Take the $99 they're selling the thing for at the store and subtract store markup, shipping, factory tooling, packaging, the rest of the stuff in the Wii box, etc. and you don't have much money to spend on the Wii Mini itself. A few bucks spent adding WiFi could end up being a significant part of the cost.
Honestly, I have to throw some praise at Nintendo for making a game system that's so cheap. My workplace is doing an "adopt-a-family" thing for the christmas season, where employees get together and buy christmas gifts for single parents who can't afford much for their kids. At $99, it's made our shopping list.
Your point about separate radios aside, the original Wii is still available for around $120. Wal-Mart had it on black Friday for $89. Losing Internet on this new console for the same price seems to be a step backward.
[...] submitting that the group's albums were designed to be listened to from beginning to end. 'It's like an artist who does a painting,' he said in 2008. 'If he thinks it's a great piece of work, he protects it. It's the same thing: This is our work [...]
Apparently their work is worth protecting, until the pricetag is high enough.
His blog is www.whoismcafee.com and it's just bizarre. Here's a sample:
I watched the police search my residence 7 times. At one point I got too close and was angrily ordered to go away. I did so while muttering “Pendejos!” loud enough for the officers to hear. Every search was allegedly performed in order to find me. On two occasions, however, the police carried large duffle type bags into the premises and left with the bags appearing nearly empty. Perhaps the bags contained their lunch and they ate while searching. Perhaps not.
On subsequent days using different disguises, I did the same general thing, one day selling tamales and burritos that I had purchased wholesale from a real vendor, on another pretending to be a drunk German tourist with a partially bandaged face and wearing speedo swimming trunks and a distasteful, oversized Hawaiian shirt and yelling loudly at anyone who would listen – “Leck mich um ausch!”. At 67 years of age it was quite a spectacle.
For a guy that thinks he's going to be falsely arrested by the Belize's prime minister's police minions, you'd think he'd want to just get out of the country. I can't imagine that it would be all that difficult. Yet, he keeps going back to his residence where he's most likely to arrested (Belize police must be idiots if this is all true) in these ludicrous disguises that just makes this whole story seem like a farce.
The logical thing would be to get away from location that the police are searching, but that's just what they would expect you to do! So, they know that you know what they know, you know? I'm sure it makes more sense with a colon stuffed full of drugs.
You would think that $25000 would be enough to grease the palms of the Mexican border guards, or hell just pay some drug runners to smuggle him to the US with their next shipment; if he is really being targeted and persecuted in Belize, the risk seems bearable.
Lest we forget that he originally went to Belize to avoid legal and tax problems in the US. I doubt the US is on the top of his "Countries I Can Flee To" list.
I wondered, back in the 80s when I was in school, why pilots made 100k a year and bus drivers made 15k a year. Looks like pay for driving a vehicle with 60 passengers has equalized. [flame suit on]
My cousin was just finishing up commercial flight school when 9/11 happened and the market for pilots dried up. He was a new graduate with around $70k in loans, facing an industry were no jobs were to be found for a new grad. As plan B, he instead joined the military as they promised some help with his loans. Now we fast forward 11 years and hear there is a shortage of qualified pilots? Color me surprised...
At 5x the price you can fly private, first class is less then 2x the cost. To make the math easy will do an 8 hour flight on a Boeing 747, 4,500 miles that will burn 22,000 gallons of fuel. The price of fuel is somewhere between $3-$5 per gallon depending on the location so just the fuel cost is $110,000. A pilot making 20k a year would get paid roughly $10 / hour a 300% wrap rate would cost $240 for the trip with two pilots it's $480, for a total cost of $110,480 for the pilots and fuel. If the pilots made 100k a year the cost of pilots and fuel would be $112,400 a two percent change in cost, I did not account for maintenance, stewardess, baggage handlers, terminal fees or and other administrative cost. Fuel is by far the number one cost in the airline business labor is a distant second.
Your math looks good, but I certainly hope that the pilot behind the yoke of a 747 is not really making $20K/year. That's a big bird.
So as the rhetoric goes the market will work its self out as we see today with Cubans $0.02.
He could instead give the $0.02 to Facebook to send messages to 6.6 people.
$0.003 per person is amazingly cheap, only if the message he's trying to send reaches the right people. The old adage is, "Advertising is only expensive if it doesn't work."
The bigger message here isn't the absolute cost; it's how hard it is to get people to pay for what they're used to getting for free... the exact problem that so many startups seem to suffer.
At my (prominant semiconductor) company, we have been specifically urged by Legal to NEVER do patent searchs. Since the penalty for knowingly infringing is triple that for unknowing infringement, this policy apparently makes some kind of legal sense.
At a previous employer, I once had to take the witness stand because I worked on some products that we were being sued over for allegedly infringing on a patent. While I was being deposed the plaintiff's lawyer asked me several times (in varying ways and approaches) about the level of effort I spent to discover the existing patents and especially their patents. I was quite happy to be able to testify that I'd never heard of the plaintiff or their silly patent, and only heard about it from our legal department after the suit was filed. The case was thrown out with prejudice, BTW.
And you in turn seem to be a vacuous moron repeating the tired conservative talking points they've used for about 50 years. Meanwhile, in the fact-based universe, there isn't any evidence that raising taxes will tank the economy. Economic growth is strongest under Democratic presidents and their policies, and that's been true since FDR. The CBO recently studied the numbers and concluded there is no evidence that lowering taxes spurs the economy. What did the GOP do in response? Learn? Hell no, they suppressed the report. That quote about trying to teach a dog difference equations? That's actually what it is like to reason with conservatives. They're simply too stupid to change. They don't respond to reason. Conservative economic theory has more in common with religion than anything else - entire chunks of it are simply taken on faith despite having no existing proof in the real world. Whenever something fails, the answer is the No True Scotsman explanation.
I really have no knowledge to discuss the accuracy of whether or not what you say about Democratic presidencies are true. I just want to point out that many Republicans don't care about that; for them, the issue is more or less government control. More government==BAD, even if the government is the right answer for the problem at hand.
I don't see how the poor are punished almost at all by inflation. In fact it seems to help them.
"Poor" people that have debts rather than assets seem to be helped by inflation, since hey, you're paying back yesterday's mortgage with tomorrow's cheaper dollars. In that light, savers are hurt and borrowers win.
The problem is that wages lag inflation, so as prices go up and incomes do not, people with obligations rather than assets run into cash-flow problems pretty quickly.
Every time Ron Paul started talking about this stuff on the campaign trail he got booed and everyone promptly stuck their hands over their ears and went "lalalalalalalalala............." I hope it holds together 3 more years so I can cash my 401K out before it's gone. A lifetime of savings and those fuckers are going to cheat me out of it. The sad thing is it's all the fault of the American people who only listen to what they want to hear. This two party shell game is going to end soon and the public will discover that no matter which shell you flip there is nothing under any of them.
Is it too late for you to move your 401k to dollar independent funds? More into commodities and hard metals?
Some 401k plans are very limited in what investment types are available. The good news is that if yours is one of these, you probably also work for a small company, which might be easy to persuade to add additional fund types.
You should have some minimum time to file a suit against someone for using your patent or it should be invalidated. [...] If you have too many patents that you can't keep track of them, and don't even realize that somebody is infringing on them until years later, then it should be invalidated.
I like the idea of trying to eliminate the abuse of submarine patents, but as soon as you reduce the actionable time frame from "life of patent" to "X number of weeks/months/years after patent was issued", then you've entered a gray area where it becomes hard to define what "X" is. If we're doing that, didn't we just redefine the lifetime of the patent to be X?
IANAL, but I believe trademarks are like that: if you do not actively defend your trademark from infringing uses, then you lose the exclusive use of your trademark.
I hadn't heard this, and it doesn't make sense. The greeter's real job is to stop people going out when the shoplifting tag sounds an alarm. I'm sure they saveWalMart far more than WalMart pays them.
Well, if that's their real purpose, then eliminating the position would probably save WalMart a ton of money. Positioning people without police powers near the door in an attempt to stop suspected shoplifters sounds like a whole let of lawsuits and bad publicity waiting to happen.
...or did he send a very slightly differently punctuated/spaced email to every employee, just to see which version ended up leaked? I'm pretty sure that's what Bruce Schneier would do.
That's exactly what I was thinking, except do it in a binary search: send another "confidential" e-mail each week, sending two different versions to different subsets of employees. Each week you eliminate half of your suspect list, and the tension mounts! What? He said it was a hobby...
Of course, Bruce Schneier would probably not recommend a mass e-mail of confidential, controversial data to a large group under the assumption that no one would spill the beans...
Five million bucks won't keep you for life unless your very prudent.
Assuming he gave up $3million in taxes, the $2m he had left earning only 5% would kick off $100k/year for the rest of his life. On his death, there would be $2m to pass to his heirs.
Granted, he could easily get himself into a lifestyle where $100k a year wasn't enough, but with $100k a year guaranteed income he could afford to pursue whatever occupation interested him, with no worries about the success or failure of the endeavor. That kind of freedom would be like nirvana to many of us.
But no, you're right, this amount of money isn't 60+ years of jetsetting with supermodels.
Suicide is extremely selfish why? If someone doesn't want to be alive anymore, shouldn't they be allowed to make that decision and stop living? What's selfish are all the other dipshits who are selfish in not wanting to let the person go.
Judging from the context that the GP was using (suggesting better ways of ending one's life than a self-inflicted bullet or hanging) maybe he was referring to the horrible scene that is left to be discovered by someone else?
My best friend's father killed himself when we were freshmen in college. His youngest daughter found his body in their kitchen. Not a pleasant last memory of dear-old dad.
No thanks. I have no quarrel. My foes are the people in the institution that pressed my ancestors into service for war and stole their income to support war.
The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
Sorry about that, but I do not consent. Throwing bad money after good is never a good idea, and when it's used as encouragement to warfare, the idea is downright reprehensible.
You have an interesting view of England's role in WWII. You would have preferred that no one oppose Germany's plans of occupying Europe?
Yes, the Pilot Precise V5 is my favorite at the moment. It is a 0.5mm tip, so it may not qualify on one of the OP's requirements, but other than that it is a fantastic pen. A commodity item, so you can find it everywhere for a decent price. Very good ink and writing feel, and it has a cap which makes it pocket-friendly. The only downside I can see is that the ink penetrates into the paper quite well, which means that writing on both sides of a piece of paper is less than ideal.
I've always thought this would be an easy way to fly on a ticket issued in another name. But in the past two years, I've seen one instance of TSA agents randomly asking people in line at the gate for their boarding passes. I wondered if that flight was flagged for some reason or just a slow day at security.
What would be your response if a liquid bomb threat was discovered and then the TSA did nothing to screen for it? Everyone would be screaming their heads off that the TSA should be checking for known threats. It is absurd to try to claim that the TSA airport checks are not security.
The checks are security... security theater that is. They don't work. They don't catch terrorists. They don't prevent terrorists from trying something else.
You mention the liquid bomb incident. First of all, the liquids were not even meant to be taken aboard an airplane. They could have been though and that started the scare. Now, the sensible rules would be such, that it would be impossible to bring enough liquid aboard to create a bomb that could do any worthwhile damage. But no. [...]
Especially when it takes about 30 seconds worth of thought to get around such a ban. Contact lens solution? Ok. Baby formula? Ok. 1 Liter of bottled water not purchased from a blessed vendor inside the security fence? Nice try, terrerrist, you just leave that right here.
In February 2002, I was in Boston for work and finished up a day early. At the airline counter I was told that for security reasons, I was not allowed to fly standby on a day other than the day for which my ticket was issued. Without missing a beat, the agent then informed me that for a $100 change fee I could get a new ticket issued for the current day.
Crap like this is not security. Does the TSA believe there terrorists in the world ready to sacrifice their own lives, but also carefully observe the 14-day advance purchase requirement to get a cheap ticket? Jihadists are traveling the world without $100 in their pockets?
Every time I show up at the security checkpoint, the security guard carefully inspects my photo ID, being sure that the name on my driver's license matches the name on a piece of paper that looks like a boarding pass, which I also provide. What kind of nonsense is this? "Here's a piece of paper with my name, and to prove I'm supposed to be here, I've also brought with me a second piece of paper with the same name." Let's pretend I can't fake the boarding pass, so securely presented by the airline's website in a.PDF file. I still can purchase an airplane ticket in any name I choose, print a legitimate boarding pass, and then cancel the ticket, even the day of the flight.
Since the TSA screening has foiled exactly zero plots, there are only three options:
1. The TSA is doing such a bang-up job as a deterrent, that no hijacker has dared to attempt it. 2. The TSA has stopped at least one hijacker, but has chosen to not publicize it for some reason. Maybe to avoid revealing their methods. 3. The TSA has done exactly nothing in the way of making airline travel actually safer. But, change fees abound, bottled water sales are up, and people needing bottled medical oxygen on board the plane cannot bring it from home, but now pay the airline $100 per flight to provide it for them.
My experience in high school was similar, but different. I always struggled with math, which maybe is why I stuck with it into college. I excelled at English, but was frustrated by the subjective nature of it and saw future in it for me. I gravitated toward the sciences, where things were objective and discrete. In hindsight, and the advice I'm trying to give my sons, is that the subjects that are difficult are exactly the ones to focus on! The stuff that comes easy will take care of itself, but as you mature, you will naturally gravitate away from the things that don't interest you, so now is the time to adsorb as much of them as possible; you may never get the chance again.
As for the realization that you don't have to prove your awesomeness to everyone around you, that's just part of maturing and being comfortable with yourself. I've discovered that other people being smart around me isn't a threat to my intelligence, and actually makes my life better.
After having my card # stolen, I enabled my bank to send me text messages anytime more than a dollar is taken from my account. Didn't even realize that I had that option until I was a victim. Now I can see everything - including when my wife's card got stolen. 10 charges to amazon.com within 5 minutes? Yeah, that's not us.
We're fully aware what happened, and unfortunately it took us twice to figure out who actually took the information and ran with it. That vendor will never ever get my money again.
Great, so what happens when you are denied a credit card. Seriously that is not a solution.
I have 2 checking accounts and a savings account. All money is direct deposited into my savings account. All bills go into checking account #1 which does not have a debit card. Account #2 has a debit card and a minimal balance of $1 to keep it open. If I know I need to buy something with the debit card I move the money to savings. You 1) never bounce a check ever again because you're purposefully put the money in an account that you use for bills, and you have 0 risk if your debit card # is stolen.
Problem solved,
This doesn't sound any more convenient than just pulling cash as needed. What is the advantage to this approach? I'm not trying to be snarky, I really am curious.
obAnecdote:
Last year, I got a phone call from my bank asking me to confirm some transactions that had occurred overnight with my debit card number. There were several on-line purchases, but something about them triggered their fraud detection and they called me. Luckily I was at my desk, so while I was on the phone with them, I pulled up my account on their web site and looked at the charges. We spent about 5 minutes on the phone discussing the last 48 hours worth of transactions, flagging each as valid or fraudulent.
They cancelled my card while I was on the phone, provisionally credited my account for the disputed charges, and thanked me for my time. Two days later I had a new debit card in my mailbox, and about four weeks later I received a letter asking for my signature affirming that the charges were not mine. Although I was nervous that somehow the fraud would continue or that they had access to my account in some other way, it really was pretty painless and the only inconvenience to me was being without my debit/ATM card for two days.
Slashdot Mirror
Take the $99 they're selling the thing for at the store and subtract store markup, shipping, factory tooling, packaging, the rest of the stuff in the Wii box, etc. and you don't have much money to spend on the Wii Mini itself. A few bucks spent adding WiFi could end up being a significant part of the cost.
Honestly, I have to throw some praise at Nintendo for making a game system that's so cheap. My workplace is doing an "adopt-a-family" thing for the christmas season, where employees get together and buy christmas gifts for single parents who can't afford much for their kids. At $99, it's made our shopping list.
Your point about separate radios aside, the original Wii is still available for around $120. Wal-Mart had it on black Friday for $89. Losing Internet on this new console for the same price seems to be a step backward.
Perhaps the natives should've just let the Pilgrims starve.
Hmm... perhaps for the natives, that would have turned out better. That's irony for you!
My kids get Christmas presents, but somehow we can still donate time and money to worthy charitable causes. It's not all-or-nothing.
[...] submitting that the group's albums were designed to be listened to from beginning to end. 'It's like an artist who does a painting,' he said in 2008. 'If he thinks it's a great piece of work, he protects it. It's the same thing: This is our work [...]
Apparently their work is worth protecting, until the pricetag is high enough.
His blog is www.whoismcafee.com and it's just bizarre. Here's a sample:
For a guy that thinks he's going to be falsely arrested by the Belize's prime minister's police minions, you'd think he'd want to just get out of the country. I can't imagine that it would be all that difficult. Yet, he keeps going back to his residence where he's most likely to arrested (Belize police must be idiots if this is all true) in these ludicrous disguises that just makes this whole story seem like a farce.
The logical thing would be to get away from location that the police are searching, but that's just what they would expect you to do! So, they know that you know what they know, you know? I'm sure it makes more sense with a colon stuffed full of drugs.
You would think that $25000 would be enough to grease the palms of the Mexican border guards, or hell just pay some drug runners to smuggle him to the US with their next shipment; if he is really being targeted and persecuted in Belize, the risk seems bearable.
Lest we forget that he originally went to Belize to avoid legal and tax problems in the US. I doubt the US is on the top of his "Countries I Can Flee To" list.
I wondered, back in the 80s when I was in school, why pilots made 100k a year and bus drivers made 15k a year. Looks like pay for driving a vehicle with 60 passengers has equalized. [flame suit on]
My cousin was just finishing up commercial flight school when 9/11 happened and the market for pilots dried up. He was a new graduate with around $70k in loans, facing an industry were no jobs were to be found for a new grad. As plan B, he instead joined the military as they promised some help with his loans. Now we fast forward 11 years and hear there is a shortage of qualified pilots? Color me surprised...
At 5x the price you can fly private, first class is less then 2x the cost. To make the math easy will do an 8 hour flight on a Boeing 747, 4,500 miles that will burn 22,000 gallons of fuel. The price of fuel is somewhere between $3-$5 per gallon depending on the location so just the fuel cost is $110,000. A pilot making 20k a year would get paid roughly $10 / hour a 300% wrap rate would cost $240 for the trip with two pilots it's $480, for a total cost of $110,480 for the pilots and fuel. If the pilots made 100k a year the cost of pilots and fuel would be $112,400 a two percent change in cost, I did not account for maintenance, stewardess, baggage handlers, terminal fees or and other administrative cost. Fuel is by far the number one cost in the airline business labor is a distant second.
Your math looks good, but I certainly hope that the pilot behind the yoke of a 747 is not really making $20K/year. That's a big bird.
So as the rhetoric goes the market will work its self out as we see today with Cubans $0.02.
He could instead give the $0.02 to Facebook to send messages to 6.6 people.
$0.003 per person is amazingly cheap, only if the message he's trying to send reaches the right people. The old adage is, "Advertising is only expensive if it doesn't work."
The bigger message here isn't the absolute cost; it's how hard it is to get people to pay for what they're used to getting for free... the exact problem that so many startups seem to suffer.
At my (prominant semiconductor) company, we have been specifically urged by Legal to NEVER do patent searchs. Since the penalty for knowingly infringing is triple that for unknowing infringement, this policy apparently makes some kind of legal sense.
At a previous employer, I once had to take the witness stand because I worked on some products that we were being sued over for allegedly infringing on a patent. While I was being deposed the plaintiff's lawyer asked me several times (in varying ways and approaches) about the level of effort I spent to discover the existing patents and especially their patents. I was quite happy to be able to testify that I'd never heard of the plaintiff or their silly patent, and only heard about it from our legal department after the suit was filed. The case was thrown out with prejudice, BTW.
And you in turn seem to be a vacuous moron repeating the tired conservative talking points they've used for about 50 years.
Meanwhile, in the fact-based universe, there isn't any evidence that raising taxes will tank the economy. Economic growth is strongest under Democratic presidents and their policies, and that's been true since FDR. The CBO recently studied the numbers and concluded there is no evidence that lowering taxes spurs the economy. What did the GOP do in response? Learn? Hell no, they suppressed the report.
That quote about trying to teach a dog difference equations? That's actually what it is like to reason with conservatives. They're simply too stupid to change. They don't respond to reason. Conservative economic theory has more in common with religion than anything else - entire chunks of it are simply taken on faith despite having no existing proof in the real world. Whenever something fails, the answer is the No True Scotsman explanation.
I really have no knowledge to discuss the accuracy of whether or not what you say about Democratic presidencies are true. I just want to point out that many Republicans don't care about that; for them, the issue is more or less government control. More government==BAD, even if the government is the right answer for the problem at hand.
I don't see how the poor are punished almost at all by inflation. In fact it seems to help them.
"Poor" people that have debts rather than assets seem to be helped by inflation, since hey, you're paying back yesterday's mortgage with tomorrow's cheaper dollars. In that light, savers are hurt and borrowers win.
The problem is that wages lag inflation, so as prices go up and incomes do not, people with obligations rather than assets run into cash-flow problems pretty quickly.
Every time Ron Paul started talking about this stuff on the campaign trail he got booed and everyone promptly stuck their hands over their ears and went "lalalalalalalalala............." I hope it holds together 3 more years so I can cash my 401K out before it's gone. A lifetime of savings and those fuckers are going to cheat me out of it. The sad thing is it's all the fault of the American people who only listen to what they want to hear. This two party shell game is going to end soon and the public will discover that no matter which shell you flip there is nothing under any of them.
Is it too late for you to move your 401k to dollar independent funds? More into commodities and hard metals?
Some 401k plans are very limited in what investment types are available. The good news is that if yours is one of these, you probably also work for a small company, which might be easy to persuade to add additional fund types.
You should have some minimum time to file a suit against someone for using your patent or it should be invalidated. [...] If you have too many patents that you can't keep track of them, and don't even realize that somebody is infringing on them until years later, then it should be invalidated.
I like the idea of trying to eliminate the abuse of submarine patents, but as soon as you reduce the actionable time frame from "life of patent" to "X number of weeks/months/years after patent was issued", then you've entered a gray area where it becomes hard to define what "X" is. If we're doing that, didn't we just redefine the lifetime of the patent to be X?
IANAL, but I believe trademarks are like that: if you do not actively defend your trademark from infringing uses, then you lose the exclusive use of your trademark.
Walmart is phasing out their greeter position.
I hadn't heard this, and it doesn't make sense. The greeter's real job is to stop people going out when the shoplifting tag sounds an alarm. I'm sure they saveWalMart far more than WalMart pays them.
Well, if that's their real purpose, then eliminating the position would probably save WalMart a ton of money. Positioning people without police powers near the door in an attempt to stop suspected shoplifters sounds like a whole let of lawsuits and bad publicity waiting to happen.
...or did he send a very slightly differently punctuated/spaced email to every employee, just to see which version ended up leaked? I'm pretty sure that's what Bruce Schneier would do.
That's exactly what I was thinking, except do it in a binary search: send another "confidential" e-mail each week, sending two different versions to different subsets of employees. Each week you eliminate half of your suspect list, and the tension mounts! What? He said it was a hobby...
Of course, Bruce Schneier would probably not recommend a mass e-mail of confidential, controversial data to a large group under the assumption that no one would spill the beans...
Five million bucks won't keep you for life unless your very prudent.
Assuming he gave up $3million in taxes, the $2m he had left earning only 5% would kick off $100k/year for the rest of his life. On his death, there would be $2m to pass to his heirs.
Granted, he could easily get himself into a lifestyle where $100k a year wasn't enough, but with $100k a year guaranteed income he could afford to pursue whatever occupation interested him, with no worries about the success or failure of the endeavor. That kind of freedom would be like nirvana to many of us.
But no, you're right, this amount of money isn't 60+ years of jetsetting with supermodels.
Suicide is extremely selfish why? If someone doesn't want to be alive anymore, shouldn't they be allowed to make that decision and stop living? What's selfish are all the other dipshits who are selfish in not wanting to let the person go.
Judging from the context that the GP was using (suggesting better ways of ending one's life than a self-inflicted bullet or hanging) maybe he was referring to the horrible scene that is left to be discovered by someone else?
My best friend's father killed himself when we were freshmen in college. His youngest daughter found his body in their kitchen. Not a pleasant last memory of dear-old dad.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
No thanks. I have no quarrel. My foes are the people in the institution that pressed my ancestors into service for war and stole their income to support war.
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
Sorry about that, but I do not consent. Throwing bad money after good is never a good idea, and when it's used as encouragement to warfare, the idea is downright reprehensible.
You have an interesting view of England's role in WWII. You would have preferred that no one oppose Germany's plans of occupying Europe?
i wonder how the bird got in the chimney in the first place
I don't know how they do it in your country, but In some places in the world it's quite common to leave the top of the chimney open to the atmosphere.
Yes, the Pilot Precise V5 is my favorite at the moment. It is a 0.5mm tip, so it may not qualify on one of the OP's requirements, but other than that it is a fantastic pen. A commodity item, so you can find it everywhere for a decent price. Very good ink and writing feel, and it has a cap which makes it pocket-friendly. The only downside I can see is that the ink penetrates into the paper quite well, which means that writing on both sides of a piece of paper is less than ideal.
I've always thought this would be an easy way to fly on a ticket issued in another name. But in the past two years, I've seen one instance of TSA agents randomly asking people in line at the gate for their boarding passes. I wondered if that flight was flagged for some reason or just a slow day at security.
What would be your response if a liquid bomb threat was discovered and then the TSA did nothing to screen for it? Everyone would be screaming their heads off that the TSA should be checking for known threats. It is absurd to try to claim that the TSA airport checks are not security.
The checks are security... security theater that is. They don't work. They don't catch terrorists. They don't prevent terrorists from trying something else.
You mention the liquid bomb incident. First of all, the liquids were not even meant to be taken aboard an airplane. They could have been though and that started the scare. Now, the sensible rules would be such, that it would be impossible to bring enough liquid aboard to create a bomb that could do any worthwhile damage. But no. [...]
Especially when it takes about 30 seconds worth of thought to get around such a ban. Contact lens solution? Ok. Baby formula? Ok. 1 Liter of bottled water not purchased from a blessed vendor inside the security fence? Nice try, terrerrist, you just leave that right here.
In February 2002, I was in Boston for work and finished up a day early. At the airline counter I was told that for security reasons, I was not allowed to fly standby on a day other than the day for which my ticket was issued. Without missing a beat, the agent then informed me that for a $100 change fee I could get a new ticket issued for the current day.
Crap like this is not security. Does the TSA believe there terrorists in the world ready to sacrifice their own lives, but also carefully observe the 14-day advance purchase requirement to get a cheap ticket? Jihadists are traveling the world without $100 in their pockets?
Every time I show up at the security checkpoint, the security guard carefully inspects my photo ID, being sure that the name on my driver's license matches the name on a piece of paper that looks like a boarding pass, which I also provide. What kind of nonsense is this? "Here's a piece of paper with my name, and to prove I'm supposed to be here, I've also brought with me a second piece of paper with the same name." Let's pretend I can't fake the boarding pass, so securely presented by the airline's website in a .PDF file. I still can purchase an airplane ticket in any name I choose, print a legitimate boarding pass, and then cancel the ticket, even the day of the flight.
Since the TSA screening has foiled exactly zero plots, there are only three options:
1. The TSA is doing such a bang-up job as a deterrent, that no hijacker has dared to attempt it.
2. The TSA has stopped at least one hijacker, but has chosen to not publicize it for some reason. Maybe to avoid revealing their methods.
3. The TSA has done exactly nothing in the way of making airline travel actually safer. But, change fees abound, bottled water sales are up, and people needing bottled medical oxygen on board the plane cannot bring it from home, but now pay the airline $100 per flight to provide it for them.
Which of the three are more likely?
Thanks for your story; it was a good read.
My experience in high school was similar, but different. I always struggled with math, which maybe is why I stuck with it into college. I excelled at English, but was frustrated by the subjective nature of it and saw future in it for me. I gravitated toward the sciences, where things were objective and discrete. In hindsight, and the advice I'm trying to give my sons, is that the subjects that are difficult are exactly the ones to focus on! The stuff that comes easy will take care of itself, but as you mature, you will naturally gravitate away from the things that don't interest you, so now is the time to adsorb as much of them as possible; you may never get the chance again.
As for the realization that you don't have to prove your awesomeness to everyone around you, that's just part of maturing and being comfortable with yourself. I've discovered that other people being smart around me isn't a threat to my intelligence, and actually makes my life better.
After having my card # stolen, I enabled my bank to send me text messages anytime more than a dollar is taken from my account. Didn't even realize that I had that option until I was a victim. Now I can see everything - including when my wife's card got stolen. 10 charges to amazon.com within 5 minutes? Yeah, that's not us.
We're fully aware what happened, and unfortunately it took us twice to figure out who actually took the information and ran with it. That vendor will never ever get my money again.
Amazon was the security hole?
Great, so what happens when you are denied a credit card. Seriously that is not a solution.
I have 2 checking accounts and a savings account. All money is direct deposited into my savings account. All bills go into checking account #1 which does not have a debit card. Account #2 has a debit card and a minimal balance of $1 to keep it open. If I know I need to buy something with the debit card I move the money to savings. You 1) never bounce a check ever again because you're purposefully put the money in an account that you use for bills, and you have 0 risk if your debit card # is stolen.
Problem solved,
This doesn't sound any more convenient than just pulling cash as needed. What is the advantage to this approach? I'm not trying to be snarky, I really am curious.
obAnecdote:
Last year, I got a phone call from my bank asking me to confirm some transactions that had occurred overnight with my debit card number. There were several on-line purchases, but something about them triggered their fraud detection and they called me. Luckily I was at my desk, so while I was on the phone with them, I pulled up my account on their web site and looked at the charges. We spent about 5 minutes on the phone discussing the last 48 hours worth of transactions, flagging each as valid or fraudulent.
They cancelled my card while I was on the phone, provisionally credited my account for the disputed charges, and thanked me for my time. Two days later I had a new debit card in my mailbox, and about four weeks later I received a letter asking for my signature affirming that the charges were not mine. Although I was nervous that somehow the fraud would continue or that they had access to my account in some other way, it really was pretty painless and the only inconvenience to me was being without my debit/ATM card for two days.