what's wrong with transferring money directly
from one account to another?
Because you literally only need a routing number and account
number to make transactions to and from that account. Once
I give you those (which happen to appear on every check), you
basically have the same level of control over the contents of
that account as do I.
Now, if you fraudulently (or as most companies perfer to call
it, "erroneously") empty my account on a whim, I need to notice
the problem and either get you to admit a problem exists, or
sue you for what you took. In the mean time, guess who gets
nailed with all the bounced check fees against that account?
So yeah, I most certainly do have a problem not only with directly using
financial accounts for any form of payment, but merely with using checks
in general. Credit cards at least have some protection (in that
I can trivially dispute the charge and the burden of proof then rests
on the one who placed the charge), but checking accounts have almost
none.
With cash, none of these problems exist. I can, completely anonymously,
pay you $50 for your goods or services, and that ends the transaction
forever, no possibility of after-the-fact fraud on either side.
In this specificcase, however, the school did say they'd
take a money order, which seems (IMO) a satisfactory compromise. In
exchange for spending an extra $0.85 for the money order, the FP author
can stand by his preference not to have a CC or checking account.
they've heard rumors about device or application compatibility
issues, or because they think they should wait for a service pack release.
Yes, I do indeed plan to wait for a service pack...
Specifically, I plan to wait for the (deliberately) long-overdue
XP sp3.
I have used Vista (I put up with it at work for about a week
on a new machine from Dell, before I wiped it and installed XP).
It supported my hardware well enough (if its performance ratings
insulted a machine that kicks serious butt under XP). It just
plain sucked. "Laggy", "bloated", and "needlessly
rearranged" come to mind as a description.
And, although I had considered this point silly before experiencing
it - Those who have warned us that the UAC will train people to
automatically "allow" everything have a damned good point... It
took all of an hour to condition me to reflexively move the mouse
toward the right spot on the screen as soon as it started to dim,
before the question even popped up.
Why exactly would you want to have two copies of itunes open at the same time?
Because modern computers can easily handle multiple users, perhaps? Because I can set up one
decent machine running Win2k3 and several cheap-ass XP boxes RD'ing into the decent one (I would
ahave said "one decent Linux box and several diskless remote X servers, but considering iTunes'
fabulous Linux support...)? Because I just want to, and don't really need a better
reason?
So you can listen to two songs simultaneously?
And if I want to do exactly that, a program should prevent me from doing so because?
Seriously dude, of all the things to complain about that's a really bad example.
No, actually, it pretty much hits the nail on the head regarding why I will never own a
Mac until Steverino departs the scene... In his world, you do things his way, or no way
at all. Well, among his loyal zealots, he can get away with that. The other 90% of the
market, even the Microsoft Majority, has already voted with their wallets regarding
how much of that they'll tolerate.
by "public," the W3C actually means "closed to the public."
Although I will completely agree this behavior sounds like an egregious example
of doublespeak, I can't help but ponder...
"So what?"
All of my own web pages still start with "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">",
which I consider just about the last thing the W3C did of any significance to the rest of the
world outside their own little social/political clique. If they want to hold opaque conferences on
government transparency, let 'em. No one really cares what they do anymore.
Should I also feel outraged that Calvin won't let Susie join the GROSS club?
Ill-behaved little boys gloating in their personal positions of power, nothing more.
So you'd feel just fine with a 0.25in thick phone 1ft high
by 6in wide and weighing 15lbs?
I care about exactly one aspect of my phone's geometry - Does
it fit in the little half-pockets on the mid-leg side of all
my jeans.
For the record, the iPhone comes in at 0.46x2.4x4.5in. That
would probably not fit in said pockets (which have a
flattened width of just under 2.5in on the pants I have on
today), or at best would fit too tightly for comfort. My
current phone fits nicely, however, at 0.9x2.0x4.3in, despite
literally twice the given-yet-irrelevant thickness.
the comparison charts deal strictly with physical attributes,
not things like GPS.
The "Wi-Fi", "Talk Time", "Internet Use", "Video Playback", and
"Audio Playback" rows on that chart would tend to disagree.
Not in most actual coursework, and when used, almost never the "very hard" form
that the FP decries as mathematically unfair. Usually in-class multiple choice
tests do nothing more than weed out those who never cracked the book - If you
read even the chapter summaries of the relevant material, you should get
very nearly 100%
We do, however, use multiple choice in virtually all of our standardized
testing, from MATs (grade school evaluations, though they don't directly impact
the students' grades) to SATs (a nationwide standardized college qualifying exam,
basically), to professional licensure/certification exams.
Although most responses so far have damned the FP author for his point, I think
it valid under his stated condition of a "very hard" test. If you would
expect the average well-prepared test-taker to get 75% correct (in the US, we
call that a "C" and consider it the average grade), multiple choice works pretty
well as a means of avoiding bias in scoring (and while the choice of questions
and answers may allow for poor wording, that same flaw applies equally well in
any form of test short of a practical - which in most cases counts as
very impractical). If, however, you expect most knowledgeable respondants
to score only slightly higher than a random set of answers, then the FP has it
right.
I would also mention that for the SATs and most professional exams, we don't
use the "dumb" form of multiple choice. The SATs count wrong answers against
the testtaker; many computerized professional exams use a curious format where
you have a set number of questions but each question counts for a number of points
roughly proportional to its hardness, and as you answer questions correctly, the
hardness increases so you can get more points quicker (or decreases so you can
get fewer points slower... so you could pass with perhaps 20 correct "hard"
answers, or 80 "easy" ones).
Of course, if you actually drive like that, which car your driving becomes totally moot because no driver will respect you anyhow.
I take it you've never driven in Boston...
And for the record, no, I do not regularly drive like that. But having the option to forcefully merge...
In any case, "respect" comes from a long relationship. On the road, that means nothing. A bunch of strangers
that I'll never see again, and around whom I drive defensively because I can't trust any of them to have
slept well last night; to have at least one hand on the wheel rather than one on the coffee and one on the cellphone;
to have a BAC of zero; To have a blood benzo level of zero (Xanax/Klonopin/Ativan/etc have warnings on them for a
reason, bluehairs!); to generally count as what we might call "sane" and not suddenly express their self
loathing with suicide-by-head-on-collision. I "respect" them only in the same way I "respect" a pissed-off
badger - I do my best to avoid them.
I can't imagine buying one of these things. It looks totally freakish
Thanks, but yes, I do feel confortable with the size of my penis.;-)
with it's tiny size you're get about zero respect from other drivers on the highway.
Who needs respect, when you can "merge" into the space between any two cars on the road, even ahead of a tailgater?
And the milage is ONLY 40 mpg? What the hell?
I'll give you that point... 40MPG really doesn't amount to anything special. For a car so tiny,
I'd expect quite a lot better fuel efficiency. Oddly enough, the relevant Wiki lists them as getting
50MPG in Europe, so I have to wonder which number holds true.
I agree it looks ugly, but if they offer the TDI version in the US (69MPG! Of course, most state DOT/DMVs seem
to have sticks up their asses regarding passenger diesels, so that will never happen), I'd buy
one when my current car dies.
The reason why this doesn't fall under the same category as brewing your own
beer is that the beer does not damage the road which requires maintenance.
We have a lot of taxes imposed ostensibly for a set purpose, which in
reality have little to do with that purpose. Cigarettes as another good example,
where the enormous per-pack taxes would (nearly) outright pay for all healthcare
in most civilized Western nations (for comparison, Japan has an annual health budget of
roughly USD$7 billion with half the population of the US, while the US pulls in
over 10 billion in cigarette taxes).
All such taxes, with the exception of FICA, merely go into the general fund
and Congress wastes it however they want - Currently, I could fairly claim
that every penny of our "road" taxes (and then some) goes to killing Iraqis.
That also implies more of a direct source-to-destination connection
than actually exists, but commits no less of an error than saying
"gas tax goes to road maintenance". The latter just sounds more palatable
to We The Sheeple, despite having no basis in reality.
I look at fuel taxes as just another one of these bogus niche taxes. Just a
questionably-legal-but-tolerated form of sales tax; if you don't buy the
product to which the tax applies, you shouldn't need to pay the tax. Simple
as that.
If his is like most of the other greasecars out there,
it's got a dual fuel system with veggie oil on one side
and standard diesel or a biodeisel mix on the other
Biodiesel != running on vegetable oil. You can run B100
from a cold start in an unmodified diesel engine, without
the slightest bit of trouble. You can even use it in
post-2007 diesels that require ULSD (<15ppm sulphur),
as biodiesel has effectively no sulphur.
Now, buidiesel does have a higher gelling point
than dinodiesel, but that just means you need to thin
it in the winter (kerosene works wonders, though here in
the NorthEast you'll probably need to run B20 at best in
the winter).
As for the more on-topic issue here of "should he get a fine
for evading fuel taxes"... If you brew your own beer, you
don't need to pay the alcohol tax on it. Why wouldn't
noncommercial low-volume biodiesel production fall into the
category?
There's no reason a state that has a net outflow of money
should be any more excited about unfunded mandates than states
with a net inflow.
Your choice of words expresses an idea that I did not.
I didn't claim they would like Real-ID as an unfunded
mandate - One can express a preference between two unpleasant
situations without wanting either outcome . Just that,
as the welfare-states have more reason to dislike it as
an unfunded mandate, it makes sense that they would
oppose it more than the sugardaddy-states, if we take them as
primarily looking at this from the financial perspective.
That's the kind of logic that says if something is on sale,
you should buy it whether you need it or not, since after all
you're "saving" money.
"Need it or not" as the key phrase there. If you don't eat
Tuna and it goes on sale, buying it seems stupid. If you stock
up on really cheap toilet paper, you will eventually use
it. And as a better analogy (a government mandated expense),
none of us "need" auto insurance, but most states leave us no
choice in the matter; so you may as well buy the cheapest you
can find.
Yes it may be an AC, but if you are going to make
a claim. Back it up with a link something resembling proof please.
The burden of proof here rests on the poster originally
making the assertion, not the respondant calling BS.
You can't prove they don't do something - Even official
statements to the contrary wouldn't disprove the practice.
OTOH, to support the GP's stance, he need only post a single
instance of such fines occurring.
The United States Government is saying "we're going to create
these standards and you are going to pay to implement them" and
the states are naturally balking at having to foot the bill for
Washington D.C.'s foolishness.
Although you make a good point, you need to dig one layer further
to see that some states object on moral (or at least, autonomy)
grounds rather than merely due to funding issues...
You can break states up into "welfare" and "SugarDaddy" states
(This has a very high correlation with red-vs-blue, incidentally,
but I don't mean this post to start a partisan flamewar). The states
that have so far objected to Real Id, almost without fail, fall among
the SugarDaddy states, the ones with a net outflow of money
vs federal taxes.
If your hypothesis (that most objecting states do so primarily for
economic reasons) held true, then you would expect to see the exact
opposite pattern among objectors/SugarDaddies. As the funding
comes from the states anyway, whether directly or via the federal
government, having each state pay their own way would cost the
SugarDaddies less, overall.
Thus, by reductio ad absurdum, your hypothesis appears false...
Though I would still applaud you for raising the point, since regardless
of whether the states or the feds pay, we the people still get
stuck with the bill at the end of the day (or April 15th, in this case).
It will replace 802.11a/b/g, but beyond that, none. Speed really
doesn't count as the biggest problem with wireless - I'd personally
put "reliability" at #1 and "security" at #2.
Which wireless security threats are scariest?
The DOJ sniffing your traffic from outside rather than
needing to at least enter the building (and thus possibly get
caught on your security camera(s)).
What of wireless VoIP?
What of it? Whether you use a VOIP set that connects via
802.11, or a VOIP set that connects a base station via
ethernet and has a cordless handset makes no
difference. Except, perhaps, that while the 2.4GHz
spectrum has gotten rather crowded lately, the 800MHz
range used for cordless phones has become less
congested in recent years.
Will your organization need to change to support
enterprise mobility?
Probably, because most enterprise apps tweak if they
lose their network connection even momentarily - See
my first answer.
How do you control costs in an expanding mobile and
wireless environment?
"The only winning move is not to play".
What can you do to stop wireless denial-of-service attacks?"
1) Use a wire.
2) Wait for the entropic death of the universe.
Seriously, no realistic solution exists between those two - A
wireless DOS doesn't take anything high-tech... A spark-gap
transmitter will do nicely. And don't forget "unintentional"
DOSs... At my house, I suffer one every few second due to a
nearby airport's radar (again, see my first answer), thus I
almost exclusively use a wired connection except for totally
noncritical and connection-state-less uses such as surfing
the web from my couch.
in the contract or at very least in the sale, they promise you a certain bandwidth,
if they can't deliver what they promise you don't need to pay what you promised.
Okay, I have a situation for you...
I currently have TW RR, but never signed a contract (with TW). I originally had
it through Adelphia, which went under and TW bought them out. But my Adelphia TOS
actually looks pretty sweet compared to TWs...
So, if I actually cared enough to take them to court over this, would I have a leg to
stand on, or should I just presume that as a mere human TW has the right to fuck me
however hard they want?
Anyway, moves like this on the part of broadband provider will just accellerate a
trend that we've already seen for the past decade - Every protocol will
eventually just use encrypted communications wrapped in bogus HTTP packets. At which
point, if the ISPs want to "shape" traffic, it will amount to flat out throttling
your pipe. Let's see the backlash then, when even Grandma can't watch cheesy
content on YouTube because the throttling makes it lag so badly.
Why should any scientist hope that standard model will or will
not turn out to be true?
FTA: "But what happens if the Higgs turns out to be just right? Well,
then the standard model predicts that you'd need a machine roughly a
quadrillion times more powerful than the LHC to find anything new. With
current technology, this would mean an accelerator the circumference of
the Milky Way."
Basically, if they find the Higgs boson, every particle physicist can go
home and retire, as any possible non-theoretical work in our lifetimes
(and possible, ever) will turn up absolutely nothing new.
1) PirateBay has ads. So what? So does Slashdot.
2) Previous Russian law allowed AllOfMP3. It no longer does. So?
3) Copying a CD from my friend doesn't (yet) count as terrorism, guys.
4) Very few people care about the label behind their music, pirated or not.
5) So the labels can't afford small artists - Good thing they don't
actually need labels anymore!
6) That would break the law. File suit, if you actually believe such BS.
7) Boo-hoo, I don't generate tax revenue. Hear the violins?
8) "Bought Pirate Products" - Change the subject, much?
9) The law already disallows piracy. Most people just don't care.
10) I've discovered over half of the artists currently on my playlist via
questionably-legal means.
The most open way to do incremental backups I have found is to use a
batch file and backup files into a zip file which have changed since the
date of your last incremental backup. Do incrementals every week/month or
so, and mirrors every night.
Look into rsync'ing
against a hardlinked copy. Each backup effectively gives
you a full backup, yet takes up only as much disk space
as an incremental.
It does eat up inodes, though, so make sure you don't skimp on them
when you first format your drive (and if you have tons of small files,
you might want to reserve a hefty surplus of them).
After years of suffering through how best to trade off between full and
incremental backups, this little trick just blew me away. As for your
backup media, you can use a separate physical machine, or even just a
single (or regularly rotating set of) large USB HDD (everyone spare me
the tape-vs-HDD argument - Suffice it to say, I consider tapes (or more
accurately, tape drives) the biggest waste of money ever created) that
you keep offline 99% of the time.
Make Net businesses compete on the same level as their
brick-and-mortar counterparts.
They'll still win. The state will just get its (un)fair cut
of the transaction.
Online, I can search for exactly what I want, find a few
highly rated variants of that product, and pull up the specs
on each in seconds. I can search for negative reviews about
them to see if they look good on paper but don't live up to
expectations. I can then "shop around" to get a good price
(even repeating the "negative reviews" check for the vendor
I choose, if I've never dealt with them before) and place my
order.
I can do all of that it considerably less time than it would
take me to drive to a local store, find the general type of
product I want, settle for one of the three models they carry
with no information beyond what the box says, and check-out with
no idea of what this product sells for elsewhere (or I can waste
even more time by visiting a few other stores, on the
unlikely chance they carry the exact same model).
And I don't need to deal with traffic. I don't need to
deal with annoying salespeople. I don't need to deal with
crowds, or for that matter any other customers with
their strange smells and who-knows-what contagious diseases
(don't mothers still teach people to cover their damned mouths
when coughing?). And most delightfully, I don't need to tell
the cashier where to stick their extended warranty.
You lost the present audience with that one statement.
Which, interestingly enough, makes a point of its own - You perhaps have a level of
real-world credibility that you would like to extend a priori to your online
life. Many of us would rather keep our "real" lives 100% separate, and accept the
penalty of needing to prove ourselves for each online community in which we participate.
I submit myself as such an example - I have 3.5 degrees (1.5 of them in "hard" subjects)
covering something like 250 credit hours, yet choose to present myself semi-anonymously
on Slashdot - Where I happen to have "Excellent" karma. My education no doubt helps me,
both in composing intelligible posts, and with having a good background from which to
post meaningful commentary on a variety of topics. But I rarely even mention
my academic credentials here, and don't think I've ever invoked them as support
in an argument online (except as I used them here, just as an possibly-meaningless example
from my own life).
But yeah, it's a very difficult problem. Figuring it out is a big, potentially very lucrative issue.
Lucrative, indeed! Many companies would love the ability to tie an individual's multiple
online personas together under a single massive profile. Cookies failed, WebBugs failed, Flash
Shared Objects failed - What greater victory could the world of commerce claim than to get us
to voluntarily do that which they can't seem to force on us?
Thanks, but no thanks. I'll earn my reputation at each site on which I choose to play, and
make it as hard as possible to connect this account with any others I might have. I value my
anonymity (or since I won't pretend any of us really have that, at least "plausible
deniability") far, far more than I dislike the small credibility-penalty of needing to establish
a new online persona.
Google has enough money to compete in these auctions. Why wouldn't they simply outbid the competitors and sell the space themselves?
Actually, they do have enough money - Google has a market cap roughly equal to Verizon and Time Warner combined
The problem here doesn't (only) involve money, though - Basically, it sounds like these auctions have
most of the "fairness" of EBay, where unscrupulous sellers (sadly, our own government in this case) and
bidders can drive a price up far beyond its
fair value. In this case, the existing broadband companies (the first two pipes referenced in the FP)
would presumeably like to keep their regional duopolies and would either use the 700MHz range for their
exclusive use, or if they can, buy it cheap just to prevent anyone else from using it.
Thus the requested condition that the winner MUST license it to competitors - That prevents Verizon (for example)
from using various tricks to get the spectrum cheap and then do nothing with it.
Not so sure I understand the reason for some of the other mentioned terms of the auction (anonymous?
I know our government has some corruption, but so bad that a non-anonymous auction would give
the existing players an unfair edge?)
It's like saying that it's legal to copy DVDs, but only if you're talented
enough to crack the encryption yourself, with no help.
Not quite - More like saying that you and your friends can legally
film yourselves doing a reproduction of a movie on DVD, purely
for noncommercial use.
Slashdot Mirror
what's wrong with transferring money directly from one account to another?
Because you literally only need a routing number and account number to make transactions to and from that account. Once I give you those (which happen to appear on every check), you basically have the same level of control over the contents of that account as do I.
Now, if you fraudulently (or as most companies perfer to call it, "erroneously") empty my account on a whim, I need to notice the problem and either get you to admit a problem exists, or sue you for what you took. In the mean time, guess who gets nailed with all the bounced check fees against that account?
So yeah, I most certainly do have a problem not only with directly using financial accounts for any form of payment, but merely with using checks in general. Credit cards at least have some protection (in that I can trivially dispute the charge and the burden of proof then rests on the one who placed the charge), but checking accounts have almost none.
With cash, none of these problems exist. I can, completely anonymously, pay you $50 for your goods or services, and that ends the transaction forever, no possibility of after-the-fact fraud on either side.
In this specificcase, however, the school did say they'd take a money order, which seems (IMO) a satisfactory compromise. In exchange for spending an extra $0.85 for the money order, the FP author can stand by his preference not to have a CC or checking account.
they've heard rumors about device or application compatibility issues, or because they think they should wait for a service pack release.
Yes, I do indeed plan to wait for a service pack...
Specifically, I plan to wait for the (deliberately) long-overdue XP sp3.
I have used Vista (I put up with it at work for about a week on a new machine from Dell, before I wiped it and installed XP). It supported my hardware well enough (if its performance ratings insulted a machine that kicks serious butt under XP). It just plain sucked. "Laggy", "bloated", and "needlessly rearranged" come to mind as a description.
And, although I had considered this point silly before experiencing it - Those who have warned us that the UAC will train people to automatically "allow" everything have a damned good point... It took all of an hour to condition me to reflexively move the mouse toward the right spot on the screen as soon as it started to dim, before the question even popped up.
Why exactly would you want to have two copies of itunes open at the same time?
Because modern computers can easily handle multiple users, perhaps? Because I can set up one decent machine running Win2k3 and several cheap-ass XP boxes RD'ing into the decent one (I would ahave said "one decent Linux box and several diskless remote X servers, but considering iTunes' fabulous Linux support...)? Because I just want to, and don't really need a better reason?
So you can listen to two songs simultaneously?
And if I want to do exactly that, a program should prevent me from doing so because?
Seriously dude, of all the things to complain about that's a really bad example.
No, actually, it pretty much hits the nail on the head regarding why I will never own a Mac until Steverino departs the scene... In his world, you do things his way, or no way at all. Well, among his loyal zealots, he can get away with that. The other 90% of the market, even the Microsoft Majority, has already voted with their wallets regarding how much of that they'll tolerate.
by "public," the W3C actually means "closed to the public."
Although I will completely agree this behavior sounds like an egregious example of doublespeak, I can't help but ponder...
"So what?"
All of my own web pages still start with "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">", which I consider just about the last thing the W3C did of any significance to the rest of the world outside their own little social/political clique. If they want to hold opaque conferences on government transparency, let 'em. No one really cares what they do anymore.
Should I also feel outraged that Calvin won't let Susie join the GROSS club? Ill-behaved little boys gloating in their personal positions of power, nothing more.
cargo pants, carpenter pants, and any other pants with random pockets are fucking retarded.
So write me a ticket, Fashion Cop.
buy regular pants.
Then I wouldn't have extra pockets... Duh!
Finally, slimness is what consumers care about.
So you'd feel just fine with a 0.25in thick phone 1ft high by 6in wide and weighing 15lbs?
I care about exactly one aspect of my phone's geometry - Does it fit in the little half-pockets on the mid-leg side of all my jeans.
For the record, the iPhone comes in at 0.46x2.4x4.5in. That would probably not fit in said pockets (which have a flattened width of just under 2.5in on the pants I have on today), or at best would fit too tightly for comfort. My current phone fits nicely, however, at 0.9x2.0x4.3in, despite literally twice the given-yet-irrelevant thickness.
the comparison charts deal strictly with physical attributes, not things like GPS.
The "Wi-Fi", "Talk Time", "Internet Use", "Video Playback", and "Audio Playback" rows on that chart would tend to disagree.
Is it that common in the US?
Not in most actual coursework, and when used, almost never the "very hard" form that the FP decries as mathematically unfair. Usually in-class multiple choice tests do nothing more than weed out those who never cracked the book - If you read even the chapter summaries of the relevant material, you should get very nearly 100%
We do, however, use multiple choice in virtually all of our standardized testing, from MATs (grade school evaluations, though they don't directly impact the students' grades) to SATs (a nationwide standardized college qualifying exam, basically), to professional licensure/certification exams.
Although most responses so far have damned the FP author for his point, I think it valid under his stated condition of a "very hard" test. If you would expect the average well-prepared test-taker to get 75% correct (in the US, we call that a "C" and consider it the average grade), multiple choice works pretty well as a means of avoiding bias in scoring (and while the choice of questions and answers may allow for poor wording, that same flaw applies equally well in any form of test short of a practical - which in most cases counts as very impractical). If, however, you expect most knowledgeable respondants to score only slightly higher than a random set of answers, then the FP has it right.
I would also mention that for the SATs and most professional exams, we don't use the "dumb" form of multiple choice. The SATs count wrong answers against the testtaker; many computerized professional exams use a curious format where you have a set number of questions but each question counts for a number of points roughly proportional to its hardness, and as you answer questions correctly, the hardness increases so you can get more points quicker (or decreases so you can get fewer points slower... so you could pass with perhaps 20 correct "hard" answers, or 80 "easy" ones).
Of course, if you actually drive like that, which car your driving becomes totally moot because no driver will respect you anyhow.
I take it you've never driven in Boston...
And for the record, no, I do not regularly drive like that. But having the option to forcefully merge...
In any case, "respect" comes from a long relationship. On the road, that means nothing. A bunch of strangers that I'll never see again, and around whom I drive defensively because I can't trust any of them to have slept well last night; to have at least one hand on the wheel rather than one on the coffee and one on the cellphone; to have a BAC of zero; To have a blood benzo level of zero (Xanax/Klonopin/Ativan/etc have warnings on them for a reason, bluehairs!); to generally count as what we might call "sane" and not suddenly express their self loathing with suicide-by-head-on-collision. I "respect" them only in the same way I "respect" a pissed-off badger - I do my best to avoid them.
I can't imagine buying one of these things. It looks totally freakish
;-)
Thanks, but yes, I do feel confortable with the size of my penis.
with it's tiny size you're get about zero respect from other drivers on the highway.
Who needs respect, when you can "merge" into the space between any two cars on the road, even ahead of a tailgater?
And the milage is ONLY 40 mpg? What the hell?
I'll give you that point... 40MPG really doesn't amount to anything special. For a car so tiny, I'd expect quite a lot better fuel efficiency. Oddly enough, the relevant Wiki lists them as getting 50MPG in Europe, so I have to wonder which number holds true.
I agree it looks ugly, but if they offer the TDI version in the US (69MPG! Of course, most state DOT/DMVs seem to have sticks up their asses regarding passenger diesels, so that will never happen), I'd buy one when my current car dies.
The reason why this doesn't fall under the same category as brewing your own beer is that the beer does not damage the road which requires maintenance.
We have a lot of taxes imposed ostensibly for a set purpose, which in reality have little to do with that purpose. Cigarettes as another good example, where the enormous per-pack taxes would (nearly) outright pay for all healthcare in most civilized Western nations (for comparison, Japan has an annual health budget of roughly USD$7 billion with half the population of the US, while the US pulls in over 10 billion in cigarette taxes).
All such taxes, with the exception of FICA, merely go into the general fund and Congress wastes it however they want - Currently, I could fairly claim that every penny of our "road" taxes (and then some) goes to killing Iraqis. That also implies more of a direct source-to-destination connection than actually exists, but commits no less of an error than saying "gas tax goes to road maintenance". The latter just sounds more palatable to We The Sheeple, despite having no basis in reality.
I look at fuel taxes as just another one of these bogus niche taxes. Just a questionably-legal-but-tolerated form of sales tax; if you don't buy the product to which the tax applies, you shouldn't need to pay the tax. Simple as that.
If his is like most of the other greasecars out there, it's got a dual fuel system with veggie oil on one side and standard diesel or a biodeisel mix on the other
Biodiesel != running on vegetable oil. You can run B100 from a cold start in an unmodified diesel engine, without the slightest bit of trouble. You can even use it in post-2007 diesels that require ULSD (<15ppm sulphur), as biodiesel has effectively no sulphur.
Now, buidiesel does have a higher gelling point than dinodiesel, but that just means you need to thin it in the winter (kerosene works wonders, though here in the NorthEast you'll probably need to run B20 at best in the winter).
As for the more on-topic issue here of "should he get a fine for evading fuel taxes"... If you brew your own beer, you don't need to pay the alcohol tax on it. Why wouldn't noncommercial low-volume biodiesel production fall into the category?
There's no reason a state that has a net outflow of money should be any more excited about unfunded mandates than states with a net inflow.
Your choice of words expresses an idea that I did not.
I didn't claim they would like Real-ID as an unfunded mandate - One can express a preference between two unpleasant situations without wanting either outcome . Just that, as the welfare-states have more reason to dislike it as an unfunded mandate, it makes sense that they would oppose it more than the sugardaddy-states, if we take them as primarily looking at this from the financial perspective.
That's the kind of logic that says if something is on sale, you should buy it whether you need it or not, since after all you're "saving" money.
"Need it or not" as the key phrase there. If you don't eat Tuna and it goes on sale, buying it seems stupid. If you stock up on really cheap toilet paper, you will eventually use it. And as a better analogy (a government mandated expense), none of us "need" auto insurance, but most states leave us no choice in the matter; so you may as well buy the cheapest you can find.
Yes it may be an AC, but if you are going to make a claim. Back it up with a link something resembling proof please.
The burden of proof here rests on the poster originally making the assertion, not the respondant calling BS.
You can't prove they don't do something - Even official statements to the contrary wouldn't disprove the practice. OTOH, to support the GP's stance, he need only post a single instance of such fines occurring.
The United States Government is saying "we're going to create these standards and you are going to pay to implement them" and the states are naturally balking at having to foot the bill for Washington D.C.'s foolishness.
Although you make a good point, you need to dig one layer further to see that some states object on moral (or at least, autonomy) grounds rather than merely due to funding issues...
You can break states up into "welfare" and "SugarDaddy" states (This has a very high correlation with red-vs-blue, incidentally, but I don't mean this post to start a partisan flamewar). The states that have so far objected to Real Id, almost without fail, fall among the SugarDaddy states, the ones with a net outflow of money vs federal taxes.
If your hypothesis (that most objecting states do so primarily for economic reasons) held true, then you would expect to see the exact opposite pattern among objectors/SugarDaddies. As the funding comes from the states anyway, whether directly or via the federal government, having each state pay their own way would cost the SugarDaddies less, overall.
Thus, by reductio ad absurdum, your hypothesis appears false... Though I would still applaud you for raising the point, since regardless of whether the states or the feds pay, we the people still get stuck with the bill at the end of the day (or April 15th, in this case).
What impact will 802.11n have?
It will replace 802.11a/b/g, but beyond that, none. Speed really doesn't count as the biggest problem with wireless - I'd personally put "reliability" at #1 and "security" at #2.
Which wireless security threats are scariest?
The DOJ sniffing your traffic from outside rather than needing to at least enter the building (and thus possibly get caught on your security camera(s)).
What of wireless VoIP?
What of it? Whether you use a VOIP set that connects via 802.11, or a VOIP set that connects a base station via ethernet and has a cordless handset makes no difference. Except, perhaps, that while the 2.4GHz spectrum has gotten rather crowded lately, the 800MHz range used for cordless phones has become less congested in recent years.
Will your organization need to change to support enterprise mobility?
Probably, because most enterprise apps tweak if they lose their network connection even momentarily - See my first answer.
How do you control costs in an expanding mobile and wireless environment?
"The only winning move is not to play".
What can you do to stop wireless denial-of-service attacks?"
1) Use a wire.
2) Wait for the entropic death of the universe.
Seriously, no realistic solution exists between those two - A wireless DOS doesn't take anything high-tech... A spark-gap transmitter will do nicely. And don't forget "unintentional" DOSs... At my house, I suffer one every few second due to a nearby airport's radar (again, see my first answer), thus I almost exclusively use a wired connection except for totally noncritical and connection-state-less uses such as surfing the web from my couch.
Name that quote
;-)
Ooh, ooh, I know!
Part of the "decorative pattern" on Bush's private toilet-paper.
I think the silly, meaningless sentence you quoted comes from the first roll, ninth sheet.
I felt like I was watching a David Lynch movie. It was a pure WTF!?! moment. I have psychological blue balls.
;-)
So we can expect the movie to wrap up everything in one tidy little package, yet make absolutely no sense?
in the contract or at very least in the sale, they promise you a certain bandwidth, if they can't deliver what they promise you don't need to pay what you promised.
Okay, I have a situation for you...
I currently have TW RR, but never signed a contract (with TW). I originally had it through Adelphia, which went under and TW bought them out. But my Adelphia TOS actually looks pretty sweet compared to TWs...
So, if I actually cared enough to take them to court over this, would I have a leg to stand on, or should I just presume that as a mere human TW has the right to fuck me however hard they want?
Anyway, moves like this on the part of broadband provider will just accellerate a trend that we've already seen for the past decade - Every protocol will eventually just use encrypted communications wrapped in bogus HTTP packets. At which point, if the ISPs want to "shape" traffic, it will amount to flat out throttling your pipe. Let's see the backlash then, when even Grandma can't watch cheesy content on YouTube because the throttling makes it lag so badly.
Why should any scientist hope that standard model will or will not turn out to be true?
FTA: "But what happens if the Higgs turns out to be just right? Well, then the standard model predicts that you'd need a machine roughly a quadrillion times more powerful than the LHC to find anything new. With current technology, this would mean an accelerator the circumference of the Milky Way."
Basically, if they find the Higgs boson, every particle physicist can go home and retire, as any possible non-theoretical work in our lifetimes (and possible, ever) will turn up absolutely nothing new.
If they don't find it, things get a bit fuzzier.
1) PirateBay has ads. So what? So does Slashdot.
2) Previous Russian law allowed AllOfMP3. It no longer does. So?
3) Copying a CD from my friend doesn't (yet) count as terrorism, guys.
4) Very few people care about the label behind their music, pirated or not.
5) So the labels can't afford small artists - Good thing they don't actually need labels anymore!
6) That would break the law. File suit, if you actually believe such BS.
7) Boo-hoo, I don't generate tax revenue. Hear the violins?
8) "Bought Pirate Products" - Change the subject, much?
9) The law already disallows piracy. Most people just don't care.
10) I've discovered over half of the artists currently on my playlist via questionably-legal means.
The most open way to do incremental backups I have found is to use a batch file and backup files into a zip file which have changed since the date of your last incremental backup. Do incrementals every week/month or so, and mirrors every night.
Look into rsync'ing against a hardlinked copy. Each backup effectively gives you a full backup, yet takes up only as much disk space as an incremental.
It does eat up inodes, though, so make sure you don't skimp on them when you first format your drive (and if you have tons of small files, you might want to reserve a hefty surplus of them).
After years of suffering through how best to trade off between full and incremental backups, this little trick just blew me away. As for your backup media, you can use a separate physical machine, or even just a single (or regularly rotating set of) large USB HDD (everyone spare me the tape-vs-HDD argument - Suffice it to say, I consider tapes (or more accurately, tape drives) the biggest waste of money ever created) that you keep offline 99% of the time.
Make Net businesses compete on the same level as their brick-and-mortar counterparts.
They'll still win. The state will just get its (un)fair cut of the transaction.
Online, I can search for exactly what I want, find a few highly rated variants of that product, and pull up the specs on each in seconds. I can search for negative reviews about them to see if they look good on paper but don't live up to expectations. I can then "shop around" to get a good price (even repeating the "negative reviews" check for the vendor I choose, if I've never dealt with them before) and place my order.
I can do all of that it considerably less time than it would take me to drive to a local store, find the general type of product I want, settle for one of the three models they carry with no information beyond what the box says, and check-out with no idea of what this product sells for elsewhere (or I can waste even more time by visiting a few other stores, on the unlikely chance they carry the exact same model).
And I don't need to deal with traffic. I don't need to deal with annoying salespeople. I don't need to deal with crowds, or for that matter any other customers with their strange smells and who-knows-what contagious diseases (don't mothers still teach people to cover their damned mouths when coughing?). And most delightfully, I don't need to tell the cashier where to stick their extended warranty.
Yeah, "level playing field"... Suuuuure.
We're assuming that real names
You lost the present audience with that one statement.
Which, interestingly enough, makes a point of its own - You perhaps have a level of real-world credibility that you would like to extend a priori to your online life. Many of us would rather keep our "real" lives 100% separate, and accept the penalty of needing to prove ourselves for each online community in which we participate.
I submit myself as such an example - I have 3.5 degrees (1.5 of them in "hard" subjects) covering something like 250 credit hours, yet choose to present myself semi-anonymously on Slashdot - Where I happen to have "Excellent" karma. My education no doubt helps me, both in composing intelligible posts, and with having a good background from which to post meaningful commentary on a variety of topics. But I rarely even mention my academic credentials here, and don't think I've ever invoked them as support in an argument online (except as I used them here, just as an possibly-meaningless example from my own life).
But yeah, it's a very difficult problem. Figuring it out is a big, potentially very lucrative issue.
Lucrative, indeed! Many companies would love the ability to tie an individual's multiple online personas together under a single massive profile. Cookies failed, WebBugs failed, Flash Shared Objects failed - What greater victory could the world of commerce claim than to get us to voluntarily do that which they can't seem to force on us?
Thanks, but no thanks. I'll earn my reputation at each site on which I choose to play, and make it as hard as possible to connect this account with any others I might have. I value my anonymity (or since I won't pretend any of us really have that, at least "plausible deniability") far, far more than I dislike the small credibility-penalty of needing to establish a new online persona.
Google has enough money to compete in these auctions. Why wouldn't they simply outbid the competitors and sell the space themselves?
Actually, they do have enough money - Google has a market cap roughly equal to Verizon and Time Warner combined
The problem here doesn't (only) involve money, though - Basically, it sounds like these auctions have most of the "fairness" of EBay, where unscrupulous sellers (sadly, our own government in this case) and bidders can drive a price up far beyond its fair value. In this case, the existing broadband companies (the first two pipes referenced in the FP) would presumeably like to keep their regional duopolies and would either use the 700MHz range for their exclusive use, or if they can, buy it cheap just to prevent anyone else from using it.
Thus the requested condition that the winner MUST license it to competitors - That prevents Verizon (for example) from using various tricks to get the spectrum cheap and then do nothing with it.
Not so sure I understand the reason for some of the other mentioned terms of the auction (anonymous? I know our government has some corruption, but so bad that a non-anonymous auction would give the existing players an unfair edge?)
It's like saying that it's legal to copy DVDs, but only if you're talented enough to crack the encryption yourself, with no help.
Not quite - More like saying that you and your friends can legally film yourselves doing a reproduction of a movie on DVD, purely for noncommercial use.
Which you can.