Yes, I've made many trips like that in fairly stiffly-sprung small cars. I don't have a problem with it, and it's preferable to a car where you'll "lose control" as soon as you try to swerve around an obstacle in the road.
However, I've been on some really horrible washboard dirt roads in the desert where I imagine that soft suspension might actually be a benefit, but that's not something most drivers ever do.
Sorry, but the people elected him, so it's presumed he's acting in their best interest. If they don't think so, they're free to elect someone else, but I never see that happen too much.
Maybe you could try charging all the voters in his congressional district with treason for re-electing him when he continues to do treasonous things.
What the heck is there to "appreciate" with the "classic American floating cloud" suspension? It sucks. You can't feel the road, the handling is vague, you can't corner worth a damn, what good is it? Why would you want a car that requires you to come to a complete stop before you can negotiate a turn? I drove a Lincoln Town Car like that a long time ago, and it was a horrible experience. The steering wheel was just like those old-time arcade racing games where the wheel could spin in circles and there was no feedback, no resistance, and no stops.
But I know what you mean about the sleazeballs at dealerships. It does seem to depend a lot on the dealership, but the high-end makes seem to have much nicer salespeople to work with. I went to a Honda dealership not too long ago to look at a particular car and the salespeople seemed like a bunch of neanderthals. I guess I should have checked the reviews on Google; they're pretty horrible.
You're kidding, right? The Mini has far more cars on the road than the higher-end BMWs, so its parts are far more valuable. High-end BMW owners don't buy possibly-stolen parts (like off Ebay or Craigslist), they go to the dealership to get all their service for $$$$. Mini owners are much more likely to do their own work with parts bought on the secondhand market.
This is the same reason that Hondas topped the most-stolen car lists for many, many years; lots of people had them, lots of their owners worked on them (even swapping engines and the like), so the parts were valuable.
What the heck is someone going to do with a stolen $80k BMW anyway? They can't register it and get valid tags. They can't strip it and sell it for parts for the reasons above. They might just joyride in it, but the best they can do is ship it to South America and resell it there. Most cars stolen in this country are stolen for their parts, not to ship to 3rd world countries where there's no law enforcement WRT stolen cars, which is why you never see really high-end cars place very high on the stolen-cars lists.
If you think stealing a Mini "isn't worth it", you're a moron (though honestly, a Honda Civic or these days a Hyundai would be a better choice).
What's funny with the Buicks is that they've been on a campaign for a while to attract younger drivers. Of course, it really hasn't worked out that well.
Yep, at least the person who cuts you off on purpose is actually watching the road and aware of their surroundings. They may be acting in an unsafe manner, but it's still a lot better than someone whose attention is elsewhere; the aggressive drivers who cut you off rarely actually hit you, because they're just being rude, but usually know their car's dimensions pretty well to pull off the maneuver without incident. I'm not saying it's great, but it's preferable to someone who's looking under their seat, at their kids in the back, texting on their phone, etc. instead of looking at the cars around them.
Similarly, I'm finding Google Maps is letting me down more and more. I'll search for some business, and it won't show up at all, or it'll show me completely wrong locations, and I hate to admit it as much as I've loathed MS all these years, but Bing Maps will show me just what I'm looking for. It does seem like Google is losing focus and their quality is faltering in many places. Maybe I'm just cherry-picking examples where GM is failing (since normally I'll use it, and only revert to Bing if something seems amiss), but it seems like this is happening more and more lately.
I'm not so sure about that. Even America's Founders thought IP was important, and enshrined it in the Constitution. However, they also had an important phrase included there: "a limited time", which the first Copyright Act set to 14 years (plus an optional 14 year extension), back in a time when electronic communications did not exist and everything was much slower. There were a lot of important inventions in America in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and the US Patent Office was utilized a lot here; I think it's pretty hard to argue that America would have been so successful during that time without any IP protection. The problem is that the terms are much too long and things are applied too broadly.
Yes, my favorite feature of it is that its spelling is phonemic; even not being fluent in it, just because I know the pronunciation rules, I could read a whole book in German aloud, and be understood by German speakers, even though I myself might only understand a fraction of what I just read aloud. Try that with English; it's impossible.
But I do agree with the other complaints about it having gendered nouns; that's my biggest complaint about it, but again that seems to be a feature of every European language except English for some reason. I'm not a linguist, but I am curious where those ever came from, and why anyone ever thought they'd be a good idea instead of simply confusing.
German IS great. Not perfect, but compared to most other indoeuropean languages it looks pretty good. If you're going to complain about gendered nouns and cases, just look at Latin; I think it had 7 cases or more. In fact, cases are usually a good thing; the more cases you have, the more complex the language is, but also the more efficient it is, because you don't have to use a lot of extra words to describe various concepts (who's doing the action, who's the recipient of the action, etc.). Just look at how short various Latin phrases are, compared to their translations in English, or worse, Spanish. And I happen to like the separable verbs.
The main problems with German are 1) gendered nouns as you say, but this is a problem with every European language except for English AFAIK, and 2) it's rather rigid, but again this is also a benefit because you just have to learn the rules and then you know the language, whereas with English the rules aren't worth bothering with because the list of exceptions is so long that you end up just memorizing everything.
Yes, I'm talking about post-Revolutionary War; during the late 1700s and 1800s, the Americans profited handsomely on "pirated" materials. They also did a lot of industrial espionage; I can't remember the device now, but one particularly famous case was for some machine whose design was stolen and brought to America, where they made copies.
But yes, before the War, the British practiced mercantilism which basically bled colonies of their raw material resources and enriched the mother country at the expense of the colonies.
It's not just internal stuff; remember HTTP's "referer" field. It should be "referrer", but only the misspelled version will work correctly as that's the standard.
However, missing an 'r' in a word that's not used very often is, to me, much less severe than something like mixing up "too|two|to" or "there|their|they're", as the previous poster said his cow-orkers do. 3rd graders aren't taught the word "referrer", but they are taught those homophones because those words are so commonly used in English, and when someone mixes those up, it shows they're literally dumber than a 3rd grader.
Just because things were done differently in older times doesn't mean that the modern way is better. Invading countries is bad IMO, but we still do it all the time. However, there is no evidence whatsoever that perpetual copyright terms are a good thing for society, and in fact are very damaging, yet that's what we have now, while back in those days they had much more sensible copyright terms.
It's going to be a while before the Chinese suffer, as they're currently ascendant, much like the Americans were in the 1800s and first half of the 1900s. Sure, it may eventually fall apart, but it'll be a while because for them to go down, someone else needs to be doing better than them, and no one is at the moment.
However, I don't really see how a nation can rise without the associated nationalism; the two seem to go hand-in-hand. Humans are still tribal creatures, and nations are just extensions of tribes, much like teams (sports teams, political parties, etc.), and people will mindlessly defend them. The only way you're going to eliminate nationalism is to eliminate nations, which means a single global government, and that certainly isn't happening any time soon.
I've seen some of their barely-readable resumes, and I wonder how they got hired in the first place.
Maybe that's the problem: your company attracts people who can't write worth a shit, and it's a feedback loop (the people doing the hiring can't write, so they hire more people who can't write, and the process repeats itself). Maybe you need to just switch to a different company; I really haven't seen this level of bad writing at the places I've worked. It has been my experience, however, that every company, big or small, has a certain culture about it and ways of doing things, and tends to attract certain types of people, and those who don't fit in don't last long. It sounds like you're not a very good fit for that company.
Perhaps, but it is a great example of history repeating itself. Back in the 1700s, Britain was the major world power, and made a lot of money with IP laws and demanded that everyone else respect them, and instead America ignored them and made cheaper copies and made a fortune at it; before long, Britain was a has-been and America was the major power.
Now, a couple hundred years later, history is repeating itself. America, which got rich partially by ignoring IP laws and making cheaper copies of stuff, is bitching and whining that others are copying their stuff and demanding their IP laws be enforced worldwide, while China ignores them and makes cheaper copies of stuff and is making a fortune doing it.
I guess it just shows how little people learn from history.
Good grief, what kind of morons do you work with? As a software engineer, I never see my coworkers make basic mistakes like these, and I'm quite sure they aren't using Word to write their emails and Skype messages either.
English's Germanic roots are great. The problem was when the French Normans invaded Britain and fucked it up by merging their language with the Germanic language that was in place there.
Putting a French language together with a Germanic language is like putting ketchup on a chocolate cake. And this is why English is the way it is now.
I think Europeans have a lot more leeway to criticize Americans than Americans have room to criticize Chinese.
Europe is having some problems, true, but they seem to mainly be due to trying to have a monetary union without having a full political union, which sounded like a good idea at first but doesn't seem to be working out too well in practice unfortunately because different countries want to manage their money differently (some are very frugal, some like to spend it like a drunken sailor and then make up for it with inflation). I just don't see the problems with blatant corruption in Europe like what we see in the USA; in Europe the politicians seem to actually be trying to do the right thing for their people, but of course butt heads with the politicians of other nations inside the union that want to run things differently. In the US, the politicians are overtly corrupt and don't bother to do anything for the people except for a small amount of pandering to their "base" to keep them going to the polls to reelect them so they can serve their corporate masters another term.
If your orders are large enough, it's certainly feasible. They're obviously not going to have the same workers working 24x7, that's why we invented "shifts" long ago. But the factory itself can certainly be kept running 24x7, in fact it's a better use of resources to do so rather than letting it sit idle for part of the day.
Exactly. If your product is selling so well that you can actually keep a factory running 24x7 to fill the demand, then why wouldn't they build another factory, logo-less product or no?
Why should they be? The USA wasn't aggressive in protecting British IP holders from infringement back in the 17-1800s, in fact they didn't enforce that at all, and the USA made a bunch of money as a result.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I've made many trips like that in fairly stiffly-sprung small cars. I don't have a problem with it, and it's preferable to a car where you'll "lose control" as soon as you try to swerve around an obstacle in the road.
However, I've been on some really horrible washboard dirt roads in the desert where I imagine that soft suspension might actually be a benefit, but that's not something most drivers ever do.
Sorry, but the people elected him, so it's presumed he's acting in their best interest. If they don't think so, they're free to elect someone else, but I never see that happen too much.
Maybe you could try charging all the voters in his congressional district with treason for re-electing him when he continues to do treasonous things.
What the heck is there to "appreciate" with the "classic American floating cloud" suspension? It sucks. You can't feel the road, the handling is vague, you can't corner worth a damn, what good is it? Why would you want a car that requires you to come to a complete stop before you can negotiate a turn? I drove a Lincoln Town Car like that a long time ago, and it was a horrible experience. The steering wheel was just like those old-time arcade racing games where the wheel could spin in circles and there was no feedback, no resistance, and no stops.
But I know what you mean about the sleazeballs at dealerships. It does seem to depend a lot on the dealership, but the high-end makes seem to have much nicer salespeople to work with. I went to a Honda dealership not too long ago to look at a particular car and the salespeople seemed like a bunch of neanderthals. I guess I should have checked the reviews on Google; they're pretty horrible.
So you come here to make up strawman arguments and look like a complete ass? Why don't you go somewhere else to troll?
I encourage you to actually read posts in their entirety before jumping to conclusions.
You're kidding, right? The Mini has far more cars on the road than the higher-end BMWs, so its parts are far more valuable. High-end BMW owners don't buy possibly-stolen parts (like off Ebay or Craigslist), they go to the dealership to get all their service for $$$$. Mini owners are much more likely to do their own work with parts bought on the secondhand market.
This is the same reason that Hondas topped the most-stolen car lists for many, many years; lots of people had them, lots of their owners worked on them (even swapping engines and the like), so the parts were valuable.
What the heck is someone going to do with a stolen $80k BMW anyway? They can't register it and get valid tags. They can't strip it and sell it for parts for the reasons above. They might just joyride in it, but the best they can do is ship it to South America and resell it there. Most cars stolen in this country are stolen for their parts, not to ship to 3rd world countries where there's no law enforcement WRT stolen cars, which is why you never see really high-end cars place very high on the stolen-cars lists.
If you think stealing a Mini "isn't worth it", you're a moron (though honestly, a Honda Civic or these days a Hyundai would be a better choice).
What's funny with the Buicks is that they've been on a campaign for a while to attract younger drivers. Of course, it really hasn't worked out that well.
Yep, at least the person who cuts you off on purpose is actually watching the road and aware of their surroundings. They may be acting in an unsafe manner, but it's still a lot better than someone whose attention is elsewhere; the aggressive drivers who cut you off rarely actually hit you, because they're just being rude, but usually know their car's dimensions pretty well to pull off the maneuver without incident. I'm not saying it's great, but it's preferable to someone who's looking under their seat, at their kids in the back, texting on their phone, etc. instead of looking at the cars around them.
Similarly, I'm finding Google Maps is letting me down more and more. I'll search for some business, and it won't show up at all, or it'll show me completely wrong locations, and I hate to admit it as much as I've loathed MS all these years, but Bing Maps will show me just what I'm looking for. It does seem like Google is losing focus and their quality is faltering in many places. Maybe I'm just cherry-picking examples where GM is failing (since normally I'll use it, and only revert to Bing if something seems amiss), but it seems like this is happening more and more lately.
I'm not so sure about that. Even America's Founders thought IP was important, and enshrined it in the Constitution. However, they also had an important phrase included there: "a limited time", which the first Copyright Act set to 14 years (plus an optional 14 year extension), back in a time when electronic communications did not exist and everything was much slower. There were a lot of important inventions in America in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and the US Patent Office was utilized a lot here; I think it's pretty hard to argue that America would have been so successful during that time without any IP protection. The problem is that the terms are much too long and things are applied too broadly.
Yes, my favorite feature of it is that its spelling is phonemic; even not being fluent in it, just because I know the pronunciation rules, I could read a whole book in German aloud, and be understood by German speakers, even though I myself might only understand a fraction of what I just read aloud. Try that with English; it's impossible.
But I do agree with the other complaints about it having gendered nouns; that's my biggest complaint about it, but again that seems to be a feature of every European language except English for some reason. I'm not a linguist, but I am curious where those ever came from, and why anyone ever thought they'd be a good idea instead of simply confusing.
Well in that case, I guess it says a lot about the Chinese's ability to learn from history, and the Americans' inability to do so.
German IS great. Not perfect, but compared to most other indoeuropean languages it looks pretty good. If you're going to complain about gendered nouns and cases, just look at Latin; I think it had 7 cases or more. In fact, cases are usually a good thing; the more cases you have, the more complex the language is, but also the more efficient it is, because you don't have to use a lot of extra words to describe various concepts (who's doing the action, who's the recipient of the action, etc.). Just look at how short various Latin phrases are, compared to their translations in English, or worse, Spanish. And I happen to like the separable verbs.
The main problems with German are 1) gendered nouns as you say, but this is a problem with every European language except for English AFAIK, and 2) it's rather rigid, but again this is also a benefit because you just have to learn the rules and then you know the language, whereas with English the rules aren't worth bothering with because the list of exceptions is so long that you end up just memorizing everything.
Yes, I'm talking about post-Revolutionary War; during the late 1700s and 1800s, the Americans profited handsomely on "pirated" materials. They also did a lot of industrial espionage; I can't remember the device now, but one particularly famous case was for some machine whose design was stolen and brought to America, where they made copies.
But yes, before the War, the British practiced mercantilism which basically bled colonies of their raw material resources and enriched the mother country at the expense of the colonies.
It's not just internal stuff; remember HTTP's "referer" field. It should be "referrer", but only the misspelled version will work correctly as that's the standard.
However, missing an 'r' in a word that's not used very often is, to me, much less severe than something like mixing up "too|two|to" or "there|their|they're", as the previous poster said his cow-orkers do. 3rd graders aren't taught the word "referrer", but they are taught those homophones because those words are so commonly used in English, and when someone mixes those up, it shows they're literally dumber than a 3rd grader.
Just because things were done differently in older times doesn't mean that the modern way is better. Invading countries is bad IMO, but we still do it all the time. However, there is no evidence whatsoever that perpetual copyright terms are a good thing for society, and in fact are very damaging, yet that's what we have now, while back in those days they had much more sensible copyright terms.
It's going to be a while before the Chinese suffer, as they're currently ascendant, much like the Americans were in the 1800s and first half of the 1900s. Sure, it may eventually fall apart, but it'll be a while because for them to go down, someone else needs to be doing better than them, and no one is at the moment.
However, I don't really see how a nation can rise without the associated nationalism; the two seem to go hand-in-hand. Humans are still tribal creatures, and nations are just extensions of tribes, much like teams (sports teams, political parties, etc.), and people will mindlessly defend them. The only way you're going to eliminate nationalism is to eliminate nations, which means a single global government, and that certainly isn't happening any time soon.
I've seen some of their barely-readable resumes, and I wonder how they got hired in the first place.
Maybe that's the problem: your company attracts people who can't write worth a shit, and it's a feedback loop (the people doing the hiring can't write, so they hire more people who can't write, and the process repeats itself). Maybe you need to just switch to a different company; I really haven't seen this level of bad writing at the places I've worked. It has been my experience, however, that every company, big or small, has a certain culture about it and ways of doing things, and tends to attract certain types of people, and those who don't fit in don't last long. It sounds like you're not a very good fit for that company.
Perhaps, but it is a great example of history repeating itself. Back in the 1700s, Britain was the major world power, and made a lot of money with IP laws and demanded that everyone else respect them, and instead America ignored them and made cheaper copies and made a fortune at it; before long, Britain was a has-been and America was the major power.
Now, a couple hundred years later, history is repeating itself. America, which got rich partially by ignoring IP laws and making cheaper copies of stuff, is bitching and whining that others are copying their stuff and demanding their IP laws be enforced worldwide, while China ignores them and makes cheaper copies of stuff and is making a fortune doing it.
I guess it just shows how little people learn from history.
Good grief, what kind of morons do you work with? As a software engineer, I never see my coworkers make basic mistakes like these, and I'm quite sure they aren't using Word to write their emails and Skype messages either.
English's Germanic roots are great. The problem was when the French Normans invaded Britain and fucked it up by merging their language with the Germanic language that was in place there.
Putting a French language together with a Germanic language is like putting ketchup on a chocolate cake. And this is why English is the way it is now.
I think Europeans have a lot more leeway to criticize Americans than Americans have room to criticize Chinese.
Europe is having some problems, true, but they seem to mainly be due to trying to have a monetary union without having a full political union, which sounded like a good idea at first but doesn't seem to be working out too well in practice unfortunately because different countries want to manage their money differently (some are very frugal, some like to spend it like a drunken sailor and then make up for it with inflation). I just don't see the problems with blatant corruption in Europe like what we see in the USA; in Europe the politicians seem to actually be trying to do the right thing for their people, but of course butt heads with the politicians of other nations inside the union that want to run things differently. In the US, the politicians are overtly corrupt and don't bother to do anything for the people except for a small amount of pandering to their "base" to keep them going to the polls to reelect them so they can serve their corporate masters another term.
If your orders are large enough, it's certainly feasible. They're obviously not going to have the same workers working 24x7, that's why we invented "shifts" long ago. But the factory itself can certainly be kept running 24x7, in fact it's a better use of resources to do so rather than letting it sit idle for part of the day.
Exactly. If your product is selling so well that you can actually keep a factory running 24x7 to fill the demand, then why wouldn't they build another factory, logo-less product or no?
Why should they be? The USA wasn't aggressive in protecting British IP holders from infringement back in the 17-1800s, in fact they didn't enforce that at all, and the USA made a bunch of money as a result.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.