It used to be perfectly acceptable as a gender-neutral singular, but that usage got phased out around the same time "thou" did (thus why modern English lacks a T-V distinction). English now lacks a gender-neutral pronoun, which is a pain in the ass, so this is how people fill it in. Personally, I think writing he/she and his/her makes for much worse reading than using they/their.
If all of them are going to become mainstream, LGBTQ is going to need a whole lot more letters. I think it'd be best if we picked a handful of definitions and allowed for ranges within them. Vegetarianism has done this - sure, there's various names like octo-lacto-vegetarian for different degrees of it, but most of the time getting that specific only matters in the context of certain situations. I have no problem with recognizing different genders, but the more you try to granularize it, the more trouble you're going to run into defining them until every person on Earth uses a slightly different definition.
My ex-girlfriend's parents had a wireless router like that... both the wireless and web interface had default settings that they weren't supposed to change. And it gets better. Administration from the WAN side was enabled (supposedly for support). Yes, with the default UN/PW. Only Frontier could make TWC look somewhat competent.
How exactly are you supposed to spread salt with dumptrucks? Give a guy a shovel and have him stand in the back and fling salt out? Multi-purpose earth-moving equipment is okay for parking lots and driveways, but would work really poorly and slowly on roads in which you need to continuously push snow to the side, not in front of you. Likewise, most city vehicles wouldn't work very well in a task for which they are not designed... there's a reason northern states don't just use pickups with plows on the roads even when they only get an inch or two of snow. Salt stockpiles don't last forever... moisture and time are their enemies. It also takes up a huge amount of space just to store. Most importantly, all of this costs more money to maintain than it costs to recover from not having it.
I should have used that line with my professors. "I shouldn't need to cite my papers, you have access to Google!"
Besides, your link says nothing about it being a "one-time fee", which is a key part of the original AC's argument. It does, however, say there would be a 300% rate increase, which would imply it's the exact opposite of a "one-time fee". In other words, you have done the opposite of providing relevant supporting information for the claims of a "one time 3k fee".
Your own article goes on to cite other issues with burying lines from a previous project, including being sued by residents and lack of space among the existing sewage, water, fiber, and gas lines... and that was in a residential area. It also mentions having to bury switch boxes that need more than four cubic meters of space, another huge issue. And all that is before you even consider maintenance costs. The main conclusion of the article is that it makes a little bit of sense if you're building new lines, but it makes very little sense to replace existing lines... and this is in Toronto no less, where it would seem to make much more sense in general than in a place like Atlanta that only sees winter once or twice a decade.
In a nutshell, it's just a power inverter connected directly to the battery - cig lighter inverters have a max draw of about 15A before they blow the fuse on most cars, so you'll either want a permanently wired solution (like I did) or just use alligator clips that come with most 400+ watt inverters. You just need to make sure it can provide as power as you expect to draw. Items like a refrigerator or freezer only need to run once or twice a day to maintain sufficient cold (as long as you open them sparingly) and will usually draw under 400 watts if they're relatively modern. Likewise, you can power fluorescent or LED bulbs with a measly 400 watt inverter. Air conditioning, electric stoves and dryers are the only major appliances I would really hesistate to run off an inverter but even those can be planned for.
It's not as convenient or robust as a whole-home generator, but it's a hell of a lot more affordable for short-term power outages (a couple days up to a week or two). If you really want to be prepared or to use larger inverters, equip your car with a second battery that is also charged from the alternator. I got my 400W inverter for $15 on sale from NewEgg and it's sufficient to run anything I might need for an outage of up to a week. Harbor Freight sells 750W inverters for $45 and 2000W inverters for $160 (and that's before their ubiquitous 25% off coupons).
The real drawback is if you need your car at the same time you need to power something in the house, but it's an emergency measure that's just to hold over until regular power is restored. Combine it with some common sense preparation, like keeping extra gas in the garage, and it's a pretty good solution to keeping things going during an outage. Hell, I'd recommend just getting an inverter in the 200W-400W range that can run off the cig lighter socket just in case you're camping or chilling at a parking area or don't want to buy extra 12V car adapters for your laptop, tablet, etc - many come with USB charging ports as well.
You obviously wouldn't expect a backup to power *everything*. My parents' backup generator is enough to run the main set of lights, and the refrigerator, freezer or dryer (although probably not all at once... but they're rarely all running at once anyway) and some of the more common appliances like the computers or TVs... in other words, all of the essentials and a fair number of luxuries. It was about $1200 and has an expected lifetime of ten to twenty years before it should need any serious maintenance costs (they're about five years in now). Until I see an actual citation that's more than "What he said", I have a hard time believing that burying all of the lines would be cheaper than that.
I live in New York, where it was also about -5F yesterday. And if we get two inches of snow before the plows get out, some people start driving 5MPH and thus slowing ALL traffic. And these are people who have lived in these conditions their entire lives. There's also the matter of southerners not having experience driving in snow any more than northerners are well prepared for going out in 115 degree summer heat.
As another poster mentioned, the power outages are sometimes caused by nature - in his example, it's because southern pines can grow so much taller due to the lack of regular winter... so when they do freeze and snap, it's a much larger tree coming down on the power lines. Power outages are almost never caused by the snow itself... usually either ice or the cold itself causing complications.
I'd like to see your citation for burying power lines to be a "one time 3k fee". Especially in cities and similar built-up areas that are the most affected. You'd also need to bury the transformers and all of the other gear currently on poles and any other points of failure. And then when you do need to do maintenance on those buried lines, the cost of unburying and reburying them is still significant. The much more economical option is to simply get your own backup source of power, be it a generator, wind or solar - whichever suits your anticipated situation best.
Five days of power outages in four years? I envy you. Where I grew up, it wasn't unusual to lose power several times in the summer to lightning and once or twice in the winter to ice. Since moving to the suburbs, we haven't had an outage last more than few seconds in the last four years but I still keep flashlights in every room and a stock of lanterns in the basement. I'm also equipped to run the essentials off of the car if necessary, although odds are I'll never have to.
I'm also in NY. I've lived in Central, Upstate and now Western NY. Without the plows and salt trucks, 90% of the people here wouldn't fare much better than those in Georgia. Why don't they have that equipment? You try explaining to taxpayers that they need to buy and maintain millions of dollars worth of equipment for a scenario that might not happen. It's the same reason we don't have a whole lot of equipment to handle hurricanes or earthquakes here. Sure, it could happen, but it's rare enough that it's not worth the money to put in a whole lot of preparation.
Don't worry, Slashdot is planning on implementing a beta version of IPv6. All of your packets will be routed directly to the NSA, then China, then the Antares nebula, and then beamed into space. Because fuck user experience.
There's no overlap between TWC and Comcast, so the number of choices won't change for anyone. I have TWC and I'm worried that Comcast will change their policies. TWC's price is a little high, and their technicians have broken my stuff more often than fixed it, but it's gotten significantly more reliable in the last couple years and as long as my loop isn't saturated, they give me about 32Mbps when I pay for 10Mbps.
"Comcast and Time Warner Cable don’t have overlapping markets, so antitrust regulators won’t view the merger with the same concerns they did with AT&T’s proposed bid with T-Mobile, experts say. That deal, which regulators rejected, would have eliminated a major national carrier and given consumers across the country fewer options."
It's also not really that simple. You can't always tell if the foundation is bad because of the materials had poor QA, the guy who poured it is incompetent, the guy who designed it didn't know what he was doing, or there was an as-yet undiscovered sinkhole right underneath the house. There's even times when everything is in spec, but it still doesn't work like it should.
My point was the presence of a PIN does not magically make a credit card the same as a debit card any more than a wheel makes a bicycle the same as a truck.
I only took one course in business law, so I don't know how a signature on a contract compares to a signature on a CC receipt (which is just a contract saying "I will pay $X" anyway), but it's intent (and a few other requirements such as age) to sign that counts. You can write a contract on a napkin, dip your penis in ink and slap it on the bottom and it's a valid signature - this is why illiterate people sometimes just put an X or another mark in lieu of a signature.
Matching signatures is only good for proving that you're the one who signed something (and it doesn't help nearly as much in proving that you're NOT the one who signed something). Retail uses it to match against the signature on your CC sometimes just as a way to cut down on identity theft, but they don't have to because it doesn't change the validity. If the signature needed to match to be valid, that would open a thousand loopholes for stealing shit.
While I'll accept your counter, it should also be noted that most EU countries are much smaller than the US, which does make it a bit easier to change that infrastructure. If the entire EU all had to switch at exactly the same time, that would be more akin to the US because every state has laws that are just a little bit different. That said, it's still no excuse for us taking this much longer to switch.
Slashdot Mirror
But some ambiguity comes in because we refer to many non-human things (pets in particular) as he/she when, grammatically, they should be called "it".
It used to be perfectly acceptable as a gender-neutral singular, but that usage got phased out around the same time "thou" did (thus why modern English lacks a T-V distinction). English now lacks a gender-neutral pronoun, which is a pain in the ass, so this is how people fill it in. Personally, I think writing he/she and his/her makes for much worse reading than using they/their.
You forgot about bestiality, at least in certain parts of the South.
If all of them are going to become mainstream, LGBTQ is going to need a whole lot more letters. I think it'd be best if we picked a handful of definitions and allowed for ranges within them. Vegetarianism has done this - sure, there's various names like octo-lacto-vegetarian for different degrees of it, but most of the time getting that specific only matters in the context of certain situations. I have no problem with recognizing different genders, but the more you try to granularize it, the more trouble you're going to run into defining them until every person on Earth uses a slightly different definition.
Gender is not the same as Sex
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
No, but it does affect routers that have smiley face stickers applied to the top or sides.
My ex-girlfriend's parents had a wireless router like that... both the wireless and web interface had default settings that they weren't supposed to change. And it gets better. Administration from the WAN side was enabled (supposedly for support). Yes, with the default UN/PW. Only Frontier could make TWC look somewhat competent.
How exactly are you supposed to spread salt with dumptrucks? Give a guy a shovel and have him stand in the back and fling salt out? Multi-purpose earth-moving equipment is okay for parking lots and driveways, but would work really poorly and slowly on roads in which you need to continuously push snow to the side, not in front of you. Likewise, most city vehicles wouldn't work very well in a task for which they are not designed... there's a reason northern states don't just use pickups with plows on the roads even when they only get an inch or two of snow. Salt stockpiles don't last forever... moisture and time are their enemies. It also takes up a huge amount of space just to store. Most importantly, all of this costs more money to maintain than it costs to recover from not having it.
I should have used that line with my professors. "I shouldn't need to cite my papers, you have access to Google!"
Besides, your link says nothing about it being a "one-time fee", which is a key part of the original AC's argument. It does, however, say there would be a 300% rate increase, which would imply it's the exact opposite of a "one-time fee". In other words, you have done the opposite of providing relevant supporting information for the claims of a "one time 3k fee".
Your own article goes on to cite other issues with burying lines from a previous project, including being sued by residents and lack of space among the existing sewage, water, fiber, and gas lines... and that was in a residential area. It also mentions having to bury switch boxes that need more than four cubic meters of space, another huge issue. And all that is before you even consider maintenance costs. The main conclusion of the article is that it makes a little bit of sense if you're building new lines, but it makes very little sense to replace existing lines... and this is in Toronto no less, where it would seem to make much more sense in general than in a place like Atlanta that only sees winter once or twice a decade.
In a nutshell, it's just a power inverter connected directly to the battery - cig lighter inverters have a max draw of about 15A before they blow the fuse on most cars, so you'll either want a permanently wired solution (like I did) or just use alligator clips that come with most 400+ watt inverters. You just need to make sure it can provide as power as you expect to draw. Items like a refrigerator or freezer only need to run once or twice a day to maintain sufficient cold (as long as you open them sparingly) and will usually draw under 400 watts if they're relatively modern. Likewise, you can power fluorescent or LED bulbs with a measly 400 watt inverter. Air conditioning, electric stoves and dryers are the only major appliances I would really hesistate to run off an inverter but even those can be planned for.
It's not as convenient or robust as a whole-home generator, but it's a hell of a lot more affordable for short-term power outages (a couple days up to a week or two). If you really want to be prepared or to use larger inverters, equip your car with a second battery that is also charged from the alternator. I got my 400W inverter for $15 on sale from NewEgg and it's sufficient to run anything I might need for an outage of up to a week. Harbor Freight sells 750W inverters for $45 and 2000W inverters for $160 (and that's before their ubiquitous 25% off coupons).
The real drawback is if you need your car at the same time you need to power something in the house, but it's an emergency measure that's just to hold over until regular power is restored. Combine it with some common sense preparation, like keeping extra gas in the garage, and it's a pretty good solution to keeping things going during an outage. Hell, I'd recommend just getting an inverter in the 200W-400W range that can run off the cig lighter socket just in case you're camping or chilling at a parking area or don't want to buy extra 12V car adapters for your laptop, tablet, etc - many come with USB charging ports as well.
You obviously wouldn't expect a backup to power *everything*. My parents' backup generator is enough to run the main set of lights, and the refrigerator, freezer or dryer (although probably not all at once... but they're rarely all running at once anyway) and some of the more common appliances like the computers or TVs... in other words, all of the essentials and a fair number of luxuries. It was about $1200 and has an expected lifetime of ten to twenty years before it should need any serious maintenance costs (they're about five years in now). Until I see an actual citation that's more than "What he said", I have a hard time believing that burying all of the lines would be cheaper than that.
I live in New York, where it was also about -5F yesterday. And if we get two inches of snow before the plows get out, some people start driving 5MPH and thus slowing ALL traffic. And these are people who have lived in these conditions their entire lives. There's also the matter of southerners not having experience driving in snow any more than northerners are well prepared for going out in 115 degree summer heat.
As another poster mentioned, the power outages are sometimes caused by nature - in his example, it's because southern pines can grow so much taller due to the lack of regular winter... so when they do freeze and snap, it's a much larger tree coming down on the power lines. Power outages are almost never caused by the snow itself... usually either ice or the cold itself causing complications.
I'd like to see your citation for burying power lines to be a "one time 3k fee". Especially in cities and similar built-up areas that are the most affected. You'd also need to bury the transformers and all of the other gear currently on poles and any other points of failure. And then when you do need to do maintenance on those buried lines, the cost of unburying and reburying them is still significant. The much more economical option is to simply get your own backup source of power, be it a generator, wind or solar - whichever suits your anticipated situation best.
Five days of power outages in four years? I envy you. Where I grew up, it wasn't unusual to lose power several times in the summer to lightning and once or twice in the winter to ice. Since moving to the suburbs, we haven't had an outage last more than few seconds in the last four years but I still keep flashlights in every room and a stock of lanterns in the basement. I'm also equipped to run the essentials off of the car if necessary, although odds are I'll never have to.
I'm also in NY. I've lived in Central, Upstate and now Western NY. Without the plows and salt trucks, 90% of the people here wouldn't fare much better than those in Georgia. Why don't they have that equipment? You try explaining to taxpayers that they need to buy and maintain millions of dollars worth of equipment for a scenario that might not happen. It's the same reason we don't have a whole lot of equipment to handle hurricanes or earthquakes here. Sure, it could happen, but it's rare enough that it's not worth the money to put in a whole lot of preparation.
Don't worry, Slashdot is planning on implementing a beta version of IPv6. All of your packets will be routed directly to the NSA, then China, then the Antares nebula, and then beamed into space. Because fuck user experience.
There's no overlap between TWC and Comcast, so the number of choices won't change for anyone. I have TWC and I'm worried that Comcast will change their policies. TWC's price is a little high, and their technicians have broken my stuff more often than fixed it, but it's gotten significantly more reliable in the last couple years and as long as my loop isn't saturated, they give me about 32Mbps when I pay for 10Mbps.
Washington Post's article confirms that:
"Comcast and Time Warner Cable don’t have overlapping markets, so antitrust regulators won’t view the merger with the same concerns they did with AT&T’s proposed bid with T-Mobile, experts say. That deal, which regulators rejected, would have eliminated a major national carrier and given consumers across the country fewer options."
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Duuuude, don't say that. People will think you're defending the Slashdot Beta and that it's their site to do what they want with.
Pretty convenient that the first of the new gTLDs approved were in Arabic, Chinese and Russian.
See: http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
It's also not really that simple. You can't always tell if the foundation is bad because of the materials had poor QA, the guy who poured it is incompetent, the guy who designed it didn't know what he was doing, or there was an as-yet undiscovered sinkhole right underneath the house. There's even times when everything is in spec, but it still doesn't work like it should.
My point was the presence of a PIN does not magically make a credit card the same as a debit card any more than a wheel makes a bicycle the same as a truck.
I only took one course in business law, so I don't know how a signature on a contract compares to a signature on a CC receipt (which is just a contract saying "I will pay $X" anyway), but it's intent (and a few other requirements such as age) to sign that counts. You can write a contract on a napkin, dip your penis in ink and slap it on the bottom and it's a valid signature - this is why illiterate people sometimes just put an X or another mark in lieu of a signature.
Matching signatures is only good for proving that you're the one who signed something (and it doesn't help nearly as much in proving that you're NOT the one who signed something). Retail uses it to match against the signature on your CC sometimes just as a way to cut down on identity theft, but they don't have to because it doesn't change the validity. If the signature needed to match to be valid, that would open a thousand loopholes for stealing shit.
"The Target breach was a large enough embarrassment to light the fuel under the motivational bonfire."
But with a name like that, surely they were asking for it...
While I'll accept your counter, it should also be noted that most EU countries are much smaller than the US, which does make it a bit easier to change that infrastructure. If the entire EU all had to switch at exactly the same time, that would be more akin to the US because every state has laws that are just a little bit different. That said, it's still no excuse for us taking this much longer to switch.