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User: letxa2000

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  1. Re:Do We Really Need Mandatory Insurance? on Pay-As-You-Drive Car Insurance · · Score: 1
    So make it so YOUR insurance company covers you for what you suffered from the uninsured motorist, and the uninsured motorist has to pay X% of his paycheck until it is paid off to the insurance company. The injured party is taken care of immediately and the insurance company recovers its loss.

  2. Re:No thanks on Pay-As-You-Drive Car Insurance · · Score: 1
    It lets the insurance companies better calculate and allocate risk. Insurance is all about risk and probabilities. The more information you have to better calculate those risks and probabilities, the more certain you can be of your risk as an insurance company.

    It's also doubtful this involves major insurance discounts. It probably involves a discount that is slightly less than the marginal benefit for them of having better information.

  3. Re:How long... on UK ISPs to Shut Down Spamvertised Websites · · Score: 2, Insightful
    My thoughts exactly. This seems like a good idea as long as the ISPs take a serious look at the accusation to make sure the site was really spamvertised and not just the target of some malicious competitor or a customer with a grudge, etc.

  4. Re:This is being done by Republican-SUPPORTERS, ri on Hackers Take Aim at Republicans · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Ironic how some activists today think that society is best served by making sure it doesn't have access to information that doesn't agree with the activists themselves. Interestingly, some of these "hacker activists" probably supposedly cling to the slogan "information wants to be free." I guess they just think they have a right to determine what information society should be free to access.

    How the actions of such "activists" differ from the efforts of government, RIAA, MPAA, etc. to restrict our access to information and the truth is left as an exercise for the reader.

  5. Re:doesn't matter if it's a hummer or not. on Student Killed Driving Solar Car · · Score: 1
    Uou made it the issue when you said: "This is more evidence of why we still use "inefficient" heavy vehicles. It's not just the efficiency of the vehicle that counts, but survivability in a crash."

    Maybe you were talking only about solar vs. ordinary cars, but it could easily be read (and was, by many people) as claiming that big SUVs are somehow safer than lighter, smaller cars. Which is basically just false.

    Ok, I guess I can see how it could be read that way. I was observing that we use heavy vehicles (even a small Honda is relatively heavy) that run on gas because the safety of the ones that run on solar are completely unsafe. It would not have mattered if this solar power car had swerved in front of the minivan, a Hummer, a Honda, or very possibly even a motorcycle. It did not have sufficient safety equipment and the driver would be just as dead. The only question is if it had been hit by a Yugo would the environmentalists still be getting out their anti-SUV pitchforks...

    Is a heavier vehicle safer? Well, had a motorcycle run into the solar-powered car the driver of the solar power car might be equally dead but might have taken the motorcycle-rider with him. As it is, the driver of the bigger heavier vehicle suffered no injury whatsoever as far as I can tell.

    And, yes, I do believe we'd all be safer if we all drove Hondas as opposed to all driving cars like the one that got run over in Canada. Even if everyone drove these paper-mache lightweight cars, they'd still be unsafe if driven at any highway speed. You crash two human bodies together at a closing velocity of 120mph with no safety features or crumple zones and those two human beings are going to be very dead even without the big bad SUVs.

  6. Re:It doesn't matter if it were a solar car or a b on Student Killed Driving Solar Car · · Score: 1
    But no-one suggests we ban SUVs and Hummers because some idiot drives a motorcycle and dies. We realize it's inherently dangerous to drive a motorcycle.

    The problem here today, though, is that someone driving an equally unsafe vehicle (a light, safety-featureless solar powered car) got creamed by a minivan. So obviosuly this is the Clash of the Titans: Big bad car against small efficient solar powered car.

    But, still, the person driving such an unsafe light vehicle accepts the same risks as the guy who decides to drive down the freeway on a motorcycle.

  7. Re:No! You fool! on Student Killed Driving Solar Car · · Score: 1
    Actually he's not. He's saying "everyone should drive hummers", which is just as bad as saying "everyone should drive smart cars"

    Actually, I wasn't saying either. I was simply predicting that everyone would start blaming big evil SUVs (I was right) and that solar powered cars aren't ready for prime time yet (I was right).

    But the karma moderation I received was of absolutely no surprise or importance to me.

  8. Re:doesn't matter if it's a hummer or not. on Student Killed Driving Solar Car · · Score: 1
    You do realize that the average SUV has a better chance of killing you in a head on collision with a stationary object than, say, a a honda accord, right?

    That's not even the issue.

    The issue here is an unsafe vehicle lost control and had insufficient safety features built into its design to survive a crash at velocity. Yes, he got hit by a minivan after he swerved in front of it. There's no suggestion that the minivan did anything wrong or that it could have avoided the crash had it been an Accord rather than a minivan. And, again, had that same unsafe vehicle (the solar powered one) crashed into a wall at highway speeds, the drive would almost certainly be equally dead.

    Keep your eyes on the ball here, folks. It's a tragedy, but the problem isn't a big bad ugly SUV. It's a typical minivan and the result would have been the same if he had hit a Yugo or one of those silly looking Mr. Bean type cars they use in the UK.

  9. Re:Who's driving whom? on Student Killed Driving Solar Car · · Score: 1
    So, environmentalists:

    Should we ban the big banner Hummer because its big, or the solar power car that crashes into other vehicles due to a little bit of wind?

  10. Re:So .. do we get rid of... on Student Killed Driving Solar Car · · Score: 1
    So... do we get rid of HUMMER's or Solar Powered cars? Wouldn't common sense dictate that the bigger car is the threat and should be disallowed?

    Should we also ban walls, signposts, stoplights which these unsafe solar powered cars can also crash into? The driver would have been equally dead if he had crashed into any of those obstacles in his vehicle at anything more than a minimal speed.

    The problem here was NOT the minivan. Or even a Hummer, had it been a Hummer. The problem was an unsafe vehicle that was not streetworthy and would not have passed any government safety inspection for road-worthiness. It had no business being on the road.

  11. Re:doesn't matter if it's a hummer or not. on Student Killed Driving Solar Car · · Score: 4, Insightful
    An unsafe, feather-weight car will lose to anything -- not just a hummer.

    True, including a wall if the vehicle is traveling at any speed. The problem here was not the minivan. The problem was un un-streetworthy vehicle that had to forego safety in an attempt to achieve efficiency. I'm sure the same vehicle traveling at 40mph that ran into a wall would have killed the driver just as effectively.

    This is more evidence of why we still use "inefficient" heavy vehicles. It's not just the efficiency of the vehicle that counts, but survivability in a crash.

  12. Re:Hummers on Student Killed Driving Solar Car · · Score: 0, Redundant
    The vehicle's design is not really street-safe - this will be a problem as more efficient, lighter cars share the road with Hummers.

    Of course the standard environmentalist wacko response will be that we should get rid of the Hummers while, in reality, this just goes to show that cars that aren't street-safe shouldn't be driven on the street. Again, it seems that alternative energy vehicles aren't ready for prime-time. Someday, perhaps.

  13. Re:Ironic... and misleading on Public Markets For Predicting Google's Market Cap · · Score: 1
    ... all they do is re-arrange what wealth exists, they produce *nothing*, and the only what it is possible is by shilling newsuckers into it all the time.

    They provide an incentive for people to buy stock in a company initially. Face it, very few people are going to buy stock in a company (and give that company working capital to grow/expand) if the people are going to be perpetually stuck with a stock certificate that they can't do anything with.

    While you're right that the stock market doesn't produce any tangible goods, it provides the very important function of providing an "aftermarket" for stocks after the company initially sells them. Without such an aftermarket, nobody would buy stocks and companies would not be able to raise money from investors and company growth would be limited. Limited company growth leads to limited growth in the economy.

    The stock market does effect the economy in very real ways.

  14. Re:Make an Example Out of This Guy on DVD-Watching Driver Charged with Murder · · Score: 1
    I agree. A few other idiots replied with smart-ass comments. But I doubt you are talking about driving down the road staring at the DVD screen. Of course not. You're driving I-10 in the middle of Texas or Arizona or I-15 in Utah and you're mostly watching out the window and listening to the DVD and glancing down from time to time at the DVD screen.

    This is actually probably safer than concentrating exclusively on the road in many parts of the country where highway hypnosis is a very real and dangerous thing regardless of how well-rested you are.

  15. Re:"A neat project, indeed." ?! on Visiting Every Latitude and Longitude Intersection · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I've also thought this project is pretty neat and even considered helping out with some confluences that are in my area here in Mexico.

    My thought has always been that there aren't enough points to be collected. Sure, it's a better sample of what we have now, but considering the confluences can be dozens of miles apart you can end up skipping entire interesting areas--either interesting for their beauty or for their boringness.

    I personally think that they should at least have the option of submitting pictures for every tenth or twentieth of a degree. That way, with the exception of mountainous terrain, the picture from one confluence will include a distant view of surrounding confluences. You end up with a complete photo catalog of the world instead of a rather broken "representation" of the world.

    IMHO.

  16. Re:Curious on Microsoft to Deploy SPF for Hotmail Users · · Score: 1
    It would take about 12 minutes for spammers to start sending spams that have the "Spam Score" header already in them. So mail servers would have to strip such headers when they are received from "the wild" but leave them intact if the mail is being received from a trusted internal mail server.

  17. Re:Ship % should underestimate, not overestimate.. on New Numbers on Linux Market Share Soon · · Score: 1
    Cause while you're waiting for your OS to install, maybe you want to have a nice BBQ out back.

  18. Re:Ship % should underestimate, not overestimate.. on New Numbers on Linux Market Share Soon · · Score: 1
    Not always. My laptop started out as an XP machine. I got sick of the fact that my new laptop, which was 3 times faster than the previous laptop from a hardware perspective, was actually running apps SLOWER. So I decided to make the leap from Microsoft to Linux.

    Now when I get a new laptop I'm not sure what I'll do. If I get another PC-based laptop (as opposed to Mac) I'll probably end up buying another Windows laptop and slapping on Linux unless there is an easy way to get a laptop with nothing on it.

  19. Re:Ship % should underestimate, not overestimate.. on New Numbers on Linux Market Share Soon · · Score: 1
    I personally run Linux on a laptop that came with XP pre-installed. I got fed up with it about 1.5 years ago, yanked the hard drive, bought a new hard drive, and installed Linux. Now if anything goes bad with the hardware I just slam the original hard drive with XP back in the machine before I take it in for service. You take an XP laptop running Linux in for service and you're not going to get far.

    "Building our own" isn't always the best idea, and isn't always possible if you're talking about laptops.

  20. Re:Instead of rewarding stockholders... on Microsoft Announces Dividend and Stock Buyback Program · · Score: 1
    In Mexico, employees are entitled to a percentage (albeit VERY SMALL) of their company's earnings each year. I guess it's kind of nice, but I've always thought it was rather socialistic. The employees are already paid for their services and are taking no risk so why should they be entitled to a share of the profits? If a company wants to give employees a stake in the company so that there is some motivation to do a better job, fine, but a legal requirement to give employees a piece of the earnings? Doesn't seem right to me.

  21. Re:Outstanding on Microsoft Announces Dividend and Stock Buyback Program · · Score: 5, Informative
    I'm no fan of Microsoft, but the CNN article said that Bill will be donating his one-off special dividend (about $4.5 billion) to the Bill Gates foundation.

  22. Re:Hear hear on Dell CEO Tells All · · Score: 1
    so - when a corporation fails to make a gross profit, and gets a tax credit for future earnings, this savings is passed on to the consumer, too, right?

    I didn't say that. But increases in their costs to make a specific profit ARE passed on to consumers.

    corporations dont price income tax into their prices, they pay it AFTER THEY"VE MADE A PROFIT. you know, they pay it on net income, not gross.

    If taxes go up, less of their net income is available for internal company use or dividends. If they have specific earnings goals and the taxes go up, the only way to achieve those specific earnings are to increase prices.

    We, the consumers, pay ALL the costs of the corporations whose product we buy. That is true by definition. They earn their money by selling products to us. Some of that money goes to pay their electric bill, some to pay the salaries, and some goes to pay taxes. If taxes increase, prices will generally reflect that to achieve a specific earning goal. If not, consumers still pay because the corporation will be spending money on taxes rather than optimizing its business or developing new products that will subsequently benefit us as consumers.

    There is no free lunch and you cannot just milk corporations as if they were endless cash chows nor can you logically believe that increasing taxes on them will have no effect on their economic performance or that it will have no effect on consumers. That is naive.

  23. Re:Hear hear on Dell CEO Tells All · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Well, guess what , if you raise your price by 10% to pass along the tax burden to the consumer, well, people are going to shift away from your product. You will no longer sell 1000 Radeon`s and therefore, your overall profits will drop, I guarantee it.

    And you are forgetting that if prices are raised on Levi's by 10% because of a tax increase, that same increase is going to apply equally to the competitors. Levi's and its competitors will all increase their prices to compensate for the tax increase and, yes, the consumer will end up paying for it. Those few companies with such incredible margins might absorb some of the increase, but most will be passed on to the consumer. And those companies with lower margins that cannot absord the increase will be made less competitive against those that can, and many will probably be driven out of business as a result.

    Oh well, just thought I`d post some realistic economics for those who care to not listen to overstatement.

    As soon as you explain how the tax increase applies to Levi's and none of its competitors maybe we'll believe your economic credentials. :)

  24. Re:Hear hear on Dell CEO Tells All · · Score: 1
    And of course one has to admire the results of propaganda by the corporatists in corporate owned media that results in someone being so overhwelmingly naive that he proposes to make the underhanded tax crookery practiced by the corporation and its beneficiaries totally official and above board.

    Take your trolling elsewhere.

  25. Re:Hear hear on Dell CEO Tells All · · Score: 4, Informative
    I do understand that, and also understand that a partnership allows pass-thru income with no taxation. I also know that a corporation is a living person in the sense of the law. But even so it doesn't make any sense to make it a living person in terms of the tax code. It is illogical and reduces efficiency.

    That a CEO is not personally responsible because his corporation is willing to "buy" that freedom from responsibility is not a valid argument and, if anything, makes it look like the government is on the take... that the government is willing to excuse you from personal responsibility as long as you submit to double taxation.