The food is quite a bit better, and healthier, than all that fried and preprocessed crap that McDonald's dishes out,...
"Better" is subjective, but I doubt you'll find it especially healthier. (Go ahead. Ask for their nutritional guidelines -- you know, the kind that are on every @#$!ing McDonald's wall.)
Whether you like fried and preprocessed crap or BAKED and preprocessed crap is a matter of taste.
I guess I was more saying: if my explanation was "I was following the person", is that illegal? If there is no expectation of privacy in a public place, then why would it be illegal?
1: Get a lawyer. What is legal in New York may not be legal in your state. I am not one, but even if I were I would tell you the same.
2: Generally speaking, YES. If you want to spend your day following someone, go right ahead. When asked, be honest. If the person you're following asks you to stop, then stop.
3: The operative word in #2 is "generally." If you're a man following a woman, or a white following a black, or an adult following a child, there might be a specific prohibition against you doing that.
4: Some folk follow others, and take pictures, and then sell their information to a third party. We call these people "private investigators", and while it's good to get your state's license if there is one, most of what they do is essentially what a private citizen could do.
According to IRS statistics, the bottom 40% of Americans have no income tax liability. They pay no federal taxes. Zip, zero, nada. Yet the warships, guns, missiles, etc, are paid for with federal tax dollars.
*ahem*.
Except for all of the following:
1: Social Security Tax they pay. 1a: the SS tax their EMPLOYER pays on their behalf. 2: Transaction Fees 3: The FICA they pay out of EITC 4: The taxes that their EMPLOYER pays on the wealth this employee generates in excess of his wages.
So, yeah, aside from all those, the working poor pay no taxes.
I would not pay more than $1 month, because frankly, TV is a big time suck and mind poison. but that's what I would do, and I am certain there are many people who agree with me.
There aren't enough folk who agree with you for the provider to make a profit. Sure, there're getting $13 more in revenue than they're getting now -- but they'd have more than $13 a month in increased expenses from doing so.
And I'm kinda amused that you listed "Comedy Central" and then bemoan all the rest of the crap on TV. I mean, you listed a channel whose business plan is "funny crap."
The channels must be cheap as in $(basic_bundle_cost/basic_bundle_channel_count).
Do you walk into a grocery store, pick up one 20 oz beverage, and then demand than they sell it to you for 1/6th the cost of a 6-pack instead of the price on the sticker?
A 40-channel bundle may cost you $40, but four $10-channel bundles will probably cost you $50, and 40 1-channel bundles will probably cost you $80+.
If internet is less expensive to deliver than TV, why oh why won't the cable companies just let me buy what I want and need, without paying for the "basic tier" of trash?
Because they need to plug you into said basic cable system anyway. They don't have the hardware to filter out their "basic" channels from any box with a live cable feed, so they just make it part of the basic connection.
Time Warner, at least, has a "basic" package which is only the free-to-TW channels: the ones they get from the over-the-air broadcasters and things like C-SPAN which are intentionally free to all.
Critic: "Hey, 90% of science fiction is crap!" Sturgon: "90% of everything is crap. What's your point?"
Selling individual channels, or smaller bundles, would mean you could probably ensure that what channels you get are those you actually want to watch; but it would also mean that a lot of marginal shows and channels would go out of business.
Channel-by-channel billing would increase the overhead for each channel, thus lowering the profit margin. With a slimmer margin, a channel needs more viewers to stay afloat. As a consequence, a lot of channels that you WANT to watch would go out of business, and we'd be stuck with a bigger share of that 90% and less of that 10%.
To use a slightly wider-sourced aphorism: "There's no accounting for taste." What's golden to you might be crap to me, and the 100 other "viewers" your network would need to stay afloat.
... for the most part I just have to do without until reality catches up with technology and gives me options suited to my lifestyle.
Reality has given you plenty of options -- you can either take the cheap free feed, or you can pay for convenience.
You choose not to, which is perfectly fine. But unless they're money to be made by getting you TV to watch, no body's going to bother.
Regardless if I care or not, why should anyone be trying to force me to wear a seat belt? How does it help them?
When you get hit head-on at 45 mph by a drunk driver, and get thrown through your windshield and splatter on the highway, you won't care at all. Your family might even not care either. (They might hate you, but more likely they're just not going to have to deal with more than the funeral)
But the police, EMT, fireman, tow truck operator, and passing motorists will all care, because instead of your corpse staying in the car where it belongs, it's plastered all over the street where it'll, at least, scar the mental images of everyone who passes by and leave quite an ugly stain.
So, please, wear a seat belt. Don't litter with your corpse.
Municipal/Government corporations have a history of being less effective, and more expensive than private business
But far, FAR more even.
You can easily build a business selling internet service in New York City. For the whole state of New York, though... well, if the state didn't require telecoms to service some parts of NY, they simply wouldn't get serviced.
This needs to be an "open to all" arrangement, or the judge should reject the settlement.
Why?
It's a bunch of private parties (the Authors Guild) deciding, after having taken a company (Google) to court, to settle their differences without having the court impose something.
Should I get half your house just because you and your wife split it?
(And before you trot out the word "ethics", they're the same fucking thing, and I don't have to agree with anyone else's "morals" OR "ethics".)
You're right. You have the absolute right to be amoral.
Invert it. If YOUR "morals" or "ethics" aren't recognized by another, the mean nothing.
Whatever your religious beliefs may be, mankind has a natural moral sense right along with our preference for bright lights, sex, and protection of our young. Any permeable society includes within it moral laws that are surprisingly similar--the biggest variable is "who is us", not "how do we act".
More to the point, are you saying that if a doctor honestly believed abortion was murder, he should just shrug his shoulders, remember that the supreme court says its ok, and quell his sense of right and wrong?
No. He should hang a sign on his wall, put his medical practice on the line, and forgo the patients he will lose.
If enemy can't even in principle destroy you - then it's a slaughter, not warfare. It might be a slaughter for noble aims, but it'll still be a slaughter.
Defeat. DEFEAT. If the enemy has no means to DEFEAT you, it's a slaughter.
But, really, any soldier who'd rather wage war than engage in slaughter is an idiot.
Until we change how we raise humans, our belief that violence could resolve differences will remain.
Please, change your damn verb.
Violence DOES resolve differences. It does so unjustly, unfairly, and often immorally. But the difference of who rules Oklahoma, or if Germany would rule all of Europe, was solved quite definitely by violence.
Violence SHOULD not be used to resolve differences, because we're better than that. If you think you need to lie to children to get them to be nonviolent, then you're a fool.
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The food is quite a bit better, and healthier, than all that fried and preprocessed crap that McDonald's dishes out,...
"Better" is subjective, but I doubt you'll find it especially healthier. (Go ahead. Ask for their nutritional guidelines -- you know, the kind that are on every @#$!ing McDonald's wall.)
Whether you like fried and preprocessed crap or BAKED and preprocessed crap is a matter of taste.
I guess I was more saying: if my explanation was "I was following the person", is that illegal? If there is no expectation of privacy in a public place, then why would it be illegal?
1: Get a lawyer. What is legal in New York may not be legal in your state. I am not one, but even if I were I would tell you the same.
2: Generally speaking, YES. If you want to spend your day following someone, go right ahead. When asked, be honest. If the person you're following asks you to stop, then stop.
3: The operative word in #2 is "generally." If you're a man following a woman, or a white following a black, or an adult following a child, there might be a specific prohibition against you doing that.
4: Some folk follow others, and take pictures, and then sell their information to a third party. We call these people "private investigators", and while it's good to get your state's license if there is one, most of what they do is essentially what a private citizen could do.
5: Get a lawyer.
According to IRS statistics, the bottom 40% of Americans have no income tax liability. They pay no federal taxes. Zip, zero, nada. Yet the warships, guns, missiles, etc, are paid for with federal tax dollars.
*ahem*.
Except for all of the following:
1: Social Security Tax they pay.
1a: the SS tax their EMPLOYER pays on their behalf.
2: Transaction Fees
3: The FICA they pay out of EITC
4: The taxes that their EMPLOYER pays on the wealth this employee generates in excess of his wages.
So, yeah, aside from all those, the working poor pay no taxes.
No, I was refuting someone who stated, as I quoted "I want channels as in [basic bundle cost] / [# of channels]."
Choice is good. But choice costs more -- so we should expect the a'la carte cost to be a bit higher.
I would not pay more than $1 month, because frankly, TV is a big time suck and mind poison. but that's what I would do, and I am certain there are many people who agree with me.
There aren't enough folk who agree with you for the provider to make a profit. Sure, there're getting $13 more in revenue than they're getting now -- but they'd have more than $13 a month in increased expenses from doing so.
And I'm kinda amused that you listed "Comedy Central" and then bemoan all the rest of the crap on TV. I mean, you listed a channel whose business plan is "funny crap."
The channels must be cheap as in $(basic_bundle_cost/basic_bundle_channel_count).
Do you walk into a grocery store, pick up one 20 oz beverage, and then demand than they sell it to you for 1/6th the cost of a 6-pack instead of the price on the sticker?
A 40-channel bundle may cost you $40, but four $10-channel bundles will probably cost you $50, and 40 1-channel bundles will probably cost you $80+.
They never gave me any explanation why I couldn't just be billed for $40 for standalone internet.
Because the $40 for the cable modem is price when you already have a cable line running to the residence.
The $10 extra is for the costs (to Cox) that you DON'T have if you already have cable TV.
If internet is less expensive to deliver than TV, why oh why won't the cable companies just let me buy what I want and need, without paying for the "basic tier" of trash?
Because they need to plug you into said basic cable system anyway. They don't have the hardware to filter out their "basic" channels from any box with a live cable feed, so they just make it part of the basic connection.
Time Warner, at least, has a "basic" package which is only the free-to-TW channels: the ones they get from the over-the-air broadcasters and things like C-SPAN which are intentionally free to all.
while you personally slave your ass away and go bankrupt trying to pay the taxes.
You must think all those folk who tried to get their income to be just under $250,000 are pretty smart, I guess.
If you go "bankrupt" trying to pay taxes, you really need to hire a new accountant.
In this time of recession, we need ways for people to cut costs, not socialistic anti-choice solutions that force people to buy junk they don't want.
For pay TV, you have at least to options, wherever you are in the country. (Cable or Satellite.) Possibly more, depending on what state you're in.
NONE OF THEM show a'la carte programming, because by their calculations they simply wouldn't stay in business doing so.
Imposing per-channel pricing on pay-TV providers is many things, but "capitalistic" it ain't.
3 points.
I guess the problem is that majority of programming suck,
What, you're not familiar with Sturgeon's Law?
Critic: "Hey, 90% of science fiction is crap!"
Sturgon: "90% of everything is crap. What's your point?"
Selling individual channels, or smaller bundles, would mean you could probably ensure that what channels you get are those you actually want to watch; but it would also mean that a lot of marginal shows and channels would go out of business.
Channel-by-channel billing would increase the overhead for each channel, thus lowering the profit margin. With a slimmer margin, a channel needs more viewers to stay afloat. As a consequence, a lot of channels that you WANT to watch would go out of business, and we'd be stuck with a bigger share of that 90% and less of that 10%.
To use a slightly wider-sourced aphorism: "There's no accounting for taste." What's golden to you might be crap to me, and the 100 other "viewers" your network would need to stay afloat.
... for the most part I just have to do without until reality catches up with technology and gives me options suited to my lifestyle.
Reality has given you plenty of options -- you can either take the cheap free feed, or you can pay for convenience.
You choose not to, which is perfectly fine. But unless they're money to be made by getting you TV to watch, no body's going to bother.
I will tell you one thing that is not great about Office 2007 - lack of keyboard shortcuts.
You're trolling.
Name one -- ONE -- keyboard shortcut that went away in 2007 that you used.
Perhaps you can explain to me how to do everything in Office 2007 without a mouse
You're using windows without a mouse? Ok, whatever.
Press the ALT key. Office 2007 will show you a list of shortcut keys, over every icon visible.
Regardless if I care or not, why should anyone be trying to force me to wear a seat belt? How does it help them?
When you get hit head-on at 45 mph by a drunk driver, and get thrown through your windshield and splatter on the highway, you won't care at all. Your family might even not care either. (They might hate you, but more likely they're just not going to have to deal with more than the funeral)
But the police, EMT, fireman, tow truck operator, and passing motorists will all care, because instead of your corpse staying in the car where it belongs, it's plastered all over the street where it'll, at least, scar the mental images of everyone who passes by and leave quite an ugly stain.
So, please, wear a seat belt. Don't litter with your corpse.
Municipal/Government corporations have a history of being less effective, and more expensive than private business
But far, FAR more even.
You can easily build a business selling internet service in New York City. For the whole state of New York, though... well, if the state didn't require telecoms to service some parts of NY, they simply wouldn't get serviced.
Why doesn't USPS track every piece of mail that the sender voluntarily puts a bar code on it?
Because scanning, maintaining, and providing a database has a non-zero cost.
UPS does so because you can't ship anything through them for less than $3 or so. USPS moves most of its mail for $.40, and some even less than that.
Spam is theft, theft of OUR bandwidth and OUR mail server space, cpu time and time.
If the commons is free, you can't steal it.
Spammers are polluters.
This needs to be an "open to all" arrangement, or the judge should reject the settlement.
Why?
It's a bunch of private parties (the Authors Guild) deciding, after having taken a company (Google) to court, to settle their differences without having the court impose something.
Should I get half your house just because you and your wife split it?
i just wanted to monitor where you are going and what you are doing. dont worry i delete it after three days
The car that you're renting me? And that you have the responsibility for maintaining?
Sure. Go ahead. Sounds reasonable to me.
(And before you trot out the word "ethics", they're the same fucking thing, and I don't have to agree with anyone else's "morals" OR "ethics".)
You're right. You have the absolute right to be amoral.
Invert it. If YOUR "morals" or "ethics" aren't recognized by another, the mean nothing.
Whatever your religious beliefs may be, mankind has a natural moral sense right along with our preference for bright lights, sex, and protection of our young. Any permeable society includes within it moral laws that are surprisingly similar--the biggest variable is "who is us", not "how do we act".
More to the point, are you saying that if a doctor honestly believed abortion was murder, he should just shrug his shoulders, remember that the supreme court says its ok, and quell his sense of right and wrong?
No. He should hang a sign on his wall, put his medical practice on the line, and forgo the patients he will lose.
Remember what happened when tasers were supposed to fix all the problems that came with gun-equipped cops?
Hundreds of American Citizens were tazered instead of being shot to death?
If enemy can't even in principle destroy you - then it's a slaughter, not warfare. It might be a slaughter for noble aims, but it'll still be a slaughter.
Defeat. DEFEAT. If the enemy has no means to DEFEAT you, it's a slaughter.
But, really, any soldier who'd rather wage war than engage in slaughter is an idiot.
Until we change how we raise humans, our belief that violence could resolve differences will remain.
Please, change your damn verb.
Violence DOES resolve differences. It does so unjustly, unfairly, and often immorally. But the difference of who rules Oklahoma, or if Germany would rule all of Europe, was solved quite definitely by violence.
Violence SHOULD not be used to resolve differences, because we're better than that. If you think you need to lie to children to get them to be nonviolent, then you're a fool.
The F-35 is the "mainstay" aircraft of the new generation. The F-22 is the "Air superiority" fighter.
The equivalent comparison is between an economy car and a sports car.