Like an image of a baby and three buttons saying MAN, WOMAN, BABY. Or a picture of a running man and buttons saying SLEEP, RUN, CHILD.
They can't be automatically generated, because automatic generation is equally as reliable as automatically solving them.
So a human would have to design each and every one of them, which is a job that nobody wants to pay somebody to do. There will thus also be a limited sampleset which will easily be learned by a crafty spammer (and like anything else digital, it only takes one person to figure it out).
1) Immediately stop what I'm doing, find a place wash my hair, wash it, dry it, brush it, and make it look decent 2) Smear the shit around with a piece of paper
I'll probably just smear the shit around with a piece of paper, thanks. I'll get a large percentage of it out immediately, and take care of the rest when a shower is more convenient.
And I'll tell you what I'm not going to do: I'm not going to rinse my head off in a bidet.
Some of the stuff that goes into my sink and bathtub is not the sort of thing I want lingering around in a toilet bowl or clogging up the works.
I suppose I could filter it, or have dedicated handwashing sinks, or something.
But even then, my shower drain is below the toilet. So I'd need to pump the water uphill to get it into the toilet.
It seems like I'll need an independent grey water system, which will need maintained.
And as it stands I've never had to clear a clog on the clean side of a toilet, and I'm not really interested in clearing a clog on the grey side.
(Also: I just don't care that much about water use. The reservoir in my small town was, in recent history, at one time the largest above-ground reservoir in the world. Even in the depths of drought, we've got lots of relatively cheap potable water for flushing toilets, washing cars, watering gardens... Running low has never been a concern here.)
I use services from an overseas Joe Small Company (androidlost) for my phone-finding.
And I don't care if the NSA (et al) can find my phone through that mechanism, because frankly I'm under the assumption that if the NSA wants to know where my phone is or has been, they've got other methods for finding that data.
Even I had totally unlocked, unbreakable, and open baseband and firmware (ha! right), with zero closed-source software installed at all, there is still telemetry available from the providers themselves because I'm still moving around with a chatty 2-way radio in my pocket.
Now, let's assume that you have 16 lawns to cut. Would it be faster to make one monster 8-wide mower that can cut each in three passes then move to the next lawn, or would it be faster to send one mower to each and cut them each in parallel with 24-passes? Remember, there is overhead involved in the move from one lawn to the next.
Overhead? One of these techniques requires one person, one mower, and one transport vehicle. The other requires twenty-four people, twenty-four mowers, and twenty-four transport vehicles.
Oh, it comes along with twenty-four people to insure, twenty-four people to calculate taxes on, twenty-four people to provide parking for, twenty-four people to feed at the Christmas party, twenty-four people [...].
I used to get several stations that were useable. Sure, there was usually snow, and it sometimes looked very ugly due to other conditions. And sometimes, by George, they looked great and pristine, as if I had a finely-tuned C-band dish in the back yard.
Whatever the case, I could always follow the local news, or enjoy a sitcom.
Now I get one channel. And it doesn't even have local news. (I do receive it perfectly, in glorious 1080i and without the ghosting that was prevalent before on that particular channel, but that does not mean that I feel that an improvement has been made. ATSC is not a very good standard for fringe areas.)
My local coffee shop (not a Starbucks, thankfully) has had free Internet since before WiFi became a thing that was useful -- there are still Ethernet jacks next to the tables.
Once WiFi went from useful to commonplace, the speeds slowed to a crawl.
What changed? The neighbors' ability to easily steal bandwidth.
But lately it's been fast enough: For the past year or so, they've used WPA with a passphrase that changes daily. It's posted on the chalk board with along with the drink specials, so it's not exactly a well-kept secret, but it does seem to keep the freeloaders at bay.
(Although I must say: One of these days I should approach the owner with a WRT54GL loaded with Tomato, and see if he'll let me install it. Net neutrality be damned: Good and forceful QoS at that level is a godsend on a heavily-burdened DSL pipe, and can allow everyone to do what everyone wants to do while still being responsive and fast.)
*And as an unreferenced footnote: I've seen LTE speed tests on my phone be in the 25/25Mbps range. Which sure is cute, but it is not exactly affordable for any length of time, and latency still sucks: If I want to watch a video or play a game, I want to use free WiFi if I can.
I ran the office mail server on a dynamic IP address for around five years. (OMG! HORRORS!)
But the truth is that it worked fine. When the IP address shifted (which sometimes didn't happen for over a year at a stretch), there was a few minutes of downtime that nobody ever bothered to complain about (perhaps they didn't even notice). Incoming mail got queued by the sending server for a bit, and then things went back to normal.
Indeed, it worked great up until the day that one of the popular RBLs blacklisted the network simply because it was known to use dynamic IPs. And that was a day or so of suckage while we transitioned to a set of static IPs, most of which consisted of me gently saying "OK, boss: It's time to pay for real Internet now."
But that's just mail, which is tainted by spam countermeasures. Hosting an HTTP or FTP server on a dynamic IP? A Minecraft box? No big deal unless that IP address changes very frequently (I'm looking at you Ameritech/SBC/AT&T, and your daily 12:01AM connection resets on business DSL circuits circa 2003).
Indeed, I'd like to submit that the only thing that actually needs a static-for-ever address is a DNS server. And that for everything else, we have DNS.
Therefore, I'd like to posit that it is absolutely possible to run a popular and well-known server on a dynamic IP address, and indeed that the lack of a static address is a hinderance of only the smallest proportion.
[Cue the folks who will insist that since DNS TTL and refresh values don't matter because they can be trivially ignored by clients and intermediate servers, that dynamic DNS is impossible to be useful for anything, ever.]
My first car was an early Chevy Beretta with a bit less than 100 HP.
Highway speed? Easy. Maintaining it? Total non-issue.
Faster than that? It's been long enough that I do not remember how what speed that car would maintain, but it was way faster than should be considered safe on most American highways.
Now: That car was fairly light. It had two doors, was FWD, had no side-impact beams and no airbags, no ABS, etc. In terms of fuel-injected vehicles, it was pretty barren of safety features, and thus light on weight.
Discussing whether a modern car with a 100HP gas motor (there are no electric engines) can get it done on a chassis that makes heavy use of carbon fiber? Silly.
Getting up to highway speed with a 100HP motor in an old muscle car? Ridiculous.
That would probably work better than the ~300HP 4.8L V8 dually 8x7x12 box truck we just got at work, and that gets on the highway just fine with an another half-ton of tools and kit in the back. Is it a race car? No. Does it get on the highway? Yep, no excessive drama, even on short ramps with proper application of the loud pedal.
Getting a muscle car out of the driveway with only 100HP? Jesus Fuck: Assuming you don't stop to help the bystanders you just scared to half to death, you'll have a hard time making the turn onto the road. (Many of the cars you delineate were sold, successfully, with around 100HP: Not every Camaro had a big block V8.)
Muscle cars do not, almost by definition, care about much about friction coefficient.
Even if we assume you mean "modern supercar" instead of "muscle car," a primary goal there is the generation of downforce. And downforce increases the coefficient of friction. (IOW, neither "muscle car" nor "modern supercar" belong in a comparison with "fuel economy": That's not what the buyer really cares about.)
That all said: It could be made more attractive. Perhaps more to the point, it could have taken a few styling cues from traditional BMWs instead of eschewing them wholesale.
And, frankly: Buyers of new BMWs are frequently buying style, as perhaps they well should: They're not inexpensive cars. But the I3 would look positively ugly in my driveway next to my 1995 325i.
(FFS, it'd probably look ugly next to my 2002 GMC Safari work truck.)
All of these old discs were recorded on an 8x Plextor (PR-820?), which was a beast of a SCSI burner and was regarded extremely well in professional circles at the time for creating excellent discs. (I still have the drive. Some day I might even pay someone skilled in the art to tune it up properly -- it stopped being reliable several years ago.)
How would the results of a modern $20 SATA burner work? Too early to tell, and normally the CDs I make these days get tossed a few hours after creation anyway, or they're just discs of MP3s for the car (where rough handling ruins them before anything else gets a chance).
But if I had to guess: Probably not as well. If nothing else, the laser in a DVD drive is all wrong for CDs (red instead of infrared).
The differing wavelength is not entirely unlike the difference between a double-density and high-density 5.25" floppy drive: DD drives have a head sized for 40 tracks, HD drives have a head sized for 80 tracks.
The result was that writing a double-density 360k floppy disk usually worked on a high-density drive, but never as well as the same media being written on a double-density drive. And so the media itself was cross-compatible, sometimes the drives themselves made that impossible...
(I've got quite old floppy disks that still read OK, but it is probably not a coincidence that none of these are double-density 5.25" disks that were written with a half-track-width high-density drive.)
As to the stuff failing after three years, I've got to ask: Did the burned media ever work properly to begin with? Or was it burned once, never properly verified or even used, and then filed away only to be discovered to be inoperable after a few years?
I've had my share of bad burns, but AFAICT they were all detectable in the verify stage.....
No current inexpensive optical media is likely to last more than about a decade (and some cheap stuff lasts a lot less long than that). There exist archival-quality optical disks, but they are much more expensive and hard to find than the regular stuff.
People always say that.
But I've got burned CD-Rs from ~15 years ago that work fine.
Not just audio CD and data CDs, either: I've got old PSX backups which should be particularly fragile (due to Sony's use of Mode 2), and particularly difficult to read (the reader in the original Playstation did not win any awards for reliability), and they work fine too.
Now, granted, some of these are indeed "archival" disks: Then-expensive gold Kodak media that is supposed to be good for 90 years and TDK Certified+, to name a couple of types I used to buy.
But I don't notice any difference between those expensive disks, and whatever crap I'd gotten at Black Friday sales at Staples eons ago.
And in all cases, the disks are stored properly, though not particularly specially: In a jewel case, either on a shelf or in a box.
Indeed, the only degradation that I've noticed is that which occurred from mishandling.
My practice with hotels is to find the cheapest one available, and then only sleep there.
Because seriously: If I wanted a community swimming pool or a weight room or hot breakfast, I'd go forth and find such a thing.
But all I want from a hotel is a clean bed and a TV with a sleep timer and a sufficiently-boring cable channel that I can go to sleep easily.
If it is early, a fridge or an ice machine is nice to keep the beer cold; otherwise, the beer will stay cold long enough. (I'd mention Internet access, but it's been years since I found a hotel without it, so that doesn't matter any longer.)
I don't unpack. Indeed, my bag might even just stay in the trunk of the car. I don't need it in the room with me.
What do you do with hotels that requires you to actually study up on reviews beforehand?
CDMA2000 is on its way out even vzw and sprint are moving to gsm with LTE. At this point you can only do data and only in areas with lte service but eventually lte service will provide voice and will be pretty ubiquitous.
Um. Last I checked (and no, it hasn't always been this way) I can talk on the phone with VZW over LTE: This is the only way that VZW allows voice and data to exist concurrently on the same handset. This works fine. Almost all of the calls I make are over LTE.
And I can also pull down a web page over the various CDMA2000 technologies where LTE is unavailable, albeit much more slowly than in the past when the airwaves were clearer.
And also, last I checked in VZW-land: LTE only exists on 700MHz bands, whereas CDMA2000 only exists on other bands.
So what exactly are you going on about? At this point, both CDMA2000 and LTE co-exist peacefully, and it will require a Great Cleansing to get rid of CDMA2000 entirely.
(CDMA "on its way out?" Show me an LTE-only VZW-sourced phone that I can get today, and I'll eat my hat.)
My new bank is friendly, they remember my name, and I don't know how they make money or what their fee structure is like because all they'll ever get is the $10 that I leave in an account. I use them for the services I detailed previously, and that is all.
I am not interested in conducting financial transactions with another party through any manner of traditional bank, or a credit union. It is not at all advantageous to me in any capacity whatsoever.
(And why is that people who are "members" at a credit union always sound like a fucking Teamster rep whenever anyone says the word "bank"? I don't like your club.)
Firstly, you should consider actually reading what I wrote before making assumptions about me.
Secondly, the fee structure is similar for many banks: By batching transactions and processing in largest-first order, they ensure the greatest likelihood of a larger number of fees. (This does seem a whole lot like new math, until a banker patiently shows you that 20 - 20.01 = -180.)
Thirdly, again, you should try actually reading. What do you think I just wrote about, if not a debit card? FFS.
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They can't be automatically generated, because automatic generation is equally as reliable as automatically solving them.
So a human would have to design each and every one of them, which is a job that nobody wants to pay somebody to do. There will thus also be a limited sampleset which will easily be learned by a crafty spammer (and like anything else digital, it only takes one person to figure it out).
If the options are:
1) Immediately stop what I'm doing, find a place wash my hair, wash it, dry it, brush it, and make it look decent
2) Smear the shit around with a piece of paper
I'll probably just smear the shit around with a piece of paper, thanks. I'll get a large percentage of it out immediately, and take care of the rest when a shower is more convenient.
And I'll tell you what I'm not going to do: I'm not going to rinse my head off in a bidet.
Wow. Some people take shit way too seriously.
Some of the stuff that goes into my sink and bathtub is not the sort of thing I want lingering around in a toilet bowl or clogging up the works.
I suppose I could filter it, or have dedicated handwashing sinks, or something.
But even then, my shower drain is below the toilet. So I'd need to pump the water uphill to get it into the toilet.
It seems like I'll need an independent grey water system, which will need maintained.
And as it stands I've never had to clear a clog on the clean side of a toilet, and I'm not really interested in clearing a clog on the grey side.
(Also: I just don't care that much about water use. The reservoir in my small town was, in recent history, at one time the largest above-ground reservoir in the world. Even in the depths of drought, we've got lots of relatively cheap potable water for flushing toilets, washing cars, watering gardens... Running low has never been a concern here.)
I use services from an overseas Joe Small Company (androidlost) for my phone-finding.
And I don't care if the NSA (et al) can find my phone through that mechanism, because frankly I'm under the assumption that if the NSA wants to know where my phone is or has been, they've got other methods for finding that data.
Even I had totally unlocked, unbreakable, and open baseband and firmware (ha! right), with zero closed-source software installed at all, there is still telemetry available from the providers themselves because I'm still moving around with a chatty 2-way radio in my pocket.
*shrug*
I still use my Droid 4 too.
Why wouldn't I? The contract isn't up yet, and the phone hasn't even been out for two years.
I do wish that sometime in the next year or so something else with a useable keyboard becomes reality.
Overhead? One of these techniques requires one person, one mower, and one transport vehicle. The other requires twenty-four people, twenty-four mowers, and twenty-four transport vehicles.
Oh, it comes along with twenty-four people to insure, twenty-four people to calculate taxes on, twenty-four people to provide parking for, twenty-four people to feed at the Christmas party, twenty-four people [...].
I used to get several stations that were useable. Sure, there was usually snow, and it sometimes looked very ugly due to other conditions. And sometimes, by George, they looked great and pristine, as if I had a finely-tuned C-band dish in the back yard.
Whatever the case, I could always follow the local news, or enjoy a sitcom.
Now I get one channel. And it doesn't even have local news. (I do receive it perfectly, in glorious 1080i and without the ghosting that was prevalent before on that particular channel, but that does not mean that I feel that an improvement has been made. ATSC is not a very good standard for fringe areas.)
"Same contract" as in "one stack of paper with both Starbucks and McDonald's listed at the top of it"?
Possible, but extremely doubtful.
Much, much more likely: A minimum of one contract per entity. Srsly. Get out of your bubble once in a while.
Neighbors, perhaps?
My local coffee shop (not a Starbucks, thankfully) has had free Internet since before WiFi became a thing that was useful -- there are still Ethernet jacks next to the tables.
Once WiFi went from useful to commonplace, the speeds slowed to a crawl.
What changed? The neighbors' ability to easily steal bandwidth.
But lately it's been fast enough: For the past year or so, they've used WPA with a passphrase that changes daily. It's posted on the chalk board with along with the drink specials, so it's not exactly a well-kept secret, but it does seem to keep the freeloaders at bay.
(Although I must say: One of these days I should approach the owner with a WRT54GL loaded with Tomato, and see if he'll let me install it. Net neutrality be damned: Good and forceful QoS at that level is a godsend on a heavily-burdened DSL pipe, and can allow everyone to do what everyone wants to do while still being responsive and fast.)
*And as an unreferenced footnote: I've seen LTE speed tests on my phone be in the 25/25Mbps range. Which sure is cute, but it is not exactly affordable for any length of time, and latency still sucks: If I want to watch a video or play a game, I want to use free WiFi if I can.
I have a fundamental disagreement with your unwarranted invocation of Godwin's Law.
I ran the office mail server on a dynamic IP address for around five years. (OMG! HORRORS!)
But the truth is that it worked fine. When the IP address shifted (which sometimes didn't happen for over a year at a stretch), there was a few minutes of downtime that nobody ever bothered to complain about (perhaps they didn't even notice). Incoming mail got queued by the sending server for a bit, and then things went back to normal.
Indeed, it worked great up until the day that one of the popular RBLs blacklisted the network simply because it was known to use dynamic IPs. And that was a day or so of suckage while we transitioned to a set of static IPs, most of which consisted of me gently saying "OK, boss: It's time to pay for real Internet now."
But that's just mail, which is tainted by spam countermeasures. Hosting an HTTP or FTP server on a dynamic IP? A Minecraft box? No big deal unless that IP address changes very frequently (I'm looking at you Ameritech/SBC/AT&T, and your daily 12:01AM connection resets on business DSL circuits circa 2003).
Indeed, I'd like to submit that the only thing that actually needs a static-for-ever address is a DNS server. And that for everything else, we have DNS.
Therefore, I'd like to posit that it is absolutely possible to run a popular and well-known server on a dynamic IP address, and indeed that the lack of a static address is a hinderance of only the smallest proportion.
[Cue the folks who will insist that since DNS TTL and refresh values don't matter because they can be trivially ignored by clients and intermediate servers, that dynamic DNS is impossible to be useful for anything, ever.]
And Europe's style would be far better served by using gasoline engines in everything...just sayin'.
(Unless, of course, your generalization is just plain wrong.)
How do I contact this union? I've got a few grievances to file.
Eh?
My first car was an early Chevy Beretta with a bit less than 100 HP.
Highway speed? Easy. Maintaining it? Total non-issue.
Faster than that? It's been long enough that I do not remember how what speed that car would maintain, but it was way faster than should be considered safe on most American highways.
Now: That car was fairly light. It had two doors, was FWD, had no side-impact beams and no airbags, no ABS, etc. In terms of fuel-injected vehicles, it was pretty barren of safety features, and thus light on weight.
Discussing whether a modern car with a 100HP gas motor (there are no electric engines) can get it done on a chassis that makes heavy use of carbon fiber? Silly.
Getting up to highway speed with a 100HP motor in an old muscle car? Ridiculous.
That would probably work better than the ~300HP 4.8L V8 dually 8x7x12 box truck we just got at work, and that gets on the highway just fine with an another half-ton of tools and kit in the back. Is it a race car? No. Does it get on the highway? Yep, no excessive drama, even on short ramps with proper application of the loud pedal.
Getting a muscle car out of the driveway with only 100HP? Jesus Fuck: Assuming you don't stop to help the bystanders you just scared to half to death, you'll have a hard time making the turn onto the road. (Many of the cars you delineate were sold, successfully, with around 100HP: Not every Camaro had a big block V8.)
In the grand scheme of things, perhaps it isn't ugly.
But it certainly looks ugly compared to my 325i.
Just sayin'. :)
Muscle cars do not, almost by definition, care about much about friction coefficient.
Even if we assume you mean "modern supercar" instead of "muscle car," a primary goal there is the generation of downforce. And downforce increases the coefficient of friction. (IOW, neither "muscle car" nor "modern supercar" belong in a comparison with "fuel economy": That's not what the buyer really cares about.)
That all said: It could be made more attractive. Perhaps more to the point, it could have taken a few styling cues from traditional BMWs instead of eschewing them wholesale.
And, frankly: Buyers of new BMWs are frequently buying style, as perhaps they well should: They're not inexpensive cars. But the I3 would look positively ugly in my driveway next to my 1995 325i.
(FFS, it'd probably look ugly next to my 2002 GMC Safari work truck.)
Might be luck. Might be hardware.
All of these old discs were recorded on an 8x Plextor (PR-820?), which was a beast of a SCSI burner and was regarded extremely well in professional circles at the time for creating excellent discs. (I still have the drive. Some day I might even pay someone skilled in the art to tune it up properly -- it stopped being reliable several years ago.)
How would the results of a modern $20 SATA burner work? Too early to tell, and normally the CDs I make these days get tossed a few hours after creation anyway, or they're just discs of MP3s for the car (where rough handling ruins them before anything else gets a chance).
But if I had to guess: Probably not as well. If nothing else, the laser in a DVD drive is all wrong for CDs (red instead of infrared).
The differing wavelength is not entirely unlike the difference between a double-density and high-density 5.25" floppy drive: DD drives have a head sized for 40 tracks, HD drives have a head sized for 80 tracks.
The result was that writing a double-density 360k floppy disk usually worked on a high-density drive, but never as well as the same media being written on a double-density drive. And so the media itself was cross-compatible, sometimes the drives themselves made that impossible...
(I've got quite old floppy disks that still read OK, but it is probably not a coincidence that none of these are double-density 5.25" disks that were written with a half-track-width high-density drive.)
As to the stuff failing after three years, I've got to ask: Did the burned media ever work properly to begin with? Or was it burned once, never properly verified or even used, and then filed away only to be discovered to be inoperable after a few years?
I've had my share of bad burns, but AFAICT they were all detectable in the verify stage.....
People always say that.
But I've got burned CD-Rs from ~15 years ago that work fine.
Not just audio CD and data CDs, either: I've got old PSX backups which should be particularly fragile (due to Sony's use of Mode 2), and particularly difficult to read (the reader in the original Playstation did not win any awards for reliability), and they work fine too.
Now, granted, some of these are indeed "archival" disks: Then-expensive gold Kodak media that is supposed to be good for 90 years and TDK Certified+, to name a couple of types I used to buy.
But I don't notice any difference between those expensive disks, and whatever crap I'd gotten at Black Friday sales at Staples eons ago.
And in all cases, the disks are stored properly, though not particularly specially: In a jewel case, either on a shelf or in a box.
Indeed, the only degradation that I've noticed is that which occurred from mishandling.
*shrug*
My practice with hotels is to find the cheapest one available, and then only sleep there.
Because seriously: If I wanted a community swimming pool or a weight room or hot breakfast, I'd go forth and find such a thing.
But all I want from a hotel is a clean bed and a TV with a sleep timer and a sufficiently-boring cable channel that I can go to sleep easily.
If it is early, a fridge or an ice machine is nice to keep the beer cold; otherwise, the beer will stay cold long enough. (I'd mention Internet access, but it's been years since I found a hotel without it, so that doesn't matter any longer.)
I don't unpack. Indeed, my bag might even just stay in the trunk of the car. I don't need it in the room with me.
What do you do with hotels that requires you to actually study up on reviews beforehand?
Um. Last I checked (and no, it hasn't always been this way) I can talk on the phone with VZW over LTE: This is the only way that VZW allows voice and data to exist concurrently on the same handset. This works fine. Almost all of the calls I make are over LTE.
And I can also pull down a web page over the various CDMA2000 technologies where LTE is unavailable, albeit much more slowly than in the past when the airwaves were clearer.
And also, last I checked in VZW-land: LTE only exists on 700MHz bands, whereas CDMA2000 only exists on other bands.
So what exactly are you going on about? At this point, both CDMA2000 and LTE co-exist peacefully, and it will require a Great Cleansing to get rid of CDMA2000 entirely.
(CDMA "on its way out?" Show me an LTE-only VZW-sourced phone that I can get today, and I'll eat my hat.)
How well does it fellate?
I fired that bank a long, long time ago.
My new bank is friendly, they remember my name, and I don't know how they make money or what their fee structure is like because all they'll ever get is the $10 that I leave in an account. I use them for the services I detailed previously, and that is all.
I am not interested in conducting financial transactions with another party through any manner of traditional bank, or a credit union. It is not at all advantageous to me in any capacity whatsoever.
(And why is that people who are "members" at a credit union always sound like a fucking Teamster rep whenever anyone says the word "bank"? I don't like your club.)
Firstly, you should consider actually reading what I wrote before making assumptions about me.
Secondly, the fee structure is similar for many banks: By batching transactions and processing in largest-first order, they ensure the greatest likelihood of a larger number of fees. (This does seem a whole lot like new math, until a banker patiently shows you that 20 - 20.01 = -180.)
Thirdly, again, you should try actually reading. What do you think I just wrote about, if not a debit card? FFS.
Is this a technical support forum for your Mac?
I thought we were talking about cars.
But whatever: It works for me. If it does not work for you, then perhaps it is your problem, and not somebody else's.