FWIW, my parents and I haven't had an American car that didn't require expensive repair work
I doubt you could find any brand of vehicle where someone doesn't have a similar experience. My personal experience was with a Mazda pickup that ate the clutch at 9000 miles. I believe the pressure plate broke, but the dealer said the clutch plate was 'stuck to the flywheel'. At 20,000 miles the truck spent 7 days in the shop getting the shifter rebuilt. And at 40,000 miles the transmission needed to be overhauled.
OTOH, I sold an '82 S-10 in 97 with 200,000 miles on it and last year I bought a '94 F350 (7.3) with 270,000 miles that is absolutely dependable, once I replaced the aging batteries.
I'm not saying we should boycott American manufacturers. But I am saying that once again they were caught flat-footed, just like they were during the 70's oil crisis.
Well, I'd argue that there is any such thing as an 'American' car manufacturer anymore, or that anyone was caught flat-footed.
And if Detroit isn't making fuel-efficient vehicles, then people will buy them from the company or country that is making them. It's that simple.
Ford, GM, and Chrysler make fuel-efficient vehicles. But Americans don't want to buy them. They manufacture for Europe and the rest of the world, just like everyone else.
As far as the MPG, my Honda FRV (diesel) which is a big 6 seater (it still does 0-60 in 9s) does 50+ in summer and 40 winter.
Out of curiosity, are you talking about US or Imperial gallons. Because if it's the latter, the numbers are a lot less impressive at ~41 and ~33 MPG. Our gallons are 17% smaller.
Having said that, I wish there were a LOT more cars with available diesel engines in the US. The only Fords available with a diesel engines are super duty trucks and vans. I don't believe GM is any different. And Jeep (Chrysler) backed off on producing a CRD Wrangler for the American market. And at 7000 lbs, my F350 isn't going to get very good mileage. Fortunately I don't drive it regularly. But if for instance the Toyota Tacoma (Hilux) was available in the US with a diesel engine, I'd trade off my little truck (driven daily) in a heartbeat.
There's no reason for the housing market to adversely effect the student loan market. You can get enough federally secured student loans to go to community or state colleges. (and mortgage the next 30 years of your life) If anything was going to effect them, it would be the out of control national debt.
Back when I graduated high school, the problem wasn't a lack of scholarships or loans, it was a lack of information. If you didn't ask about ACT/SAT tests or loans, they didn't provide any info.
You give the dot com revolution entirely too much credit. What you are seeing is continuous improvement in manufacturing and supply chain logistics. JIT, KANBAN, and Lean manufacturing are much older than dot com. Affordable communications (of which the Internet as a whole is a driving force) is responsible as much as anything. It's all about taking the bumps out of the supply chain so you have smooth flow from manufacturer to end user.
Now that B2B communications are streamlined, you have to look for new ways to improve efficiencies. 20 years ago I worked building a warehouse that was state of the art for it's time. It had miles and miles of conveyor, the workers picked orders for their retail stores and placed them on the conveyor, and the cartons weren't touched again until they were loaded on a truck. The floor had wires embedded in it so the forklifts could follow a path without running into anything. Although it still required an operator to select the correct bin location and retrieve the pallet.
One of the large greeting card companies uses a 'lights out' warehouse. At a guess, they've been using it for at least a decade. And it uses robotic forklifts to move everything within it.
The reason more companies are looking to warehouse automation is market competition. Like several others have mentioned, technical innovations are getting advanced enough and cheap enough that when weighed with labor costs, it's cheaper to automate. It has also become a business necessity to manage inventory as efficiently as possible. It's no longer possible to remain competitive if you are maintaining months of inventory.
BTW, I wouldn't classify Amazon as central distribution. It would be like saying Google has a central data warehouse. Amazon does well for the same reason eBay does well; if you want to buy something, they can probably point you to a seller. It's not the distribution that is centralized, it's the consumer interface.
So are other people, who one may assume will install "free" 9x/ME/2K/XP.
Why assume that? I considered getting one for my mom, but she complained last weekend when I delivered the new ($90) laser printer I picked up a few weeks ago. "... you should be using your money for yourself...."
But back around '94 I built her an OS/2 machine that she used for 10 years. She only gave it up because AOL quit releasing a Win16 version of their software. I then replaced it with a Compaq laptop with XP that didn't even last 3 years. (dead motherboard) I liked the OS/2 machine because I never worked on it once during that time. The same can't be said for the laptop.
I'd much rather spend $200 and get a low maintenance Linux machine than work on the hand-me-down Windows machine that she's going to be using instead. Anyone know how usable AOL's site is using Linux/broadband?
Well, unless you want to run your own server so that you can use whatever software you like. Of course, your ISP could assign yourname.someisp.com to your IP, but they aren't willing to do that. If they were, there would be no market for dyndns.
The whole point of any contact info is so that YOU can determine how you want to be contacted. Personally, I think an accurate whois would be useful. I use it from time to time to make sure site A is actually affiliated to site B. But as a domain holder for a personal domain, I don't want my address and phone number listed, so my info is proxied. I wouldn't have had a problem putting a valid e-mail address in whois, because I would have just added a domainadmin@domain.org account. If they allowed me to choose what info I want to publish, I'll post accurate info in those fields. Until then, I'll pay $6 a year and you can contact me through my proxy. It's not like you can't contact me, you just don't get my direct number.
Maybe I'm remembering wrong, but isn't common carrier status one of the arguments ISPs used in the past so they wouldn't be responsible for the content passing through their networks?
I would rather see an easy-to-use system covering what they are going to vote for, and when. That way I could explain to my representatives what issues I find important and how I would like them to vote. Let me be involved without requiring me to devote the equivalent of a full time job to being an informed voter.
The concept is this: right now you have two options. Option 1: you assume the shipping manifest is correct and take a pallet into inventory, but say 2% of pallets are actually missing items (or have extra ones). Option 2: you break down each pallet as it arrives and check each item on the pallet (say with a handheld barcode scanner) and make sure that you received everything you're supposed to have.
Option 3: vendor rating. Vendors with a good track record are received based on packing slip, with occasional counting. Vendors with a not so good track record are counted.
Option 4: receive by weight. If the weight of the pallet is reasonably close to the expected weight, receive using the packing slip.
A lot depends on the product being received. Many items will be received at the distribution center from the vendor with 1 item per pallet, and will be shipped the the store the same way. Coke, laundry detergent, lawn mowers. Other items that are small and lightweight will be received at the DC on a pallet, and broken down to cartons for the stores. I would be surprised, as large as Walmart DCs are, if they get too many mixed pallets. Which is alway why they wouldn't see large gains from RFID at their DCs.
How do you stare in a MMO? Quite often when I have to go AFK I'll go to a safe area let my character stand there. I don't pay any attention to who else might be there, and particularly with 3rd party perspective, I'm not seeing through my avatar's eyes.
I always find it amusing the rare occasions when I see to toons face to face having a conversation, because other than dealing with NPCs, no one I know feels the need to face the person they are talking to. Often we aren't even in the same zone.
Most people looking down their noses at people embroiled in the mortgage debacle have read their card agreements about as closely as the average sub-primer read the documents at their closings.
Absolutely. I just received a notice of updated terms on my BofA card. If I am over my limit or late on making my monthly payment twice, they can (at their discretion) raise my interest rate to their default rate of 33%. They can also raise my rate if my credit score drops significantly. I don't remember what the late or over the limit fees are, but it's pretty common for them to be ~$35 per month. Fortunately I don't need the card, so my terms are pretty reasonable. But if you were out of work for a few months you could dig yourself a pretty deep hole without making any new purchases.
No, they won't effect your credit score because they don't show up on your credit report. They aren't new lines of credit, they are linked to your regular credit card account. On the ones that I have used; you log into the bank's website and use your regular account to authorize a transaction tied to a specially generated credit card number. I use them from time to time to deal with merchants that I have never dealt with before.
So it goes like this... you pay some premium fee and in effect it signs you up for every MMO out there and pays those fees (from your massive fee), creates a character with that name and as close to appearance as possible on each one of those worlds (reserving names would be problematic),
I think you start out with some bad assumptions. First, that you would pay a fee. Sure, there would be providers with premium content or premium servers, but with an open system there is no reason there wouldn't be smaller, free servers. Kind of like the internet.
The other assumption is that character names would need to be unique. MMORPGs require unique names because it's an easy way to address duplication problems. Character's could be internally differentiated by using their originating server in conjunction with their name or a UID.
The big problem you would run into is client side processing (which is a fiscal approach, not a technical one) and cached images. It would be frustrating to have to download several hundred megabytes the first time you entered a new server.
Any store that tries to check my bag against my receipt loses my business immediately from that day forward.
Seems like a much better approach to me. Now instead of being seen as someone looking to be difficult, you're a lost customer. Just make sure you contact the store management and let them know why you're taking your business somewhere else. Of course if Fry's has something you really have to have, there is always the option of mail order. I've never set foot in a Fry's, but they have sold me several hard drives.
However, if I was being asked every single time I tried to walk out of the shop, or if they actually had a policy of searching everyone (they don't _actually_ go this far do they?), then I wouldn't even bother walking into that shop anymore, no matter how big the savings were.
The don't actually 'search' anyone. The Circuit Citys here don't do anything at all. BestBuy has a person standing at the door that asks to see your receipt at you walk out the door. Year's ago when I shopped at Sam's Club, they marked everyone's receipt with a yellow marker as you walked out the door. And Walmart semi randomly (I don't know their select criteria) has someone that asks people to see their receipt to compare to their purchases, which appears to be more of an effort to stop cashiers from giving expensive things away. Quite simply, if the guy had shown his receipt it would have taken less than 5 seconds out of his life. As far as privacy is concerned, even the bag would not have contained anything that a dozen people at and around the checkouts had not already seen. It was a non-event until the guy started acting like a shoplifter.
ID cards are available for people who do not drive. In the past they were primarily used for things like writing checks, but today they are used to prove your identity when you get a job.
Actually, from the perspective of the person detained it was a little beyond a mistake. While the blog is slashdotted, it doesn't take much to recognize that the person detained is also the person who owns the domain. While it sounds like the whole deal was a clusterfuck (if security was going to hold him, they never should have allowed him out of the store), I'd wait to judge until I see it reported by an independent news agency, rather than his blog regurgitated through 100 other blogs.
Boing Boing reader Michael Amor Righi says, Today I was arrested by the Brooklyn, Ohio police department. It all started when I refused to show my receipt to the loss prevention employee at Circuit City,....
It's common practice for retail store to check receipts and bag contents at the exit. It happens occasionally at Circuit City, and frequently at Best Buy and Walmart. Apparently all they asked to check was the bag that contained his Circuit City purchases and his receipt. I'm not sure what privacy he is protecting, and I doubt a jury would be impressed either.
As far as his arrest, you'd really need an unbiased accounting to tell whether the police were justified. BTW, in many states you are not required to carry or produce identification, but if you refuse the police have the option of 'detaining' you for 72 hours to determine your identity.
Honestly, even from his own account it sounds like he did everything possible to inflame the situation. I don't work in retail, but if I had been the store manager I would have asked the police to release him, refunded his money and banned him from the property. If he chose to sue, I'd produce the security tapes for the jury.
Really, if you want to fight for privacy, put your efforts into fighting warrantless wiretaps and sneak and peek searches. Or the proliferation of public surveillance cameras. Or the increasing amounts of information on non-criminals stored in law enforcement databases. This one just comes across as juvenile antics.
If Sony really wants to push Blu-Ray, they should get a manufacturer like Apex on board pushing out sub $50 basic players. Though until HD TVs make it down into the lower price ranges, it probably won't matter.
There's nothing admirable about sustaining a destructive addiction at the expense of your family/government.
Would it be worse if your destructive activities required hundreds of thousands of tax dollars and rescuers risking their lives to save you when you screwed up? Extreme Sports
Okay, what does a glider that can carry several tons look like (on earth)?
Well, if you don't mind using something that is 65 year old, it would look something like this: CG-4 Waco Without the war limitations on available material and composites, it should be no problem to create something lighter and with a larger payload.
You can still run into that with Ubuntu as well. I was installing something the other day, I think it was uShare, that had a dependency on a package that wasn't available in Ubuntu. (despite uShare being packaged for it) I eventually pulled the Debian package, and forced a dependency. Don't know if that will come back to bite me later or not. Knoppix used to be bad about making special packages that made it difficult to update from the Debian repository. But not nearly as bad as working with RedHat, Rawhide, and Mandrake differences a few years ago.
You should be careful about using unstable, particularly if you don't have a good understanding of dpkg. With unstable it is very easy to really mess up your system if you aren't careful. I know this from experience. A much safer approach if you want quicker releases is to run Testing, it is between Stable and Unstable. If there is something you specifically need in unstable, you can pull just those packages.
I haven't tried recently, but in the past my biggest issue with Debian has been the installer. I recently installed Kubuntu on a machine and it went real smooth, and didn't seem load a bunch of unnecessary stuff, unlike Knoppix. I'm not sure about the whole no root account thing though, so I may try another pure Debian install.
Many diesel engines will run with biodiesel without any modification at all, only at the price of a somewhat reduced engine life.
Biodiesel isn't going to shorten the engine life. The problems that diesel engines have with biodiesel are with it's solvent properties. In a motor that has many miles of diesel use it will clean the diesel residue from the fuel system, clogging the fuel filter. It could damage the injection pump or injectors, but only if the fuel filter is deficient. And that would have shortened their life anyway. Biodiesel doesn't play well with natural rubber hoses and gaskets either, but they aren't used in new motors. The lubricity of biodiesel is higher than diesel, reducing the need for fuel additives.
There are two problems with biodiesel though; lack of quality control in production, something that will go away as the industry matures. And biodiesel has worse gelling problems in cold temperatures. If it weren't for gelling we wouldn't even have to mess with biodiesel, we could burn pure canola oil.
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If I were to open a restaurant called Chuck Norris' Good Eats, I'd be infringing his trademark, not his copyright.
I wouldn't worry about Chuck Norris. Alton Brown probably knows 100 different ways to cook you. At least with Chuck it would be a quick death.
FWIW, my parents and I haven't had an American car that didn't require expensive repair work
I doubt you could find any brand of vehicle where someone doesn't have a similar experience. My personal experience was with a Mazda pickup that ate the clutch at 9000 miles. I believe the pressure plate broke, but the dealer said the clutch plate was 'stuck to the flywheel'. At 20,000 miles the truck spent 7 days in the shop getting the shifter rebuilt. And at 40,000 miles the transmission needed to be overhauled.
OTOH, I sold an '82 S-10 in 97 with 200,000 miles on it and last year I bought a '94 F350 (7.3) with 270,000 miles that is absolutely dependable, once I replaced the aging batteries.
I'm not saying we should boycott American manufacturers. But I am saying that once again they were caught flat-footed, just like they were during the 70's oil crisis.
Well, I'd argue that there is any such thing as an 'American' car manufacturer anymore, or that anyone was caught flat-footed.
And if Detroit isn't making fuel-efficient vehicles, then people will buy them from the company or country that is making them. It's that simple.
Ford, GM, and Chrysler make fuel-efficient vehicles. But Americans don't want to buy them. They manufacture for Europe and the rest of the world, just like everyone else.
As far as the MPG, my Honda FRV (diesel) which is a big 6 seater (it still does 0-60 in 9s) does 50+ in summer and 40 winter.
Out of curiosity, are you talking about US or Imperial gallons. Because if it's the latter, the numbers are a lot less impressive at ~41 and ~33 MPG. Our gallons are 17% smaller.
Having said that, I wish there were a LOT more cars with available diesel engines in the US. The only Fords available with a diesel engines are super duty trucks and vans. I don't believe GM is any different. And Jeep (Chrysler) backed off on producing a CRD Wrangler for the American market. And at 7000 lbs, my F350 isn't going to get very good mileage. Fortunately I don't drive it regularly. But if for instance the Toyota Tacoma (Hilux) was available in the US with a diesel engine, I'd trade off my little truck (driven daily) in a heartbeat.
There's no reason for the housing market to adversely effect the student loan market. You can get enough federally secured student loans to go to community or state colleges. (and mortgage the next 30 years of your life) If anything was going to effect them, it would be the out of control national debt.
Back when I graduated high school, the problem wasn't a lack of scholarships or loans, it was a lack of information. If you didn't ask about ACT/SAT tests or loans, they didn't provide any info.
You give the dot com revolution entirely too much credit. What you are seeing is continuous improvement in manufacturing and supply chain logistics. JIT, KANBAN, and Lean manufacturing are much older than dot com. Affordable communications (of which the Internet as a whole is a driving force) is responsible as much as anything. It's all about taking the bumps out of the supply chain so you have smooth flow from manufacturer to end user.
Now that B2B communications are streamlined, you have to look for new ways to improve efficiencies. 20 years ago I worked building a warehouse that was state of the art for it's time. It had miles and miles of conveyor, the workers picked orders for their retail stores and placed them on the conveyor, and the cartons weren't touched again until they were loaded on a truck. The floor had wires embedded in it so the forklifts could follow a path without running into anything. Although it still required an operator to select the correct bin location and retrieve the pallet.
One of the large greeting card companies uses a 'lights out' warehouse. At a guess, they've been using it for at least a decade. And it uses robotic forklifts to move everything within it.
The reason more companies are looking to warehouse automation is market competition. Like several others have mentioned, technical innovations are getting advanced enough and cheap enough that when weighed with labor costs, it's cheaper to automate. It has also become a business necessity to manage inventory as efficiently as possible. It's no longer possible to remain competitive if you are maintaining months of inventory.
BTW, I wouldn't classify Amazon as central distribution. It would be like saying Google has a central data warehouse. Amazon does well for the same reason eBay does well; if you want to buy something, they can probably point you to a seller. It's not the distribution that is centralized, it's the consumer interface.
So are other people, who one may assume will install "free" 9x/ME/2K/XP.
...."
Why assume that? I considered getting one for my mom, but she complained last weekend when I delivered the new ($90) laser printer I picked up a few weeks ago. "... you should be using your money for yourself
But back around '94 I built her an OS/2 machine that she used for 10 years. She only gave it up because AOL quit releasing a Win16 version of their software. I then replaced it with a Compaq laptop with XP that didn't even last 3 years. (dead motherboard) I liked the OS/2 machine because I never worked on it once during that time. The same can't be said for the laptop.
I'd much rather spend $200 and get a low maintenance Linux machine than work on the hand-me-down Windows machine that she's going to be using instead. Anyone know how usable AOL's site is using Linux/broadband?
(there isn't really anything wrong with your personal web page being at http://someisp.com/~yourname).
Well, unless you want to run your own server so that you can use whatever software you like. Of course, your ISP could assign yourname.someisp.com to your IP, but they aren't willing to do that. If they were, there would be no market for dyndns.
The whole point of any contact info is so that YOU can determine how you want to be contacted. Personally, I think an accurate whois would be useful. I use it from time to time to make sure site A is actually affiliated to site B. But as a domain holder for a personal domain, I don't want my address and phone number listed, so my info is proxied. I wouldn't have had a problem putting a valid e-mail address in whois, because I would have just added a domainadmin@domain.org account. If they allowed me to choose what info I want to publish, I'll post accurate info in those fields. Until then, I'll pay $6 a year and you can contact me through my proxy. It's not like you can't contact me, you just don't get my direct number.
Cable companies are not carriers
Maybe I'm remembering wrong, but isn't common carrier status one of the arguments ISPs used in the past so they wouldn't be responsible for the content passing through their networks?
I would rather see an easy-to-use system covering what they are going to vote for, and when. That way I could explain to my representatives what issues I find important and how I would like them to vote. Let me be involved without requiring me to devote the equivalent of a full time job to being an informed voter.
The concept is this: right now you have two options. Option 1: you assume the shipping manifest is correct and take a pallet into inventory, but say 2% of pallets are actually missing items (or have extra ones). Option 2: you break down each pallet as it arrives and check each item on the pallet (say with a handheld barcode scanner) and make sure that you received everything you're supposed to have.
Option 3: vendor rating. Vendors with a good track record are received based on packing slip, with occasional counting. Vendors with a not so good track record are counted.
Option 4: receive by weight. If the weight of the pallet is reasonably close to the expected weight, receive using the packing slip.
A lot depends on the product being received. Many items will be received at the distribution center from the vendor with 1 item per pallet, and will be shipped the the store the same way. Coke, laundry detergent, lawn mowers. Other items that are small and lightweight will be received at the DC on a pallet, and broken down to cartons for the stores. I would be surprised, as large as Walmart DCs are, if they get too many mixed pallets. Which is alway why they wouldn't see large gains from RFID at their DCs.
Or make rude remarks and just stare.
How do you stare in a MMO? Quite often when I have to go AFK I'll go to a safe area let my character stand there. I don't pay any attention to who else might be there, and particularly with 3rd party perspective, I'm not seeing through my avatar's eyes.
I always find it amusing the rare occasions when I see to toons face to face having a conversation, because other than dealing with NPCs, no one I know feels the need to face the person they are talking to. Often we aren't even in the same zone.
Most people looking down their noses at people embroiled in the mortgage debacle have read their card agreements about as closely as the average sub-primer read the documents at their closings.
Absolutely. I just received a notice of updated terms on my BofA card. If I am over my limit or late on making my monthly payment twice, they can (at their discretion) raise my interest rate to their default rate of 33%. They can also raise my rate if my credit score drops significantly. I don't remember what the late or over the limit fees are, but it's pretty common for them to be ~$35 per month. Fortunately I don't need the card, so my terms are pretty reasonable. But if you were out of work for a few months you could dig yourself a pretty deep hole without making any new purchases.
Do these cards affect your credit score?
No, they won't effect your credit score because they don't show up on your credit report. They aren't new lines of credit, they are linked to your regular credit card account. On the ones that I have used; you log into the bank's website and use your regular account to authorize a transaction tied to a specially generated credit card number. I use them from time to time to deal with merchants that I have never dealt with before.
So it goes like this... you pay some premium fee and in effect it signs you up for every MMO out there and pays those fees (from your massive fee), creates a character with that name and as close to appearance as possible on each one of those worlds (reserving names would be problematic),
I think you start out with some bad assumptions. First, that you would pay a fee. Sure, there would be providers with premium content or premium servers, but with an open system there is no reason there wouldn't be smaller, free servers. Kind of like the internet.
The other assumption is that character names would need to be unique. MMORPGs require unique names because it's an easy way to address duplication problems. Character's could be internally differentiated by using their originating server in conjunction with their name or a UID.
The big problem you would run into is client side processing (which is a fiscal approach, not a technical one) and cached images. It would be frustrating to have to download several hundred megabytes the first time you entered a new server.
Any store that tries to check my bag against my receipt loses my business immediately from that day forward.
Seems like a much better approach to me. Now instead of being seen as someone looking to be difficult, you're a lost customer. Just make sure you contact the store management and let them know why you're taking your business somewhere else. Of course if Fry's has something you really have to have, there is always the option of mail order. I've never set foot in a Fry's, but they have sold me several hard drives.
However, if I was being asked every single time I tried to walk out of the shop, or if they actually had a policy of searching everyone (they don't _actually_ go this far do they?), then I wouldn't even bother walking into that shop anymore, no matter how big the savings were.
The don't actually 'search' anyone. The Circuit Citys here don't do anything at all. BestBuy has a person standing at the door that asks to see your receipt at you walk out the door. Year's ago when I shopped at Sam's Club, they marked everyone's receipt with a yellow marker as you walked out the door. And Walmart semi randomly (I don't know their select criteria) has someone that asks people to see their receipt to compare to their purchases, which appears to be more of an effort to stop cashiers from giving expensive things away. Quite simply, if the guy had shown his receipt it would have taken less than 5 seconds out of his life. As far as privacy is concerned, even the bag would not have contained anything that a dozen people at and around the checkouts had not already seen. It was a non-event until the guy started acting like a shoplifter.
What if a person doesn't have ID?
ID cards are available for people who do not drive. In the past they were primarily used for things like writing checks, but today they are used to prove your identity when you get a job.
Actually, from the perspective of the person detained it was a little beyond a mistake. While the blog is slashdotted, it doesn't take much to recognize that the person detained is also the person who owns the domain. While it sounds like the whole deal was a clusterfuck (if security was going to hold him, they never should have allowed him out of the store), I'd wait to judge until I see it reported by an independent news agency, rather than his blog regurgitated through 100 other blogs.
It's common practice for retail store to check receipts and bag contents at the exit. It happens occasionally at Circuit City, and frequently at Best Buy and Walmart. Apparently all they asked to check was the bag that contained his Circuit City purchases and his receipt. I'm not sure what privacy he is protecting, and I doubt a jury would be impressed either.
As far as his arrest, you'd really need an unbiased accounting to tell whether the police were justified. BTW, in many states you are not required to carry or produce identification, but if you refuse the police have the option of 'detaining' you for 72 hours to determine your identity.
Honestly, even from his own account it sounds like he did everything possible to inflame the situation. I don't work in retail, but if I had been the store manager I would have asked the police to release him, refunded his money and banned him from the property. If he chose to sue, I'd produce the security tapes for the jury.
Really, if you want to fight for privacy, put your efforts into fighting warrantless wiretaps and sneak and peek searches. Or the proliferation of public surveillance cameras. Or the increasing amounts of information on non-criminals stored in law enforcement databases. This one just comes across as juvenile antics.
If Sony really wants to push Blu-Ray, they should get a manufacturer like Apex on board pushing out sub $50 basic players. Though until HD TVs make it down into the lower price ranges, it probably won't matter.
There's nothing admirable about sustaining a destructive addiction at the expense of your family/government.
Would it be worse if your destructive activities required hundreds of thousands of tax dollars and rescuers risking their lives to save you when you screwed up? Extreme Sports
Well, if you don't mind using something that is 65 year old, it would look something like this: CG-4 Waco Without the war limitations on available material and composites, it should be no problem to create something lighter and with a larger payload.
You can still run into that with Ubuntu as well. I was installing something the other day, I think it was uShare, that had a dependency on a package that wasn't available in Ubuntu. (despite uShare being packaged for it) I eventually pulled the Debian package, and forced a dependency. Don't know if that will come back to bite me later or not. Knoppix used to be bad about making special packages that made it difficult to update from the Debian repository. But not nearly as bad as working with RedHat, Rawhide, and Mandrake differences a few years ago.
If you want newer versions, use debian unstable.
You should be careful about using unstable, particularly if you don't have a good understanding of dpkg. With unstable it is very easy to really mess up your system if you aren't careful. I know this from experience. A much safer approach if you want quicker releases is to run Testing, it is between Stable and Unstable. If there is something you specifically need in unstable, you can pull just those packages.
I haven't tried recently, but in the past my biggest issue with Debian has been the installer. I recently installed Kubuntu on a machine and it went real smooth, and didn't seem load a bunch of unnecessary stuff, unlike Knoppix. I'm not sure about the whole no root account thing though, so I may try another pure Debian install.
Many diesel engines will run with biodiesel without any modification at all, only at the price of a somewhat reduced engine life.
Biodiesel isn't going to shorten the engine life. The problems that diesel engines have with biodiesel are with it's solvent properties. In a motor that has many miles of diesel use it will clean the diesel residue from the fuel system, clogging the fuel filter. It could damage the injection pump or injectors, but only if the fuel filter is deficient. And that would have shortened their life anyway. Biodiesel doesn't play well with natural rubber hoses and gaskets either, but they aren't used in new motors. The lubricity of biodiesel is higher than diesel, reducing the need for fuel additives.
There are two problems with biodiesel though; lack of quality control in production, something that will go away as the industry matures. And biodiesel has worse gelling problems in cold temperatures. If it weren't for gelling we wouldn't even have to mess with biodiesel, we could burn pure canola oil.