It's unlimited bandwidth, but you still pay by the minute. It just means you don't have to pay by the minute AND by the byte.
I don't know anything about the pricing plans, really, since I refuse to get a cell phone, but it seems that 300 minutes for $40 is seriously on the low side. That's only 5 hours a month of connection time - and, yes, downloading data counts as connection time.
Disclaimer - my wife works for Sprint (FON, not PCS). It makes telemarketers asking us to switch LD companies fun though ("Can you beat free? No?").
"Technicalese" is a misnomer. Documents that are for consumption by the average user do not use the same jargon and poor sentence structure as documents meant for a sysadmin or programmer. Yes, there are tons of instances where this isn't true - and the docs suck. This is why programmers should not write docs and you should hire tech writers to do so (yes, I say this as a programmer).
Medical materials certainly do have "medicalese", but they also have a plain text section that is much easier to read. The prescription drug industry discovered this was necessary after people started suing them for being unable to determine what the side effects were, what the drug interactions were, etc.
Legal documents usually have no such section. It's very much a case of the lawyers building a wall around their own industry to keep the common person out. Sooner or later some of these absurd EULAs are going to be challenged and struck down for not being understandable by the average reader. Equally important, it's absurd to expect someone to read and understand a 3500 word document just to buy an airline ticket.
First off, this "alpha" is 6 months old now... a helluva lot of coding and optimization can happen in 6 months. And the game isn't due out for another year still. By that time a PC that can run it will be extremely reasonable.
Besides, a $2k PC isn't required. I could build a PC that could handle it for under $1000 (no monitor). Most of that cost is in the video card, because the video card is now considerably more complex than the CPU. But an ATI Radeon 9700 will be selling for at or under $100 by the time this comes out - which cuts 20-30% of the price right there.
The PS2 can't handle a game of the graphical complexity that Doom3 will be. D3 is written for graphics chips that are two generations beyond what the PS2 is. Try doing dynamic lighting, bump mapping, curved surfaces, and high poly counts on a PS2... you can't. It's not made to handle it. Oh... and then do that at 1024x768 with 4x anti-aliasing and ansiotropic filtering... no, you don't need that kind of thing on the PS2 because the resolution is so damn poor (somewhat less than 640x480 and interlaced at that). And you're wondering why it's hardware intensive? WC3 is pretty, but it's not designed to push the limits of the hardware - Doom3 is.
Finally, remember that id software is only partially a game company nowadays. I suspect they make a rather sizeable portion of their profit from licensing - $1M + royalties for the latest and greatest engine and support. Doom3 may not be everyone's FPS cup of tea, but it's likely that one of the games based off the engine will do exceptionally well, as Half-Life did with Q1, CS with Q2, and RtCW with Q3.
IMO, everything. Not releasing 3rd party IP is fine and dandy - doing anything else would broaden the scope of the ruling absurdly and ensure it got struck down by a higher court.
Allowing MS to skate out of releasing information for "security" reasons is, frankly, crap. It's promoting the idea of security through obscurity, and it lets MS classify pretty much anything they want as security. Sure, they'll have to give out bits and pieces and make noise like they're actually following the consent decree. But just like all the prior decrees they'll quickly ignore the spirit of the law and gut it. You can be assured that all the real important parts of the interoperability puzzle will fall into the "security" domain and thus remain closed off.
A quick glance at the State Settlement and Final Judgement makes it appear that CKK has accepted the proposed settlement between the Federal government, the 9 states, and MS.
IANAL, and I only scanned the top few pages for information. If I'm wrong, someone please correct me.
If you look at Satellite pricing vs. Cable pricing (I live in Seattle), it's about the same for the same content
Not for everyone... I may finally be able to get satellite since removing a bunch of trees. If so we can save $30/mo for the same service. Currently we have digital cable w/ HBO (and our cable company lumps Cinemax in with HBO). To move to DirecTV with local stations and HBO (screw Cinemax) it's a $30 savings. And I get more "regular" channels. And I can either get a DirecTiVo or a DirecTV receiver that I can plug my TiVo serial cable into, so now I don't fail to change channels ever again and wind up recording the wrong damn thing.
The right solution is to allow Dish and DirectTv to merge with restrictions and to force local Cable competition
That won't ever happen - local cable competition has never existed outside a few very small markets, and it's starting to disappear in even those. Given that, the right solution is to prevent the merger. Competition is the consumer's friend.
As for HD over satellite - it'll happen eventually because if cable companies start offering it widely then the satellite vendors will have to to stay competitive. It may mean launching new birds, acquiring more transponders somehow, or even changing the encoding on the stream, but they'll do it.
Heh, you live near my sister then - she lives in Owensburro. I don't know the details of how her reception is, but they seem pleased with it. She wasn't happy that she would be unable to get the locals via sat, but they found some resolution... otherwise I'd still be hearing about it (since I suggested they look at DirecTV and TiVo).
The deal you're going to get via the telco seems pretty good... I'm surprised they're even bothering with the current regulations on the book though. Bowling Green/Owensburo may have enough people to justify it though.
Back on topic, though - the problem is that if you look at the merger plans the idea wasn't to just eliminate duplication. There were plans to sell off a large percentage of the bandwidth, partially to reap profits, partially to head off anti-trust issues ("see, someone else can broadcast now!").
The core issue, though, is that the merger would have drastically reduced competition. When there are 3 or more companies competing against one another there's usually advantages to the consumer - especially in price and service. When there's only two the competition often becomes a mutual oligopoly, with the companies agreeing (tacitly or otherwise) on pricing structures, service levels, and so forth. Do you really think that the satellite pricing would be as low as it is if Dish and DirecTV weren't competing against one another and the cable companies? Do you think that the hardware would be "free"?
You know, I'm continuously amazed by the number of brain dead comments like this that I see.
With Echostar and Hughes merged they wouldn't have competed against the cable companies. They would've formed a 2 party oligopoly. Satellite pricing has been pretty constant in the past 5 years, while cable prices have risen dramatically in most markets. Eliminate one third of the competition, however, and you want to bet that satellite pricing won't go through the roof like cable has? And it has even less regulation than cable has! Come on people, THINK.
All the kvetching about locals is crap. The big markets/cities have locals available over satellite. Rural locations don't, but I seriously question that the merged company would've spent the tremendous amount of bandwidth needed to rectify that situation for the very minor gains it would've resulted in. Anyway, the regulations are that if you can receive a good over-the-air signal then you cannot get the national broadcasts - this happened to my sister. They still love their DirecTV though. The only real downside is that they can't DirecTiVo the local channels since they come in via antenna. They survive.
Frankly, I have no idea what your issue with Gamespy is. Of course, I have the real thing, not the crappy Gamespy Arcade. And I have a registered version from back in the days when it was known as QuakeSpy.
As far as Peter Molyneux - I didn't care for B&W either, nor did my wife, but you're on crack if you don't think it succeeded. It sold a couple million copies and has a considerable fan base. I'm not in that fan base. Neither are you. Doesn't mean it wasn't successful.
And as for your later allegation that sales figures are meaningless - whatever. Windows is the most popular OS, and Linux has only a fraction of its market share. If you don't want to acknowledge that then you're living in an alternate universe. And I say this as someone who likes Linux and develops for Unix. Doesn't mean I'm blind to market realities.
If you go back and read some of the first Doom3 articles from E3, and if you watch the video from the same, you'll know that Doom3 is going to deliver exactly what you're asking for.
The still shots of D3 really don't do justice to it (but I rarely feel that still shots do). It's the motion video that captures just how amazing the game could be. Who knows if it will live up to the potential, but if it doesn't then another game using the engine will.
No... controller cards aren't integrated into the BIOS. These are. That's all the difference in the world.
the main reason SATA interests me at all (currently) is the increased airflow from getting rid of all those ribbon cables
Same... it's one of the technologies I've been holding out for (since I'm holding out for the NV30 anyway, holding out for other stuff right now doesn't hurt). But even if the Seagate SATA drives hit the market, there are no SATA CD-RW/DVDs/etc - so it doesn't buy all that much. I may look back into rounded PATA cables, or look at folding my own (doable without cutting).
In a year or so SATA should be able to completely replace PATA for everything. The motherboards with SATA integrated into the chipset will be out in early 2003, which is when it'll really take off. But really there's no reason to not trust one of the current motherboards with SATA support.
Your questions are irrelevant since hybrid vehicles won't increase energy demand based on driving them. I suspect manufacturing energy costs will go up, but I don't know by how much.
I suspect the question you want to know is - how much of our oil supply is imported from the Middle East?
Roughly 40%.
Cut fuel consumption by cars by 50% and you've drastically reduced how much oil has to be imported from the Middle East (not eliminated - oil is used for far more than just gasoline).
Uh... have you looked at any of the new motherboards? Most KT400 and Intel 845PE/GE motherboards have SATA support.
The support is, however, provided by a secondary chip on the motherboard and is not integrated into the South bridge or whatever yet. So you're constrained by the 133 MB/s of the PCI bus. Since no drive approaches even 66 MB/s sustained transfer yet, it's really not an issue though.
Intel made a huge sacrifice in IPC for clock-speed
Yes, and Intel is having problems with that now. The P4M (Mobile) has a lower clock speed and higher IPC. The Itanium even more so. And AMD's strategy of using processor rating has been remarkably successful - what's the actual clock speed of an AMD Athlon XP 2800? What about the forthcoming Barton core Athlon 3000? Only the die hard enthusiasts remember. Everyone else just assumes 2.8 GHz and 3.0 GHz respectively - which is wrong.
In city driving? I don't think so. My wife has a 2002 Camry 4 cylinder and it doesn't get anywhere close to that city driving.
Highway driving is a horse of a different color. I had a 1996 Nissan Altima that got something like 45 mpg highway driving. Closer to 25 in the city. My current Nissan Maxima (6 cylinder) gets over 30 mpg highway driving, but only 20 in stop and go.
Yes it is that good. The average family sedan gets only about 23 mpg. Less if it's a 6 cylinder. And that's in city driving.
The average family sedan converted to hybrid would double that figure.
Diesel is dead in the US. It's only used for 18-wheelers and other large vehicles, with a few automobiles thrown in. The emissions are too high to be used in regular automobiles en masse, and truckers are now fighting against the emissions being applied to them as well. Note that the emissions from diesel are different from those using regular gas, but they're still present and in some ways worse (particularly sulphur compounds).
Ok, ignoring that the 100,000 mile figure is way too low, your MPG is way, way too high.
Take your average SUV - it gets a wonderful 15 mpg. Convert to hybrid, get the mpg up to, oh say, 40 - which is quite attainable.
Cost savings over 100,000 miles? $6250.
That's going to pay for a lot of repairs.
Very few cars are getting anywhere close to 30 mpg nowadays - certainly not the family sedans that are most popular (Honda Accord, Toyota Camry, Ford Taurus). They're generally in the low 20s for city driving. And since EPA mpg doesn't reflect real life mpg, they actually wind up getting in the very low 20s.
The wonderful part about hybrids is they actually get better mpg in stop and go traffic than in highway driving - and most Americans now spend more time (and gas) in stop-n-go traffic than they do cruising at 70 mph down the freeway.
Because the compilers generate code that is considerably faster than gcc.
We have gcc compiled here... but it takes twice as long to compile our code as it takes xlC, and the resultant code core dumps as soon as something actually happens. We haven't had time to trace the issue down yet, but we still hope to move to gcc because of issues we have with IBM's xlC and dbx (as in - dbx usually doesn't work).
I don't know if credit companies sell the lists to other companies. I think they do and that is improper too, in my view.
They can and do now. Thanks to a new federal law that explicitly allows them to unless you opt-out. You should've gotten a letter from every financial institution you do business with about this about a year and a half ago - the new law went into effect July 1, 2001. Most people probably just threw the opt-out forms in the trash. Oops. I filled out each and every one and sent it back in.
I think you should be able to prevent them
You can - when they call you ask to be put on their "Do not solicit" list.
Unfortunately it only helps a little... that DNS/DNC/DNM (solicit/call/mail - often separate lists, but solicit covers both call and mail) is for that telemarketer only. The institution that gave them your number will probably never hear about it, so unless you call them and somehow reach the right number to be put on their list it won't do too much good.
And, like you, I never buy from telemarketers or spammers. I did, however, get Citibank to stop telemarketing me. I signed up for a couple programs that had hefty fees - like $40-50 (the bank gets a $10 kickback on these, so it's very much in their interest to have these "benefit" programs). I then called back and cancelled them after they showed up on my bill. After the second time they discovered it cost wayyyyy too much to market to me and stopped.
What I really love is when phone companies call my wife to try and get her to change long distance companies. She works for one and we get free long distance because of it. It's a real hard sell at that point:)
While I'm not the person you were replying to, I suspect he meant without permission
Ok, that I'll buy. But it's a very important distinction and completely changes the argument.
I'm all for that too. Opt-in should be default. I don't forsee it happening nationwide though because of the clout of the various businesses that would be affected. Sigh.
You've never bought a house, have you? If mortgages weren't common place then very few people would be able to do so. Cars are in much the same category (and yes, I have family members that can and do buy their cars with cash).
You have a really simplistic view if you think credit is merely "spending money that one does not have". Credit is often a means of convienence - that's what my credit cards are. I've never once not paid the bill in full. But credit cards give me an extra 30-60 days of float and let me do things like buy goods online or buy from stores without having to deal with huge amounts of cash in my wallet or writing freaking checks everywhere.
Spending money one doesn't have is a recipe for disaster. That's not how most of the credit industry works. Far more money is used for secured loans (auto, house, business, etc) than unsecured loans (credit cards).
Heck, even the checking system would fall apart without credit information, because banks now rely on credit data to even allow you to write checks (which, frankly, are a short term unsecured loan).
In addition to the other excellent replies giving examples (various licensing), there are other entire industries that have to do the same.
You're an electrician? Ok. Well, you better have a copy of each revision of the NEC for the past 20 years. Because different municipalities follow different codes. I don't know of any that are further back than 1996, but I'm sure there are some. And while, in theory, holding to the 2002 NEC will keep you backwards compliant I'm sure there are subtle exceptions to that.
Want to buy the NEC? Sure... the full code book is available for about $100 from the organization. There are mini-books available from other sources for about $50. And if you don't have it you'll eventually violate it and get caught, which is going to be really expensive.
All the government has to do is prove that the cost to assemble the database is in the $800/year range. Which really isn't hard to do. That cost has to be passed on to someone, and it makes sense to pass it on to the companies that want to engage in that market. You don't have to buy it. But a single violation will change the economics of that real fast.
Congrats! You've single handedly destroyed the US economy!
What do you think Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion make their money from? Primarily selling credit data about you to other companies. Yes, it's personally identifiable because otherwise it would be useless. And while this isn't their sole source of income, it is the majority of it.
So how did your proposed law destroy the economy? Simple. Nobody can get credit now. We've been catapulted back to the 1940s with respect to lending. How on earth is a bank or other institution supposed to know if you're a good credit risk if they can't get personally identifiable information about you? Without that information the entire market will collapse. I damn well won't lend money to someone that I can't get information about. What money is lent will be at huge interest rates because the insecurity is so high.
Quibble with the system if you will, but it's a lot more effective than just about any other country's, and has lead directly to the economic prosperity enjoyed by the US today.
Slashdot Mirror
It's unlimited bandwidth, but you still pay by the minute. It just means you don't have to pay by the minute AND by the byte.
I don't know anything about the pricing plans, really, since I refuse to get a cell phone, but it seems that 300 minutes for $40 is seriously on the low side. That's only 5 hours a month of connection time - and, yes, downloading data counts as connection time.
Disclaimer - my wife works for Sprint (FON, not PCS). It makes telemarketers asking us to switch LD companies fun though ("Can you beat free? No?").
No, no, no...
"Technicalese" is a misnomer. Documents that are for consumption by the average user do not use the same jargon and poor sentence structure as documents meant for a sysadmin or programmer. Yes, there are tons of instances where this isn't true - and the docs suck. This is why programmers should not write docs and you should hire tech writers to do so (yes, I say this as a programmer).
Medical materials certainly do have "medicalese", but they also have a plain text section that is much easier to read. The prescription drug industry discovered this was necessary after people started suing them for being unable to determine what the side effects were, what the drug interactions were, etc.
Legal documents usually have no such section. It's very much a case of the lawyers building a wall around their own industry to keep the common person out. Sooner or later some of these absurd EULAs are going to be challenged and struck down for not being understandable by the average reader. Equally important, it's absurd to expect someone to read and understand a 3500 word document just to buy an airline ticket.
Come on NineNine... you're smarter than that.
First off, this "alpha" is 6 months old now... a helluva lot of coding and optimization can happen in 6 months. And the game isn't due out for another year still. By that time a PC that can run it will be extremely reasonable.
Besides, a $2k PC isn't required. I could build a PC that could handle it for under $1000 (no monitor). Most of that cost is in the video card, because the video card is now considerably more complex than the CPU. But an ATI Radeon 9700 will be selling for at or under $100 by the time this comes out - which cuts 20-30% of the price right there.
The PS2 can't handle a game of the graphical complexity that Doom3 will be. D3 is written for graphics chips that are two generations beyond what the PS2 is. Try doing dynamic lighting, bump mapping, curved surfaces, and high poly counts on a PS2... you can't. It's not made to handle it. Oh... and then do that at 1024x768 with 4x anti-aliasing and ansiotropic filtering... no, you don't need that kind of thing on the PS2 because the resolution is so damn poor (somewhat less than 640x480 and interlaced at that). And you're wondering why it's hardware intensive? WC3 is pretty, but it's not designed to push the limits of the hardware - Doom3 is.
Finally, remember that id software is only partially a game company nowadays. I suspect they make a rather sizeable portion of their profit from licensing - $1M + royalties for the latest and greatest engine and support. Doom3 may not be everyone's FPS cup of tea, but it's likely that one of the games based off the engine will do exceptionally well, as Half-Life did with Q1, CS with Q2, and RtCW with Q3.
If you actually wanted to capitalize on it in the stock market, maybe you should've been calling your broker at 3:59 pm EST instead of posting on /.
IMO, everything. Not releasing 3rd party IP is fine and dandy - doing anything else would broaden the scope of the ruling absurdly and ensure it got struck down by a higher court.
Allowing MS to skate out of releasing information for "security" reasons is, frankly, crap. It's promoting the idea of security through obscurity, and it lets MS classify pretty much anything they want as security. Sure, they'll have to give out bits and pieces and make noise like they're actually following the consent decree. But just like all the prior decrees they'll quickly ignore the spirit of the law and gut it. You can be assured that all the real important parts of the interoperability puzzle will fall into the "security" domain and thus remain closed off.
Well, the flipside is that the comments shouldn't have been publicly accessible prior to 4:30 pm EST.
Someone at the Judicial system just screwed up...
A quick glance at the State Settlement and Final Judgement makes it appear that CKK has accepted the proposed settlement between the Federal government, the 9 states, and MS.
IANAL, and I only scanned the top few pages for information. If I'm wrong, someone please correct me.
If you look at Satellite pricing vs. Cable pricing (I live in Seattle), it's about the same for the same content
Not for everyone... I may finally be able to get satellite since removing a bunch of trees. If so we can save $30/mo for the same service. Currently we have digital cable w/ HBO (and our cable company lumps Cinemax in with HBO). To move to DirecTV with local stations and HBO (screw Cinemax) it's a $30 savings. And I get more "regular" channels. And I can either get a DirecTiVo or a DirecTV receiver that I can plug my TiVo serial cable into, so now I don't fail to change channels ever again and wind up recording the wrong damn thing.
The right solution is to allow Dish and DirectTv to merge with restrictions and to force local Cable competition
That won't ever happen - local cable competition has never existed outside a few very small markets, and it's starting to disappear in even those. Given that, the right solution is to prevent the merger. Competition is the consumer's friend.
As for HD over satellite - it'll happen eventually because if cable companies start offering it widely then the satellite vendors will have to to stay competitive. It may mean launching new birds, acquiring more transponders somehow, or even changing the encoding on the stream, but they'll do it.
Heh, you live near my sister then - she lives in Owensburro. I don't know the details of how her reception is, but they seem pleased with it. She wasn't happy that she would be unable to get the locals via sat, but they found some resolution... otherwise I'd still be hearing about it (since I suggested they look at DirecTV and TiVo).
The deal you're going to get via the telco seems pretty good... I'm surprised they're even bothering with the current regulations on the book though. Bowling Green/Owensburo may have enough people to justify it though.
Back on topic, though - the problem is that if you look at the merger plans the idea wasn't to just eliminate duplication. There were plans to sell off a large percentage of the bandwidth, partially to reap profits, partially to head off anti-trust issues ("see, someone else can broadcast now!").
The core issue, though, is that the merger would have drastically reduced competition. When there are 3 or more companies competing against one another there's usually advantages to the consumer - especially in price and service. When there's only two the competition often becomes a mutual oligopoly, with the companies agreeing (tacitly or otherwise) on pricing structures, service levels, and so forth. Do you really think that the satellite pricing would be as low as it is if Dish and DirecTV weren't competing against one another and the cable companies? Do you think that the hardware would be "free"?
You know, I'm continuously amazed by the number of brain dead comments like this that I see.
With Echostar and Hughes merged they wouldn't have competed against the cable companies. They would've formed a 2 party oligopoly. Satellite pricing has been pretty constant in the past 5 years, while cable prices have risen dramatically in most markets. Eliminate one third of the competition, however, and you want to bet that satellite pricing won't go through the roof like cable has? And it has even less regulation than cable has! Come on people, THINK.
All the kvetching about locals is crap. The big markets/cities have locals available over satellite. Rural locations don't, but I seriously question that the merged company would've spent the tremendous amount of bandwidth needed to rectify that situation for the very minor gains it would've resulted in. Anyway, the regulations are that if you can receive a good over-the-air signal then you cannot get the national broadcasts - this happened to my sister. They still love their DirecTV though. The only real downside is that they can't DirecTiVo the local channels since they come in via antenna. They survive.
Frankly, I have no idea what your issue with Gamespy is. Of course, I have the real thing, not the crappy Gamespy Arcade. And I have a registered version from back in the days when it was known as QuakeSpy.
As far as Peter Molyneux - I didn't care for B&W either, nor did my wife, but you're on crack if you don't think it succeeded. It sold a couple million copies and has a considerable fan base. I'm not in that fan base. Neither are you. Doesn't mean it wasn't successful.
And as for your later allegation that sales figures are meaningless - whatever. Windows is the most popular OS, and Linux has only a fraction of its market share. If you don't want to acknowledge that then you're living in an alternate universe. And I say this as someone who likes Linux and develops for Unix. Doesn't mean I'm blind to market realities.
If you go back and read some of the first Doom3 articles from E3, and if you watch the video from the same, you'll know that Doom3 is going to deliver exactly what you're asking for.
The still shots of D3 really don't do justice to it (but I rarely feel that still shots do). It's the motion video that captures just how amazing the game could be. Who knows if it will live up to the potential, but if it doesn't then another game using the engine will.
So basically it's through a controller card
No... controller cards aren't integrated into the BIOS. These are. That's all the difference in the world.
the main reason SATA interests me at all (currently) is the increased airflow from getting rid of all those ribbon cables
Same... it's one of the technologies I've been holding out for (since I'm holding out for the NV30 anyway, holding out for other stuff right now doesn't hurt). But even if the Seagate SATA drives hit the market, there are no SATA CD-RW/DVDs/etc - so it doesn't buy all that much. I may look back into rounded PATA cables, or look at folding my own (doable without cutting).
In a year or so SATA should be able to completely replace PATA for everything. The motherboards with SATA integrated into the chipset will be out in early 2003, which is when it'll really take off. But really there's no reason to not trust one of the current motherboards with SATA support.
Your questions are irrelevant since hybrid vehicles won't increase energy demand based on driving them. I suspect manufacturing energy costs will go up, but I don't know by how much.
I suspect the question you want to know is - how much of our oil supply is imported from the Middle East?
Roughly 40%.
Cut fuel consumption by cars by 50% and you've drastically reduced how much oil has to be imported from the Middle East (not eliminated - oil is used for far more than just gasoline).
but where are the SATA motherboards?
Uh... have you looked at any of the new motherboards? Most KT400 and Intel 845PE/GE motherboards have SATA support.
The support is, however, provided by a secondary chip on the motherboard and is not integrated into the South bridge or whatever yet. So you're constrained by the 133 MB/s of the PCI bus. Since no drive approaches even 66 MB/s sustained transfer yet, it's really not an issue though.
Intel made a huge sacrifice in IPC for clock-speed
Yes, and Intel is having problems with that now. The P4M (Mobile) has a lower clock speed and higher IPC. The Itanium even more so. And AMD's strategy of using processor rating has been remarkably successful - what's the actual clock speed of an AMD Athlon XP 2800? What about the forthcoming Barton core Athlon 3000? Only the die hard enthusiasts remember. Everyone else just assumes 2.8 GHz and 3.0 GHz respectively - which is wrong.
In city driving? I don't think so. My wife has a 2002 Camry 4 cylinder and it doesn't get anywhere close to that city driving.
Highway driving is a horse of a different color. I had a 1996 Nissan Altima that got something like 45 mpg highway driving. Closer to 25 in the city. My current Nissan Maxima (6 cylinder) gets over 30 mpg highway driving, but only 20 in stop and go.
Yes it is that good. The average family sedan gets only about 23 mpg. Less if it's a 6 cylinder. And that's in city driving.
The average family sedan converted to hybrid would double that figure.
Diesel is dead in the US. It's only used for 18-wheelers and other large vehicles, with a few automobiles thrown in. The emissions are too high to be used in regular automobiles en masse, and truckers are now fighting against the emissions being applied to them as well. Note that the emissions from diesel are different from those using regular gas, but they're still present and in some ways worse (particularly sulphur compounds).
Ok, ignoring that the 100,000 mile figure is way too low, your MPG is way, way too high.
Take your average SUV - it gets a wonderful 15 mpg. Convert to hybrid, get the mpg up to, oh say, 40 - which is quite attainable.
Cost savings over 100,000 miles? $6250.
That's going to pay for a lot of repairs.
Very few cars are getting anywhere close to 30 mpg nowadays - certainly not the family sedans that are most popular (Honda Accord, Toyota Camry, Ford Taurus). They're generally in the low 20s for city driving. And since EPA mpg doesn't reflect real life mpg, they actually wind up getting in the very low 20s.
The wonderful part about hybrids is they actually get better mpg in stop and go traffic than in highway driving - and most Americans now spend more time (and gas) in stop-n-go traffic than they do cruising at 70 mph down the freeway.
Because the compilers generate code that is considerably faster than gcc.
We have gcc compiled here... but it takes twice as long to compile our code as it takes xlC, and the resultant code core dumps as soon as something actually happens. We haven't had time to trace the issue down yet, but we still hope to move to gcc because of issues we have with IBM's xlC and dbx (as in - dbx usually doesn't work).
I don't know if credit companies sell the lists to other companies. I think they do and that is improper too, in my view.
:)
They can and do now. Thanks to a new federal law that explicitly allows them to unless you opt-out. You should've gotten a letter from every financial institution you do business with about this about a year and a half ago - the new law went into effect July 1, 2001. Most people probably just threw the opt-out forms in the trash. Oops. I filled out each and every one and sent it back in.
I think you should be able to prevent them
You can - when they call you ask to be put on their "Do not solicit" list.
Unfortunately it only helps a little... that DNS/DNC/DNM (solicit/call/mail - often separate lists, but solicit covers both call and mail) is for that telemarketer only. The institution that gave them your number will probably never hear about it, so unless you call them and somehow reach the right number to be put on their list it won't do too much good.
And, like you, I never buy from telemarketers or spammers. I did, however, get Citibank to stop telemarketing me. I signed up for a couple programs that had hefty fees - like $40-50 (the bank gets a $10 kickback on these, so it's very much in their interest to have these "benefit" programs). I then called back and cancelled them after they showed up on my bill. After the second time they discovered it cost wayyyyy too much to market to me and stopped.
What I really love is when phone companies call my wife to try and get her to change long distance companies. She works for one and we get free long distance because of it. It's a real hard sell at that point
While I'm not the person you were replying to, I suspect he meant without permission
Ok, that I'll buy. But it's a very important distinction and completely changes the argument.
I'm all for that too. Opt-in should be default. I don't forsee it happening nationwide though because of the clout of the various businesses that would be affected. Sigh.
You've never bought a house, have you? If mortgages weren't common place then very few people would be able to do so. Cars are in much the same category (and yes, I have family members that can and do buy their cars with cash).
You have a really simplistic view if you think credit is merely "spending money that one does not have". Credit is often a means of convienence - that's what my credit cards are. I've never once not paid the bill in full. But credit cards give me an extra 30-60 days of float and let me do things like buy goods online or buy from stores without having to deal with huge amounts of cash in my wallet or writing freaking checks everywhere.
Spending money one doesn't have is a recipe for disaster. That's not how most of the credit industry works. Far more money is used for secured loans (auto, house, business, etc) than unsecured loans (credit cards).
Heck, even the checking system would fall apart without credit information, because banks now rely on credit data to even allow you to write checks (which, frankly, are a short term unsecured loan).
In addition to the other excellent replies giving examples (various licensing), there are other entire industries that have to do the same.
You're an electrician? Ok. Well, you better have a copy of each revision of the NEC for the past 20 years. Because different municipalities follow different codes. I don't know of any that are further back than 1996, but I'm sure there are some. And while, in theory, holding to the 2002 NEC will keep you backwards compliant I'm sure there are subtle exceptions to that.
Want to buy the NEC? Sure... the full code book is available for about $100 from the organization. There are mini-books available from other sources for about $50. And if you don't have it you'll eventually violate it and get caught, which is going to be really expensive.
All the government has to do is prove that the cost to assemble the database is in the $800/year range. Which really isn't hard to do. That cost has to be passed on to someone, and it makes sense to pass it on to the companies that want to engage in that market. You don't have to buy it. But a single violation will change the economics of that real fast.
Congrats! You've single handedly destroyed the US economy!
What do you think Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion make their money from? Primarily selling credit data about you to other companies. Yes, it's personally identifiable because otherwise it would be useless. And while this isn't their sole source of income, it is the majority of it.
So how did your proposed law destroy the economy? Simple. Nobody can get credit now. We've been catapulted back to the 1940s with respect to lending. How on earth is a bank or other institution supposed to know if you're a good credit risk if they can't get personally identifiable information about you? Without that information the entire market will collapse. I damn well won't lend money to someone that I can't get information about. What money is lent will be at huge interest rates because the insecurity is so high.
Quibble with the system if you will, but it's a lot more effective than just about any other country's, and has lead directly to the economic prosperity enjoyed by the US today.
Baen books got /.'d by a link in a signature before.
The GA No Call site appears to be run on an XT with a 2400 bps modem. It's down every time I try to get to it.