I wasn't there, so I have no real opinion on the whole thing other than to say, "I do hope they figure out what really happened so we can put it all to rest." There are important, unanswered questions about what happened and both theories seem entirely plausible to me.
The 911 calls clearly show that Zimmerman pursued Martin after having been told not to, and Martin was found to have had no weapons of any kind on his person. Neither of those facts have been disputed by any version of events that I've heard. Where's the doubt and unanswered questions for you?
Quite honestly, it doesn't matter if Martin beat the crap out of Zimmerman before he was shot. Zimmerman was an armed man following him as he was trying to go about his daily business. In the same situation, I would have done the same. *that* is the self defense in this situation. If there was an altercation before Martin was shot, it was because Martin was trying to defend himself against Zimmerman. It's not relevant to the fact that Zimmerman followed him after having been told not to, and that as a direct result of that, Martin was killed. Whether it's manslaughter or premeditated may be in question, but there should be no doubt at all that Martin was murdered.
While I don't like turning this into a racial thing, the unfortunate reality is that if Martin was a 17-year old white girl, there wouldn't be any doubt whether Zimmerman was a murderer. Unfortunately, his victim was a 17-year old black boy. That, alone, is enough in the minds of some people to cast doubt on whether it was murder or self defense, and it makes me sick to my stomach. That kid did not have to die, and he is being denied justice by a police force that refuses to arrest and charge his killer.
Unfortunately, the racial tensions that are coming out of the woodwork over this one are exactly the reason that Martin was killed in the first place: in the US, the schism between Blacks and Whites was never resolved. It was put on the back burner and allowed to fester while on the surface people pretended it was done with. As long as there continues to exist a double standard, it can never be resolved properly.
The US is not alone in this... there's similar problems in other countries... look at how France is treating the Muslims (well, the US is doing it, too). Look at how "witches" are being treated in Africa and India. Look at how the first nations population is grossly over-represented in Canadian prisons. The world has a lot of problems. My only hope (aside from justice for Martin) is that it will open a dialogue and people will realise that the colour of your skin is not an indicator of what you will do with your life. Sadly, I think that realisation is generations away in parts of the US. (and yes, it took generations in other parts of the world, but we had a head start... in the British Empire, for example, slavery was officially abolished in 1833, but was largely gone already by 1797 and had been ruled in 1772 that Slavery was not legal in England itself, only the colonies... the beginnings of desegregation in England go back to a 1569 report, which declared that "England [was] too pure an air for a slave to breathe in". So we've had a bit of a head start.)
1944 - Too soon. 1967 (when it was written), not too soon.
History softens the blow for certain types of events, to the point where it's not considered bad taste to make a joke about it. While tragic events are still fresh in memory, they need to be treated with a certain amount of dignity and respect. It's about social decorum... while that's a construct, it's one that still has value in social interactions.
BTW, with this particular example, does Godwin's law say I lose?
In order to be that fast, they need to be small. I'm fairly sure that a phalanx would have no problem hitting one, and because of their size, wouldn't have a hard time sinking them. Since phalanxes can already target sea-level cruise missiles like the exocet, it isn't much of a stretch to be able to sink such a high speed boat.
It would certainly be difficult to hit with traditional artillery, or the big sea guns. Even smaller sea guns would have a hard time hitting something that was moving fast enough. But a 4500 round per minute gatling gun controlled by a radar system designed to hit *much* faster moving targets should make quick work of what's essentially a speedboat with a gun.
Unfortunately, there's no other option. Even Chromium doesn't have native Flash support on Linux (about half of the videos on Youtube will gak saying that you support for the video format requested).
About half of youtube works without Flash installed. Other video sites, not so much... blip.tv (which is the other one I use fairly regularly) has actually discontinued their html5 support in favour of going 100% flash.
Ultimately, my choice was between installing Flash and using the browser of my choice, or installing Chrome for Linux. I went with flash, but I am not happy with the decision. It's sort of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
I looked into the TMobile deal and yes, I could go that way but I would only get Edge speed for data.
What do you actually use data for? If it's relatively low usage (and sounds like it is, considering that you've rolled over 1GB by buying it in 500MB packs), then you may not ever notice the difference by switching the EDGE instead of 3G. You wouldn't be able to watch live YouTube video, but for stuff like surfing the web and e-mail, the 115kbit/s that you can get out of EDGE is plenty fast enough. Try turning off 3G data in your phone for a week, and see whether 2G speeds work for your usage.
There's times where getting the latest and greatest won't actually get you any advantage. This being Slashdot, I'll give you a car analogy: why buy a Ferrari if all you're doing with it is the Sunday church run?
If I were in the US, I'd seriously consider the $30/mo TMob plan. The data would be fast enough for my usage, and it comes with unlimited text which I'm led to understand costs $20/mo in and of itself with most US carriers. (which is ridiculous, unlimited global text costs me $5/mo (CAD) with my carrier, and they don't have an option to add domestic only texting).
Buying the helicopters is not the only cost in the mix. They have to be fueled, maintained, piloted, housed, etc for who knows how long. The purchase cost plus the penalties may still have been less than the purchase cost plus the operating costs, which would make it cost effective to cancel. (I have no idea if this is true or not, I'm just throwing the possibility out there.)
Only if we didn't need helicopters.:)
We still use the Sea Kings for SAR, among other uses. So rather than having newer helicopters that were more reliable, more fuel efficient, and easier to get parts for, we keep a fleet of ancient helicopters in the sky, because the conservatives cancelled a contract that was signed by the liberals. And in so doing, they paid cancellation fees that were more expensive than buying the silly helicopters would have been in the first place.:)
And I agree with you on nuclear subs. We should be building our own, not buying 2nd hand subs that had been decommissioned by the Brits. There was a time when we had the best shipyards in the world, and I think if we're going to be buying ships, we should be putting that money into our own economy, not somebody else's.
Actually, I got an dove penny in my change yesterday. Those things were circulated for Canada's centennial, in 1967. That's 45 years in circulation.
I suspect that merchants will adjust their pricing to remove the pennies from the pricing, and that they will probably end up increasing their prices to counter the increased merchant fees they will be paying with more customers paying with plastic. In the end, I think this move will cost the economy far more than $11m.
It was the cons who cancelled the helicopters, and it's worth pointing out that the penalties for cancelling that contract were higher than it would have cost to actually buy the damned helicopters.
I do agree, however, that we got royally ripped off on the submarines.
So in a little over a month there will be no coins circulating that is worth less than 1 Norwegian krone... but you know what? The wast majority of Norwegians pay by card anyhow, and the prices has not changed with the smaller coins going away. If you pay by card, you pay the exact amount. If you pay cash, it is rounded up or down to the nearest coin-value.
That's the problem, and my biggest problem with this boneheaded move...
1. Not everybody has access to a card. 2. Unless you keep a certain minimum balance in the bank, or pay a monthly fee, you get hit with a service charge every time you use your card in Canada 3. The merchant gets hit with a service charge every time anyway. 4. (and my main personal concern with it) it's harder to budget when you're paying with plastic, because the money is not tangible.
I have quite happily been using folding money for small expenses for a while. It's much easier to budget if I take $100 cash out of the bank every payday, and tell myself that's my whatever money, and when it's gone it's gone. If they force me to start using a card for that, I will have to actually open a new bank account or buy a prepaid visa specifically so that I can have a card with separate funds from the money I use for groceries, gas, the rent, etc.. And yes, this would force me to use a card, because there's no way "rounding to the nearest $0.05" will work out in my favour.
This, of course, will mean that the merchants have to eat the increased costs of running a merchant terminal, and decreased margins, which means that it will increase the costs for everybody. The price of a cup of coffee will go up because of this.
"How many piercings or tattoos do you have?" Apparently, any is grounds for termination at some places.
Well, I have some friends who work for Starbucks, and apparently corporate policy is not to have visible tattoos. None of them seem to pay attention to it. I can see it being important in a customer-facing role, wanting to present a clean-cut image, but if you're never face to face with customers, then who cares?
"How fast can you get to work from your place at both wee hours of the morning as well as rush hour?" The place graded people on a tier system -- people who were lower tiers were people who were not in the center of town or had to commute through a main, overcrowded highway.
That's just asinine. If it takes me an hour to get to work in the morning, then I leave an hour early. Not hiring me because of that is silly.
"What kind of car do you drive?" I've had two places where they considered the choice of vehicle as part of the hiring process. One place viewed anyone driving anything but a hybrid subcompact as contemptible, and anathema to their "green" image. Another place viewed anything but European sedans as "too pedestrian for our parking lot." I even overheard the interviewer saying, "hire the BMW guy, beemer drivers have organizational skills."
Impressive. My understanding was always that BMW drivers were assholes, on the whole. Especially if it's a black 5-series.
"Do you pack?" Having a concealed carry will help you get a job at some places because it means that you already went through some criminal screening.
See, personally, I would deliberately not hire somebody who carries a concealed weapon. There's a chance they may bring it to work, and that is a bad thing.
The best one was a question/statement: "Do you have a CISSP or a TS/SCI clearance? If not, GTFO. We don't hire garbage who can't prove themselves."
Not sure how things work in the states, but around here, a company needs to put you forward for a TS clearance. You can't just get one as an individual. Sounds more to me like they're cheap, and don't want to pay for you to get the clearance when they can get somebody else to pay for it instead. It costs money and time for them to have you do the paperwork and submit it.
You can install Bodhi from a thumb drive in about 10 minutes. There's even a video floating around Youtube of somebody installing it in a virtual machine in less than 10 minutes, from first boot to working installed desktop. When I installed it on my Dell ultraportable, everything worked out of the box, no configuration needed. (though to be fair, the Dell came with Ubuntu preinstalled, so it's hardly surprising)
Ubuntu can be done just about as quickly, in my experience. As long as you have a reasonably fast optical drive or are installing from a good quality thumb drive.
fiscal conservative social liberals are employing a non-optimal strategy.
I think that's at least in part because your Republican party is winning a propaganda war. They're spending gobs and gobs of cash trying to convince people that they're the fiscally responsible ones, and that the Democrats are the ones pissing away money. (irony, much?). When you look at the numbers, it's actually been the inverse: the deficit has consistently increased year over year under Republican presidents, and decreased under Democrats.
Unfortunately, however, they are spending more money trying to propagate the myth that they're the ones saving money, and people are buying into it. Personally, I don't see how the idea of fiscal responsibility is incompatible with progressive social ideals.
In fact, if I were to tell you where I stood on social matters, most Americans would probably call me a communist.... I believe that the justice system should be focused on mending recidivism rates, and that this means spending money on education and apprenticeship programs for offenders to equip them with the skills they need to find a productive job upon their release. I also think that this means that education on the whole should be a main target for money. I believe in publicly accessible health care, because I know that early detection of health problems means that they're *far* cheaper to treat in the long run. I believe in social welfare programs in general, because while there's some people who abuse them, society as a whole benefits from not letting people fall through the cracks. I believe that we should be taxing bad behaviours (environmental practices), and rewarding good behaviours (subsidizing solar installations, for example). I believe that these sorts of environmental rules should extend in to other areas of industry as well... make it too expensive to run your business badly, and business will stop doing things badly (regulated but mostly free market). And I believe that the tax rates on the wealthy and corporations should be set at a level they can bear... there's no excuse for a corporation to be able to post a $1bn profit for a year when they've used tax loopholes to not pay a dime in corporate income taxes (again, sustainable market growth, but make sure that the corporations contribute their fair share to the economy). All of these ideas are very socialist... enough that McCarthy would have called me a communist sympathizer, but I also believe, quite firmly, that the government should never be allowed to run deficit spending, unless it's extenuating circumstances (such as an economic crash), and that for such circumstances, it should require a 2/3 majority in all levels of government to pass.
If I were in the US, I'd probably be trying to make a difference in the Democrat party.... as it is, I actually belong to the Green party in this country, and have been quite active in trying to get certain policies set.... the Greens are, in most of the world, socially liberal while being fiscally conservative... a very good compromise, IMO.:)
It's also the downfall of a 2-party system. In the rest of the world, with multi-party democracies, the fiscal conservative social liberals (like me) can join or found their own party and have a reasonable chance of getting in. (and in fact, have gotten in in several countries in Europe)
They're not underwater graveyards, so yes, they can be salvaged. I'm not aware of anywhere within US territorial waters that is that deep (and in fact, I think the cutoff for territorial waters is 2,500m depth), so yes. I think you're right, they are legally up for grabs for anybody who can salvage them.
I'd be more concerned about the environmental impact. Yes, it's *very* deep, but wildlife has a tendency to accumulate around features on the ocean floor, and it's quite possible that these rocket engines have become artificial reefs. Beyond that, great steps have to be taken in preserving things that have been salvaged from the bottom of the ocean, because the chemistry changes. Just look at the steps they took to preserve the Mary Rose. I have no doubt of the historical significance of these (I'd add Mercury 3, and Apollo 8, 11, and 13 to the list), but I question whether it's a good idea to try to raise them.
Bell Canada's "FibeTV" service is essentially the same technology as UVerse. It's IPTV, with the IPTV traffic separated onto a 2nd VLAN from the Internet traffic over DSL, and doesn't count against your monthly cap. Their HD streams are encoded at 5.5mbit, which makes this a good thing: 3 HD streams at the same time = 16.5mbit/s of data use, times 1 hour = 59400 million bits. divide by 8 = 7.425GByte of data transferred. Multiply that 3h of TV watching by 30 days in a month, and you're at 222.75GB of data, just for watching what would be considered an "average" amount of TV in a month.
Unless ATT's using a stupidly low bitrate for their HD streams, then there's no way the average user could watch TV without going over the 250GB/mo cap.
I don't think they are stupid at all... the per-user costs do go up as the population density goes down, all other things being equal.
Yes, but the point is that you don't need wireline telephone/DSL service to an uninhabited island north of the 60th parallel. Canada has a *huge* land area, but most of that land area is uninhabited, and the actual population distribution is pretty much the same as any other country: clumps of population with empty space between. Sure the fiber run from Calgary to Edmonton is longer than the fiber run from New York City to Jersey City, but you don't need to provide service to most of that empty space. It costs more to run that inter-city fiber due to the longer haul, but the cost of inter-city fiber is a comparatively small portion of the overall cost of providing service (especially DSL service, where an individual DSLAM can service a maximum of 48 customers, and can cost upwards of $10,000 per unit, depending on the make/model in use -- usually closer to $2,000 per unit, and sometimes even less in rural areas where they only offer ADSL1 service). When you consider that a single inter-city fiber run can service half a million people or more and only needs to be installed once (much lower fail rate than DSLAMs), it's a comparatively small part of the cost.
And for *really* rural areas, where running fiber is not an option, they can still service the area using a satellite uplink. In fact, in some northern communities in Canada, that's exactly what they *are* doing.
The population density argument doesn't fly for landline services. For something like cellular service, absolutely. It makes perfect sense, because there *are* huge tracts of uninhabited land where they need to provide service... in some parts of the country there's 100km of wheat fields between settlements, but they still have to cover it in case somebody needs to call an ambulance or a tow truck. But for wireline services, it's a red herring.
And how does it compare to the US when you discount the huge tracts of largely unpopulated deserts and sparsely populated farming land in the US?
About the same. The population density in Toronto is about the same as the population density in Los Angeles or New York. NYC and LA are larger cities than TO, but when you look at the land area they cover, they're about the same. Cities don't magically become twice as densely populated when you cross the 49th, it's just that there's more cities in the US, and particularly, more megacities like NY, LA, or Chicago.
Oh and Rogers does have a 250 GB/month plan ($100/month) and 120 and 150 GB plans. Which are overall reasonable plans on capacity and speed, terrible on price, but well, that's the price we pay for living in a large country slightly larger than the US but with the population of california.
*shrugs* I pay $42/mo for 12meg service with a 300GB cap from TekSavvy... Rogers doesn't win the game there.
Also, the "population density" argument is a false argument... yes, the total population is only about 35 million in the 2nd largest country in the world, giving one of the lowest aggregate population densities in the world, but the bulk of the population in this country is within 100km of the US border. When you discount the huge tracts of largely unpopulated arctic and tundra, Canada's population density is actually about equal to the US.
I'm pretty sure that's what the competition is called in the US... they don't count their video/vod streams against your monthly data cap either, do they?
I know that their competing services offered north of the border don't count... you'd blow through the monthly cap in less than a day if it did. So how is this any different? They're offering a VOD service and saying it doesn't count against your monthly cap.
the missing adverb that would have made what I said mean what you interpreted it to mean was "directly". all I said was that there was a relationship, and that it was loosely "the bigger the star, the faster it blows up".
thank you for expounding on the nature of that relationship, but it's not exactly germane to the point, which is that it's plausible that big stars formed and blew up in the universe's infancy, but more likely that the planets are trapped planets and much younger than the star.
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't there, so I have no real opinion on the whole thing other than to say, "I do hope they figure out what really happened so we can put it all to rest." There are important, unanswered questions about what happened and both theories seem entirely plausible to me.
The 911 calls clearly show that Zimmerman pursued Martin after having been told not to, and Martin was found to have had no weapons of any kind on his person. Neither of those facts have been disputed by any version of events that I've heard. Where's the doubt and unanswered questions for you?
Quite honestly, it doesn't matter if Martin beat the crap out of Zimmerman before he was shot. Zimmerman was an armed man following him as he was trying to go about his daily business. In the same situation, I would have done the same. *that* is the self defense in this situation. If there was an altercation before Martin was shot, it was because Martin was trying to defend himself against Zimmerman. It's not relevant to the fact that Zimmerman followed him after having been told not to, and that as a direct result of that, Martin was killed. Whether it's manslaughter or premeditated may be in question, but there should be no doubt at all that Martin was murdered.
While I don't like turning this into a racial thing, the unfortunate reality is that if Martin was a 17-year old white girl, there wouldn't be any doubt whether Zimmerman was a murderer. Unfortunately, his victim was a 17-year old black boy. That, alone, is enough in the minds of some people to cast doubt on whether it was murder or self defense, and it makes me sick to my stomach. That kid did not have to die, and he is being denied justice by a police force that refuses to arrest and charge his killer.
Unfortunately, the racial tensions that are coming out of the woodwork over this one are exactly the reason that Martin was killed in the first place: in the US, the schism between Blacks and Whites was never resolved. It was put on the back burner and allowed to fester while on the surface people pretended it was done with. As long as there continues to exist a double standard, it can never be resolved properly.
The US is not alone in this... there's similar problems in other countries... look at how France is treating the Muslims (well, the US is doing it, too). Look at how "witches" are being treated in Africa and India. Look at how the first nations population is grossly over-represented in Canadian prisons. The world has a lot of problems. My only hope (aside from justice for Martin) is that it will open a dialogue and people will realise that the colour of your skin is not an indicator of what you will do with your life. Sadly, I think that realisation is generations away in parts of the US. (and yes, it took generations in other parts of the world, but we had a head start... in the British Empire, for example, slavery was officially abolished in 1833, but was largely gone already by 1797 and had been ruled in 1772 that Slavery was not legal in England itself, only the colonies... the beginnings of desegregation in England go back to a 1569 report, which declared that "England [was] too pure an air for a slave to breathe in". So we've had a bit of a head start.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2hS_LhslTw&feature=related
1944 - Too soon. 1967 (when it was written), not too soon.
History softens the blow for certain types of events, to the point where it's not considered bad taste to make a joke about it. While tragic events are still fresh in memory, they need to be treated with a certain amount of dignity and respect. It's about social decorum... while that's a construct, it's one that still has value in social interactions.
BTW, with this particular example, does Godwin's law say I lose?
In order to be that fast, they need to be small. I'm fairly sure that a phalanx would have no problem hitting one, and because of their size, wouldn't have a hard time sinking them. Since phalanxes can already target sea-level cruise missiles like the exocet, it isn't much of a stretch to be able to sink such a high speed boat.
It would certainly be difficult to hit with traditional artillery, or the big sea guns. Even smaller sea guns would have a hard time hitting something that was moving fast enough. But a 4500 round per minute gatling gun controlled by a radar system designed to hit *much* faster moving targets should make quick work of what's essentially a speedboat with a gun.
Fortunately, Chrome is an option.
Unfortunately, there's no other option. Even Chromium doesn't have native Flash support on Linux (about half of the videos on Youtube will gak saying that you support for the video format requested).
About half of youtube works without Flash installed. Other video sites, not so much... blip.tv (which is the other one I use fairly regularly) has actually discontinued their html5 support in favour of going 100% flash.
Ultimately, my choice was between installing Flash and using the browser of my choice, or installing Chrome for Linux. I went with flash, but I am not happy with the decision. It's sort of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
I looked into the TMobile deal and yes, I could go that way but I would only get Edge speed for data.
What do you actually use data for? If it's relatively low usage (and sounds like it is, considering that you've rolled over 1GB by buying it in 500MB packs), then you may not ever notice the difference by switching the EDGE instead of 3G. You wouldn't be able to watch live YouTube video, but for stuff like surfing the web and e-mail, the 115kbit/s that you can get out of EDGE is plenty fast enough. Try turning off 3G data in your phone for a week, and see whether 2G speeds work for your usage.
There's times where getting the latest and greatest won't actually get you any advantage. This being Slashdot, I'll give you a car analogy: why buy a Ferrari if all you're doing with it is the Sunday church run?
If I were in the US, I'd seriously consider the $30/mo TMob plan. The data would be fast enough for my usage, and it comes with unlimited text which I'm led to understand costs $20/mo in and of itself with most US carriers. (which is ridiculous, unlimited global text costs me $5/mo (CAD) with my carrier, and they don't have an option to add domestic only texting).
Buying the helicopters is not the only cost in the mix. They have to be fueled, maintained, piloted, housed, etc for who knows how long. The purchase cost plus the penalties may still have been less than the purchase cost plus the operating costs, which would make it cost effective to cancel. (I have no idea if this is true or not, I'm just throwing the possibility out there.)
Only if we didn't need helicopters. :)
We still use the Sea Kings for SAR, among other uses. So rather than having newer helicopters that were more reliable, more fuel efficient, and easier to get parts for, we keep a fleet of ancient helicopters in the sky, because the conservatives cancelled a contract that was signed by the liberals. And in so doing, they paid cancellation fees that were more expensive than buying the silly helicopters would have been in the first place. :)
And I agree with you on nuclear subs. We should be building our own, not buying 2nd hand subs that had been decommissioned by the Brits. There was a time when we had the best shipyards in the world, and I think if we're going to be buying ships, we should be putting that money into our own economy, not somebody else's.
As I type this, I have a 1976 and a 1967 penny in my wallet.
Actually, I got an dove penny in my change yesterday. Those things were circulated for Canada's centennial, in 1967. That's 45 years in circulation.
I suspect that merchants will adjust their pricing to remove the pennies from the pricing, and that they will probably end up increasing their prices to counter the increased merchant fees they will be paying with more customers paying with plastic. In the end, I think this move will cost the economy far more than $11m.
It was the cons who cancelled the helicopters, and it's worth pointing out that the penalties for cancelling that contract were higher than it would have cost to actually buy the damned helicopters.
I do agree, however, that we got royally ripped off on the submarines.
So in a little over a month there will be no coins circulating that is worth less than 1 Norwegian krone... but you know what? The wast majority of Norwegians pay by card anyhow, and the prices has not changed with the smaller coins going away. If you pay by card, you pay the exact amount. If you pay cash, it is rounded up or down to the nearest coin-value.
That's the problem, and my biggest problem with this boneheaded move...
1. Not everybody has access to a card.
2. Unless you keep a certain minimum balance in the bank, or pay a monthly fee, you get hit with a service charge every time you use your card in Canada
3. The merchant gets hit with a service charge every time anyway.
4. (and my main personal concern with it) it's harder to budget when you're paying with plastic, because the money is not tangible.
I have quite happily been using folding money for small expenses for a while. It's much easier to budget if I take $100 cash out of the bank every payday, and tell myself that's my whatever money, and when it's gone it's gone. If they force me to start using a card for that, I will have to actually open a new bank account or buy a prepaid visa specifically so that I can have a card with separate funds from the money I use for groceries, gas, the rent, etc.. And yes, this would force me to use a card, because there's no way "rounding to the nearest $0.05" will work out in my favour.
This, of course, will mean that the merchants have to eat the increased costs of running a merchant terminal, and decreased margins, which means that it will increase the costs for everybody. The price of a cup of coffee will go up because of this.
One of the features on paper is the ability to run Android apps natively....
Unless they've scrapped that feature, in which case they're boned.
"How many piercings or tattoos do you have?" Apparently, any is grounds for termination at some places.
Well, I have some friends who work for Starbucks, and apparently corporate policy is not to have visible tattoos. None of them seem to pay attention to it. I can see it being important in a customer-facing role, wanting to present a clean-cut image, but if you're never face to face with customers, then who cares?
"How fast can you get to work from your place at both wee hours of the morning as well as rush hour?" The place graded people on a tier system -- people who were lower tiers were people who were not in the center of town or had to commute through a main, overcrowded highway.
That's just asinine. If it takes me an hour to get to work in the morning, then I leave an hour early. Not hiring me because of that is silly.
"What kind of car do you drive?" I've had two places where they considered the choice of vehicle as part of the hiring process. One place viewed anyone driving anything but a hybrid subcompact as contemptible, and anathema to their "green" image. Another place viewed anything but European sedans as "too pedestrian for our parking lot." I even overheard the interviewer saying, "hire the BMW guy, beemer drivers have organizational skills."
Impressive. My understanding was always that BMW drivers were assholes, on the whole. Especially if it's a black 5-series.
"Do you pack?" Having a concealed carry will help you get a job at some places because it means that you already went through some criminal screening.
See, personally, I would deliberately not hire somebody who carries a concealed weapon. There's a chance they may bring it to work, and that is a bad thing.
The best one was a question/statement: "Do you have a CISSP or a TS/SCI clearance? If not, GTFO. We don't hire garbage who can't prove themselves."
Not sure how things work in the states, but around here, a company needs to put you forward for a TS clearance. You can't just get one as an individual. Sounds more to me like they're cheap, and don't want to pay for you to get the clearance when they can get somebody else to pay for it instead. It costs money and time for them to have you do the paperwork and submit it.
"service guarantees citizenship!" (Starship Troopers)
The Romans beat them to it.
Half an hour? You're doing it wrong.
You can install Bodhi from a thumb drive in about 10 minutes. There's even a video floating around Youtube of somebody installing it in a virtual machine in less than 10 minutes, from first boot to working installed desktop. When I installed it on my Dell ultraportable, everything worked out of the box, no configuration needed. (though to be fair, the Dell came with Ubuntu preinstalled, so it's hardly surprising)
Ubuntu can be done just about as quickly, in my experience. As long as you have a reasonably fast optical drive or are installing from a good quality thumb drive.
fiscal conservative social liberals are employing a non-optimal strategy.
I think that's at least in part because your Republican party is winning a propaganda war. They're spending gobs and gobs of cash trying to convince people that they're the fiscally responsible ones, and that the Democrats are the ones pissing away money. (irony, much?). When you look at the numbers, it's actually been the inverse: the deficit has consistently increased year over year under Republican presidents, and decreased under Democrats.
Unfortunately, however, they are spending more money trying to propagate the myth that they're the ones saving money, and people are buying into it. Personally, I don't see how the idea of fiscal responsibility is incompatible with progressive social ideals.
In fact, if I were to tell you where I stood on social matters, most Americans would probably call me a communist.... I believe that the justice system should be focused on mending recidivism rates, and that this means spending money on education and apprenticeship programs for offenders to equip them with the skills they need to find a productive job upon their release. I also think that this means that education on the whole should be a main target for money. I believe in publicly accessible health care, because I know that early detection of health problems means that they're *far* cheaper to treat in the long run. I believe in social welfare programs in general, because while there's some people who abuse them, society as a whole benefits from not letting people fall through the cracks. I believe that we should be taxing bad behaviours (environmental practices), and rewarding good behaviours (subsidizing solar installations, for example). I believe that these sorts of environmental rules should extend in to other areas of industry as well... make it too expensive to run your business badly, and business will stop doing things badly (regulated but mostly free market). And I believe that the tax rates on the wealthy and corporations should be set at a level they can bear... there's no excuse for a corporation to be able to post a $1bn profit for a year when they've used tax loopholes to not pay a dime in corporate income taxes (again, sustainable market growth, but make sure that the corporations contribute their fair share to the economy). All of these ideas are very socialist... enough that McCarthy would have called me a communist sympathizer, but I also believe, quite firmly, that the government should never be allowed to run deficit spending, unless it's extenuating circumstances (such as an economic crash), and that for such circumstances, it should require a 2/3 majority in all levels of government to pass.
If I were in the US, I'd probably be trying to make a difference in the Democrat party.... as it is, I actually belong to the Green party in this country, and have been quite active in trying to get certain policies set.... the Greens are, in most of the world, socially liberal while being fiscally conservative... a very good compromise, IMO. :)
It's also the downfall of a 2-party system. In the rest of the world, with multi-party democracies, the fiscal conservative social liberals (like me) can join or found their own party and have a reasonable chance of getting in. (and in fact, have gotten in in several countries in Europe)
They're not underwater graveyards, so yes, they can be salvaged. I'm not aware of anywhere within US territorial waters that is that deep (and in fact, I think the cutoff for territorial waters is 2,500m depth), so yes. I think you're right, they are legally up for grabs for anybody who can salvage them.
I'd be more concerned about the environmental impact. Yes, it's *very* deep, but wildlife has a tendency to accumulate around features on the ocean floor, and it's quite possible that these rocket engines have become artificial reefs. Beyond that, great steps have to be taken in preserving things that have been salvaged from the bottom of the ocean, because the chemistry changes. Just look at the steps they took to preserve the Mary Rose. I have no doubt of the historical significance of these (I'd add Mercury 3, and Apollo 8, 11, and 13 to the list), but I question whether it's a good idea to try to raise them.
that's a bit odd.... not surprising, but odd.
Bell Canada's "FibeTV" service is essentially the same technology as UVerse. It's IPTV, with the IPTV traffic separated onto a 2nd VLAN from the Internet traffic over DSL, and doesn't count against your monthly cap. Their HD streams are encoded at 5.5mbit, which makes this a good thing: 3 HD streams at the same time = 16.5mbit/s of data use, times 1 hour = 59400 million bits. divide by 8 = 7.425GByte of data transferred. Multiply that 3h of TV watching by 30 days in a month, and you're at 222.75GB of data, just for watching what would be considered an "average" amount of TV in a month.
Unless ATT's using a stupidly low bitrate for their HD streams, then there's no way the average user could watch TV without going over the 250GB/mo cap.
I don't think they are stupid at all... the per-user costs do go up as the population density goes down, all other things being equal.
Yes, but the point is that you don't need wireline telephone/DSL service to an uninhabited island north of the 60th parallel. Canada has a *huge* land area, but most of that land area is uninhabited, and the actual population distribution is pretty much the same as any other country: clumps of population with empty space between. Sure the fiber run from Calgary to Edmonton is longer than the fiber run from New York City to Jersey City, but you don't need to provide service to most of that empty space. It costs more to run that inter-city fiber due to the longer haul, but the cost of inter-city fiber is a comparatively small portion of the overall cost of providing service (especially DSL service, where an individual DSLAM can service a maximum of 48 customers, and can cost upwards of $10,000 per unit, depending on the make/model in use -- usually closer to $2,000 per unit, and sometimes even less in rural areas where they only offer ADSL1 service). When you consider that a single inter-city fiber run can service half a million people or more and only needs to be installed once (much lower fail rate than DSLAMs), it's a comparatively small part of the cost.
And for *really* rural areas, where running fiber is not an option, they can still service the area using a satellite uplink. In fact, in some northern communities in Canada, that's exactly what they *are* doing.
The population density argument doesn't fly for landline services. For something like cellular service, absolutely. It makes perfect sense, because there *are* huge tracts of uninhabited land where they need to provide service... in some parts of the country there's 100km of wheat fields between settlements, but they still have to cover it in case somebody needs to call an ambulance or a tow truck. But for wireline services, it's a red herring.
And how does it compare to the US when you discount the huge tracts of largely unpopulated deserts and sparsely populated farming land in the US?
About the same. The population density in Toronto is about the same as the population density in Los Angeles or New York. NYC and LA are larger cities than TO, but when you look at the land area they cover, they're about the same. Cities don't magically become twice as densely populated when you cross the 49th, it's just that there's more cities in the US, and particularly, more megacities like NY, LA, or Chicago.
Oh and Rogers does have a 250 GB/month plan ($100/month) and 120 and 150 GB plans. Which are overall reasonable plans on capacity and speed, terrible on price, but well, that's the price we pay for living in a large country slightly larger than the US but with the population of california.
*shrugs* I pay $42/mo for 12meg service with a 300GB cap from TekSavvy... Rogers doesn't win the game there.
Also, the "population density" argument is a false argument... yes, the total population is only about 35 million in the 2nd largest country in the world, giving one of the lowest aggregate population densities in the world, but the bulk of the population in this country is within 100km of the US border. When you discount the huge tracts of largely unpopulated arctic and tundra, Canada's population density is actually about equal to the US.
oh yes, and because it's the meme of the day, "frist psot", even though this was actually the second post. must conform, you know.
I'm pretty sure that's what the competition is called in the US... they don't count their video/vod streams against your monthly data cap either, do they?
I know that their competing services offered north of the border don't count... you'd blow through the monthly cap in less than a day if it did. So how is this any different? They're offering a VOD service and saying it doesn't count against your monthly cap.
the missing adverb that would have made what I said mean what you interpreted it to mean was "directly". all I said was that there was a relationship, and that it was loosely "the bigger the star, the faster it blows up".
thank you for expounding on the nature of that relationship, but it's not exactly germane to the point, which is that it's plausible that big stars formed and blew up in the universe's infancy, but more likely that the planets are trapped planets and much younger than the star.