You can tell them that... but they're not going to buy it. First off, ISPs operate under legally-established safe harbor provisions, which require them to do certain things. If you haven't also done those things, then you're not operating under the safe harbor provisions, and thus, the rules that apply to you aren't the same as those that apply to the ISPs. It's not simply a matter of not knowing what data goes through your network - there are other things you have to do, which include keeping certain types of records about your users... and TOR by design does not do that.
Second, prosecutors have leeway to choose which cases they will prosecute - so your "you must also prosecute" is simply not true, and the prosecution and judge both know this. So they'll simply ignore your speech, and instruct the jury to do so as well.
Now, whether these things are right is a separate question - but there are definite legal differences between an ISP and you, if you're operating a TOR node.
I would guess that the original poster's question is meant to be more "What backup plan should the average nerd have in case all their electronics are seized or destroyed for some reason" rather than "What backup plan should the average nerd have in case the Tor exit node they operate is taken down".
Keeping off-site copies of important data is a good plan - either backed up at a cloud storage provider, or periodically burned to DVD and put somewhere else. Having some paper records of very important things (e.g., phone numbers and email addresses of close friends and family, if you're like me and generally just let your phone remember those things) could be very useful as well - right after you've either gotten in trouble with the police or been in a major disaster is not a good time to not be able to contact people.
Of course, paper can also get damaged - so a fire- and water-proof safe is good to keep some those important papers in. Or a safe deposit box at a bank. (Ideally, both, with copies in each.)
Of course, all of this is essentially basic disaster planning - having off-site backups and either spare off-site hardware or the means to get it quickly.
It won't help in the case of confiscation, but if you absolutely need to have computer access all the time, you might also want to keep a small netbook, tablet, spare phone, or whatever in that safe or safe deposit box. If you're more worried about confiscation, keep enough cash there to buy one of those if you should need it.
Your ISP has an acceptable use policy that you are required to agree to in order to get service from them, which most likely states that you're not allowed to do anything illegal, and that if you do use their network to do something illegal, you agree that you are wholly responsible for it. It also keeps records, so that it can cooperate with the authorities in tracking down people who are using their network for illegal purposes.
A Tor operator, on the other hand, by design does not know who is using their connection, and thus, cannot enforce that their users must agree to any policy. Further, and again by design, a Tor node does not keep any records that can be used to help authorities track down people using that connection for illegal purposes.
Much of the law operates on the basis of what a 'reasonable person' would understand. A reasonable person would understand that, given their policies and practices, a typical ISP is not attempting to shield people performing illegal activities. On the other hand, a reasonable person who knows what a Tor exit node is and sets one up should understand that there is a high chance that there will be illegal activities being funneled through their node.
So, from a legal point of view, there's a big difference. Now, ethics and morals... those are different things. But honestly, if you're not willing to go to jail to defend the principle that people should be able to anonymously use the Internet, then maybe operating a Tor exit node isn't something you should be doing.
Don't forget, though, that many cell phone carriers offer upgrades at pretty cheap prices, once new phones come out. If you don't feel the need to constantly have the latest phone, replacing a lost phone via upgrade can be a good, cheap way to do it. And also, don't forget to read the fine print on the insurance.
In my own case, early last year, I bought an iPhone 4. At that point, it was the latest model. I lost it about two months ago, and was about to go on a trip, so I checked the places I thought I most likely might have left it, then decided I needed to replace it. I logged into AT&T's web site to see if they had any upgrade offers for me, and found that I could get a 4s for $99 or a 5 for $199. Since the 5 wasn't immediately available then, I got the 4s. I was offered insurance through AT&T, and decided "why not?" and took it.
When I got home and fully looked through the paperwork for the insurance, though, I discovered something interesting. They have a deductible, which is tiered according to what sort of phone you have - and which the sales person hadn't mentioned. iPhones (all models) are in their highest tier, with a deductible of $199. So... if I'd had the insurance on my 4, and I'd used it, I would have paid more than I did for a new phone, and would have most likely gotten a refurbished 4, instead of a new 4s. And, to add insult to injury, I would've been paying the $7 a month premium for about 17 months, for another $102.
Looking at AT&T's rules on upgrade eligibility, it appears that I become eligible for an upgrade 12 months after having one. Depending on your plan, it might be as long as 24 months. However, it appears that it's possible to transfer eligibility from one number to another, if you're paying for multiple phones. Since I have my wife and daughter's phones on my account, if I lost this one now, I could transfer either of their eligibilities and again get a new phone for the same as my deductible would be with their insurance. Give it six months to a year, and Apple will probably have a newer model out, and my upgrade would be even less.
In about sixteen years of owning cell phones, I've lost three. So it looks like for me, I'm better off not bothering with the insurance. I cancelled it.
Oh, and by the way few days later, my phone turned up - it'd been found at a restaurant I frequent (I'd actually gone by and asked if they'd found it before I bought the new one, but apparently they hadn't found it at that point). Looking online, I found that I was able to sell my relatively pristine 4 for $145 easily. So... I actually made money off of losing my phone, and got an upgrade.:-)
I think they've figured that out - they just don't care. The DoD isn't really that big.
Consider: the DoD, by their own claims, has about 3 million employees worldwide.
So far this year, Apple has sold over 120 million iPhones.
Thus, even if the DoD bought an iPhone for every one of their employees, that would only increase Apple's sales figures by 2.5%. Is that worth the expense of creating another phone model, manufacturing it, and then keeping it in manufacture?
Before you answer that, consider this: what percentage of those DoD employees actually work in a position where they're not allowed to bring in a phone with a camera? Of those in such positions, how many of them actually work in a place where that requirement is enforced? From my own experience, only the most secure facilities actually try to keep out cell phone cameras - many facilities that in theory don't allow them in do allow them in practice.
My guess would be that a high estimate would be 20% - which would then have Apple creating another model and manufacturing it for a potential 0.5% increase in sales - but that's assuming that everyone in the DoD who potentially needs such a phone gets one, and that they all get one in the course of one year. If, say, the DoD were to follow a more normal course and buy them over the course of three years or so, that comes an increase of less than 0.2%.
The simple fact is, the market that 'needs' a lack of a camera is tiny.
The problem with this is when the things that are hit include people. Punishing someone after a collision won't put the legs back on someone who had them crushed, or restore mental functioning to someone left with brain damage from it. Since it's not always possible to put things back the way they were, and the potential impact on individuals is so high, it makes sense to attempt to prevent people from driving while impaired.
Oh, and by the way - there are such things as accidents. Collisions do sometimes happen for reasons that the driver could not reasonably expect or prevent - unexpected mechanical failure, a seemingly healthy driver suffering a heart attack or stroke while driving, large animals running into the road, damage to the road itself, even things like cars being struck by lightning while driving, rockslides, and objects falling off of other cars and trucks onto the road (in that last case, the person who secured the object may be at fault - but they're not the one who hit the thing).
Falling into more grey areas are things like black ice or severe rain and wind. These can be anticipated, but avoiding driving entirely when they might be happening is not always possible, since other sorts of emergencies do happen.
Small correction: voters in Colorado approved marijuana for medical use back in 2000, well before the previous election cycle. A friend of mine out there had a roommate at the time with brain cancer, who got approved for medical marijuana to help suppress chemo side effects.
At the time, there was nowhere you could buy marijuana in Colorado, though, so my friend and his roommate had to grow it themselves. He also made sure to keep his roommate's certificate saying that he'd been approved easily accessible, just in case any police spotted the plants in their yard and decided to stop by and ask them about it. Never did happen, though - their yard was already fenced in, and apparently no one was nosy enough to look into it, or cared if they did. His roommate's cancer was terminal, and he died a few years later. (And no, my friend didn't keep growing the weed - he never used it anyway.)
Just as a single word can have multiple meanings, a single phrase can have multiple meanings as well. The Y2K bug that a lot of people (including me!) helped fix, yes, that was real. However, the Y2K bug that some nutcases hyped, where everything that had a clock chip in it would go haywire at 00:00:01 Jan 1, 2000, did not exist.
It's like person A saying "dragons don't exist", and person B replying, "Yes, they do! The komodo dragon is a real animal!" The komodo dragon is a dragon, but it's not the kind of dragon person A is talking about. In the same way, there was a real thing called the Y2K bug, but it's not the same thing that most people are talking about when they say "the Y2K bug was a myth" or "the Y2K bug didn't happen".
And in any case, it should be obvious that the original poster is making a joke. I refer people to TVTropes' "Rule of Funny". (Which only somewhat works here, since the joke wasn't that funny, but the guy was trying.)
Funny, then how AC/DC has released 5 singles since they've gained control over their own catalog - at least three of them after Angus made the comment mentioned above.
Re-fixed that for you. While they may not have had any say before, they certainly do have say since they bought their own catalog back... but they've continued to release singles.
Funny, then, how AC/DC has released 52 singles in the course of their career... the most recent in 2011. You'd think that if they didn't want people to buy single songs, they wouldn't make singles....
Fiction goes alphabetical by author. Within a particular author, arranged by title or series and number in series. Anthologies by name of editor; multi-author series are a separate section, arranged by series title and number in series. Fiction all together is about two bookcases, thanks to a large culling that happened when I had to move after a divorce, so I don't feel a need to separate by genre.
Non-fiction is organized more loosely, but books on the same subject are together. If a single subject starts to occupy more than one shelf, then it's generally time to start subdividing it more finely (e.g., my dozen-odd dinosaur books are a category, but my computer books are divided into programming, security, operating systems, and other finer divisions, since I have about three shelves of a bookcase of "computer books").
My RPGs are arranged by title and edition, except for xD&D, which gets its own section arranged by edition and core/non-core/3rd-party supplement status.
But you don't actually own the book with paper books either - you own a particular copy. If that copy is lost, stolen, destroyed in a fire, ruined in a flood, etc., then the fact that you still hypothetically own it does you no good.
With my ebooks, though, I have a backup copy on my computer at home, another copy on the external hard drive that I back up to, and another in the copy of my personal files that's on my laptop. Not to mention that I can re-download most of them at any time, as long as the places I bought them from stay in business.
Also, ebooks have an enormous practical advantage for book lovers - namely, that keeping an ebook "in print" costs a publisher essentially nothing. I've had quite a few physical books over the years that I've had to go to considerable trouble and expense to replace when something happened to them, because they'd been out of print for decades. Indeed, about half the ebooks I've been buying lately are books that I'd either 'owned' before or had read before, but I hadn't been able to either replace them or get my own copy because physical copies were too expensive ($100, $200, or more for a paperback fiction book). Now, many of them are being re-released as ebooks, either by publishing companies or directly by the authors, and I'm finally able to get them at a reasonable price.
Apparently you don't actually like books that much, given that you say there's only a ridiculously slim chance that there's a book you want that you don't already have and have with you, that you only read one book at a time (and apparently none of those are large hardbacks), you haven't been to a library in decades, and you think that sorting books on a shelf is the same thing as cataloging them (and, for that matter, "sort the fucking books on the shelf" implies that you own few enough books that they'll all fit on a single shelf). Also, your comments seem to indicate that you never need to use books as references for anything.
For those of us who actually like books, though, trust me when I say that many of these things actually are large advantages.
To give a few examples of some reasons that I'd love to have more of my library as ebooks:
I play and GM RPGs. There's a huge number of books involved, which are often big, heavy hardbacks. I run and play some games online, and it's nice to be able to respond when I have a few spare minutes in the day. Just carrying the core books for the two main games I play would literally mean carrying fourteen pounds of books. If you added in the supplemental books that players are using things from, you'd easily double that.
I'm also a writer. As such, it's very nice to have a dictionary and thesaurus with me that don't require a working Internet connection (since sometimes I'm working at bus stops, restaurants, or wherever else I have a few spare minutes to write). Not to mention carrying around my previous stories so I can fact-check myself to ensure consistency (and being able to search for phrases helps greatly there). Granted, I could keep those on the same device I'm doing the writing on, but it's nice to be able to have it open on a second screen.
Lastly, like many heavy readers, I don't read just one book at a time. I usually have half a dozen or more that I'm reading at once. For example, right now I have three books on magic and divination in Ancient Greece that I'm reading as research for part of a story I'm writing; a book on swordfighting, for a martial arts class I'm taking; a romantic comedy novel, a dramatic medieval fantasy novel, and near-future dramatic SF novel (picking which one I choose to read based on what I feel like reading at the time). And that's completely leaving aside the books mentioned above that I'm using as references for things.
Oh, and good for you that you've never suffered from impaired eyesight. Some of us do and have, and very few books are actually available in large print editions. Usually I don't have any problems with my eyes, but when I do, it's been very nice to be able to change the font size up for a few days until they're back to normal.
On the other hand, though, physical books do still have their own advantages - when you're dealing with something where illustrations are important, especially. Many of the martial arts books I've been reading have a lot of illustrations, and they're usually laid out on the assumption that you're viewing facing pages together. Some are in nonstandard formats (e.g., bound on the short side) in order to allow sequences to be laid out in certain ways. If you're looking for something visual in a book, it's much, much faster to be able to riffle through it to search (or if you know approximately where in a book something is, it can be faster to find).
In a perfect world, I'd like to have all my books in both formats, so I can enjoy the advantages of each - but unfortunately, most publishers don't want to do that... or at least, not without charging you for the book twice.
You could look at it that way... but the prejudice that suggested women, blacks, and other demographics were lesser was a major factor in why they were much less likely to be educated and to own land.
People say this a lot, but... the Electoral College has chosen a candidate who didn't win the popular vote only three times in the last two hundred years, and only once in the last hundred years. So, it usually does represent the vote of the people. (And the 2000 election debacle boils down to Florida, and the various shenanigans that happened there. It's still uncertain who really did win Florida in 2000, since the results are within the statistical margin of error... but the decision ultimately came to the Supreme Court, which the Bushes had managed to pack heavily with conservatives, so... yeah.)
That's not to say that it couldn't be improved. I'd personally suggest that instead of "winner take all", the states should allocate their electoral votes according to the election results in their state. That would introduce some rounding errors, but it would also get rid of the whole thing of "key states" in the election.
Yeah, it is different in Florida. State universities charge per semester hour, so the more hours your degree requires, the more you have to pay... and most STEM degrees require more hours than the standard requirement. On the other hand, though, it's not a lot more - usually something like an additional 8 to 10 semester hours over the general requirement of 160, so it's only about 5-10% more total.
Honestly, the big thing that irks me in Florida schools is the "athletic fee". At FSU, at least, all students are required to pay it... in return for which, you're eligible to get 'free' tickets to the university sporting events. However, the number of free student tickets available is considerably less than the number of students, so the only people who reliably get the tickets are frats and sororities, who send people out days in advance to establish places in the line to get tickets, then rotate members to hold their place. Not to mention, of course, that you're still stuck paying the fee even if you have no interest in going to the events.
While we're at it, abandoning the idea that everybody needs a college degree, and having apprenticeship programs for fields where that makes sense. Those also have worked well in Germany.
The thing that strikes me the most here is this: while stranger abductions are the ones that get the attention, children are much more likely to be abused by close relatives or those who have regular access to them -- and a tracking device won't be of much help there.
Same here. Indeed, I've had it happen a couple of times that I press the "Answer" button, get no reaction, and think that maybe I didn't make good contact with the screen, so I move to press it again... and then, as my finger is moving, it picks up, and I now press the "End Call" button, which conveniently goes right across where "Answer" was before.
_I_ dont have problems remembering my web password, but apparently you dont do IT support in any capacity that has you dealing with users on a regular basis. Some of them-- particularly those who dont have to care because of their position-- have that problem.
From my own experience in IT support, those who don't have to care about not being able to remember their email password because of their position also are high enough that they don't set up their own devices - IT does it for them, or their executive assistant (or whoever normally handles their email for them so they don't have to log in and look at it themselves) does. For them, it doesn't matter how complicated the setup is, unless it's something that needs to be redone on a frequent basis.
(Indeed, that's how our IT department people first got their own Blackberries - a few high execs decided to get them, then called our CIO and said, "Have somebody set these up for us." They got handed over to us, and then our manager went back to the CIO to say, "Hey - if we're going to be expected to support these, maybe we should have a few for testing?"
... because my PC is a VM running under Parallels on my Mac, and I see no need to buy an upgrade for something that only runs games and a few specialty programs that don't have Mac versions until and unless I absolutely have to.
If it were a memory leak problem, though, rebooting the router would fix it. It's more likely something physical, since physical components degrade over time. One thing that I'm wondering is what his environment is - humidity and temp where the routers are.
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You can tell them that... but they're not going to buy it. First off, ISPs operate under legally-established safe harbor provisions, which require them to do certain things. If you haven't also done those things, then you're not operating under the safe harbor provisions, and thus, the rules that apply to you aren't the same as those that apply to the ISPs. It's not simply a matter of not knowing what data goes through your network - there are other things you have to do, which include keeping certain types of records about your users... and TOR by design does not do that.
Second, prosecutors have leeway to choose which cases they will prosecute - so your "you must also prosecute" is simply not true, and the prosecution and judge both know this. So they'll simply ignore your speech, and instruct the jury to do so as well.
Now, whether these things are right is a separate question - but there are definite legal differences between an ISP and you, if you're operating a TOR node.
I would guess that the original poster's question is meant to be more "What backup plan should the average nerd have in case all their electronics are seized or destroyed for some reason" rather than "What backup plan should the average nerd have in case the Tor exit node they operate is taken down".
Keeping off-site copies of important data is a good plan - either backed up at a cloud storage provider, or periodically burned to DVD and put somewhere else. Having some paper records of very important things (e.g., phone numbers and email addresses of close friends and family, if you're like me and generally just let your phone remember those things) could be very useful as well - right after you've either gotten in trouble with the police or been in a major disaster is not a good time to not be able to contact people.
Of course, paper can also get damaged - so a fire- and water-proof safe is good to keep some those important papers in. Or a safe deposit box at a bank. (Ideally, both, with copies in each.)
Of course, all of this is essentially basic disaster planning - having off-site backups and either spare off-site hardware or the means to get it quickly.
It won't help in the case of confiscation, but if you absolutely need to have computer access all the time, you might also want to keep a small netbook, tablet, spare phone, or whatever in that safe or safe deposit box. If you're more worried about confiscation, keep enough cash there to buy one of those if you should need it.
Well, here's a couple of differences....
Your ISP has an acceptable use policy that you are required to agree to in order to get service from them, which most likely states that you're not allowed to do anything illegal, and that if you do use their network to do something illegal, you agree that you are wholly responsible for it. It also keeps records, so that it can cooperate with the authorities in tracking down people who are using their network for illegal purposes.
A Tor operator, on the other hand, by design does not know who is using their connection, and thus, cannot enforce that their users must agree to any policy. Further, and again by design, a Tor node does not keep any records that can be used to help authorities track down people using that connection for illegal purposes.
Much of the law operates on the basis of what a 'reasonable person' would understand. A reasonable person would understand that, given their policies and practices, a typical ISP is not attempting to shield people performing illegal activities. On the other hand, a reasonable person who knows what a Tor exit node is and sets one up should understand that there is a high chance that there will be illegal activities being funneled through their node.
So, from a legal point of view, there's a big difference. Now, ethics and morals... those are different things. But honestly, if you're not willing to go to jail to defend the principle that people should be able to anonymously use the Internet, then maybe operating a Tor exit node isn't something you should be doing.
I tried, but there was this whole problem with the chainsaw, and the blood, and....
Oh, wait. Leatherman, not Leatherface.
Never mind.
Don't forget, though, that many cell phone carriers offer upgrades at pretty cheap prices, once new phones come out. If you don't feel the need to constantly have the latest phone, replacing a lost phone via upgrade can be a good, cheap way to do it. And also, don't forget to read the fine print on the insurance.
In my own case, early last year, I bought an iPhone 4. At that point, it was the latest model. I lost it about two months ago, and was about to go on a trip, so I checked the places I thought I most likely might have left it, then decided I needed to replace it. I logged into AT&T's web site to see if they had any upgrade offers for me, and found that I could get a 4s for $99 or a 5 for $199. Since the 5 wasn't immediately available then, I got the 4s. I was offered insurance through AT&T, and decided "why not?" and took it.
When I got home and fully looked through the paperwork for the insurance, though, I discovered something interesting. They have a deductible, which is tiered according to what sort of phone you have - and which the sales person hadn't mentioned. iPhones (all models) are in their highest tier, with a deductible of $199. So... if I'd had the insurance on my 4, and I'd used it, I would have paid more than I did for a new phone, and would have most likely gotten a refurbished 4, instead of a new 4s. And, to add insult to injury, I would've been paying the $7 a month premium for about 17 months, for another $102.
Looking at AT&T's rules on upgrade eligibility, it appears that I become eligible for an upgrade 12 months after having one. Depending on your plan, it might be as long as 24 months. However, it appears that it's possible to transfer eligibility from one number to another, if you're paying for multiple phones. Since I have my wife and daughter's phones on my account, if I lost this one now, I could transfer either of their eligibilities and again get a new phone for the same as my deductible would be with their insurance. Give it six months to a year, and Apple will probably have a newer model out, and my upgrade would be even less.
In about sixteen years of owning cell phones, I've lost three. So it looks like for me, I'm better off not bothering with the insurance. I cancelled it.
Oh, and by the way few days later, my phone turned up - it'd been found at a restaurant I frequent (I'd actually gone by and asked if they'd found it before I bought the new one, but apparently they hadn't found it at that point). Looking online, I found that I was able to sell my relatively pristine 4 for $145 easily. So... I actually made money off of losing my phone, and got an upgrade. :-)
I think they've figured that out - they just don't care. The DoD isn't really that big.
Consider: the DoD, by their own claims, has about 3 million employees worldwide.
So far this year, Apple has sold over 120 million iPhones.
Thus, even if the DoD bought an iPhone for every one of their employees, that would only increase Apple's sales figures by 2.5%. Is that worth the expense of creating another phone model, manufacturing it, and then keeping it in manufacture?
Before you answer that, consider this: what percentage of those DoD employees actually work in a position where they're not allowed to bring in a phone with a camera? Of those in such positions, how many of them actually work in a place where that requirement is enforced? From my own experience, only the most secure facilities actually try to keep out cell phone cameras - many facilities that in theory don't allow them in do allow them in practice.
My guess would be that a high estimate would be 20% - which would then have Apple creating another model and manufacturing it for a potential 0.5% increase in sales - but that's assuming that everyone in the DoD who potentially needs such a phone gets one, and that they all get one in the course of one year. If, say, the DoD were to follow a more normal course and buy them over the course of three years or so, that comes an increase of less than 0.2%.
The simple fact is, the market that 'needs' a lack of a camera is tiny.
The problem with this is when the things that are hit include people. Punishing someone after a collision won't put the legs back on someone who had them crushed, or restore mental functioning to someone left with brain damage from it. Since it's not always possible to put things back the way they were, and the potential impact on individuals is so high, it makes sense to attempt to prevent people from driving while impaired.
Oh, and by the way - there are such things as accidents. Collisions do sometimes happen for reasons that the driver could not reasonably expect or prevent - unexpected mechanical failure, a seemingly healthy driver suffering a heart attack or stroke while driving, large animals running into the road, damage to the road itself, even things like cars being struck by lightning while driving, rockslides, and objects falling off of other cars and trucks onto the road (in that last case, the person who secured the object may be at fault - but they're not the one who hit the thing).
Falling into more grey areas are things like black ice or severe rain and wind. These can be anticipated, but avoiding driving entirely when they might be happening is not always possible, since other sorts of emergencies do happen.
Small correction: voters in Colorado approved marijuana for medical use back in 2000, well before the previous election cycle. A friend of mine out there had a roommate at the time with brain cancer, who got approved for medical marijuana to help suppress chemo side effects.
At the time, there was nowhere you could buy marijuana in Colorado, though, so my friend and his roommate had to grow it themselves. He also made sure to keep his roommate's certificate saying that he'd been approved easily accessible, just in case any police spotted the plants in their yard and decided to stop by and ask them about it. Never did happen, though - their yard was already fenced in, and apparently no one was nosy enough to look into it, or cared if they did. His roommate's cancer was terminal, and he died a few years later. (And no, my friend didn't keep growing the weed - he never used it anyway.)
Just as a single word can have multiple meanings, a single phrase can have multiple meanings as well. The Y2K bug that a lot of people (including me!) helped fix, yes, that was real. However, the Y2K bug that some nutcases hyped, where everything that had a clock chip in it would go haywire at 00:00:01 Jan 1, 2000, did not exist.
It's like person A saying "dragons don't exist", and person B replying, "Yes, they do! The komodo dragon is a real animal!" The komodo dragon is a dragon, but it's not the kind of dragon person A is talking about. In the same way, there was a real thing called the Y2K bug, but it's not the same thing that most people are talking about when they say "the Y2K bug was a myth" or "the Y2K bug didn't happen".
And in any case, it should be obvious that the original poster is making a joke. I refer people to TVTropes' "Rule of Funny". (Which only somewhat works here, since the joke wasn't that funny, but the guy was trying.)
Funny, then how AC/DC has released 5 singles since they've gained control over their own catalog - at least three of them after Angus made the comment mentioned above.
Re-fixed that for you. While they may not have had any say before, they certainly do have say since they bought their own catalog back... but they've continued to release singles.
Funny, then, how AC/DC has released 52 singles in the course of their career... the most recent in 2011. You'd think that if they didn't want people to buy single songs, they wouldn't make singles....
Have to make a decision about which government they want to anger the least, of course.
I organize mine much like a bookstore:
Fiction goes alphabetical by author. Within a particular author, arranged by title or series and number in series. Anthologies by name of editor; multi-author series are a separate section, arranged by series title and number in series. Fiction all together is about two bookcases, thanks to a large culling that happened when I had to move after a divorce, so I don't feel a need to separate by genre.
Non-fiction is organized more loosely, but books on the same subject are together. If a single subject starts to occupy more than one shelf, then it's generally time to start subdividing it more finely (e.g., my dozen-odd dinosaur books are a category, but my computer books are divided into programming, security, operating systems, and other finer divisions, since I have about three shelves of a bookcase of "computer books").
My RPGs are arranged by title and edition, except for xD&D, which gets its own section arranged by edition and core/non-core/3rd-party supplement status.
But you don't actually own the book with paper books either - you own a particular copy. If that copy is lost, stolen, destroyed in a fire, ruined in a flood, etc., then the fact that you still hypothetically own it does you no good.
With my ebooks, though, I have a backup copy on my computer at home, another copy on the external hard drive that I back up to, and another in the copy of my personal files that's on my laptop. Not to mention that I can re-download most of them at any time, as long as the places I bought them from stay in business.
Also, ebooks have an enormous practical advantage for book lovers - namely, that keeping an ebook "in print" costs a publisher essentially nothing. I've had quite a few physical books over the years that I've had to go to considerable trouble and expense to replace when something happened to them, because they'd been out of print for decades. Indeed, about half the ebooks I've been buying lately are books that I'd either 'owned' before or had read before, but I hadn't been able to either replace them or get my own copy because physical copies were too expensive ($100, $200, or more for a paperback fiction book). Now, many of them are being re-released as ebooks, either by publishing companies or directly by the authors, and I'm finally able to get them at a reasonable price.
Apparently you don't actually like books that much, given that you say there's only a ridiculously slim chance that there's a book you want that you don't already have and have with you, that you only read one book at a time (and apparently none of those are large hardbacks), you haven't been to a library in decades, and you think that sorting books on a shelf is the same thing as cataloging them (and, for that matter, "sort the fucking books on the shelf" implies that you own few enough books that they'll all fit on a single shelf). Also, your comments seem to indicate that you never need to use books as references for anything.
For those of us who actually like books, though, trust me when I say that many of these things actually are large advantages.
To give a few examples of some reasons that I'd love to have more of my library as ebooks:
I play and GM RPGs. There's a huge number of books involved, which are often big, heavy hardbacks. I run and play some games online, and it's nice to be able to respond when I have a few spare minutes in the day. Just carrying the core books for the two main games I play would literally mean carrying fourteen pounds of books. If you added in the supplemental books that players are using things from, you'd easily double that.
I'm also a writer. As such, it's very nice to have a dictionary and thesaurus with me that don't require a working Internet connection (since sometimes I'm working at bus stops, restaurants, or wherever else I have a few spare minutes to write). Not to mention carrying around my previous stories so I can fact-check myself to ensure consistency (and being able to search for phrases helps greatly there). Granted, I could keep those on the same device I'm doing the writing on, but it's nice to be able to have it open on a second screen.
Lastly, like many heavy readers, I don't read just one book at a time. I usually have half a dozen or more that I'm reading at once. For example, right now I have three books on magic and divination in Ancient Greece that I'm reading as research for part of a story I'm writing; a book on swordfighting, for a martial arts class I'm taking; a romantic comedy novel, a dramatic medieval fantasy novel, and near-future dramatic SF novel (picking which one I choose to read based on what I feel like reading at the time). And that's completely leaving aside the books mentioned above that I'm using as references for things.
Oh, and good for you that you've never suffered from impaired eyesight. Some of us do and have, and very few books are actually available in large print editions. Usually I don't have any problems with my eyes, but when I do, it's been very nice to be able to change the font size up for a few days until they're back to normal.
On the other hand, though, physical books do still have their own advantages - when you're dealing with something where illustrations are important, especially. Many of the martial arts books I've been reading have a lot of illustrations, and they're usually laid out on the assumption that you're viewing facing pages together. Some are in nonstandard formats (e.g., bound on the short side) in order to allow sequences to be laid out in certain ways. If you're looking for something visual in a book, it's much, much faster to be able to riffle through it to search (or if you know approximately where in a book something is, it can be faster to find).
In a perfect world, I'd like to have all my books in both formats, so I can enjoy the advantages of each - but unfortunately, most publishers don't want to do that... or at least, not without charging you for the book twice.
You could look at it that way... but the prejudice that suggested women, blacks, and other demographics were lesser was a major factor in why they were much less likely to be educated and to own land.
People say this a lot, but... the Electoral College has chosen a candidate who didn't win the popular vote only three times in the last two hundred years, and only once in the last hundred years. So, it usually does represent the vote of the people. (And the 2000 election debacle boils down to Florida, and the various shenanigans that happened there. It's still uncertain who really did win Florida in 2000, since the results are within the statistical margin of error... but the decision ultimately came to the Supreme Court, which the Bushes had managed to pack heavily with conservatives, so... yeah.)
That's not to say that it couldn't be improved. I'd personally suggest that instead of "winner take all", the states should allocate their electoral votes according to the election results in their state. That would introduce some rounding errors, but it would also get rid of the whole thing of "key states" in the election.
Yeah, it is different in Florida. State universities charge per semester hour, so the more hours your degree requires, the more you have to pay... and most STEM degrees require more hours than the standard requirement. On the other hand, though, it's not a lot more - usually something like an additional 8 to 10 semester hours over the general requirement of 160, so it's only about 5-10% more total.
Honestly, the big thing that irks me in Florida schools is the "athletic fee". At FSU, at least, all students are required to pay it... in return for which, you're eligible to get 'free' tickets to the university sporting events. However, the number of free student tickets available is considerably less than the number of students, so the only people who reliably get the tickets are frats and sororities, who send people out days in advance to establish places in the line to get tickets, then rotate members to hold their place. Not to mention, of course, that you're still stuck paying the fee even if you have no interest in going to the events.
While we're at it, abandoning the idea that everybody needs a college degree, and having apprenticeship programs for fields where that makes sense. Those also have worked well in Germany.
The thing that strikes me the most here is this: while stranger abductions are the ones that get the attention, children are much more likely to be abused by close relatives or those who have regular access to them -- and a tracking device won't be of much help there.
Same here. Indeed, I've had it happen a couple of times that I press the "Answer" button, get no reaction, and think that maybe I didn't make good contact with the screen, so I move to press it again... and then, as my finger is moving, it picks up, and I now press the "End Call" button, which conveniently goes right across where "Answer" was before.
_I_ dont have problems remembering my web password, but apparently you dont do IT support in any capacity that has you dealing with users on a regular basis. Some of them-- particularly those who dont have to care because of their position-- have that problem.
From my own experience in IT support, those who don't have to care about not being able to remember their email password because of their position also are high enough that they don't set up their own devices - IT does it for them, or their executive assistant (or whoever normally handles their email for them so they don't have to log in and look at it themselves) does. For them, it doesn't matter how complicated the setup is, unless it's something that needs to be redone on a frequent basis.
(Indeed, that's how our IT department people first got their own Blackberries - a few high execs decided to get them, then called our CIO and said, "Have somebody set these up for us." They got handed over to us, and then our manager went back to the CIO to say, "Hey - if we're going to be expected to support these, maybe we should have a few for testing?"
... because my PC is a VM running under Parallels on my Mac, and I see no need to buy an upgrade for something that only runs games and a few specialty programs that don't have Mac versions until and unless I absolutely have to.
If it were a memory leak problem, though, rebooting the router would fix it. It's more likely something physical, since physical components degrade over time. One thing that I'm wondering is what his environment is - humidity and temp where the routers are.
They did use WiFi, of a sort. Except it wasn't branded. They called it face-to-face communications.
You're confusing their NFC with their WiFi. Their WiFi was called "yelling down the hall".