Its the RIAA that is suing, not the lawyers. The lawyer's are just doing their job as EMPL0YEES of the RIAA.
Look, lawyers trot out the same old bullshit rationalization all the time: "we owe our client the best representation we can provide". The problem is, it frequently becomes just that-- purely a rationalization. Working "both sides of the fence", as lawyers often do, has a tendency to reduce the system in their minds to a game. "Ethics" become a list of rules to be weaseled around rather than a code of conduct based on personal and/or professional morals. The rationalization comes from the willingness to engage in dishonest behavior because "the other side's lawyer will be doing it too". Doubtless there are some who aren't like that, but the vast majority of the lawyers I have dealt with (some of them close relatives of mine) are astounding moral relativists who proudly regale listeners with tales of their greatest feats of dirty trickery. My own cousin (attorney for a large hotel chain) has boastfully admitted to courtroom behavior so underhanded that he wouldn't be out of place on the dock at Nuremberg. I have met only two lawyers who were truly honest, moral men, and both of them quit practicing law to be accountants because winning cases required abandoning their personal ethics.
How do you explain the atrocious behavior of the police in New Orleans? Believe me, it is not just violent people who get shot by the police. Police corruption is extremely commmon.
Oh, surely, the NO police are rat scum bastards indeed. I was merely making a snide observation about how the story conveniently left out the "minor" detail that the dumbass was waving a knife and made it sound like he was shot for merely being disorderly.
But by and large, this sort of stuff can already be done much cheaper -- by a mule.
Oh please! Taking care of the bizarre needs of the human animals is trouble enough. There's a reason the military has moved from pack animals to motorized vehicles. Vehicles run on liquid fuel that doesn't spoil. Vehicles can take a bullet in the side and usually require only a replacement part or two to fix. Vehicles don't get tired. The list goes on and on.
Mules? You gotta be fuckin' kidding me. Go back to the VFW, grandpa.
Royal Marines yomped all the way from San Carlos to Port Stanley with 110lb loads in their backpacks, and had to fight along the way...
C'mon, save the bullshit chest-pounding for making fun of whiny civilian hikers. Royal Marines, US Army soldiers-- same damn thing. Every branch of every country's military likes to indulge in verbal dick swinging superiority, but there ain't that much fuckin' difference between us all. We're all ground pounders, and we all had to carry a lot of really heavy crap sometimes. Get a clue: 70lbs is AVERAGE, not maximum.
JP-4 has a very low flash point and is very unstable, not to mention it is a JET FUEL, one spark and you would be toasted.
There's nothing exceptionally volatile about "JET FUEL". Jet fuel is less reactive than avgas. JP-4 is 50-60% gasoline and the rest kerosene. Sure, JP-8 would be less volatile, but come on, do you feel exceptional trepidation when you mow your lawn? The gas in your lawn mower is more volatile than JP-4.
Will a longer antannae help receive more signals? Sure it will. But I hardly believe that your relationship between accuracy and antannae size has any basis.
True, the accuracy of the antenna is largely unrelated to the antenna size. I meant more along the lines of "where on the 3cm by 3cm patch antenna or the 1cm by 4cm do you set the '1cm fix' point?" To put it another way, if you were asked to locate your car with 1cm accuracy, where do you measure to? A point directly below the geometric center of the car? Centered on the center of mass? The point directly below the radiator cap? "Location" is largely constrained by the size of the smallest square that can hold the item being located. In the case of satellite location devices, that's essentially the antenna.
Then add to that a main and reserve chute if you're Airborne (like me), knife, weapons, ammo, cleaning kit, protective mask, maybe a radio and batteries, binos, rope, crampons, etc. etc.
I remember an old poster at one army post that had a pic of a guy carrying a fridge on his back, with the caption "Don't be an ass, leave it behind." I wish.
I know your pain, my brother. When I was in the 7th Light ID and later the 101st AB, the dirtiest word I heard was "man-portable"...
Just before I left LA a man was shot for disorderly conduct because both officers were under 130lbs and felt they couldn't handle the man.
You mean the guy yesterday brandishing a knife? That's a little more than "disorderly conduct". Waving a knife at cops is kinda asking to die.
I just read an article about the NSA using visiting the website an excuse to install a thirty year cookie onto your computer to monitor where you browsed.
How does their cookie, which is no more than a mere inactive variable, do anything other than tell them that you've visited their site before?
while in a desert the opportunities for accidents may be minimized, I wonder how well it will deal with unexpected random events, such as people who don't put on their turn signal when changing lanes.
Accident opportunities in the desert are minimized? "The desert" isn't just rolling sand dunes, or a dirt road through scrubby brush. It's rocky, angled, steep, unpredictable terrain. Dealing with something as easily identifiable and predictable as road traffic (cars never leap into the air, or instantly hop sideways 6 feet) is a snap compared to off-road driving. What do you do that's so complicated when you see a car changing lanes suddenly, putting it too close to you? Apply brakes? Change lanes? A computer can do those things pretty easily-- probably safer and more attentively than a person.
After all, if you are a Russian govt. official who is tasked with stamping out piracy while being paid sod all, would you:
a) Come down like a ton of bricks on the heads of people who have a known talent for making those who annoy them appear on the ingredient lists of dog food cans, or
Not to mention that if you are a russian gov't official there's strong chance you are yourself already a member of group a).
seems to be a mistake in summary - in article i could find only "High accuracy at the cm scale" which isn't exactly 1cm
Indeed, "high accuracy at the cm scale" has a specific meaning, and that is "accuracy at a scale of less than one meter". The summary writer is a dunce, as they usually are. I mean, come on! The antennas for these devices are bigger than 1 cm! You're not likely to have accuracy greater than the size of your antenna.
Again, i don't know how many times we have to say it in this thread, we're talking about using a telephone as a BUG, NOT tapping into phone conversations. tapping in to a phone conversation has been and will continue to be a piece of cake. using a telephone as a bug (so you can listen to the room the telephone is in, even when nobody is on the phone!) used to be quite simple, now it's unrealistic.
The next person who says something about tapping the phone line will get "-1, Can't Read"
Sometimes it feels like your talking to a brick wall, eh? I think I made it pretty clear now, with plenty of repeated all-caps, boldface, and exclamation points. Though I think I may have fallen a bit short on the civility front.
Nope, he's right, it is trivial to do. Cringley had a nice article on it a while back. [link to article about CALEA and recording phone calls]
Jesus fucking christ, you illiterate jackasses. How many times does it have to be said?
THIS ISN'T ABOUT TAPPING PHONE CALLS THIS ISN'T ABOUT TAPPING PHONE CALLS THIS ISN'T ABOUT TAPPING PHONE CALLS
Let me explain in small words that you might possibly understand. In the olden days, it was a trivial exercise to modify a telephone so that the microphone could pick up any conversation in the room and transmit it over the phone line, even when the phone was still hung up. This is what the original poster was referring to when he said "turn your telephone into a bug". There does not currently exist any form of fancy digital packet monitoring technology that can record a conversation in my living room while my phone is on the fucking hook!
This isn't high technology. This is basic electronics. You can't tie the microphone circuit to the live pair anymore because nearly all phones now use piezo mics which require active amplification rather than the old carbon ones which didn't. It's that fucking simple. Please, for god's sake, will you people try actually reading the fucking words and finding out what's being said, rather than cherry picking a few words and assuming you know what's going on. I know you're probably not actually stupid, but my god, you sure sound like complete, utter idiots.
"Having been a telecommunications technician for 15 years, I probably understand modern telecom networks better than you."
Apparently not, because the guy was absolutely right. They were tapping conversations at switch interchanges going overseas, notably to Afghanistan for obvious reasons. Voice traffic is packetized at the CO for transport, where it can be replicated to a third party who wants to listen in with minimal effort or risk of being detected. There's little or no reason to put a tap on a local loop anymore.
Jesus fucking christ, you illiterate jackasses. How many times does it have to be said?
THIS ISN'T ABOUT TAPPING PHONE CALLS THIS ISN'T ABOUT TAPPING PHONE CALLS THIS ISN'T ABOUT TAPPING PHONE CALLS
Let me explain in small words that you might possibly understand. In the olden days, it was a trivial exercise to modify a telephone so that the microphone could pick up any conversation in the room and transmit it over the phone line when the phone was still hung up. This is what the original poster was referring to when he said "turn your telephone into a bug". There does not currently exist any form of fancy digital packet monitoring technology that can record a conversation in my living room while my phone is on the fucking hook!
This isn't high technology. This is basic electronics. You can't tie the microphone circuit to the live pair anymore because nearly all phones now use piezo mics which require active amplification rather than the old carbon ones which didn't. It's that fucking simple. Please, for god's sake, will you people try actually reading the fucking words and finding out what's being said, rather than cherry picking a few words and assuming you know what's going on. I know you're probably not actually stupid, but my god, you sure sound like complete, utter idiots.
if you download a file over gprs and each megabyte costs you 3$, then saving 200 megabytes means saving 600$
In order to save 200MB with WinRK over gzip, you'd need a 600MB file. What kind of idiot would send a file that big (400MB after compression) using $3/MB GPRS? Yeah, you're saving $600, but you're still spending $1200! Given the several hours longer WinRK needs over gzip, I could hire a boy to run a CDR down to the nearest internet cafe in less time, for less money, and he could bring me back a coffee to boot! As others have noted, there are usually no-limit data transmission plans for far less than you'd even save, much less spend, paying per-megabyte.
another case is if you only have 100 megabytes you can use and only a zzzxxxyyy archiver can compress it into the 100mb while gzip -9 leaves you with 102mb.
Can't imagine a single scenario in which a) I am up against a hard intermediate storage limit; b) I have plenty of computational power, storage, and time at both ends to allow such intensive compression/decompression; and c) I'm running Windows at each end!
so it really depends if you need it or not. sometimes you need it, mostly you don't.
I don't think you've successfully shown that. Do you have any specific examples where one might actually need it, or just these abstract thought experiments?
No. Is trivial.
You clearly have little understanding of modern telecomm networks. It is now much easier to tap a phone than it used to be.
Having been a telecommunications technician for 15 years, I probably understand modern telecom networks better than you. I quote the OP:
"The modification to make your telephone into a bugging device is actually quite trivial."
Note the subject is modifying a phone to pick up audio when hung up, not performing a wiretap. Thanks for playing, better luck next time. Remember, read each question completely to be sure you understand it before filling in the bubble next to the answer.
I'm sorry I haven't kept completely up to date on the technology, but I really don't buy any assurances that it can't be done as easily or more easily than in the past. Are you suggesting it is somehow more secure because they'd have to replace more components to do the job?
That's not exactly what I'm saying, but close. Nearly all modern telephones are glued together crapboxes that use piezo microphones. The microphones require active amplification. The amount of additional work required to squeeze an additional, external amplifier into a phone, not to mention the difficulty in finding the right place to solder it in when every phone essentially has its own custom-designed circuit board; well, it essentially becomes an impossible task. It would actually be easier, faster, cheaper, and more effective to just hide a stand-alone bug somewhere else. What I'm saying is that while you are not "somehow more secure", you most definitely do not have to worry about them turning your phone into a bug. That was indeed a trivial thing back in the old days of standardized AT&T phones, but is now nearly impossible.
The modification to make your telephone into a bugging device is actually quite trivial.
Was quite trivial. It's not 1975 anymore, though, and all our phones aren't model 500 or 2500 Western Electrics. Nowadays, just about everyone has a cheap electronic phone made of inexpensive parts glued inside a plastic case. The [NSA/FBI/CIA] can't just send a guy in disguised as the telephone repair man to couple the carbon mic circuit to the live pair with a resistor like they used to. Not to say they have no way to listen to you, just thought you might want to update your paranoia to something more modern, like laser modulation audio bugging, rather than continuing to use one that's been pretty much abandoned for 20 years.
I have a generic 128 MB video card in my game machine, which should be enough for any modern development.
128MB should be enough? Who says? I upgraded from 128 to 256 two years ago, for less than $100, and my Asus GeForce FX 5700 runs Civ4 just fine. The thing about progress is that it depends upon things progressing. Among other things this means that at some point your video card is going to need to be replaced with something newer. Civ4 is just the first of many games that you won't be able to play. You just gotta accept that your video card is Old News. An FX5700 is like fifty bucks on ebay. Suck it up and upgrade like a man.
if you have to hide things from each other because the other one'd go apeshit if they knew about them, then you have a bigger problem in your relationship, anyway.
Not necessarily. Even in the healthiest of relationships one often becomes unreasonably annoyed with one's partner, and sometimes that annoyance gets vented to others. There's nothing wrong with (say) griping to a friend over IM that your GF is driving you up the wall because "she just won't fucking shut up about how her clothes don't fit right, but she continues to buy fucking cheap crap clothes; every day she says the same thing in the same annoying voice. SHUT THE FUCK UP!"*. You would not, however, want her to read that particular comment because its wording is inflamatory. Having a good relationship isn't about talking nicey-nicey all the time. Part of a good relationship is knowing when to vent your unreasonable irritation with an uninvolved third party confidant, rather than bottling it up and spitting it in her face one day.
* jesus fucking christ, if I have to hear about my GF talk about her ill fitting wardrobe for much longer, I'm gonna scream. Good thing she doesn't read slashdot.
Internet sales has been treated like mail-order for a long while. The standard there has been, you collect sales tax for residents of states/counties in which you have an office..
Not just "treated like" mail order, it is mail order. You give them the appropriate financial information and they send you the stuff by mail. The only difference is that you're not calling an 800 number or sending an order form by USPS, you're filling out a web form. I want to know why it is these federal jackasses think that simply employing a particularly convenient means of placing an order should mean a mail-order business is responsible for more tax.
- Bob makes $120k/year taxes = $ 35k -$22k deductions = $12k total taxes
- Joe Sixpack makes $50k/year taxes = $18k - $3k deductions = $15k total taxes.
That doesn't seem right. Keep in mind the above is very inaccurate and I just made it up off the top of my head
Jeez, if you're going to pull crap out of your ass, make it halfway plausible. Bob's base tax rate (35/120) is only 29% while Joe's is 36% (18/50), so right off the bat you've grossly slanted the numbers in favor of your conclusion, when in reality taxation slants the other way.
but deductions are used for things like investments that Joe Sixpack can not really afford besides the basics like his home.
You don't take deductions out of your final tax bill, you apply them to your unadjusted income before you calculate the tax. So let's try your absurd ass-pulled numbers doing the math the way it's really done:
Bob: $120K - $22K deduction = $98K, taxed at 29% = $28,420 in taxes
Joe: $50K - $3K deduction = $47K, taxed at 36% = $16,920 in taxes
See, even with Joe paying a murderously regressive tax rate 7% higher than Bob, and Bob taking a seven-fold greater deduction, Bob still pays more in taxes.
Hint: saying you pulled the numbers out of your ass doesn't get you out of having to substantiate your assertion somehow.
in my opinion it's never adequately explained why it has to be a kid who controls the fleet, rather than Wrackham
Because it would have spoiled the whole "exploitation of innocence" premise. If you read the original short story, the triteness of the concept really shines through. The full novel is highly polished with many well crafted sub-themes, but the framework upon which these are hung is ridiculous. Really, the most gaping plot hole is the fact that no amount of training and manipulation can turn a child into an effective military leader. The novel essentially hand-waves this away by simply assuming forced-maturity is possible, from having Ender experience significant muscular development at 10 years old, to having him skip 6-8 years worth of normally puberty-driven neurological development. Indeed, if you add 6-8 years to the kids' ages and then it starts to be believable-- but of course that kills the premise...
Moon hoax believers are just going to have to be nuts for now. Their claims have been thoroughly debunked and only those with the patience of a saint, or the same bull-headed idiot stubbornness would want to waste time arguing with them. People have better things to do with their time.
Indeed. There are some people out there who are just plain crazy and no amount of rational discussion will ever convince them. "Moon landing = hoax" nuts remind me of the apocryphal story of the psychiatric medicine intern and the delusional patient:
A new intern arrives at a mental hospital and is examining a patient who believes he is dead.
"So you're dead, eh?" asks the intern.
"Yep," says the patient, nodding, "Been dead for years."
"Do dead people bleed?" asks the intern.
"Don't be ridiculous!" says the man, "Of course dead people don't bleed!"
So the intern grabs the man's hand, takes a pin, and pokes the meaty part of the man's hand below the thumb. Slowly but surely, a red drop of blood wells up. "Well what do you know!" says the man in gape-jawed amazment, "Dead people do bleed!"
You just gotta let some people have their crazy, I figure.
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Look, lawyers trot out the same old bullshit rationalization all the time: "we owe our client the best representation we can provide". The problem is, it frequently becomes just that-- purely a rationalization. Working "both sides of the fence", as lawyers often do, has a tendency to reduce the system in their minds to a game. "Ethics" become a list of rules to be weaseled around rather than a code of conduct based on personal and/or professional morals. The rationalization comes from the willingness to engage in dishonest behavior because "the other side's lawyer will be doing it too". Doubtless there are some who aren't like that, but the vast majority of the lawyers I have dealt with (some of them close relatives of mine) are astounding moral relativists who proudly regale listeners with tales of their greatest feats of dirty trickery. My own cousin (attorney for a large hotel chain) has boastfully admitted to courtroom behavior so underhanded that he wouldn't be out of place on the dock at Nuremberg. I have met only two lawyers who were truly honest, moral men, and both of them quit practicing law to be accountants because winning cases required abandoning their personal ethics.
Oh, surely, the NO police are rat scum bastards indeed. I was merely making a snide observation about how the story conveniently left out the "minor" detail that the dumbass was waving a knife and made it sound like he was shot for merely being disorderly.
Oh please! Taking care of the bizarre needs of the human animals is trouble enough. There's a reason the military has moved from pack animals to motorized vehicles. Vehicles run on liquid fuel that doesn't spoil. Vehicles can take a bullet in the side and usually require only a replacement part or two to fix. Vehicles don't get tired. The list goes on and on.
Mules? You gotta be fuckin' kidding me. Go back to the VFW, grandpa.
C'mon, save the bullshit chest-pounding for making fun of whiny civilian hikers. Royal Marines, US Army soldiers-- same damn thing. Every branch of every country's military likes to indulge in verbal dick swinging superiority, but there ain't that much fuckin' difference between us all. We're all ground pounders, and we all had to carry a lot of really heavy crap sometimes. Get a clue: 70lbs is AVERAGE, not maximum.
There's nothing exceptionally volatile about "JET FUEL". Jet fuel is less reactive than avgas. JP-4 is 50-60% gasoline and the rest kerosene. Sure, JP-8 would be less volatile, but come on, do you feel exceptional trepidation when you mow your lawn? The gas in your lawn mower is more volatile than JP-4.
True, the accuracy of the antenna is largely unrelated to the antenna size. I meant more along the lines of "where on the 3cm by 3cm patch antenna or the 1cm by 4cm do you set the '1cm fix' point?" To put it another way, if you were asked to locate your car with 1cm accuracy, where do you measure to? A point directly below the geometric center of the car? Centered on the center of mass? The point directly below the radiator cap? "Location" is largely constrained by the size of the smallest square that can hold the item being located. In the case of satellite location devices, that's essentially the antenna.
I know your pain, my brother. When I was in the 7th Light ID and later the 101st AB, the dirtiest word I heard was "man-portable"...
SGT: "Hey private, you're carrying the minifix! heh heh heh"
me: "mumble..."
You mean the guy yesterday brandishing a knife? That's a little more than "disorderly conduct". Waving a knife at cops is kinda asking to die. I just read an article about the NSA using visiting the website an excuse to install a thirty year cookie onto your computer to monitor where you browsed.
How does their cookie, which is no more than a mere inactive variable, do anything other than tell them that you've visited their site before?
Accident opportunities in the desert are minimized? "The desert" isn't just rolling sand dunes, or a dirt road through scrubby brush. It's rocky, angled, steep, unpredictable terrain. Dealing with something as easily identifiable and predictable as road traffic (cars never leap into the air, or instantly hop sideways 6 feet) is a snap compared to off-road driving. What do you do that's so complicated when you see a car changing lanes suddenly, putting it too close to you? Apply brakes? Change lanes? A computer can do those things pretty easily-- probably safer and more attentively than a person.
Not to mention that if you are a russian gov't official there's strong chance you are yourself already a member of group a).
Indeed, "high accuracy at the cm scale" has a specific meaning, and that is "accuracy at a scale of less than one meter". The summary writer is a dunce, as they usually are. I mean, come on! The antennas for these devices are bigger than 1 cm! You're not likely to have accuracy greater than the size of your antenna.
Sometimes it feels like your talking to a brick wall, eh? I think I made it pretty clear now, with plenty of repeated all-caps, boldface, and exclamation points. Though I think I may have fallen a bit short on the civility front.
Jesus fucking christ, you illiterate jackasses. How many times does it have to be said?
THIS ISN'T ABOUT TAPPING PHONE CALLS
THIS ISN'T ABOUT TAPPING PHONE CALLS
THIS ISN'T ABOUT TAPPING PHONE CALLS
Let me explain in small words that you might possibly understand. In the olden days, it was a trivial exercise to modify a telephone so that the microphone could pick up any conversation in the room and transmit it over the phone line, even when the phone was still hung up. This is what the original poster was referring to when he said "turn your telephone into a bug". There does not currently exist any form of fancy digital packet monitoring technology that can record a conversation in my living room while my phone is on the fucking hook!
This isn't high technology. This is basic electronics. You can't tie the microphone circuit to the live pair anymore because nearly all phones now use piezo mics which require active amplification rather than the old carbon ones which didn't. It's that fucking simple. Please, for god's sake, will you people try actually reading the fucking words and finding out what's being said, rather than cherry picking a few words and assuming you know what's going on. I know you're probably not actually stupid, but my god, you sure sound like complete, utter idiots.
Apparently not, because the guy was absolutely right. They were tapping conversations at switch interchanges going overseas, notably to Afghanistan for obvious reasons. Voice traffic is packetized at the CO for transport, where it can be replicated to a third party who wants to listen in with minimal effort or risk of being detected. There's little or no reason to put a tap on a local loop anymore.
Jesus fucking christ, you illiterate jackasses. How many times does it have to be said?
THIS ISN'T ABOUT TAPPING PHONE CALLS
THIS ISN'T ABOUT TAPPING PHONE CALLS
THIS ISN'T ABOUT TAPPING PHONE CALLS
Let me explain in small words that you might possibly understand. In the olden days, it was a trivial exercise to modify a telephone so that the microphone could pick up any conversation in the room and transmit it over the phone line when the phone was still hung up. This is what the original poster was referring to when he said "turn your telephone into a bug". There does not currently exist any form of fancy digital packet monitoring technology that can record a conversation in my living room while my phone is on the fucking hook!
This isn't high technology. This is basic electronics. You can't tie the microphone circuit to the live pair anymore because nearly all phones now use piezo mics which require active amplification rather than the old carbon ones which didn't. It's that fucking simple. Please, for god's sake, will you people try actually reading the fucking words and finding out what's being said, rather than cherry picking a few words and assuming you know what's going on. I know you're probably not actually stupid, but my god, you sure sound like complete, utter idiots.
In order to save 200MB with WinRK over gzip, you'd need a 600MB file. What kind of idiot would send a file that big (400MB after compression) using $3/MB GPRS? Yeah, you're saving $600, but you're still spending $1200! Given the several hours longer WinRK needs over gzip, I could hire a boy to run a CDR down to the nearest internet cafe in less time, for less money, and he could bring me back a coffee to boot! As others have noted, there are usually no-limit data transmission plans for far less than you'd even save, much less spend, paying per-megabyte.
another case is if you only have 100 megabytes you can use and only a zzzxxxyyy archiver can compress it into the 100mb while gzip -9 leaves you with 102mb.
Can't imagine a single scenario in which a) I am up against a hard intermediate storage limit; b) I have plenty of computational power, storage, and time at both ends to allow such intensive compression/decompression; and c) I'm running Windows at each end! so it really depends if you need it or not. sometimes you need it, mostly you don't.
I don't think you've successfully shown that. Do you have any specific examples where one might actually need it, or just these abstract thought experiments?
Having been a telecommunications technician for 15 years, I probably understand modern telecom networks better than you. I quote the OP:
Note the subject is modifying a phone to pick up audio when hung up, not performing a wiretap. Thanks for playing, better luck next time. Remember, read each question completely to be sure you understand it before filling in the bubble next to the answer.That's not exactly what I'm saying, but close. Nearly all modern telephones are glued together crapboxes that use piezo microphones. The microphones require active amplification. The amount of additional work required to squeeze an additional, external amplifier into a phone, not to mention the difficulty in finding the right place to solder it in when every phone essentially has its own custom-designed circuit board; well, it essentially becomes an impossible task. It would actually be easier, faster, cheaper, and more effective to just hide a stand-alone bug somewhere else. What I'm saying is that while you are not "somehow more secure", you most definitely do not have to worry about them turning your phone into a bug. That was indeed a trivial thing back in the old days of standardized AT&T phones, but is now nearly impossible.
Ozone? what does any of this have to do with ozone?
Was quite trivial. It's not 1975 anymore, though, and all our phones aren't model 500 or 2500 Western Electrics. Nowadays, just about everyone has a cheap electronic phone made of inexpensive parts glued inside a plastic case. The [NSA/FBI/CIA] can't just send a guy in disguised as the telephone repair man to couple the carbon mic circuit to the live pair with a resistor like they used to. Not to say they have no way to listen to you, just thought you might want to update your paranoia to something more modern, like laser modulation audio bugging, rather than continuing to use one that's been pretty much abandoned for 20 years.
128MB should be enough? Who says? I upgraded from 128 to 256 two years ago, for less than $100, and my Asus GeForce FX 5700 runs Civ4 just fine. The thing about progress is that it depends upon things progressing. Among other things this means that at some point your video card is going to need to be replaced with something newer. Civ4 is just the first of many games that you won't be able to play. You just gotta accept that your video card is Old News. An FX5700 is like fifty bucks on ebay. Suck it up and upgrade like a man.
Not necessarily. Even in the healthiest of relationships one often becomes unreasonably annoyed with one's partner, and sometimes that annoyance gets vented to others. There's nothing wrong with (say) griping to a friend over IM that your GF is driving you up the wall because "she just won't fucking shut up about how her clothes don't fit right, but she continues to buy fucking cheap crap clothes; every day she says the same thing in the same annoying voice. SHUT THE FUCK UP!"*. You would not, however, want her to read that particular comment because its wording is inflamatory. Having a good relationship isn't about talking nicey-nicey all the time. Part of a good relationship is knowing when to vent your unreasonable irritation with an uninvolved third party confidant, rather than bottling it up and spitting it in her face one day.
* jesus fucking christ, if I have to hear about my GF talk about her ill fitting wardrobe for much longer, I'm gonna scream. Good thing she doesn't read slashdot.
Not just "treated like" mail order, it is mail order. You give them the appropriate financial information and they send you the stuff by mail. The only difference is that you're not calling an 800 number or sending an order form by USPS, you're filling out a web form. I want to know why it is these federal jackasses think that simply employing a particularly convenient means of placing an order should mean a mail-order business is responsible for more tax.
- Joe Sixpack makes $50k/year taxes = $18k - $3k deductions = $15k total taxes.
That doesn't seem right. Keep in mind the above is very inaccurate and I just made it up off the top of my head
Jeez, if you're going to pull crap out of your ass, make it halfway plausible. Bob's base tax rate (35/120) is only 29% while Joe's is 36% (18/50), so right off the bat you've grossly slanted the numbers in favor of your conclusion, when in reality taxation slants the other way.
but deductions are used for things like investments that Joe Sixpack can not really afford besides the basics like his home.
You don't take deductions out of your final tax bill, you apply them to your unadjusted income before you calculate the tax. So let's try your absurd ass-pulled numbers doing the math the way it's really done:
Bob: $120K - $22K deduction = $98K, taxed at 29% = $28,420 in taxes
Joe: $50K - $3K deduction = $47K, taxed at 36% = $16,920 in taxes
See, even with Joe paying a murderously regressive tax rate 7% higher than Bob, and Bob taking a seven-fold greater deduction, Bob still pays more in taxes.
Hint: saying you pulled the numbers out of your ass doesn't get you out of having to substantiate your assertion somehow.
Because it would have spoiled the whole "exploitation of innocence" premise. If you read the original short story, the triteness of the concept really shines through. The full novel is highly polished with many well crafted sub-themes, but the framework upon which these are hung is ridiculous. Really, the most gaping plot hole is the fact that no amount of training and manipulation can turn a child into an effective military leader. The novel essentially hand-waves this away by simply assuming forced-maturity is possible, from having Ender experience significant muscular development at 10 years old, to having him skip 6-8 years worth of normally puberty-driven neurological development. Indeed, if you add 6-8 years to the kids' ages and then it starts to be believable-- but of course that kills the premise...
Indeed. There are some people out there who are just plain crazy and no amount of rational discussion will ever convince them. "Moon landing = hoax" nuts remind me of the apocryphal story of the psychiatric medicine intern and the delusional patient:
You just gotta let some people have their crazy, I figure.