their hodge-podge of GSM alternates is really inefficient.
Maybe that's the Repub line now. Definitely wasn't back when they'd thought they'd won the initial vote. I remember official releases that said things like, "The Democrats never consider an election final until they've won."
When they thought they had won the Washington Governor's election, and the Demos complained about votes that should have been counted but weren't, the Repubs sneered at them as poor losers.
There's a simple way to block all spam -- unplug your mail server. Which is precisely what you're doing if you filter based on an indiscriminate blacklist.
They are my views for the simple reason that I hold them. Nothing more is needed.
In other words, you're simply stating a personal prejudice. You're entitled to have opinions -- but if you want anybody to care about them, you have to be willing to justify them in terms other people care about.
A rock and a hard place? Nobody's twisting anybody's arms and saying, "Go out and blacklist people!" These are net vigilantes on a power trip, and they're making life difficult for a lot of innocent people who have nothing to do with spam. Those are the people caught between a rock and a hard place.
You keep saying you find "gifted" unclear, but you never justify the statement, except to repeat that it's not correct English. To most people "clarity" means the meaning is clear, not that it honors some obscure (or, as in this case, imaginary) grammatical rule.
Strictly speaking, you're right. But Moore's law, despite the name, isn't a law of nature. It's an observation about the progress of the chip industry. And that progress is motivated by a simple feedback loop: other industries put ICs into their products, which motivates the IC industry to retool to make better, cheaper ICs, which motivates other industries to put ICs into their products...
Moore's original observation, that transistor density doubles every 18 months, will obviously cease to apply once it becomes impossible to make transistors. But as long as that feedback loop continues to churn, it continues to make sense to talk about Moore's law.
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You're right, I never go near casinos. I don't have the memory for blackjack, the self-control for poker, or the self-destructiveness it takes to play purely random games.
Actually, it's not that hard to replace the dollar bills, since they generally wear out in a few years. Plus the Treasury has made a point of getting the older, easier-to-counterfeit designs out of circulation. If the U.S. has obsolete denominations in circulation, it has more to do with politics than anything.
Perhaps you're thinking of the Bank of England, the U.K.'s central bank. It was privately owned for most of its 300-year history, but has been government owned since 1946.
True. But this is way beyond "I had a hunch". The fact that the guy was passing counterfeit bills was "obvious" to everybody in sight.
How quickly they forget! The UK used to be famous for its confusing assortment of coins. Then you guys went decimal back in the 70s, and got rid of all your shillings, half-crowns and what not. So you've only had about 30 years to accumulate obsolete coins that should be withdrawn.
I agree that getting rid of the penny is a good idea. But then we'd have to round all prices off to the nearest nickel. People aren't quite ready for that.
Sounds like your cash registers are the same as ours. But we have $1 bills and you don't. That frees up enough space for two new denominations of coins, $1 and $2. (Canada is the same.) We don't have $2 coins at all, and the $1 coins are rarely seen.
As a "mere foreigner" you have an unfair advantage -- you haven't had a chance to absorb the folklore that "everybody knows".
I'm tempted to correct your definition of "due process", but we'd just get hung up in legal terminology neither of us is qualified to debate. Suffice to say that law enforcement would not be practical if cops weren't allowed to exercise a certain amount of judgment. Which means that inevitably some cops will exercise bad judgment. Not good, but judges aren't immune to bad judgment either.
A sidebar on coins and currency. When I was a kid, you saw a lot of denominations you no longer see, even though they're still officially in circulation. I believe this is mainly due to the domination of retail by big chains, which don't like to deal with more denominations than will fit easily in a standard cash register. (If you run one cash register, dealing with fifty-cent pieces is a small nuisance. If you run millions of them, dealing with fifty-cent pieces subtracts big bucks from your bottom line.) So they put the "odd" denominations in the bank, and never give them out as change. That's why dollar coins will never catch on, unless and until Congress makes room for them by withdrawing dollar bills.
I'm sorry, but if you don't understand the concept of "under arrest", I can't help you!
Not "finally". Americans have been ignorant for a long time. You know why one particular state issues license plates that say "USA" on them? Because before they did that, their residents couldn't drive in other states without being pulled over and asked for their passports!
Jeez, where does it say that Best Buy arrested him?
I once worked for a colo company where the Abuse guy was too busy fighting flame wars with his opposite numbers at the vigilante orgs to convince them that we were actively seeking out and terminating spammers. Which we were. So our customers were getting screwed, as well as their customers, by having legitimate email blocked. The only people not screwed were the spammers themselves, who just switched providers every time we terminated them.
One sad thing about the U.S. cell system is that all there are so many incompatible cell protocols and systems. You get a phone that handles 3 or 4 different protocols, you worry about "roaming" charges -- and you still often find yourself in places where your particular provider just can't serve you.
The Europeans did the right thing when they agreed that all their providers would have to use GSM, so everybody's phone would work with everybody's network. U.S. providers complain that GSM doesn't use bandwidth efficiently. But from the consumer point of view, their hodge-podge of GSM alternates is really inefficient.
Maybe that's the Repub line now. Definitely wasn't back when they'd thought they'd won the initial vote. I remember official releases that said things like, "The Democrats never consider an election final until they've won."
When they thought they had won the Washington Governor's election, and the Demos complained about votes that should have been counted but weren't, the Repubs sneered at them as poor losers.
There's a simple way to block all spam -- unplug your mail server. Which is precisely what you're doing if you filter based on an indiscriminate blacklist.
A rock and a hard place? Nobody's twisting anybody's arms and saying, "Go out and blacklist people!" These are net vigilantes on a power trip, and they're making life difficult for a lot of innocent people who have nothing to do with spam. Those are the people caught between a rock and a hard place.
You keep saying you find "gifted" unclear, but you never justify the statement, except to repeat that it's not correct English. To most people "clarity" means the meaning is clear, not that it honors some obscure (or, as in this case, imaginary) grammatical rule.
Language comes from people, not textbooks.
Moore's original observation, that transistor density doubles every 18 months, will obviously cease to apply once it becomes impossible to make transistors. But as long as that feedback loop continues to churn, it continues to make sense to talk about Moore's law.
How is that you can spell perfectly, but you don't know how to read?