If there's a need to subsidize rural mail delivery, the government can just as well levy a tax on all postage and contract with privatized-USPS or someone else to provide service in areas where it would otherwise be uneconomical.
In the current system, the USPS monopoly allows it to have hours that make banks look good and send men with guns to shut you down if you even think about sending a non-urgent document by FedEx.
Then again, T-Mobile's US UMTS network is practically nonexistent. Take Boston as an example: they've got 3G inside 495, except for a large number of inexplicable nulls and EDGE-only areas. Then you go from Worcester to Springfield and it's EDGE only. 2G coverage for a 4G world.
Indeed. Has to have been cabled before all the cable companies merged into Virgin, because they haven't laid a single meter of cable since and never will again.
This is indeed the problem —AT&T would rather sue those who point out that their network is archaic than actually do something about it. At this point they have zero excuses for not having HSPA equipment at every base station.
A VAT would require a constitutional amendment -- but you'd want one anyway to ensure that the VAT replaced the income tax rather than being a massive add-on to it.
Yes. It was a civil case rather than a criminal one, but Food Lion won against ABC in Food Lion v. Capital Cities/ABC. On the other hand, half of the verdict was reversed on appeal. On the gripping hand, the portion of the verdict that was sustained awarded FL a whopping $2.00.
4th Circuit Court of Appeals case number 97-2492. (My access to LN is broken so I'm not going to provide the West cite. Frakking West.)
The UK does have a film censor board — fairly mild as such things go, but the government will send men with guns to stop you from selling a movie without a BBFC certificate, so it's a censorship board nonetheless.
Their revenue? The Native Americans only share a duopoly on gambling because they're able to take advantage of regulatory arbitrage and states haven't figured out that they'd collect more profit from taxes on privately-run gambling. They're no more entitled to it than AWB was entitled to export all Australian wheat or Carlos Slim is entitled to pwn Mexicans' wallets.
And your suggestion to direct revenue from gambling taxes to education is faulty -- that's likely to be a federal tax, and we have too much federal involvement in education as is. (No Child Left Untested, anyone?)
(Full disclosure: I work for the federal government. That means I have a heightened awareness of how good we are at pissingaway taxpayer dollars.)
I'll give you South Korea and Japan, but the UK? Surely you're joking. In the UK, 8Mb/s DSL is screaming fast, and the upload speed sucks so hard that it's typically not even advertised. On the other hand, large chunks of the US are getting FTTH lit up right now.
What he said. And let's not forget the Mesklin novels and the short stories.
(Full disclosure: I can be found now and then in SF con dealers' rooms selling people nice hardbacks, some of which are collections of his stories -- Trio for Slide Rule and Typewriter has both of Roger_Wilco's recommendations.)
Indeed. Intel does the right thing here -- if I'm interpreting their NISPOM-equivalent manual correctly, not only will they not outsource IT, they don't even allow non-Intel employees to have root.
The E-ring people definitely need to do something about the contractors who hire employees based solely on clearance and blood pressure, and the poorly-written contracts that allow them to get away with it.
Actually, the parties to the Dresden Agreement of 1931 have sent repeated followup expeditions, but the crawling chaos got them all. And the Russians are deploying shoggoths in attack mode in the Khyber pass... sucks to be in that universe, I gather.
(The robot to be slurped is "A Colder War" by Charles Stross. Highly recommended.)
What's now posing as the Moon is really the Fourth Imperium Utu-class planetoid Dahak, hull number 177291 -- the original was destroyed 51,000 years ago.
Call 'em up on the phone -- (800) 284 3100. Give them the item number (694341) and you can order. They've got thousands, but for some reason it's not on the web site right now. Unfortunately, the 15% off coupon is web-only, but you can use 594321 to get $15 off.
Enterprise would be so much better if Archer had half a clue. Consider:
"The Andorian Incident": The transporter is new and not guaranteed to work. By taking hostages, the Andorians have already forfeited their lives, but rather than beaming them out, an away party is beamed in.
"Cold Front": Near the end, Archer has a phaser on Silik, yet does not kill him.
"Fortunate Son": The Enterprise away team is under fire from the freighter crew. They could have had their opponents beamed out or heavy weapons beamed in--on the gripping hand, neither option would be necessary if Starfleet Academy could find non-Stormtrooper marksmanship instructors.
Conclusion: The protagonists' survival is attributable solely to their being characters in the Star Trek universe. Were they nonfictional, they wouldn't last five minutes in a firefight.
So you've paid a lot of money for a PDA/phone, and then you've still got to fork out more for additional memory, yet another phone to cover the other two bands, and (if applicable) a Mac OS sync program (which isn't even compatible with Mac OS X). And what's with the non-standard units of measurement on the specification page? Nokia are probably trying to disguise the fact that this sucker is 16 cm long and weighs 250 g.
You've used the wrong tense -- Hal Clement still is a great writer of the genre; he hasn't stopped writing yet, and I hope he doesn't stop anytime soon.
BTW, don't forget to pick up your copy of the new George R.R. Martin book, Quartet: Four Stories from the Crossroads, also published by NESFA Press. (Disclaimer: I proofread it.)
-Brad Ackerman
absolutely not speaking for Boskone
Do note that while the big American studios may be attempting to break away from their lackluser performance as of late, they still can't resist the temptation to fsck with the source material. The book on which this movie is based (Das Versprechen) takes place in Switzerland, so I wonder what else they've changed -- and does Hollywood ever change a book for the better?
At that price, the producers actually justify piracy themselves...
Bullshit. The Geobreeders 2 OVA costs JPY 6000 a disc, and you don't see me complaining (granted, it's got catgirls by the boatload and a great scene with Higehashi Yuu suffering from nicotine withdrawal). If you don't like the price, don't buy. There are plenty of series that can be bought on 4-episode, $30 discs.
BTW: If I were interested in a crap quality download, I could spend two hours finding the binary articles, downloading, and praying that I get a complete file (value of my time: $500+). I'd end up with something that I wouldn't willingly pay more than $5 for. Alternatively, I could walk to Suncoast (20 minutes round trip) and spend $20, receiving for that a 10 Mbit/s file with all the necessary audio channels. Welcome to the real world -- time is money here.
As far as the series itself goes, Ao no Rokugou rocks. Haven't seen eps 3 and 4 yet, though. Other fun recent issues are Dual, FLCL and Di Gi Charat.
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If there's a need to subsidize rural mail delivery, the government can just as well levy a tax on all postage and contract with privatized-USPS or someone else to provide service in areas where it would otherwise be uneconomical.
In the current system, the USPS monopoly allows it to have hours that make banks look good and send men with guns to shut you down if you even think about sending a non-urgent document by FedEx.
Outside the M25? Could be ages.
Then again, T-Mobile's US UMTS network is practically nonexistent. Take Boston as an example: they've got 3G inside 495, except for a large number of inexplicable nulls and EDGE-only areas. Then you go from Worcester to Springfield and it's EDGE only. 2G coverage for a 4G world.
Indeed. Has to have been cabled before all the cable companies merged into Virgin, because they haven't laid a single meter of cable since and never will again.
This is indeed the problem —AT&T would rather sue those who point out that their network is archaic than actually do something about it. At this point they have zero excuses for not having HSPA equipment at every base station.
A VAT would require a constitutional amendment -- but you'd want one anyway to ensure that the VAT replaced the income tax rather than being a massive add-on to it.
Yes. It was a civil case rather than a criminal one, but Food Lion won against ABC in Food Lion v. Capital Cities/ABC. On the other hand, half of the verdict was reversed on appeal. On the gripping hand, the portion of the verdict that was sustained awarded FL a whopping $2.00.
4th Circuit Court of Appeals case number 97-2492. (My access to LN is broken so I'm not going to provide the West cite. Frakking West.)
The UK does have a film censor board — fairly mild as such things go, but the government will send men with guns to stop you from selling a movie without a BBFC certificate, so it's a censorship board nonetheless.
The other civilizations played with artifacts of the Great Old Ones, who ate their brains.
(c.f. "A Colder War")
That's oh so last month. C.f. Halting State by Charles Stross, just published in October.
Their revenue? The Native Americans only share a duopoly on gambling because they're able to take advantage of regulatory arbitrage and states haven't figured out that they'd collect more profit from taxes on privately-run gambling. They're no more entitled to it than AWB was entitled to export all Australian wheat or Carlos Slim is entitled to pwn Mexicans' wallets.
And your suggestion to direct revenue from gambling taxes to education is faulty -- that's likely to be a federal tax, and we have too much federal involvement in education as is. (No Child Left Untested, anyone?)
(Full disclosure: I work for the federal government. That means I have a heightened awareness of how good we are at pissing away taxpayer dollars.)
Robert Sawyer wrote a book based on the premise that Carinæ is about to light up and toast us.
I'll give you South Korea and Japan, but the UK? Surely you're joking. In the UK, 8Mb/s DSL is screaming fast, and the upload speed sucks so hard that it's typically not even advertised. On the other hand, large chunks of the US are getting FTTH lit up right now.
Asok had to implement an Internet-via-sewers project once. "I get a straw!"
What he said. And let's not forget the Mesklin novels and the short stories.
(Full disclosure: I can be found now and then in SF con dealers' rooms selling people nice hardbacks, some of which are collections of his stories -- Trio for Slide Rule and Typewriter has both of Roger_Wilco's recommendations.)
Indeed. Intel does the right thing here -- if I'm interpreting their NISPOM-equivalent manual correctly, not only will they not outsource IT, they don't even allow non-Intel employees to have root. The E-ring people definitely need to do something about the contractors who hire employees based solely on clearance and blood pressure, and the poorly-written contracts that allow them to get away with it.
Actually, the parties to the Dresden Agreement of 1931 have sent repeated followup expeditions, but the crawling chaos got them all. And the Russians are deploying shoggoths in attack mode in the Khyber pass... sucks to be in that universe, I gather. (The robot to be slurped is "A Colder War" by Charles Stross. Highly recommended.)
What's now posing as the Moon is really the Fourth Imperium Utu-class planetoid Dahak, hull number 177291 -- the original was destroyed 51,000 years ago.
Call 'em up on the phone -- (800) 284 3100. Give them the item number (694341) and you can order. They've got thousands, but for some reason it's not on the web site right now. Unfortunately, the 15% off coupon is web-only, but you can use 594321 to get $15 off.
- "The Andorian Incident": The transporter is new and not guaranteed to work. By taking hostages, the Andorians have already forfeited their lives, but rather than beaming them out, an away party is beamed in.
- "Cold Front": Near the end, Archer has a phaser on Silik, yet does not kill him.
- "Fortunate Son": The Enterprise away team is under fire from the freighter crew. They could have had their opponents beamed out or heavy weapons beamed in--on the gripping hand, neither option would be necessary if Starfleet Academy could find non-Stormtrooper marksmanship instructors.
Conclusion: The protagonists' survival is attributable solely to their being characters in the Star Trek universe. Were they nonfictional, they wouldn't last five minutes in a firefight.For $600, you don't get:
So you've paid a lot of money for a PDA/phone, and then you've still got to fork out more for additional memory, yet another phone to cover the other two bands, and (if applicable) a Mac OS sync program (which isn't even compatible with Mac OS X). And what's with the non-standard units of measurement on the specification page? Nokia are probably trying to disguise the fact that this sucker is 16 cm long and weighs 250 g.
The whole point is that they don't expect you to obey the speed limit. If you did, they wouldn't be able to rake in the bucks, would they?
You've used the wrong tense -- Hal Clement still is a great writer of the genre; he hasn't stopped writing yet, and I hope he doesn't stop anytime soon.
BTW, don't forget to pick up your copy of the new George R.R. Martin book, Quartet: Four Stories from the Crossroads, also published by NESFA Press. (Disclaimer: I proofread it.)
-Brad Ackerman
absolutely not speaking for Boskone
Do note that while the big American studios may be attempting to break away from their lackluser performance as of late, they still can't resist the temptation to fsck with the source material. The book on which this movie is based (Das Versprechen) takes place in Switzerland, so I wonder what else they've changed -- and does Hollywood ever change a book for the better?
Bullshit. The Geobreeders 2 OVA costs JPY 6000 a disc, and you don't see me complaining (granted, it's got catgirls by the boatload and a great scene with Higehashi Yuu suffering from nicotine withdrawal). If you don't like the price, don't buy. There are plenty of series that can be bought on 4-episode, $30 discs.
BTW: If I were interested in a crap quality download, I could spend two hours finding the binary articles, downloading, and praying that I get a complete file (value of my time: $500+). I'd end up with something that I wouldn't willingly pay more than $5 for. Alternatively, I could walk to Suncoast (20 minutes round trip) and spend $20, receiving for that a 10 Mbit/s file with all the necessary audio channels. Welcome to the real world -- time is money here.
As far as the series itself goes, Ao no Rokugou rocks. Haven't seen eps 3 and 4 yet, though. Other fun recent issues are Dual, FLCL and Di Gi Charat.