No offense, but I've always suspected that the biggest reason companies have irresponsible policies like the one described in the OP is because of irresponsible programming like you just described.
In order to perform collision detection, there is absolutely no reason that you couldn't track the SSN separately from the primary key on your "customers".
I'm not big on regulation, but there really should be a law preventing the usage of SSN as a PK in any data storage schema.
I can afford the ~$5000 for a new pacemaker. So too can almost-everyone.
Where do you live? And who are the people you know? Holy cow. The median household income in the US in 2007 was $50,233.00 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States). You're talking about 10% of their annual income for an unexpected expenditure.
That's HOUSEHOLD, not person. Meaning that in 10 years, 50% of the households in the US will have made $502,330 or LESS. In total, before taxes. After taxes, federal tax being 25% @ $50k, they'll have $375,000 left. In total, without spending any money on food or shelter. I won't get into the minutiae of rent and food. There's also state, local, and sales tax to consider in most places. Furthermore, the rising cost of fuel has hamstrung most workers and businesses.
I'll stop, as its clear that the "average" American worker can't afford to "pay cash" for any significant medical procedure.
We should also acknowledge the predestined endpoint of human life - death. No matter how rich you are, or how much money the government gives you, you can not live forever.
I'm not sure what to say to that. It almost sounds like you're arguing that, since poor people can't afford health care, we should just let them die. I won't entertain the argument. It's been had before, in the late 19th Century, it was called Social Darwinism. You're welcome to look it up yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism. Abstract: It's bullshit and evil.
For the record, my wealthy "independent" friend, the only one proposing a Britian/Canadian healthcare system for the US was Hillary Clinton. It was a terrible idea for all the points you made. Obama essentially proposes premium subsidies and a government insurance program for all citizens. To prevent another medicaid, he proposes forcing private insurers to negotiate lower costs with doctors and hospitals. No one wants to make you wait in line for 6 months for a pacemaker. Nor does anyone want to stop you from paying cash if you're willing and able.
Please, look up some facts before repeating talking points from stump speeches.
PS: Your estimates are wrong about pacemakers. The device costs $5000. It costs about $35,000 after its actually implanted.
I pay $0 on cable, $180 on internet, and I haven't bought a new computer in six years. As a result of this self-sacrifice, I have saved 1/2 a million in just five years, and I can EASILY afford a doctor's visit at any of a hundred hospitals within driving distance.
Given your estimates, you'd have saved $18,000 in 5 years. Your ability to save $500,000 in five years is helped by your frugality, but your frugality is certainly not the reason for your ability to save. Your above average income is.
If you SAVED your money, instead of wasting it on non-important trivia, you wouldn't have to hold your hand out. You'd be able to pay your own bills.
Yea, that's a really arrogant statement coming from someone who obviously is able to make $100,000+/year. I grew up the only son of a Bartender(mother) and a non-Union(Unions are evil through, right?) Bricklayer(father). Obviously, we did not have health insurance. I distinctly remember weeks of ramen and huge pots of homemade soup after I came down with strep throat, because the doctor's appointment and prescribed amoxicillian depleted the family budget for the month. This draconian cost cutting would happen anytime I got sick a as child. Can you even imagine how that made a young sick child feel? To know that his illness is essentially bankrupting the family?
Its not about "raiding" your wallet. Its about the acknowledging the value of human life and human dignity. Entitlement programs aren't there to keep fat rednecks on their couches in trailer parks. Yes, those people exist, and yes they do take advantage of government programs. But that is simply part of the cost. It can be mitigated with good regulation, and it can be controlled with good planning and thoughtful program design. But these programs are there there for people like my parents. Who built your house, served your beer, and who the rest of the world has to stand on top of to be "wealthy".
Because you can't on the top of the pile without standing on all the people underneath.
And to the GP: Don't worry. Obama's proposals will let you keep your employer coverage you covet. So you don't have to stand in line with the "Rabble".
One last thing, before you dismiss me as a poor parasite who wants to take your money away too. I'm a Sr. Software Engineer at a major development house, and I also run a consulting company. I will clear over $200,000 this year. I will pay for these programs too -- probably more than you will.
. i don't think the average user wants all/a portion of his music collection on his phone anyway
This is something I've never understood. Hasn't history taught us anything? There is always a vocal minority screaming that they don't want an "all-in-one" device. They first spoke up when the Smartphones were first coming out, the original Treos and Blackberry's. Most arguments were along the lines of, "the UI is too confusing", "the battery life sucks", "I can carry a cellphone and a pager and a PDA, my pockets are ENORMOUS", etc.
However, what they really mean is that they don't want a "poorly designed all-in-one device". That's a non-argument though, because it's true of ANY product. Of course we want it to be designed well.
Back to music though, of course people want their phones to have all their music. How great would that be? One less thing to carry. The trick is doing it without making the phone bigger/shorter battery/grossly more expensive. Do that, and it'll sell like hotcakes. Well, as long as its branded and marketed with an "i" in the beginning of its name.
Why is that? You're assuming that a company has only one domain, whereas they have hundreds/thousands of paperclips?
There are currently, roughly, 65 Million registered domains. A 7% increase in the cost of those domains implies that Verisign is going to rake in an extra $4.5 million per year. Where, exactly, do you think that money is going to come from?
Listen, I'm not arguing that we're all going to be out on the street next year because of an increase like this. I'm just saying its not "just an extra $0.42, who cares", like all the other posts had said.
I knew I was exaggerating; I admitted it in my post. It still goes to the point though, that a 7% raise in the cost of a such a base unit of a economy has fair and wide-reaching effects.
Wow, I think we all need to go back to Economics 101.
To address all the quotes like this one:
'ripoff' because that makes it sound like $6 would break you. Claiming that because its $0.42, and that's not a lot unless we're a big company, so we shouldn't care. That's just downright wrong and foolish.
Remember, domain names are the base unit of property on the internet. The blocks on which EVERYTHING rests. Therefore, increasing costs there causes that cost to trickle down to EVERYTHING else. Imagine that since the prices are going up 7%, that EVERYTHING being sold or offered via the web went up 7%.
Of course, that's hyperbole, but you get the idea. Remember, you do buy goods and services from those big companies, and they have to pass down their costs to their consumers, ie: you.
Where would your outrage be then? Pretty damn loud, I think.
Assuming you're talking about doing a complete format, ie: zeroing all the bits, and not just whacking the file directory, then a "format" still only implies that you're writing all the sectors once per format.
27 years * 365 days * 10 = 98550 writes = ~100,000 writes
That's not a lot. Consider if there's a temp directory that is being written to 1/second. There's 86,000 seconds in a day. That sector will be dead in just over 1 day.
In the end though, "10 formats a day for 27 years" is a meaningless statistic. As several people have pointed out, there are controllers switching the frequently written sectors around. I didn't read the Samsung site, nor do I care to. It just struck me as a geek version of the "5000 song MP3 player" marketing lingo we hear all too often.
Not to be an ass, but have you ever read a law in its original form?
I'd hardly call it english. Legalise really is its own form of code.
I think the GP's point stands, it'd be useful to have some sort of independent QA organization that would validate a bill against its intent.
Of course, then again, I think Pork should be illegal as well. Putting a $100 million into a defense spending bill for Senator Tube's state to build a bridge to an island of 50 people should get someone hung.
OpenOffice is not in great use across the global range of companies
True, but neither are Macs, and I doubt you'd knock a college student for using one of those. However, this example is even more poignant, OpenOffice clones the UI of MS Office fairly closely. Therefore, skills learned in OO will transport nicely to MS Office.
Using free software, therefore, may or may not be the best solution in a University setting.
Well then, glad that's settled. A binary decision is decidedly either true or false. Your argument must've truly was astounding, you haven't even persuaded yourself to your line of thinking (is that even possible?).
Solar cells will come down in price too, of course, and presumably get more efficient.
Yea, if only they could manage that! We could have a spirited argument on Slashdot article about it!
vandals could easily damage your solar cells
Well, when they're making them more efficent (sometime in the future, obviously), they could also work on making them indestructible as well! Like my windows.
They'd also become less efficient over time and likely just need repair from general aging problems, and in the end you're probably losing more money than by using national power.
Yes! Obviously they'll go bad, because everything has a short lifespan....ya know, like my house's foundation. It's only got 6 months left!
Ok, ok, enough of that. Seriously though. Did you read the SUMMARY? Did it even occur that maybe you should look up the lifespan of a solar panel before MAKING UP statistics? (40+ years, according to a cursory Google Search for "solar panel lifespan"
As the GP said, you CAN make multiple identities. For example, make a "blog-posting" account, and use it to Authenticate to all the blogs in which you want to post. Use it to login to other "annoyance" login websites.
Then make a seperate one for your bank, your credit cards, etc.
The beauty of this system is that its a superclass of the current model -- it has all the capabilities of the established model, plus some more functionality.
I'm going to respond to a lot of things I see scattered throughout this thread, not just in the parent post. Let's start with "reverse engineering is illegal"
In the United States, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act exempts from the circumvention ban some acts of reverse engineering aimed at interoperability of file formats and protocols, but judges in key cases have ignored this law, since it is acceptable to circumvent restrictions for use, but not for access.[4] Aside from restrictions on circumvention, reverse engineering of software is protected in the U.S. by the fair use exception in copyright law. [5]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering/
No, it's not. Not in the US anyway, the DMCA actually leaves a loophole. That's that.
Now, can we please stop slinging around "State" like 1960's hippies saying "The Man"? It sounds idiotic. You need the state, whether you want to admit it or not. If you don't think you need the "State", go take a year long hiatus in a central African country. Once you see bands of militia marauding around, murdering and raping at will , with absolutely no resistance from anyone, come back and talk about how much we don't need the "State".
That is not FUD; that is very real. The human animal is a frightening creature, for it is capable of incredible acts of justification, especially when operating as part of a group. Almost any horrifying act can be justified, in the absence of rational discourse.
The State's entire existence is rooted solely in a simple premise: we give up freedom, in exchange for protection from each other, from nature, from everything. In this case, the "State" is protecting its people from a corporation's economic abuse. Fine, do away with government, maybe the market would shake out the monopolies somehow, but exactly what interest would a market entity have in keeping you alive, when the guy down the street decides its in his best interest to smash your skull in and take your TV? Certainly not your money, the guy down the street has it now, and can spend it just as easily as you could have. And certainly not your life, any two morons with 2 minutes of free time can produce more of that.
Alright, so we need the "State". Back to Microsoft, they are not propped up by any sort of governmental conspiracy that keeps them as the market leader. They hold that distinction by producing a good product.
Now, scoff all you want, mod me down to, but the Windows desktop, until maybe a few years ago, was the ONLY operating system viable for a "desktop" computer. Ubuntu Linux and OSX are relative newcomers to the party, and they are making good inroads so far, but lets not pretend that Microsoft is successful because they made an awful product that was only profitable because of government subsidies. Windows was (still is?) the be all end of Desktop operating systems for the average user, and Microsoft did earn that distinction.
However, and here's the rub, as the market leader, there MUST be some sort of check on their power. As we've seen, they are able to employ all sorts of nefarious means to keep their power. It's like any other monarchy, the power of the monarch must be checked, otherwise you end up with an autocratic despot only interested in increasing his own power, the people be damned.
They are not being fined to "pad" the EU's pockets. That is an absolutely absurd notion, since any business Microsoft does in their territory, is subject to tax. The EU gets their cut, fine or no fine.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if you're being modded funny for implying that Java is a knockoff of .NET, because that is pretty funny. Or sad...
No offense, but I've always suspected that the biggest reason companies have irresponsible policies like the one described in the OP is because of irresponsible programming like you just described.
In order to perform collision detection, there is absolutely no reason that you couldn't track the SSN separately from the primary key on your "customers".
I'm not big on regulation, but there really should be a law preventing the usage of SSN as a PK in any data storage schema.
I can afford the ~$5000 for a new pacemaker. So too can almost-everyone.
Where do you live? And who are the people you know? Holy cow. The median household income in the US in 2007 was $50,233.00 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States). You're talking about 10% of their annual income for an unexpected expenditure.
That's HOUSEHOLD, not person. Meaning that in 10 years, 50% of the households in the US will have made $502,330 or LESS. In total, before taxes. After taxes, federal tax being 25% @ $50k, they'll have $375,000 left. In total, without spending any money on food or shelter. I won't get into the minutiae of rent and food. There's also state, local, and sales tax to consider in most places. Furthermore, the rising cost of fuel has hamstrung most workers and businesses.
I'll stop, as its clear that the "average" American worker can't afford to "pay cash" for any significant medical procedure.
We should also acknowledge the predestined endpoint of human life - death. No matter how rich you are, or how much money the government gives you, you can not live forever.
I'm not sure what to say to that. It almost sounds like you're arguing that, since poor people can't afford health care, we should just let them die. I won't entertain the argument. It's been had before, in the late 19th Century, it was called Social Darwinism. You're welcome to look it up yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism. Abstract: It's bullshit and evil.
For the record, my wealthy "independent" friend, the only one proposing a Britian/Canadian healthcare system for the US was Hillary Clinton. It was a terrible idea for all the points you made. Obama essentially proposes premium subsidies and a government insurance program for all citizens. To prevent another medicaid, he proposes forcing private insurers to negotiate lower costs with doctors and hospitals. No one wants to make you wait in line for 6 months for a pacemaker. Nor does anyone want to stop you from paying cash if you're willing and able.
Please, look up some facts before repeating talking points from stump speeches.
PS: Your estimates are wrong about pacemakers. The device costs $5000. It costs about $35,000 after its actually implanted.
I pay $0 on cable, $180 on internet, and I haven't bought a new computer in six years. As a result of this self-sacrifice, I have saved 1/2 a million in just five years, and I can EASILY afford a doctor's visit at any of a hundred hospitals within driving distance.
Given your estimates, you'd have saved $18,000 in 5 years. Your ability to save $500,000 in five years is helped by your frugality, but your frugality is certainly not the reason for your ability to save. Your above average income is.
If you SAVED your money, instead of wasting it on non-important trivia, you wouldn't have to hold your hand out. You'd be able to pay your own bills.
Yea, that's a really arrogant statement coming from someone who obviously is able to make $100,000+/year. I grew up the only son of a Bartender(mother) and a non-Union(Unions are evil through, right?) Bricklayer(father). Obviously, we did not have health insurance. I distinctly remember weeks of ramen and huge pots of homemade soup after I came down with strep throat, because the doctor's appointment and prescribed amoxicillian depleted the family budget for the month. This draconian cost cutting would happen anytime I got sick a as child. Can you even imagine how that made a young sick child feel? To know that his illness is essentially bankrupting the family?
Its not about "raiding" your wallet. Its about the acknowledging the value of human life and human dignity. Entitlement programs aren't there to keep fat rednecks on their couches in trailer parks. Yes, those people exist, and yes they do take advantage of government programs. But that is simply part of the cost. It can be mitigated with good regulation, and it can be controlled with good planning and thoughtful program design. But these programs are there there for people like my parents. Who built your house, served your beer, and who the rest of the world has to stand on top of to be "wealthy".
Because you can't on the top of the pile without standing on all the people underneath.
And to the GP: Don't worry. Obama's proposals will let you keep your employer coverage you covet. So you don't have to stand in line with the "Rabble".
One last thing, before you dismiss me as a poor parasite who wants to take your money away too. I'm a Sr. Software Engineer at a major development house, and I also run a consulting company. I will clear over $200,000 this year. I will pay for these programs too -- probably more than you will.
Well, to be fair, even MS is playing with OSS a little. Albiet in a very Microsofty way, they are releasing all the source-code for the .NET Framework:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/03/releasing-the-source-code-for-the-net-framework-libraries.aspx/
Right, and no one will ever need more than 640 kb of RAM.
Come on, look around, where are you? You're expected to have a better vision of technology here.
One day, there will be a machine that can fly as well, and better than, humans. Hell, the Predator UAV's already fly in bad weather.
Its a question of WHEN not IF.
Oh man, tell me someone else knows what he's referencing. I'm on 24, I can't POSSIBLY be THAT old:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0089886/
No no no.....
You're making the same mistake as TFA.
There's a declining net aggregate utility in owning share in the company. A sharply declining one too.
The first 5% might cost them $300 million or whatever, the next 5% significantly less, etc.
Its not a linear function, and therefore, you can't make the leap to "Facebook is worth $10 billion, and each user $300"
Now, that said, I agree no matter what, its still wildly overpriced.
This is something I've never understood. Hasn't history taught us anything? There is always a vocal minority screaming that they don't want an "all-in-one" device. They first spoke up when the Smartphones were first coming out, the original Treos and Blackberry's. Most arguments were along the lines of, "the UI is too confusing", "the battery life sucks", "I can carry a cellphone and a pager and a PDA, my pockets are ENORMOUS", etc.
However, what they really mean is that they don't want a "poorly designed all-in-one device". That's a non-argument though, because it's true of ANY product. Of course we want it to be designed well.
Back to music though, of course people want their phones to have all their music. How great would that be? One less thing to carry. The trick is doing it without making the phone bigger/shorter battery/grossly more expensive. Do that, and it'll sell like hotcakes. Well, as long as its branded and marketed with an "i" in the beginning of its name.
Why is that? You're assuming that a company has only one domain, whereas they have hundreds/thousands of paperclips?
There are currently, roughly, 65 Million registered domains. A 7% increase in the cost of those domains implies that Verisign is going to rake in an extra $4.5 million per year. Where, exactly, do you think that money is going to come from?
Listen, I'm not arguing that we're all going to be out on the street next year because of an increase like this. I'm just saying its not "just an extra $0.42, who cares", like all the other posts had said.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/hyperbole/
I knew I was exaggerating; I admitted it in my post. It still goes to the point though, that a 7% raise in the cost of a such a base unit of a economy has fair and wide-reaching effects.
To address all the quotes like this one: 'ripoff' because that makes it sound like $6 would break you. Claiming that because its $0.42, and that's not a lot unless we're a big company, so we shouldn't care. That's just downright wrong and foolish.
Remember, domain names are the base unit of property on the internet. The blocks on which EVERYTHING rests. Therefore, increasing costs there causes that cost to trickle down to EVERYTHING else. Imagine that since the prices are going up 7%, that EVERYTHING being sold or offered via the web went up 7%.
Of course, that's hyperbole, but you get the idea. Remember, you do buy goods and services from those big companies, and they have to pass down their costs to their consumers, ie: you.
Where would your outrage be then? Pretty damn loud, I think.
RTFA he linked to:
during a time when Ireland was, even during the "potato blight", a net exporter of food.
No?
Assuming you're talking about doing a complete format, ie: zeroing all the bits, and not just whacking the file directory, then a "format" still only implies that you're writing all the sectors once per format.
27 years * 365 days * 10 = 98550 writes = ~100,000 writes
That's not a lot. Consider if there's a temp directory that is being written to 1/second. There's 86,000 seconds in a day. That sector will be dead in just over 1 day.
In the end though, "10 formats a day for 27 years" is a meaningless statistic. As several people have pointed out, there are controllers switching the frequently written sectors around. I didn't read the Samsung site, nor do I care to. It just struck me as a geek version of the "5000 song MP3 player" marketing lingo we hear all too often.
Before some computing history geek has a nerdgasm, I'll amend my comment to "1952", and the engineers of the IBM 701:
1 _intro.html/
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/701/70
I know you were being funny, but in all seriousness, its not an absurd idea.
Go back to 1950 and ask the IBM engineers if they thought that in 2007 we'd have terabyte storage systems on our desks with over 3 Ghz processors.
Remember, anything that you don't understand, is by default magic.
Yea, who would pay $400 dollars for a device that essentially performs the exact same function as a $50 portable CD player?
That's a terrible idea...
Oh, wait....http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/t humb/5/57/Ipod_sales.svg/402px-Ipod_sales.svg.png/
(Sorry for the hotlink, the link to the actual Wikipedia page was being hosed by the Slashcode)Not to be an ass, but have you ever read a law in its original form?
I'd hardly call it english. Legalise really is its own form of code.
I think the GP's point stands, it'd be useful to have some sort of independent QA organization that would validate a bill against its intent.
Of course, then again, I think Pork should be illegal as well. Putting a $100 million into a defense spending bill for Senator Tube's state to build a bridge to an island of 50 people should get someone hung.
True, but neither are Macs, and I doubt you'd knock a college student for using one of those. However, this example is even more poignant, OpenOffice clones the UI of MS Office fairly closely. Therefore, skills learned in OO will transport nicely to MS Office.
Using free software, therefore, may or may not be the best solution in a University setting.Well then, glad that's settled. A binary decision is decidedly either true or false. Your argument must've truly was astounding, you haven't even persuaded yourself to your line of thinking (is that even possible?).
You PDA has an 80 GB HDD in it?
What model is that?
Yea, if only they could manage that! We could have a spirited argument on Slashdot article about it!
vandals could easily damage your solar cellsWell, when they're making them more efficent (sometime in the future, obviously), they could also work on making them indestructible as well! Like my windows.
They'd also become less efficient over time and likely just need repair from general aging problems, and in the end you're probably losing more money than by using national power.Yes! Obviously they'll go bad, because everything has a short lifespan....ya know, like my house's foundation. It's only got 6 months left!
Ok, ok, enough of that. Seriously though. Did you read the SUMMARY? Did it even occur that maybe you should look up the lifespan of a solar panel before MAKING UP statistics? (40+ years, according to a cursory Google Search for "solar panel lifespan"
Please stop, its just painful.
As the GP said, you CAN make multiple identities. For example, make a "blog-posting" account, and use it to Authenticate to all the blogs in which you want to post. Use it to login to other "annoyance" login websites.
Then make a seperate one for your bank, your credit cards, etc.
The beauty of this system is that its a superclass of the current model -- it has all the capabilities of the established model, plus some more functionality.
I'm going to respond to a lot of things I see scattered throughout this thread, not just in the parent post. Let's start with "reverse engineering is illegal"
In the United States, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act exempts from the circumvention ban some acts of reverse engineering aimed at interoperability of file formats and protocols, but judges in key cases have ignored this law, since it is acceptable to circumvent restrictions for use, but not for access.[4] Aside from restrictions on circumvention, reverse engineering of software is protected in the U.S. by the fair use exception in copyright law. [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering/
No, it's not. Not in the US anyway, the DMCA actually leaves a loophole. That's that.
Now, can we please stop slinging around "State" like 1960's hippies saying "The Man"? It sounds idiotic. You need the state, whether you want to admit it or not. If you don't think you need the "State", go take a year long hiatus in a central African country. Once you see bands of militia marauding around, murdering and raping at will , with absolutely no resistance from anyone, come back and talk about how much we don't need the "State".
That is not FUD; that is very real. The human animal is a frightening creature, for it is capable of incredible acts of justification, especially when operating as part of a group. Almost any horrifying act can be justified, in the absence of rational discourse.
The State's entire existence is rooted solely in a simple premise: we give up freedom, in exchange for protection from each other, from nature, from everything. In this case, the "State" is protecting its people from a corporation's economic abuse. Fine, do away with government, maybe the market would shake out the monopolies somehow, but exactly what interest would a market entity have in keeping you alive, when the guy down the street decides its in his best interest to smash your skull in and take your TV? Certainly not your money, the guy down the street has it now, and can spend it just as easily as you could have. And certainly not your life, any two morons with 2 minutes of free time can produce more of that.
Alright, so we need the "State". Back to Microsoft, they are not propped up by any sort of governmental conspiracy that keeps them as the market leader. They hold that distinction by producing a good product.
Now, scoff all you want, mod me down to, but the Windows desktop, until maybe a few years ago, was the ONLY operating system viable for a "desktop" computer. Ubuntu Linux and OSX are relative newcomers to the party, and they are making good inroads so far, but lets not pretend that Microsoft is successful because they made an awful product that was only profitable because of government subsidies. Windows was (still is?) the be all end of Desktop operating systems for the average user, and Microsoft did earn that distinction.
However, and here's the rub, as the market leader, there MUST be some sort of check on their power. As we've seen, they are able to employ all sorts of nefarious means to keep their power. It's like any other monarchy, the power of the monarch must be checked, otherwise you end up with an autocratic despot only interested in increasing his own power, the people be damned.
They are not being fined to "pad" the EU's pockets. That is an absolutely absurd notion, since any business Microsoft does in their territory, is subject to tax. The EU gets their cut, fine or no fine.
Considering they do make anti-tank mines, I'm gonna say no.
It's likely heavy enough to set off an anti-tank mine too. Even if its not, I'd wager an anti-personnel mine would ruin its day.
Yea, I dunno, I call shenanigans.
By my count, your post has 832 words in it. (Alright, fine, by MS Word's count).
It was posted 1 minute after the article went up.
That's some A-mazing typing there cheif. (Or the Slashcode is broken again)