Exactly, but on the other hand there are airports. When you buy a plane ticket you're paying an airline, not an airport. So you as a traveller are never reimbursing the airport for your usage of their power.
Have you ever actually seen a plane ticket? Check the bits of the fare calculation section that start with 'X'. Of course you pay for the airport, and often it's a lot. At some European airports you may pay close to $100 for the privilege of walking down their corridors and plugging shit into their juicy 230-volt outlets.
How do you think airports are funded, by charitable donations? They get landing fees from the airline, passenger fees from you, and rent from the vendors who want you sitting at their tables drinking their coffee - even if they have to spend an extra cent on power to seal the deal.
But realize, just because you're using $.12 of electricity in return for a $4.39 cup of java doesn't make it "ok". Only the fact that Starbucks permits it makes it ok.
No, the fact that it's reasonable behavior (remember common sense? Or was that before your time?) makes it okay. Just like going into the bathroom and washing a stain out of your shirt using their *gasp* water, or holding the door open a few seconds longer to help someone with crutches enter, even though that wastes the store's *gasp* heat.
Interestingly (perhaps), here (Kuala Lumpur) it's the other way around - Starbucks offers free wifi, while the other chains are affiliated with pay-for-service wifi vendors.
The Starbuckses are definitely mobbed with laptop users, so if that was the demographic they were after, they've got it.
Given the cost and crappiness of T-Mobile's service, I don't understand why it is that so many Starbücks in the US are full of laptoppers. I would have thought they'd all be at The Community Beanery down the street where the wifi is free. Maybe it's the cigarette smoke.
Maybe you've missed the context, which was a claim that only native English speakers put apostrophes before plurals in English words. I was explaining why some non-native speakers might in fact have that tendency.
I disagree with your perspective. The misuse of apostrophes (in particular, the "oh shit, there is an 's' approaching, best put in an apostrophe to warn the reader") to be a crime almost exclusively committed by native English speakers.
In Dutch, if you are writing a word that ends with a vowel and takes an 's' in the plural (such as many imported foreign words), then you are required to use an apostrophe. For example, "Foto's" is the plural of "Foto".
So I guess now we have the question if what is really meant by misuse.
Re:Sorry to be a downer, but it's important.
on
Indoor Tropical Island
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Hmmm.. Somehow I don't think you will be hearing / reading "fun little tsunami references" in the affected area for some time.
Bah. I live in one of the tsunami-hit countries, I know missing people, I still cry when I read some of the stories (there, now I've gone and done it, admitted on Slashdot that I cried), but I've also heard delicate little jokes here and there and I don't see that as a cause to pick up the torches and pitchforks. Humor is definitely one of the ways people deal with tragedy, and I'd say it's one of the more healthy ways.
Without a doubt there is the potential for comments that are in genuinely poor taste, but IMHO the aforementioned quip is far too trivial to be taking offense at - especially if you're doing it from the comfort of your computer room thousands of kilometres away.
My house is NEVER above 20C and is usually between 15C and 20C. In the summer, I set the air conditioning to 20C/68F. In the winter, that's also where the furnace is set during the day. At night, we drop it down to about 15C/60F (though not with the air conditioning as that would get really expensive).
Wow, I think I would die within 15 minutes of entering your house. It gets up into the 30s almost every day here and I never use the AC.
Good thing we've got such a big planet with all these options...
What's funny is that I spent 15 minutes last night in a T-Shirt in my back yard, untangling the dogs' leashes and it was -10C. I was perfectly comfortable. I wouldn't have wanted to spend hours like that, but it was OK. I actually like the -5C that it hangs around for most of the winter here. I only really want/need it warmer a couple of days every few weeks because it helps clean off the sidewalks and streets when it's above freezing.
Right now, it's -12C with a wind chill of -17C and I didn't (along with a lot of other people) bother to fasten my overcoat this morning when walking the 3 blocks from the parking lot to get indoors.
Right now it's 23C and I am bundled up in a sweater because with the breeze coming through the window it's too cool to be comfortable in a T-shirt. I was outside a couple hours ago and many people were wearing jackets.
Fortunately I can count on it reaching a comfy 30 again tomorrow so I just have to make it through the night.
It was about a 15-minute walk to the Metro stop from my apartment (Adams Morgan) but I rode a bike and within a couple weeks I had the timing down so I could leave home, get to the stop 3 minutes later, go down the escalator, and walk straight onto a train. My office was right at the Metro station on the other side.
The bus sucks, you'll get no argument from me there.
I used this site a while back when researching, and ended up using 101 6868 prefix. No monthly fee, and only 7.9c minute to the UK.
Ironically, my family can call me from the UK for less than 4c a minute. I have absolutely no idea why.
Probably because they are more astute shoppers (though that doesn't address the curious use of "ironically"). $0.08/minute to the UK was good about 5 years ago but now it is a crap price. $0.02 is the baseline at the moment.
Last time I went to the UK I took my Vonage box with me, plugged it into the ADSL there and used it as normal.
You didn't say how many different people you wanted to call overseas, but if it's just 1 number you could get a Vonage box and send it to them.
Then you'd just be calling a local number, so you'd only have to pay the flat rate each month.
If you want to get calls from people in the UK, you can get a London number from Vonage. It's an extra US$5/month. That way you don't have to send boxes to every Graham, Nigel, and Reginald.
The best way to get cheap international rates is with a phone card. Try this place, I've had good experience with them. The rates are usually way cheaper than what any VOIP provider offers.
How about broadvoice.com? $25/month for unlimited calls to Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, San Marino, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Kingdom, United States, and, for when you've really been bad, Vatican City.
if you have to dial a number to get out, chances are your phone number is not the exact one showing up. But the number is probably similar and after a while people figure it out.
Any calling card I've used in the USA recently, the correct number has shown up on the far end caller ID.
When an internatinal call lands in India, the party which brings the call is supposed to pay a certain amount (10 cents per minute) to the terminating network. But Reliance showed the international traffic as local/national traffic and got away without paying any charges. Recently, they were asked to cough up US$ 50m as fine.
What is the purpose of these different rates? It's not as if it costs more money to terminate an international call than a domestic one. Sounds like protectionist nonsense (i.e., corruption) to me.
Yes, and bicycles make it so convenient to shop for, say, a family of four, or a medium-sized appliance! I think you have found the answer! They are also excellent for the elderly (SOME of whom are capable of driving properly, like my grandfather) and the infirm. Yes sir, you really are on to something there!
Nobody is arguing that bicycles are the perfect solution to every problem. How's that car working out for you when you're blind? Or 15 years old? Sheesh.
Meanwhile, my grandfather rode his bike into his 80s, doing all his shopping, errands, etc. In fact, in the Netherlands where he lived that's quite common. People just stay in better shape. As an added bonus, they get more fulfulling senior years, as they can still move around and do stuff.
Anyway, you can get a modded bike that works well for major grocery shopping. When you buy the appliance, pay $25 for home delivery. It's cheaper than a car.
Cheaper yes, more convenient no. When I lived in SF I could drive for 5-10 minutes to work, spend 0-5 minutes finding parking within a couple blocks, and be done. Taking public transport to work required two buses and the muni train and took 30 to 60 minutes.
Sounds like an extreme case to me. You had a two-transfer ride and you worked somewhere with easy street parking. Either one of those would be unusual, but putting them both together takes your case out of the realm of useful example.
P.S. Get a bike. Within the city, it's faster than the bus or driving.
Let's not even get into stuff like going shopping for a family, or making a trip to the ER without paying a grand or more for an ambulance ride.
Good point, because as we all know, people who don't own cars aren't allowed to take taxis.
Mind you, SF has one of the best public transportation systems in the US, so basically I am calling bullshit.
It has one of the best (probably the best) bus systems, but that is not the same as having one of the best public transportation systems.
A good public transportation system, in a city where surface streets are used by private vehicles, can only be implemented at a different Z-axis position. That means underground (New York) or elevated (Chicago).
You're thinking "cheaper" because your fare might be only a dollar or two. You're ignoring the substantial infrastructure costs associated with building out a public transit system.
And you, in turn, are ignoring the substantial costs associated with facilitating car use (as a margin over the costs if roads were just used for commercial vehicles and public transportation).
Increased land scarcity (as up to 1/4 of available land is used to accommodate cars), law enforcement and emergency response costs, pollution, stress, increased health insurance costs (since so many healthcare expenses are a result of cars), government expenses for fuel policy up to and includng $200 billion wars in Iraq, and so on and so forth.
It'd be interesting to see how much a new transit system (like in Dallas or Austin) would be relative to the cost of giving each rider a new (or used) car. Project the cost out by 10 years, and the car will most likely be cheaper (just from the taxes from gas purchases).
Make sure to take into account the lost productivity for all road users due to the additional congestion created by putting all these cars on the road.
Using public transport in my area (DC Metro/Maryland/Virginia) means moving slowly for about 2 hours for any given trip.
I used to commute from DC to the burbs in Maryland every day. It took me 15 minutes on Metro (20 minutes door-to-door), like clockwork.
My neighbor worked in the same building, and drove. She almost never made it in less than 30 minutes, often closer to 45.
She spent a whole lot more money, got stressed out by the traffic (boy did she get stressed out), got less exercise, and was in greater danger of personal injury. An all-around losing bet if you ask me.
Is every public transportation route and system the bee's knees? Absolutely not. But to say that it's categorically inferior is stupid. I readily accept that there are commutes much more easily accomplished by car. I wouldn't personally choose to live in any such place, but I know they exist.
Well, the thing about the average Chinese tourist is they can already read most of the signs at a survival level because a huge chunk of the Japanese writing system was stolen from China.
This is much more true the other way around. Japanese visitors to China can puzzle their way around by looking for familiar characters, but Japanese has other alphabets that have no relation to Chinese.
Put another way (and quite roughly), Chinese writing is a subset of Japanese writing.
If they can manage to destroy the entire US eastern seaboard, terrorists of pretty much any stripe will probably accept any other damage as 'aceptable losses'.
Poppycock. This topic hits close to home for me, because I myself happen to be a major international terrorist. You may remember me from such atrocities as the Chicago Fire, Mount Saint Helens, and Sinbad's movie career.
The simple fact is, at the end of the day we're slaves to ratings just like everybody else. I recently had to shelve several plans after they focus-grouped poorly, including infecting the world's dolphin population with AIDS to depress imperialist American schoolchildren, and mixing a healthy dose of Nair into the global shampoo supply stream.
That last one cost me a lot of money - my operatives had already commandeered a Vidal Sassoon supertanker in the Far East when I got the word from Saatchi & Saatchi that the operation was a lead balloon with hairline-conscious 18-35s in Jeddah's bellwether south side.
Now that everyones attention is on natural disasters rather than terrorism, let us take this opportunity to combine them....
Could a terrorist set off a bomb large enough to trigger the slide? Seems like this would be an easier target and do more damage than any nuke a typical terrorist could make.
But the main victims would be countries like Senegal and Brazil that have a greater proportion of coastline to total area, and/or poorer disaster response capabilities, as compared to the USA. It's hard to see how that will advance the agenda of any of the terrorists we know about right now.
No it doesn't. Dictionaries are not an authority. Someone putting their pet foreign word into their dictionary doesn't make it an English word. Dictionaries are only supposed to report language usage, they don't define it.
Re-read what you wrote. Dictionaries report language usage (nobody has claimed that the dictionary put the word into the language; we've only cited its presence there as evidence). If all the dictionaries report that a word is being used in the language, then either there is a conspiracy among dictionary editors, or the word is being used in the language.
Well if there's a foreign word that next to no-one has heard of, and no-one uses, does it become an English word just because the occasional person uses it in an English sentence?
I don't know, but that's not relevant to the case of "zeitgeist" which is a pretty common word.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever actually seen a plane ticket? Check the bits of the fare calculation section that start with 'X'. Of course you pay for the airport, and often it's a lot. At some European airports you may pay close to $100 for the privilege of walking down their corridors and plugging shit into their juicy 230-volt outlets.
How do you think airports are funded, by charitable donations? They get landing fees from the airline, passenger fees from you, and rent from the vendors who want you sitting at their tables drinking their coffee - even if they have to spend an extra cent on power to seal the deal.
No, the fact that it's reasonable behavior (remember common sense? Or was that before your time?) makes it okay. Just like going into the bathroom and washing a stain out of your shirt using their *gasp* water, or holding the door open a few seconds longer to help someone with crutches enter, even though that wastes the store's *gasp* heat.
Interestingly (perhaps), here (Kuala Lumpur) it's the other way around - Starbucks offers free wifi, while the other chains are affiliated with pay-for-service wifi vendors.
The Starbuckses are definitely mobbed with laptop users, so if that was the demographic they were after, they've got it.
Given the cost and crappiness of T-Mobile's service, I don't understand why it is that so many Starbücks in the US are full of laptoppers. I would have thought they'd all be at The Community Beanery down the street where the wifi is free. Maybe it's the cigarette smoke.
Maybe you've missed the context, which was a claim that only native English speakers put apostrophes before plurals in English words. I was explaining why some non-native speakers might in fact have that tendency.
In Dutch, if you are writing a word that ends with a vowel and takes an 's' in the plural (such as many imported foreign words), then you are required to use an apostrophe. For example, "Foto's" is the plural of "Foto".
So I guess now we have the question if what is really meant by misuse.
Bah. I live in one of the tsunami-hit countries, I know missing people, I still cry when I read some of the stories (there, now I've gone and done it, admitted on Slashdot that I cried), but I've also heard delicate little jokes here and there and I don't see that as a cause to pick up the torches and pitchforks. Humor is definitely one of the ways people deal with tragedy, and I'd say it's one of the more healthy ways.
Without a doubt there is the potential for comments that are in genuinely poor taste, but IMHO the aforementioned quip is far too trivial to be taking offense at - especially if you're doing it from the comfort of your computer room thousands of kilometres away.
Wow, I think I would die within 15 minutes of entering your house. It gets up into the 30s almost every day here and I never use the AC.
Good thing we've got such a big planet with all these options...
Right now it's 23C and I am bundled up in a sweater because with the breeze coming through the window it's too cool to be comfortable in a T-shirt. I was outside a couple hours ago and many people were wearing jackets.
Fortunately I can count on it reaching a comfy 30 again tomorrow so I just have to make it through the night.
It was about a 15-minute walk to the Metro stop from my apartment (Adams Morgan) but I rode a bike and within a couple weeks I had the timing down so I could leave home, get to the stop 3 minutes later, go down the escalator, and walk straight onto a train. My office was right at the Metro station on the other side.
The bus sucks, you'll get no argument from me there.
Probably because they are more astute shoppers (though that doesn't address the curious use of "ironically"). $0.08/minute to the UK was good about 5 years ago but now it is a crap price. $0.02 is the baseline at the moment.
If you want to get calls from people in the UK, you can get a London number from Vonage. It's an extra US$5/month. That way you don't have to send boxes to every Graham, Nigel, and Reginald.
How about broadvoice.com? $25/month for unlimited calls to Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, San Marino, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Kingdom, United States, and, for when you've really been bad, Vatican City.
+1 Funny
(sorry, already posted to the thread)
Any calling card I've used in the USA recently, the correct number has shown up on the far end caller ID.
What is the purpose of these different rates? It's not as if it costs more money to terminate an international call than a domestic one. Sounds like protectionist nonsense (i.e., corruption) to me.
Nobody is arguing that bicycles are the perfect solution to every problem. How's that car working out for you when you're blind? Or 15 years old? Sheesh.
Meanwhile, my grandfather rode his bike into his 80s, doing all his shopping, errands, etc. In fact, in the Netherlands where he lived that's quite common. People just stay in better shape. As an added bonus, they get more fulfulling senior years, as they can still move around and do stuff.
Anyway, you can get a modded bike that works well for major grocery shopping. When you buy the appliance, pay $25 for home delivery. It's cheaper than a car.
Yeah, they've been in DC for years. I don't get the news angle either. But it has sparked a lively discussion.
Sounds like an extreme case to me. You had a two-transfer ride and you worked somewhere with easy street parking. Either one of those would be unusual, but putting them both together takes your case out of the realm of useful example.
P.S. Get a bike. Within the city, it's faster than the bus or driving.
Good point, because as we all know, people who don't own cars aren't allowed to take taxis.
It has one of the best (probably the best) bus systems, but that is not the same as having one of the best public transportation systems.
A good public transportation system, in a city where surface streets are used by private vehicles, can only be implemented at a different Z-axis position. That means underground (New York) or elevated (Chicago).
And you, in turn, are ignoring the substantial costs associated with facilitating car use (as a margin over the costs if roads were just used for commercial vehicles and public transportation).
Increased land scarcity (as up to 1/4 of available land is used to accommodate cars), law enforcement and emergency response costs, pollution, stress, increased health insurance costs (since so many healthcare expenses are a result of cars), government expenses for fuel policy up to and includng $200 billion wars in Iraq, and so on and so forth.
Make sure to take into account the lost productivity for all road users due to the additional congestion created by putting all these cars on the road.
I used to commute from DC to the burbs in Maryland every day. It took me 15 minutes on Metro (20 minutes door-to-door), like clockwork.
My neighbor worked in the same building, and drove. She almost never made it in less than 30 minutes, often closer to 45.
She spent a whole lot more money, got stressed out by the traffic (boy did she get stressed out), got less exercise, and was in greater danger of personal injury. An all-around losing bet if you ask me.
Is every public transportation route and system the bee's knees? Absolutely not. But to say that it's categorically inferior is stupid. I readily accept that there are commutes much more easily accomplished by car. I wouldn't personally choose to live in any such place, but I know they exist.
That's why I said "putting it roughly"; I was trying to help people understand the basic reason why going one direction is easier than the other.
Obviously Chinese has had centuries to develop since the Japanese stole our alphabet.
Doesn't usually work that way. Japanese shoppers sometimes travel to the US to save on Japanese electronics.
In most cases, the only reason to buy in Japan is because it isn't available elsewhere yet.
This is much more true the other way around. Japanese visitors to China can puzzle their way around by looking for familiar characters, but Japanese has other alphabets that have no relation to Chinese.
Put another way (and quite roughly), Chinese writing is a subset of Japanese writing.
Poppycock. This topic hits close to home for me, because I myself happen to be a major international terrorist. You may remember me from such atrocities as the Chicago Fire, Mount Saint Helens, and Sinbad's movie career.
The simple fact is, at the end of the day we're slaves to ratings just like everybody else. I recently had to shelve several plans after they focus-grouped poorly, including infecting the world's dolphin population with AIDS to depress imperialist American schoolchildren, and mixing a healthy dose of Nair into the global shampoo supply stream.
That last one cost me a lot of money - my operatives had already commandeered a Vidal Sassoon supertanker in the Far East when I got the word from Saatchi & Saatchi that the operation was a lead balloon with hairline-conscious 18-35s in Jeddah's bellwether south side.
But the main victims would be countries like Senegal and Brazil that have a greater proportion of coastline to total area, and/or poorer disaster response capabilities, as compared to the USA. It's hard to see how that will advance the agenda of any of the terrorists we know about right now.
Re-read what you wrote. Dictionaries report language usage (nobody has claimed that the dictionary put the word into the language; we've only cited its presence there as evidence). If all the dictionaries report that a word is being used in the language, then either there is a conspiracy among dictionary editors, or the word is being used in the language.
I don't know, but that's not relevant to the case of "zeitgeist" which is a pretty common word.