Here in northern NJ, along the train lines for commuters going into NYC, you didn't even need to have a great price to sell your house before the downturn started. Today, you can price a home for well below what it's likely worth, and that'll bring a lot of attention, but if the house doesn't show well, the seller is going to end up with a lower offer than they could otherwise get. Cleaning it up so it shows well, and setting a offer price somewhat below the approximate market value will help the seller get the best price possible.
Generally, my wife doesn't bother with traditional advertising, like newspaper listings or even multiple public open houses. Those approaches are just not worth the time and money; the internet has replaced traditional newspaper/booklet advertising, and public open houses after the first one just bring the neighbors poking around; all of the serious buyers are working with agents, and will come when no one else is around. What my wife often does do is a mass-mailing of a large format full-color postcard announcing the listing and first public open house; this goes to the entire neighborhood, her large contact list of current and previous clients, and her contact list of other agents. This kind of advertising has proven to be very effective at bringing in potential buyers, who often turn out to be friends or family of neighbors (the non-nosy ones) or past clients.
A good one does, though it might be hard to find a good agent in your area. They most likely work for a company like Re/Max, where the agents are largely independent professionals, rather than semi-employees of the brokerage. If you need assistance, my wife is part of a nationwide referral program of professionals who treat their clients as well as she does, and she'd be happy to find some good agents in your area for you. Her website is http://andreawebb.com./
Do you think "Cozy 5br 2.5 bath on 0.5 acre lot" with a few pictures adequately describes a house? I've bought a couple of properties, and I've seen a lot of houses with my wife, and I've got to say that when you're looking to buy a house (or you're looking for a house that suits your client's needs) you've got to take time to walk around, look at all the details, look out through the windows at the view, listen to the environment, and really get a feel for what it'd be like to live in that space. You just can't get that from a computer listing, and there are so many houses on the market that agents and buyers can't view them all. So, anything a listing agent can do to get other agents into your home is going to improve the chances of those agents bringing suitable buyers back to view the home, which increases your chances of getting an offer quickly.
Let me make another point about that: getting an offer quickly is crucial. I've seen the statistics and studies, and the longer a house is on the market, the lower its eventual sales price will be. People start to think that there must be something wrong with it for it to still be on the market, and once you drop the price (which you absolutely must, or you stop getting showings) you start to look desperate, and the offers you get will be made by bargain hunters and buyers who are looking to take advantage of your increasing anxiety about selling the house. Also, when you're in this situation, you're most likely either anxious to make an offer on a new home (which you can't do because you need the money from your existing home first) or you've already bought a new home, and you're paying two mortgages and tax bills.
I'm not sure what kind of "lock" she has on the information stream; everyone can view the basic information from the MLS on http://realtor.com/ and my wife is always responding to folks who come to her website asking for the more in-depth information on the MLS. Now, a few notes on this:
She prefers to work with people who are willing to sign a buyers agreement with her, because she spends a lot of time following up with the people she works with, including scanning new listings for similar homes that the clients might also be interested in, and her time is valuable and unpaid unless the client uses her to make an offer and close the deal.
A lot of the information on the MLS is fairly private for the seller, often including contact numbers and instructions about how/when/who to contact about appointments to show the property. Realtors like my wife have an ethics code about protecting this information and following the instructions, and there can be severe penalties for failing to do so. That's why the information is restricted on Realtor.com. In fact, there are three levels of MLS reports; the public one you see on Realtor.com, a client report that is for giving to potential buyers, and an agent report that shows everything.
There is also a code of ethics regarding what goes into an MLS listing which Realtors must follow; if the system were opened up to the general public, you'd get inaccurate and outright deceitful listings, with no real recourse for the MLS. Craigslist is an example of this; most of the listings are basically honest, but if you're going to buy a $500k property from a Craigslist listing, you're going to have to do a lot more due diligence to make sure the basic facts about the property are accurate.
A good agent will put in a lot more work, including fronting a lot of the preparation and marketing expenses, for a higher priced home. For example, when a house first goes on the market, there is an Open House held just for agents and brokers. Top level agents listing high-end homes will often pay a caterer hundreds of dollars for this open house, just to draw in as much attention from other agents and brokers as possible. This spreads knowledge about the house that you can't get through an online ad, and those agents are going to have your home in mind when they're thinking about the needs of their buyer clients.
You'd be surprised how many people don't get it, and how many people are happy to pay her 3% (the buyer's agent gets the other 3%, and both agents pay a big chunk of their 3% to their brokers and the IRS) to have her take care of hiring the cleaners and stagers to take care of cleaning up the house.
So you're saying that one agent's self-interest is to push the asking price as low as possible, and the other's self-interest is to push the offered price as high as possible. That sounds like conflicting interests requiring negotiation that will wind up with a price in the middle that everyone accepts, which is exactly what you want.
Now, honest agents who are working for their client's best-interests will also wind up on opposite sides, but they'll be on the same sides as their clients, unlike the dishonest agents you described. But it works out the same either way; everyone's coming from opposite directions, and have to meet in the middle on a price, which sets the fair market value for the home.
My wife is a Real Estate agent (not a broker; there's a difference) and there is a ton of work she does for her listing clients, often including spending hundreds of dollars of her own money, sometimes over a thousand, to pay for preparing the house for sale and marketing the home. I've also donated many hours of my own time ripping out old carpeting, taking down wallpaper, painting, and doing various light carpentry jobs for her clients.
Her clients also get her experience. I've seen a number of For Sale By Owner homes, and they never look as nice as my wifes listings. People just don't realize that you have to clean your home and make repairs before you try to sell it. Otherwise, it looks like run-down junk, and buyers will treat it accordingly. First impressions are everything, and you need an agent who knows what to spend money on and how much to spend, so that you get the best return on your last-minute fix-up dollar.
All of that is before the house even goes on the market. Once it's on, there are endless phone calls, viewing arrangements, and follow-ups that have to be performed; it's definitely a full-time job. Once an offer is negotiated and accepted, there's even more phone calls and work to do meeting with inspectors, dealing with lawyers, and making sure the deal doesn't fall through. It's just a steady stream of work, and if you've already got a job, you don't want to do the agent's job too.
Finally, all of the buyers know that you're not working with an agent, and since they're probably selling their home as well, they know just how much you're saving. 99% of the time they'll deduct that amount from what they would otherwise offer you, figuring that you wouldn't have gotten the money anyway, and why should you get a free ride? It can't be for your time; agents don't do anything, right?
It's amazing to me that NASA has the foresight to design such a remote update system years before the concept of a "firmware update" was ever applied to consumer technology.
As both a mechanical engineer and software engineer, this doesn't amaze me at all. It's basic "CYA", applied by engineers. They were sitting around a table one day, going over failure modes or something like that, and someone said "Hey, what if we forgot something here? Can we prove that we've covered everything that could be foreseen?". They thought about that for a minute, and being practical engineers, they said "Nope; we can't prove squat, and we probably did miss something, so lets build in something to let us deal with that contingency." And that's how the remote update system got invented. It's an obvious solution to an obvious problem, once you accept that uncertainty is a constant that needs to be dealt with rather than hidden away.
Well written HTML + CSS should be completely device independent. It should be fully navigable on a 1600x1400 monitor, a 320x240 cell phone, or a line by line screen reader. And it should be completely transparent to the user. We have the technology, designers just need to use it.
I used to believe this too, but no longer. A mobile device is used in very different ways from a full desktop, and for most websites that means a different design is justified. I'm not talking about graphic design either; that should actually be as similar as possible to maintain the branding. I'm talking about designing how the user reads, navigates, and searches the site. For a desktop, multilevel menus, navigation sidebars, and text-entry search boxes are appropriate. For a mobile, only a small subset of the navigation should be presented, and it should all be presented in a way that is easy to select without having to type anything. (Even the better mobile keyboards are a pain to use.)
Actually, designs that are appropriate for mobile devices are more similar to TV-based designs than desktop PC designs. Think about how you interact with the software running your TV or DVD player: each screen-full of menus is reasonably simple in both content and visual design, and it's easily navigated with the up/down/left/right/enter controls on your remote. That works for mobile devices too, but it's overly simplistic when you add a full keyboard and mouse to the user's input controls.
You can't do this using CSS; the different designs call for more than just a different look to each page, it calls for a different set of smaller pages with different navigation between them. You might be able to programmatically generate both designs from the same content in a CMS, if your content is appropriately granular, but you can't do it by feeding all of the content to the browser and having the browser use the CSS to figure out the design.
The problem with your argument is that insurance is all about sharing the costs; each individual can't adequately prepare for everything that might possibly happen to them, especially given the very high cost associated with many of the possibilities. So, everyone contributes a smaller amount to the insurance pool, and the people who actually need it get to make withdrawals. This lowers everyone's average costs and risks.
What you're suggesting is doing away with insurance altogether: let everyone save their money for a rainy day, and if that day comes before someone has saved enough, that person is screwed. Unless you've already got more money than you know what to do with, this approach is very risky. Unfortunately, this is also common; this is the game being played by all of the uninsured people in the US, and unfortunately most of them don't have any money to save for that rainy day.
One thing that might make eliminating (most) insurance tenable would be drastically reducing the cost of health care. I've heard recently that if every health care facility in the US were run as efficiently as the most efficient ones (with regards to paperwork overhead, keeping the quality of care the same) enough money would be saved to pay for the health costs of not just every US citizen, but every person in the world outside of China, India, and Western Europe... and that's without even transitioning to a preventative-care focus, which would probably drop costs another order of magnitude or two. With cost reductions like that, we could easily have national (global?) emergency+illness care coverage for everyone, and let individuals cover the low-cost routine checkups and OTC medicines.
I have found from years of experience that only hacks make claims about cross browser coding taking longer and not being cost effective. It doesn't take long to code properly.
I've got years of experience, I'm not a hack, and I claim that cross-browser coding takes longer.
When you code to standards, and have the experience to know what won't work in IE without hacks, you can code sites that work in all standards compliant browsers + IE.
Sure, when you've got full control over the final appearance. However, when someone else in your company is responsible for dictating the appearance, you've got to code what looks right in standards-compliant browsers, then try to make IE behave. I'm lucky; I get to target FF 2+ and IE 6+ as my minimum browsers, and I use jQuery for my javascript work, so most of my problems come from IE 6, and even they aren't too bad. It still takes longer to work this way, though.
In that case, if it works at all, it'd probably work by punching a bunch of holes in the tank and causing a leak, and then igniting the fuel that's leaked out and mixed with the air. That's still hard to do though; with a pressurized tank once the leaking starts you get a high velocity stream that carries the fuel away from your target position before it can ignite, and low density around the target point. With a non-pressurized tank, the fuel is probably a liquid stream that'll be falling onto the ground, which also takes it away from your target point and prevents the fuel/air mixture you're looking for from being creating. You'd have to start the leak, wait for a puddle to form, and then try to ignite the vapors over the puddle.
Tracers apparently pass through smaller tanks too quickly to ignite anything; they tried that on the Mythbusters show. Also, to get ignition, you need fire, fuel and oxygen. Sticking a fire suddenly into the middle of a fuel tank is just going to heat the fuel up a bit without the oxygen.
I'm sure people who are vehemently opposed to animal testing will be willing to volunteer their bodies, right?
Many would, but if you try to take them up on that, a whole other group of activists gets involved preventing that testing too.
So, you think "Ok, I just won't test my product then", and a third group of activists pounces on you. There's just no way to get ahead without paying everyone off to make them happy and quiet.
Please tell me how to install drivers for an HP PSC2510 with network support without downloading a whole CD's worth of crapware! All I want is the driver, but HP always forces me to install all kinds of total garbage software along with the drivers!
After all, the constitution doesn't prevent us from being stopped and asked questions.
You completely misunderstand the Constitution. It's not a list of our rights, it's a list of the rights we give up to the government so that the government can do the job we want it to do. The Constitution does not give the government the authority or responsibility to stop us and ask us questions without a Warrant, and so it does not have that authority and should not do it.
It seems that Warrants might be the way to make this kind of detection Constitutionally valid. The Fourth Amendment says:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
If you claim that the "place to be searched" is "any vehicle emitting an unusual amount of radiation" and that the "persons or things to be seized" are the "driver and/or passengers of such a vehicle" and "the source of the radiation, if it is not a legally allowed source for public use", that might be particular enough even though it doesn't name specific people or places. Sooner or later, though, the practice is likely to wind up tested in the Supreme Court unless the police are very light-handed about it.
I'm pretty sure Perl can do these things too, though I don't know Lisp or Scheme well enough for an apples-to-apples comparison of the capabilities.
imagine being able to write a function that, at compile time, takes and returns entire syntax trees. Or imagine if the C preprocessor let you write #defines that were full-fledged functions that had the entire language and runtime available during expansion.
Perl's BEGIN functions run during the compile phase, and let you run whatever code you like at that time. You can define new functions based on compile-time options if you like, or based on whatever else you might base it on. You also have full access to the symbol table, which is handy if you want to do something like put wrappers around other functions. Note that you don't have to do this stuff in BEGIN blocks; you have these capabilities at runtime too. If you want to introduce new keywords to the language, there are modules in CPAN that do that, and I'm pretty sure they do it by adding functions to the Core namespace. I've never had a need for this though, so I'm not certain exactly how it's done.
Imagine if C let you hook into the tokenizer and the parser! Why, you could invent your own language for solving your problem, and then solve your problem in that language!
Again, I'm pretty sure that a Perl programs ability to tap into and manipulate its own symbol tree, either that compile time or run time, gives it the ability to do this sort of thing. Or, there are also modules like Parse::RecDescent which might be better for the task.
As a visitor from New York, it took me almost a week to figure out where I could get them. There are pamphlets everywhere describing them, but none say where to buy them. There are also vending machines everywhere for buying tickets, but none offer Oyster cards, or tell you that you need to go to a window for one. I don't remember seeing ticket windows in every station; some of them must be in out-of-the way corners or were simply unmanned.
New York has "Metro Cards", which have a magnetic stripe on them. You can buy them from a vending machine with cash, refill them in the same machines as-needed, or just discard them when they're empty. They do keep logs, so if you travel around with a particular card for a while, commit a crime, and get arrested, the card that you're carrying can be used to find out where you've been getting on the subway.
Some big differences from London's Oyster cards:
Metro Cards offer a slight discount, and only for bulk purchases, over paying cash. Oyster cards offer a significant discount, forcing more people to use them. (I found that the Oyster prices were just barely reasonable, and the cash prices were insanely expensive.)
Metro Cards are easy to get; there are vending machines throughout the NY subway system. Oyster cards are difficult to purchase; there are just a few major stations with ticket windows. I imagine most Londoners get them through the mail, thereby attaching their home address to their Oyster card ID.
Metro Cards are used when you enter the subway system. Oyster cards are used when you enter and when you leave. The NY Police can figure out that if you enter the subway system at several different stations during the course of a day, that you probably got off near those stations too, but they're not really tracking you that closely. The London Police can tell exactly where and when you got on and off, and that helps them figure out which cameras you probably passed when, so they can find you on video more easily.
Metro Cards use magnetic stripes, so you have to swipe them to read them. Oyster cards use RFID, so they might be scanable in places other than the turnstyles.
But no system of representing numbers could express pi's relationship to 1 exactly without an infinite amount of information.
What is it about the symbol for pi that makes it more or less special than the symbol '3', or either of their relationships to the symbol '1'?
There's a whole lot of math you can do using the symbol for pi to stand for the ratio between a circle's radius and circumference. The fact that it doesn't look like the symbols for decimal integers doesn't hurt it any; in fact, for most of higher math most of those symbols aren't even used that much.
Also, if all you need to represent pi is two numbers and the division/ratio operator, that's hardly what I'd call an 'infinite amount of information'.
For the vast majority of human history, the only electromagnetic fields of significance other than those from astronomical sources were electrical storms and magnetite deposits. The former are short-lived and probably don't have much effect; the latter might have a significant effect. Today, we're surrounded by man-made electromagnetic fields from the moment we're conceived. These might completely overwhelm the traditional influences that astrology used to predict, and they might be having an impact on us which we haven't linked back to the fields yet.
Astrology is an 'observational' science; it's a holdover from a period when all science involved observing and recording correlations, with no understanding of the physical phenomena that caused the effects. Traditional folk medicine is the same kind of science; a lot of trial and error helped healers figure out which plants have medicinal properties, how to use them, and what they're good for, with no understanding of chemistry, pharmacology, or how the body works.
'Real' astrologists don't just consider the day of the year you were born; they consider the year, and work up a full model of what was going on in the sky at that time. If there's any truth here, knowing the specific moment of your birth and where it occurred probably captures detailed data about astronomical events during your whole gestation, including where your gestation falls in short and long-term solar cycles. The position of Jupiter might not actually matter, and may just help identify the specific point in a long-term solar cycle, and that is what's really important: how much radiation was the sun generating while you were an embryo, and based on your latitude and the time of year, how much of it were you exposed to?
These cycles get really long; our solar system bounces up and down through the center of our galactic arm as it goes around the galactic center. We're almost certainly exposed to different amounts and kinds of radiation from various sources as we move around. I don't recall how long this particular cycle is; my gut tells me our species has been through it at least a couple of times, and we don't really know if our immediate ancestors were sky watchers too.
It took THREE VERSIONS to come up with a layout idea that's been used in newspapers for books for literally centuries?!
Web pages have infinite vertical space. Newspapers and books don't. Horizontal space is at a premium for web pages. It's not as important for newspapers and books. Unsurprisingly, a layout strategy that trades horizontal space for vertical space isn't a high priority for a technology primarily aimed at web pages. I wouldn't say that web standards that actually prioritise the web are nothing but "idiocy", I'd say that's entirely sensible.
That might explain why there isn't a layout style specifically for columns, but tell me this: why does CSS use this 'float' nonsense instead of the element layout models that have been used for GUI window layout for decades? It's trivial to define a GUI window in any language and IDE that has one element span across the top of the window, one across the bottom, and three packed horizontally in the middle. That's your classic "Header,Footer,Left Nav,Right Ad,Middle Content" web page layout, and we've known how to make that adjust nicely to variable window sizes forever.
To get columns, the best approach would probably be a line-width style, which would let you specify that lines in an element should be 66em or whatever you'd like, and a columns style that lets you specify the min gutter width and max number of columns. (Min would be 1, and to maintain flexible layouts the browser should be able to adjust the number of columns between 1 and the max you specify, and also to increase the gutter width if the element is wider than needed to hold your max columns.)
There; that took me all of 10 minutes to come up with a layout box model and multi-column style specification. Why is the W3C taking so long to figure out something useful?
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Here in northern NJ, along the train lines for commuters going into NYC, you didn't even need to have a great price to sell your house before the downturn started. Today, you can price a home for well below what it's likely worth, and that'll bring a lot of attention, but if the house doesn't show well, the seller is going to end up with a lower offer than they could otherwise get. Cleaning it up so it shows well, and setting a offer price somewhat below the approximate market value will help the seller get the best price possible.
Generally, my wife doesn't bother with traditional advertising, like newspaper listings or even multiple public open houses. Those approaches are just not worth the time and money; the internet has replaced traditional newspaper/booklet advertising, and public open houses after the first one just bring the neighbors poking around; all of the serious buyers are working with agents, and will come when no one else is around. What my wife often does do is a mass-mailing of a large format full-color postcard announcing the listing and first public open house; this goes to the entire neighborhood, her large contact list of current and previous clients, and her contact list of other agents. This kind of advertising has proven to be very effective at bringing in potential buyers, who often turn out to be friends or family of neighbors (the non-nosy ones) or past clients.
A good one does, though it might be hard to find a good agent in your area. They most likely work for a company like Re/Max, where the agents are largely independent professionals, rather than semi-employees of the brokerage. If you need assistance, my wife is part of a nationwide referral program of professionals who treat their clients as well as she does, and she'd be happy to find some good agents in your area for you. Her website is http://andreawebb.com./
Do you think "Cozy 5br 2.5 bath on 0.5 acre lot" with a few pictures adequately describes a house? I've bought a couple of properties, and I've seen a lot of houses with my wife, and I've got to say that when you're looking to buy a house (or you're looking for a house that suits your client's needs) you've got to take time to walk around, look at all the details, look out through the windows at the view, listen to the environment, and really get a feel for what it'd be like to live in that space. You just can't get that from a computer listing, and there are so many houses on the market that agents and buyers can't view them all. So, anything a listing agent can do to get other agents into your home is going to improve the chances of those agents bringing suitable buyers back to view the home, which increases your chances of getting an offer quickly.
Let me make another point about that: getting an offer quickly is crucial. I've seen the statistics and studies, and the longer a house is on the market, the lower its eventual sales price will be. People start to think that there must be something wrong with it for it to still be on the market, and once you drop the price (which you absolutely must, or you stop getting showings) you start to look desperate, and the offers you get will be made by bargain hunters and buyers who are looking to take advantage of your increasing anxiety about selling the house. Also, when you're in this situation, you're most likely either anxious to make an offer on a new home (which you can't do because you need the money from your existing home first) or you've already bought a new home, and you're paying two mortgages and tax bills.
I'm not sure what kind of "lock" she has on the information stream; everyone can view the basic information from the MLS on http://realtor.com/ and my wife is always responding to folks who come to her website asking for the more in-depth information on the MLS. Now, a few notes on this:
A good agent will put in a lot more work, including fronting a lot of the preparation and marketing expenses, for a higher priced home. For example, when a house first goes on the market, there is an Open House held just for agents and brokers. Top level agents listing high-end homes will often pay a caterer hundreds of dollars for this open house, just to draw in as much attention from other agents and brokers as possible. This spreads knowledge about the house that you can't get through an online ad, and those agents are going to have your home in mind when they're thinking about the needs of their buyer clients.
You'd be surprised how many people don't get it, and how many people are happy to pay her 3% (the buyer's agent gets the other 3%, and both agents pay a big chunk of their 3% to their brokers and the IRS) to have her take care of hiring the cleaners and stagers to take care of cleaning up the house.
So you're saying that one agent's self-interest is to push the asking price as low as possible, and the other's self-interest is to push the offered price as high as possible. That sounds like conflicting interests requiring negotiation that will wind up with a price in the middle that everyone accepts, which is exactly what you want.
Now, honest agents who are working for their client's best-interests will also wind up on opposite sides, but they'll be on the same sides as their clients, unlike the dishonest agents you described. But it works out the same either way; everyone's coming from opposite directions, and have to meet in the middle on a price, which sets the fair market value for the home.
My wife is a Real Estate agent (not a broker; there's a difference) and there is a ton of work she does for her listing clients, often including spending hundreds of dollars of her own money, sometimes over a thousand, to pay for preparing the house for sale and marketing the home. I've also donated many hours of my own time ripping out old carpeting, taking down wallpaper, painting, and doing various light carpentry jobs for her clients.
Her clients also get her experience. I've seen a number of For Sale By Owner homes, and they never look as nice as my wifes listings. People just don't realize that you have to clean your home and make repairs before you try to sell it. Otherwise, it looks like run-down junk, and buyers will treat it accordingly. First impressions are everything, and you need an agent who knows what to spend money on and how much to spend, so that you get the best return on your last-minute fix-up dollar.
All of that is before the house even goes on the market. Once it's on, there are endless phone calls, viewing arrangements, and follow-ups that have to be performed; it's definitely a full-time job. Once an offer is negotiated and accepted, there's even more phone calls and work to do meeting with inspectors, dealing with lawyers, and making sure the deal doesn't fall through. It's just a steady stream of work, and if you've already got a job, you don't want to do the agent's job too.
Finally, all of the buyers know that you're not working with an agent, and since they're probably selling their home as well, they know just how much you're saving. 99% of the time they'll deduct that amount from what they would otherwise offer you, figuring that you wouldn't have gotten the money anyway, and why should you get a free ride? It can't be for your time; agents don't do anything, right?
As both a mechanical engineer and software engineer, this doesn't amaze me at all. It's basic "CYA", applied by engineers. They were sitting around a table one day, going over failure modes or something like that, and someone said "Hey, what if we forgot something here? Can we prove that we've covered everything that could be foreseen?". They thought about that for a minute, and being practical engineers, they said "Nope; we can't prove squat, and we probably did miss something, so lets build in something to let us deal with that contingency." And that's how the remote update system got invented. It's an obvious solution to an obvious problem, once you accept that uncertainty is a constant that needs to be dealt with rather than hidden away.
I used to believe this too, but no longer. A mobile device is used in very different ways from a full desktop, and for most websites that means a different design is justified. I'm not talking about graphic design either; that should actually be as similar as possible to maintain the branding. I'm talking about designing how the user reads, navigates, and searches the site. For a desktop, multilevel menus, navigation sidebars, and text-entry search boxes are appropriate. For a mobile, only a small subset of the navigation should be presented, and it should all be presented in a way that is easy to select without having to type anything. (Even the better mobile keyboards are a pain to use.)
Actually, designs that are appropriate for mobile devices are more similar to TV-based designs than desktop PC designs. Think about how you interact with the software running your TV or DVD player: each screen-full of menus is reasonably simple in both content and visual design, and it's easily navigated with the up/down/left/right/enter controls on your remote. That works for mobile devices too, but it's overly simplistic when you add a full keyboard and mouse to the user's input controls.
You can't do this using CSS; the different designs call for more than just a different look to each page, it calls for a different set of smaller pages with different navigation between them. You might be able to programmatically generate both designs from the same content in a CMS, if your content is appropriately granular, but you can't do it by feeding all of the content to the browser and having the browser use the CSS to figure out the design.
The problem with your argument is that insurance is all about sharing the costs; each individual can't adequately prepare for everything that might possibly happen to them, especially given the very high cost associated with many of the possibilities. So, everyone contributes a smaller amount to the insurance pool, and the people who actually need it get to make withdrawals. This lowers everyone's average costs and risks.
What you're suggesting is doing away with insurance altogether: let everyone save their money for a rainy day, and if that day comes before someone has saved enough, that person is screwed. Unless you've already got more money than you know what to do with, this approach is very risky. Unfortunately, this is also common; this is the game being played by all of the uninsured people in the US, and unfortunately most of them don't have any money to save for that rainy day.
One thing that might make eliminating (most) insurance tenable would be drastically reducing the cost of health care. I've heard recently that if every health care facility in the US were run as efficiently as the most efficient ones (with regards to paperwork overhead, keeping the quality of care the same) enough money would be saved to pay for the health costs of not just every US citizen, but every person in the world outside of China, India, and Western Europe... and that's without even transitioning to a preventative-care focus, which would probably drop costs another order of magnitude or two. With cost reductions like that, we could easily have national (global?) emergency+illness care coverage for everyone, and let individuals cover the low-cost routine checkups and OTC medicines.
I've got years of experience, I'm not a hack, and I claim that cross-browser coding takes longer.
Sure, when you've got full control over the final appearance. However, when someone else in your company is responsible for dictating the appearance, you've got to code what looks right in standards-compliant browsers, then try to make IE behave. I'm lucky; I get to target FF 2+ and IE 6+ as my minimum browsers, and I use jQuery for my javascript work, so most of my problems come from IE 6, and even they aren't too bad. It still takes longer to work this way, though.
In that case, if it works at all, it'd probably work by punching a bunch of holes in the tank and causing a leak, and then igniting the fuel that's leaked out and mixed with the air. That's still hard to do though; with a pressurized tank once the leaking starts you get a high velocity stream that carries the fuel away from your target position before it can ignite, and low density around the target point. With a non-pressurized tank, the fuel is probably a liquid stream that'll be falling onto the ground, which also takes it away from your target point and prevents the fuel/air mixture you're looking for from being creating. You'd have to start the leak, wait for a puddle to form, and then try to ignite the vapors over the puddle.
Tracers apparently pass through smaller tanks too quickly to ignite anything; they tried that on the Mythbusters show. Also, to get ignition, you need fire, fuel and oxygen. Sticking a fire suddenly into the middle of a fuel tank is just going to heat the fuel up a bit without the oxygen.
It's called Amsterdam. For soft-core, try a strip club
Many would, but if you try to take them up on that, a whole other group of activists gets involved preventing that testing too.
So, you think "Ok, I just won't test my product then", and a third group of activists pounces on you. There's just no way to get ahead without paying everyone off to make them happy and quiet.
I would love to play a game where my character sits in front of a virtual computer and types for 12 hours a day.
Please tell me how to install drivers for an HP PSC2510 with network support without downloading a whole CD's worth of crapware! All I want is the driver, but HP always forces me to install all kinds of total garbage software along with the drivers!
You completely misunderstand the Constitution. It's not a list of our rights, it's a list of the rights we give up to the government so that the government can do the job we want it to do. The Constitution does not give the government the authority or responsibility to stop us and ask us questions without a Warrant, and so it does not have that authority and should not do it.
It seems that Warrants might be the way to make this kind of detection Constitutionally valid. The Fourth Amendment says:
If you claim that the "place to be searched" is "any vehicle emitting an unusual amount of radiation" and that the "persons or things to be seized" are the "driver and/or passengers of such a vehicle" and "the source of the radiation, if it is not a legally allowed source for public use", that might be particular enough even though it doesn't name specific people or places. Sooner or later, though, the practice is likely to wind up tested in the Supreme Court unless the police are very light-handed about it.
I'm pretty sure Perl can do these things too, though I don't know Lisp or Scheme well enough for an apples-to-apples comparison of the capabilities.
Perl's BEGIN functions run during the compile phase, and let you run whatever code you like at that time. You can define new functions based on compile-time options if you like, or based on whatever else you might base it on. You also have full access to the symbol table, which is handy if you want to do something like put wrappers around other functions. Note that you don't have to do this stuff in BEGIN blocks; you have these capabilities at runtime too. If you want to introduce new keywords to the language, there are modules in CPAN that do that, and I'm pretty sure they do it by adding functions to the Core namespace. I've never had a need for this though, so I'm not certain exactly how it's done.
Again, I'm pretty sure that a Perl programs ability to tap into and manipulate its own symbol tree, either that compile time or run time, gives it the ability to do this sort of thing. Or, there are also modules like Parse::RecDescent which might be better for the task.
As a visitor from New York, it took me almost a week to figure out where I could get them. There are pamphlets everywhere describing them, but none say where to buy them. There are also vending machines everywhere for buying tickets, but none offer Oyster cards, or tell you that you need to go to a window for one. I don't remember seeing ticket windows in every station; some of them must be in out-of-the way corners or were simply unmanned.
New York has "Metro Cards", which have a magnetic stripe on them. You can buy them from a vending machine with cash, refill them in the same machines as-needed, or just discard them when they're empty. They do keep logs, so if you travel around with a particular card for a while, commit a crime, and get arrested, the card that you're carrying can be used to find out where you've been getting on the subway.
Some big differences from London's Oyster cards:
What is it about the symbol for pi that makes it more or less special than the symbol '3', or either of their relationships to the symbol '1'?
There's a whole lot of math you can do using the symbol for pi to stand for the ratio between a circle's radius and circumference. The fact that it doesn't look like the symbols for decimal integers doesn't hurt it any; in fact, for most of higher math most of those symbols aren't even used that much.
Also, if all you need to represent pi is two numbers and the division/ratio operator, that's hardly what I'd call an 'infinite amount of information'.
For the vast majority of human history, the only electromagnetic fields of significance other than those from astronomical sources were electrical storms and magnetite deposits. The former are short-lived and probably don't have much effect; the latter might have a significant effect. Today, we're surrounded by man-made electromagnetic fields from the moment we're conceived. These might completely overwhelm the traditional influences that astrology used to predict, and they might be having an impact on us which we haven't linked back to the fields yet.
Astrology is an 'observational' science; it's a holdover from a period when all science involved observing and recording correlations, with no understanding of the physical phenomena that caused the effects. Traditional folk medicine is the same kind of science; a lot of trial and error helped healers figure out which plants have medicinal properties, how to use them, and what they're good for, with no understanding of chemistry, pharmacology, or how the body works.
'Real' astrologists don't just consider the day of the year you were born; they consider the year, and work up a full model of what was going on in the sky at that time. If there's any truth here, knowing the specific moment of your birth and where it occurred probably captures detailed data about astronomical events during your whole gestation, including where your gestation falls in short and long-term solar cycles. The position of Jupiter might not actually matter, and may just help identify the specific point in a long-term solar cycle, and that is what's really important: how much radiation was the sun generating while you were an embryo, and based on your latitude and the time of year, how much of it were you exposed to?
These cycles get really long; our solar system bounces up and down through the center of our galactic arm as it goes around the galactic center. We're almost certainly exposed to different amounts and kinds of radiation from various sources as we move around. I don't recall how long this particular cycle is; my gut tells me our species has been through it at least a couple of times, and we don't really know if our immediate ancestors were sky watchers too.
That might explain why there isn't a layout style specifically for columns, but tell me this: why does CSS use this 'float' nonsense instead of the element layout models that have been used for GUI window layout for decades? It's trivial to define a GUI window in any language and IDE that has one element span across the top of the window, one across the bottom, and three packed horizontally in the middle. That's your classic "Header,Footer,Left Nav,Right Ad,Middle Content" web page layout, and we've known how to make that adjust nicely to variable window sizes forever.
To get columns, the best approach would probably be a line-width style, which would let you specify that lines in an element should be 66em or whatever you'd like, and a columns style that lets you specify the min gutter width and max number of columns. (Min would be 1, and to maintain flexible layouts the browser should be able to adjust the number of columns between 1 and the max you specify, and also to increase the gutter width if the element is wider than needed to hold your max columns.)
There; that took me all of 10 minutes to come up with a layout box model and multi-column style specification. Why is the W3C taking so long to figure out something useful?