Here's something that I've always wondered and never got an answer to. Why are some people bothered by the sight of blood? What's shocking about it? Dunno, but I can't watch surgery video. In Afghanistan I had hands-on experience with everything from sucking chest wounds to burned and blown-up bodies. I can hold a big ol' gaping wound shut with a pressure dressing in real life, but I can't stand to watch open heart surgery on the Discovery Channel. Mysteries of the universe.
As for why Atari did not erase the EPROMS, Actually, the most probable reason they didn't erase the EPROMS is that the only way to do so is with a hammer. EPROMS are not erasable. EEPROMS are the ones you can erase.
I love the "spin" in this line:
Soyuz capsules have previously saved the lives of the crew even after severe malfunctions that might have lead to the loss of a less robust vehicle. Well yeah, it's not surprising that the Soyuz is built more robustly than other spacecraft, given that it has a 20% malfunction rate. It's a classic Soviet design philosophy: when quality and precision are unavailable, substitute brute strength.
well what happens when I make a purchase but I am in Georgia at the time? Or maybe Texas? Whose tax do I pay then? Yeah, what if you live in California, but order a last minute birthday gift from a company in Pennsylvania, sent directly to your sister in Washington, while you're on vacation in New Mexico, and your credit card bills are going to your address of record in Arizona? I did exactly that last year. No, any such law is going to be OBSCENELY silly, not to mention blatantly unconstitutional.
Yes indeed, I plan to sue my employer, the federal government, for providing a substandard work environment.
Maybe they'll be responsive to my request and also upgrade to IE 7. I feel your pain. I work for the second largest school district in the country, the most dysfunctional bureaucracy this side of the Federal Government. We sit in desk chairs from the 60's, at desks from the 40's designed for 5'6" women, staring at blurry 15" CRT monitors, and using IE6 because the $100M web based software system the district bought doesn't work right under IE7 (it doesn't actually work right anyway, but that's a programming issue). If I tried to sue them for substandard working conditions, they'd say "take a number"...
Why is it that proponents of religion think that the only way to understand the why of morality and ethics is via faith-based adherence to ancient mythology?
I'm not military my self, but from my understanding soldiers who want to bring ammo home is the sort of thing that might be encouraged as it gives them a chance to enjoy target practice during their off hours. I would think that this is the sort of thing that should be encouraged to a degree. Yeah, you've obviously never been in the US military. When you leave the firing range or come out of a combat zone, they just about make you turn out your pockets to make sure you don't have any stray ammo that you might shoot someone with. Back when I was with the 7th Light Infantry, they not only wouldn't let us have bayonets in garrison (might stab each other), but they took away our E-tools (shovels) because a couple infantry guys got in a shovel fight!
Its been long known that some soldiers, etc. have been keeping guns and ammo for themselves including rifles and machine guns. Known by whom? They keep a pretty tight accounting of firearms in the military, at least in garrison. Now, in theater you can take your pick amongst the AKs, RPKs, ever old M-16A1's at the local hadji market, but bring it back here to the US? No way.
wish I had a dollar for every M17 mask turned in for a lost M17A2 Hah! Been there! Another good one is helmets. When my unit deployed to Afghanistan, some of us had old PASGT helmets issued due to inventory shortages on the ACH. Amusingly, despite enough ACHs being issued in theater to replace nearly all the PASGTs, when it came time to turn equipment back in, a surprising number turned in PASGT helmets. One particularly humorous one was even a rare early "Mk I" PASGT, 1.5x as thick and heavy as the "full production" version that saw widespread issue. It was probably worth MORE than an ACH solely for its collectors value!
The Shah was a U.S. government puppet, installed in 1953 after the
U.S. government destroyed the administration of the democratically elected President Mohammed Mossadegh". Nice propaganda, but it isn't true. The US has indeed fomented rebellion and installed puppet dictators, but the Shah of Iran was not one of them. Shah Pahlavi was the last in a line of Iranian kings that goes back hundreds, and arguably thousands of years. The Shah, as head of the constitutional monarchy removed Mossadeq from his position as head of parliament after he 1) demanded full control of the military, 2) moved to abolish anonymity in popular voting, and 3) moved to dissolve parliament, a power reserved for the Shah. It was, in fact, Mossadeq who was trying to install himself as dictator. All the US did was strongly encourage the Shah to act within his power as head of state in removing a populist would-be dictator from a dangerous position. Now, Shah Pahlavi was no saint, to be sure, and the wisdom of our involvement in the region is debatable (see Pakistan today); but the popular myth that it was any sort of "coup" fails in the face of fact. Even the hideously anti-US slanted wikipedia entry admits that "Operation Ajax", the so-called "coup", was nothing of the sort:
"The plot, known as Operation Ajax, centered around convincing Iran's monarch to use his constitutional authority to dismiss Mossadegh from office"
Ah yeas, spreading stories about Mossadeq and lobbying the constitutional leader of the country to act within his powers to remove a man contrary to our interests, yes, that's the same as arming revolutionaries to storm the presidential mansion! In that case, anyone who's ever written a letter asking congress to impeach Bush, they are also attempting a "coup".
Really, if you want an example of US malfeasance, go look at that asshole Kissinger with regard to Chile and Pinochet. Iran just ain't fuckin' it, no matter how much airhead intellectual leftist tell each other it was.
piston engine???? If you look at the warplanes of WW2, you find a handful of primitive experimental jet aircraft, and a whole lot of piston engined aircraft. B-17? Piston engined. P-51? Piston engined. Me-109? Piston freakin' engined.
Do you seriously not know world history well enough to know that WW2 was the age of piston engined aircraft?
Had it not been a 17-year old used car. The story says the kid was charged with larceny over $5,000. In light of that, I think it's the dealer who should have been charged with a larceny. Age does not determine value. It's an obscure model that you may not have heard of, but that doesn't mean it's not worth $5K. You've probably never heard of a VW Syncro Westfalia Vanagon either, a vehicle they quit making in '91, clean examples of which sell for between $15K and $20K. Basically, your ignorance does not set market price.
they can certainly say "you are no longer allowed to sell anything to our residents". And how the holy hell would they ever enforce that? Post guards at the state line to stop US Mail trucks to inspect their cargo? Do you have any idea how fast that lands you in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison? Such a ban would be meaningless. Amazon need not say or do anything, and commerce would continue.
While I have no objection to your general argument, your math is poor so I hope your software firm does not code where numerical precision is important. Virtually any profitable company would jump at the chance to have a 5% flat rate tax. You missed his point. His point was about so-called loopholes and tax dodges. His specific example was the "loophole" of being able to deduct expenses from revenue for purposes of calculating income.
For the current crop of "use taxes", neither of those are the case. Of course that's why they hide it behind the thin veneer of "use", rather than "import". It's a complete sham, of course, a bunch of weasel words that get around the letter of the law by circumscribing the items to be taxed in negative, rather than naming the items by their untaxable true category. It's what happens when you let lawyers run a country.
tax also has an excise tax for people who import goods from out of state. This is precisely where their argument (and yours) falls apart. They only have legal standing to demand tax from the person bringing the item into the state. They have no legal right to demand that Amazon, an out of state seller, do anything at all for them. Any taxation they demand has to come from regulation of the buyer. The Asahi Metal Industries v Superior Court of California was about product liability, not taxes. The Interstate Commerce clause trumps a narrow ruling on what constitutes a business presence for purposes of liability. If Amazon was sending Amazon-branded* flaming balls of pitch to New York that were starting fires, the Asahi case might have been relevant, but they're not---- they're sending mundane products, made by other companies, through the US Mail!
* note that a key fact in the Asahi case was that Asahi was the manufacturer of the product in question.
Not to be pedantic, but the USPS is no longer a part of the federal government. Absolutely, unequivocally untrue. The USPS is an "independent establishment of the executive branch of the Government of the United States," (39 U.S.C. ss 201). As recently as 2004 the Supreme Court has ruled that the USPS is not a corporation, government owned or otherwise.
The population of civil servants still working at the USPS is dwindling rapidly. The rest of the employees are no longer government employees. You're nuts. Everyone working at the USPS is a government employee. You're referring perhaps to Contracted Delivery Service, where routine delivery is contracted out to private companies. Those people are obviously not USPS employees. They work for the contractor. They do not work for the USPS. The wisdom of contracting out delivery is quite debatable, but in no way does this change the fact that everyone who works for the USPS is still a government employee! CDS is a very small portion of USPS business. The letter Carriers Union makes it out to be the end of the world, but they would, wouldn't they.
So, if by "build" you mean "solicited bids," then yes. Yes it is, then, as that is how the government "builds" everything it builds. The Lunar Lander was built by Grumman, who won the bid. The M-1 Abrams, General Dynamics, who won the bid. The Interstate Highway System, which was built by hundreds of different contractors who won the damned bid to build them. With the exception of historical oddities like the Springfield Armory (closed in 1968) and the Army Corps of Engineers, that's the way the feds get things done: they pay someone else to build it to their specs.
Hops prices are anomalous right now. Between hail storms ruining crops here and in europe, the previous hop glut pushing growers into other crops or out of business, and (of all things) a warehouse fire in Washington burning up 2 years' worth of stored surplus hops, it's been a bit of "Murphy's Law" for hops lately. Making matters worse is the hoarding by large brewers at the first signs of price increase and the weak dollar making European hops even more expensive, the price is not surprising. Given the high prices, many growers will doubtless return, and we'll see more reasonable prices before long.
He was hired to do a job. The particularities of employment contracts vary. Unless you are privy to the specifics of the agreement, you, an uninformed goof on Slashdot, aren't really in any position to say.
I think that holders of copyrights and trademarks are obligated to protect them or else risk losing the copyright or trademark. trademark, yes. copyright, no.
Or pilots, to monitor stress levels? To what end? When something relevant happens to cause a pilot stress, you can bet he's going to announce it to his co-pilot, air traffic control, and the cockpit voice recorder!
I hope they improve existing lie detectors, the "at a distance" option is much less important. Existing lie detectors are a complete sham. They're nothing but security theater, designed to scare the guilty into confessing. The problem is that there is no concrete difference between truth and lie. The "at a distance" thing is utterly absurd in the context of polygraphy anyway. Polygraphy is already based on the comparison of reactions to "control" questions and "relevant" questions. Such a comparison is already on shaky ground when the examiner is asking the questions. Anyone who suggests that it's even possible to build a device that can take a single statement, especially one collected surreptitiously, and successfully determine its veracity is either a fool or trying to sell you his "lie detector".
...left us with a shuttle which would truck stuff to nowhere. Now they have a place to go (ISS) but they are canceling the shuttle with no spacecraft to replace it. The trouble with the STS is that its big selling point was as a shuttle to a future International Space Station. By the same token, the ISS' big selling point was that it could be built, manned, and supplied with the STS. They're both lackluster designs limited to a ridiculous LEO slot that's outlandishly costly to maintain. Really, they're BOTH white elephants.
Slashdot Mirror
disregard. It's been so long, I forgot about the horrors of the Quartz Window....
Why is it that proponents of religion think that the only way to understand the why of morality and ethics is via faith-based adherence to ancient mythology?
"The plot, known as Operation Ajax, centered around convincing Iran's monarch to use his constitutional authority to dismiss Mossadegh from office"
Ah yeas, spreading stories about Mossadeq and lobbying the constitutional leader of the country to act within his powers to remove a man contrary to our interests, yes, that's the same as arming revolutionaries to storm the presidential mansion! In that case, anyone who's ever written a letter asking congress to impeach Bush, they are also attempting a "coup".
Really, if you want an example of US malfeasance, go look at that asshole Kissinger with regard to Chile and Pinochet. Iran just ain't fuckin' it, no matter how much airhead intellectual leftist tell each other it was.
Do you seriously not know world history well enough to know that WW2 was the age of piston engined aircraft?
* note that a key fact in the Asahi case was that Asahi was the manufacturer of the product in question.
Hops prices are anomalous right now. Between hail storms ruining crops here and in europe, the previous hop glut pushing growers into other crops or out of business, and (of all things) a warehouse fire in Washington burning up 2 years' worth of stored surplus hops, it's been a bit of "Murphy's Law" for hops lately. Making matters worse is the hoarding by large brewers at the first signs of price increase and the weak dollar making European hops even more expensive, the price is not surprising. Given the high prices, many growers will doubtless return, and we'll see more reasonable prices before long.
...left us with a shuttle which would truck stuff to nowhere. Now they have a place to go (ISS) but they are canceling the shuttle with no spacecraft to replace it. The trouble with the STS is that its big selling point was as a shuttle to a future International Space Station. By the same token, the ISS' big selling point was that it could be built, manned, and supplied with the STS. They're both lackluster designs limited to a ridiculous LEO slot that's outlandishly costly to maintain. Really, they're BOTH white elephants.