Are you ready for an era where the ignition key doesn't exist?"
A physical key still unlocks the doors when the car's battery has died. A physical key doesn't itself have a battery to die, leaving you stranded in a blizzard in the middle of nowhere after you stop to pee on the side of the road. And perhaps most importantly - A physical key doesn't cost some $300 to replace when you drop it in a puddle. If that particular scam doesn't solely account for the auto industry's desire to move to keyless fobs, I have a bridge for sale.
They honestly see resource shortages as a good thing, because the modern technological lifestyle is inherently evil.
Nice strawman, but... No.
No one (sane) considers resource shortages a "good" thing. Resource pressure, on the other hand, helps to prevent actual shortages.
When you have a free and unlimited open faucet, you use water for any old thing that comes to mind - Drinking, bathing, slip-n'-slides, washing the car, making rainbows with mist, growing a climate-inappropriate groundcover plant, whatever strikes your fancy.
When you have a $200/month water bill associated with that faucet, you damned well make sure it goes to the necessities, and you find a way to shower in under five minutes.
And when you get a ration of one gallon of water per day - You use it for drinking and cooking, period.
Conservationists "like" situation #2 solely because it prevents us from getting to #3. Unfortunately, we have, historically, artificially created the appearance of situation #1 even in the middle of a frickin' desert thanks to activities like draining the Colorado river dry (and the resulting downstream environmental disaster, as well as not-so-slowly depleting continental aquifers that take millennia to refill (ask Florida what happens when those get too low).
In a universe where you can really make infinite energy and infinite water and infinite food - Waste all you want! But in our universe, TANSTAAFL.
It actually started the other way around: what was originally Google Docs became (part of) Google Drive a while back.
The nomenclature part of this doesn't bother me. I couldn't care less whether they call it "Google Docs" or "Google Drive" or "Google Kittens".
I very much do care, however, about needing to actually download and install an app to do something that previously worked perfectly well via website. I've always found Sheets a bit more cludgy than using Excel locally, but its online massively-collaborative nature more than made up for that (when sharing and collaboration matter). Now, it sounds like they've extended the long-standing intentional cut-and-paste "bug" to any serious use of Docs. Not acceptable, Google.
First of all, the original lights survey does not equal a neatly labelled Bortle map. But fair enough, that does go to an interactive Google map of something vaguely similar to what the GP posted.
Second... I see now how I missed the link - TFA has randomly chosen to disobey web site useability rule #1 - Don't change the style of links just because you happen to dislike underlined blue text. Very clever. Clearly, any moron could have viewed the page source, found the link (assuming they already knew it), searched the page for the the text bound to that link, and clicked it, amirite? Yes, I missed it. And yes, TFA fails worse than any of us.
That said, thank you for pointing out to me that I haven't "fixed" my latest installation of FireFox to ignore site-imposted styling of links. I will remedy that immediately.
No, that's a site with a map - had you actually read the article, you'd have found it included a way to incorporate the information in Google Earth (a map program, you may have heard of it) as well.
Let's see, download and install a program plus download an import a map layer... Or visit a URL.
Yes, not the same thing - But the GP's link counts as a heck of a lot more convenient for those of us who just want to find the nearest convenient spot with the lowest light pollution.
In my case, thanks to the GP, that took about 20 seconds to discover that I live at the edge of a 3 or 4 zone, and I have a ton of options for getting a 2 about an hour's drive away.
Or, I could have followed the directions in TFA and still have Google Earth spending the next hour killing my bandwidth downloading map tiles.
The article referenced in the summary had plenty of information - including two different ways to get the dark sky maps.
Do you mean the closing paragraph's "Or, for the incredibly lazy, click here for a click-and-drag map" - Which conspicuously didn't actually include any sort of link?
With capacity like this they could put in a RAID0 option which halves the capacity but increases the reliability by orders of magnitude.
SSDs don't tend to fail quite the same way that HDDs do, which I suspect leads to the (erroneous) belief that they fail more often (others in this discussion have already linked to large-scale studies that found a 1.5% failure rate in the warranty period vs 5% for HDDs).
When HDDs fail, you have usually had literally months of fair warning - SMART failures you ignored, weird noises, occasional checksum errors in the logs and eventually periodic bluescreens... And when they die, you can usually still recover 99.9% of the data on them.
When SSDs fail, the lights just go out. One millisecond you have it working fine, the next, it just doesn't exist anymore as a device in your computer. And on reboot, it might come back as an actual visible device, but it has nothing left on it (no doubt you could theoretically recover data by removing the chips and reading them one by one, but not many people have that as a realistic option).
That said, you could buy two at half the size each and RAID0 them - But I don't think you could have that done transparently within the device itself and have it work as intended.
You were warned not to let kids play with guns for literally years, and now April 8th came, you're still letting them play with guns.
Except, a dozen years ago, I bought a Nerf dart "gun". Feed it red paper tape, and it makes satisfying but harmless "bangs". Nerf never pointed out, back in 2002, that as of April 8th, 2014, my harmless foam darts would suddenly and randomly turn into armor-piercing explosive rounds.
Sure, if you worked in enterprise IT and looked at the fine print, you'd know that Microsoft's greatest-most-secure-OS-ever-now-with-automatic-no-hassle-updating-of-bugs had a planned 10 year support window.
Grandma neither works in IT nor can she make out the fine print through her trifocals, these days. And since she still thinks she lives in the Great Depression, she won't spend the extra $0.10 to get name-brand bread, never mind blowing a Benjamin upgrading to this newfangled "Winnate" thing all her younger friends say they got with their new computers and hate soooo much.
You think there is going to be an active community of people fixing flaws in Windows XP?
Yes, they go by the name "Microsoft".
MS already has extended support contracts in place that require it to continue keeping XP alive for those customers with deep enough pockets to pay for it. The GP simply meant that those patches will inevitably get leaked to the public, albeit not in a reliable, consistent manner.
If there is anything worse than linking the monetary system to governments, if you would be linking them the corporations that even worse about selfishness and tilting the playing field towards themselves at all costs.
As the bigger problem here, Paul's solution to this "problem" would effectively allow third parties to create equity in a company out of thin air. Something tells me Walmart/IBM/whomever wouldn't take kindly to every Bitcoin miner on the planet diluting their stock value.
This would only work if it functioned essentially like corporate scrip, where Walmart alone could create Bitcoins, and they could then give customers their change in BTC. Even then, they probably wouldn't want to do so, because again, it directly dilutes their stock - Or put another way, it makes "giving change" roughly equivalent to paying a microdividend (albeit in the form of a liability whose value they have some influence over, equity in themselves).
We've got a debate here that has two sides. 1. "We think there's a higher principal to uphold as a society" 2. *Comes in shouting about how little they care about the issue*
Although we have a lot more than two sides here, I have to point out that "not caring" very neatly does take a contrary stance to some crap about applying higher principals to the dispatching of rabid dogs. Some would take the stance that we shouldn't kill people, period; others completely disregard that as a baseless stance.
That said, I most assuredly didn't say I don't care about the issue. I consider this "accidental" suffering nothing short of karma injecting a tiny slice of justice back into this particular case.
First, why does the US still allow a death penalty?
Some people, you can't "rehabilitate". Some people (like Lockett), you don't even want to try. You just want them out of the picture. And put bluntly, life in prison costs too much - Scum like this doesn't deserve room, board, and free cable on the taxpayers' dime for life. They deserve...
Well, they deserve worse than he got, but we compromise with our squeamishness about actually giving his victims justice by trying to put them down more-or-less peacefully. Kinda ironic, actually, that Europe's refusal to sell us thiopental unintentionally caused Lockett to taste a tiny slice of actual justice.
Next, and relates to the first is that the Prison systems in the US have become a for profit business
Entirely separate issue. Yes, we have waaay too damned many people in a cage for nonviolent victimless offenses. Gleefully raping and murdering people doesn't compare well to getting high on the "wrong" intoxicants, however.
We tend to argue how much a prisoner costs society, but rarely discuss the morality of executing people.
Where does any moral dilemma come into the picture? Yes, Virginia, you can do things so bad that you effectively forfeit your right to basic human dignity, much less your life and comfort. Lockett did so.
Oklahoma killed a monster today. No moral issues apply.
This waste of oxygen rounded up two friends and went to beat up a guy who owed him a few bucks.
Girlfriend and another female friend just happen to drop by at the wrong moment.
Good round of beatings, all three wastes of oxygen rape the female friend.
He not-quite-fatally shoots the girlfriend twice. They fucking bury her alive.
Do you want to know exactly how bad I feel that this guy suffered for an hour?
Yes, we have some grey area in death penalty cases. This ain't one of them.
Oh, and if you want to really feel good about humanity today, the second execution that they stopped because of Lockett squirming a little? Raped and murdered an 11 month old baby. Real paragons of virtues, these guys.
There's this marvelous service called a safe deposit box that banks offer...
Or your parents/kids/trusted friend's house, for alternatives that don't cost a monthly fee. Plenty of offsite options.
I honestly don't quite understand the problem from TFS - You can get duplicate social security cards and birth certificates trivially; I have about a dozen photo IDs from over the years, some on the older side but barring a facially-disfiguring disaster, I still look sufficiently like "me".
Keep a duplicate SS and BC, your passport (when not in use) or an old license/work/student ID, and (if you can afford it) a few hundred in cash at Mom's house. Done. You have a "backup" of everything you need to live the two weeks it takes to get all the regular contents of your wallet reissued.
How does not being in debt make you have a low credit score.
It doesn't. Most people have no clue how that works (and most people have crap credit scores to prove it).
If you have never taken on any debt that you paid off more-or-less on time and never had an electric/cell/cable bill then yes, you will have a crap credit rating. If you have a mountain of debt repeatedly past due then yes, you will have a crap credit rating. But even just having a single credit card that you use for nothing but buying gas and pay in full every month will give you a pretty decent credit rating. Combine that with a modest car loan once a decade, a student loan you didn't ignore for 20 years, and a few utilities that actually report on you (many actually don't, oddly enough), and you can get into the upper 700s without ever taking on any "real" debt.
I fit pretty much exactly that situation when I bought my first home, and with the exception of a small student loan, had never owed more than I could pay off immediately; and even at the peak of the housing crash, I had banks begging me to take a mortgage in the ballpark of half a percent below (with no points) the market average.
Printed documents have value, particularly financial, medical, and legal documents; scans of them do not.
I scan and shred every (worth-keeping) bit of mail I get. Period.
Financial? Every financial institution with which I do business (banks, credit cards, stock trading) sends my statements electronically already. Medical document producers annoyingly refuse to send me things electronically, but it makes zero difference whether I know my cholesterol levels because of reading it off a printed page or a PDF. As for legal documents, my 1040 counts as the single most important legal document I deal with each year, and Yes, Virginia, I fill it out and file it electronically, and store only a digital copy of my filing. As the sole exception to that, the deed to my home they physically handed to me at closing - But the paper has no actual value, only the fact that my town office has the transfer of ownership on file really matters.
Physical mail has outlived its usefulness. Let the USPS go under, and we can all move on from killing so many trees in the name of Direct Marketing. The only things I physically receive that I actually wouldn't rather have emailed to me me, I ordered from Amazon.
But really...it's about drugs. You don't need to sell Beanie Babies anonymously.
And showering in a public bathhouse takes fewer resources than doing it in your own bathroom. You don't need to shower privately.
I would also point out that cash has more anonymity than any digital currency ever created. Why do you need cash, you goddamned drug-dealing terrorist?
/ tldr: "Need" has nothing to do with it. Uncle Sam has no business in my business.
Okay, I can understand political and crime/legal dramas (wouldn't want people accidentally thinking they have legal rights). But tBBT?
What, does Putin happen to favor String Theory, and Sheldon's recent abandonment of it (oh BTW, spoilers, sweetie!) pushed him in to a prostitute-killing rage?
An "urban legend" refers to something that sounds true, but may or may not actually have happened (though usually not, and when actually real, usually they blend several unrelated events into one narrative). It usually has a moralistic component to it, where somehow the naughty teenagers or the careless company or what-have-you gets their just desserts.
By contrast, the burial of ET in the desert meets none of those criteria. Atari dumped millions of cartridges in the New Mexico desert to dispose of them, we have an abundance of documentation from the era that it really happened, and the only "moral" to the story involves not expecting your developers to cover your $12M bet with their own asses in the month before Christmas.
Otherwise - Very cool, to see these recovered. Now they can properly recycle them as eWaste, rather than just letting them slowly leach lead into the ground.
Why not use a mass transit service like subway or tram?
I suspect you meant that tongue-in-cheek, but if not...
The nearest subway stop to me: 213 miles.
The nearest passenger train stop: 90 miles.
The nearest bus stop? 24 miles.
Hell, the nearest taxi service won't even come to my house unless I prepay by credit card.
And although you could fairly say that I live in the middle of nowhere, I actually live in a fairly densely populated region of the country, just not inside an actual city. The US just plain has fuck-all for realistic public transportation.
Sure, management wouldn't let him make the change and that is bad.
With this going so high that congress dragged the CEO in to lie to them that this involved anything more than "cheaper to let you die", by naming these two engineers, GM has just given them the power to completely ruin the company.
"We tried to do the right thing and management thwarted us at every turn". Done in one, the CEO just perjured herself before congress, and the class action liability suits put GM (back) into bankruptcy (where they belong).
Unfortunately in this case, engineers tend to have too strong of a "boyscout" streak in them, and the ones implicated here will probably just do their best to ignore the fact that GM just threw them under the bus for following orders.
Or put another way - I don't work in an industry that seriously puts people's lives in danger, and legal would goose-step me out of the goddamned building before they let me do something like GM claims these two engineers did "on their own". So an entire multinational supply and manufacturing chain of command just quietly went along with the whims of two peons that massively violated protocol? Bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
Where is WALDO?
Umm... Right here?
Are you ready for an era where the ignition key doesn't exist?"
A physical key still unlocks the doors when the car's battery has died. A physical key doesn't itself have a battery to die, leaving you stranded in a blizzard in the middle of nowhere after you stop to pee on the side of the road. And perhaps most importantly - A physical key doesn't cost some $300 to replace when you drop it in a puddle. If that particular scam doesn't solely account for the auto industry's desire to move to keyless fobs, I have a bridge for sale.
They honestly see resource shortages as a good thing, because the modern technological lifestyle is inherently evil.
Nice strawman, but... No.
No one (sane) considers resource shortages a "good" thing. Resource pressure, on the other hand, helps to prevent actual shortages.
When you have a free and unlimited open faucet, you use water for any old thing that comes to mind - Drinking, bathing, slip-n'-slides, washing the car, making rainbows with mist, growing a climate-inappropriate groundcover plant, whatever strikes your fancy.
When you have a $200/month water bill associated with that faucet, you damned well make sure it goes to the necessities, and you find a way to shower in under five minutes.
And when you get a ration of one gallon of water per day - You use it for drinking and cooking, period.
Conservationists "like" situation #2 solely because it prevents us from getting to #3. Unfortunately, we have, historically, artificially created the appearance of situation #1 even in the middle of a frickin' desert thanks to activities like draining the Colorado river dry (and the resulting downstream environmental disaster, as well as not-so-slowly depleting continental aquifers that take millennia to refill (ask Florida what happens when those get too low).
In a universe where you can really make infinite energy and infinite water and infinite food - Waste all you want! But in our universe, TANSTAAFL.
It actually started the other way around: what was originally Google Docs became (part of) Google Drive a while back.
The nomenclature part of this doesn't bother me. I couldn't care less whether they call it "Google Docs" or "Google Drive" or "Google Kittens".
I very much do care, however, about needing to actually download and install an app to do something that previously worked perfectly well via website. I've always found Sheets a bit more cludgy than using Excel locally, but its online massively-collaborative nature more than made up for that (when sharing and collaboration matter). Now, it sounds like they've extended the long-standing intentional cut-and-paste "bug" to any serious use of Docs. Not acceptable, Google.
First of all, the original lights survey does not equal a neatly labelled Bortle map. But fair enough, that does go to an interactive Google map of something vaguely similar to what the GP posted.
Second... I see now how I missed the link - TFA has randomly chosen to disobey web site useability rule #1 - Don't change the style of links just because you happen to dislike underlined blue text. Very clever. Clearly, any moron could have viewed the page source, found the link (assuming they already knew it), searched the page for the the text bound to that link, and clicked it, amirite? Yes, I missed it. And yes, TFA fails worse than any of us.
That said, thank you for pointing out to me that I haven't "fixed" my latest installation of FireFox to ignore site-imposted styling of links. I will remedy that immediately.
No, that's a site with a map - had you actually read the article, you'd have found it included a way to incorporate the information in Google Earth (a map program, you may have heard of it) as well.
Let's see, download and install a program plus download an import a map layer... Or visit a URL.
Yes, not the same thing - But the GP's link counts as a heck of a lot more convenient for those of us who just want to find the nearest convenient spot with the lowest light pollution.
In my case, thanks to the GP, that took about 20 seconds to discover that I live at the edge of a 3 or 4 zone, and I have a ton of options for getting a 2 about an hour's drive away.
Or, I could have followed the directions in TFA and still have Google Earth spending the next hour killing my bandwidth downloading map tiles.
The article referenced in the summary had plenty of information - including two different ways to get the dark sky maps.
Do you mean the closing paragraph's "Or, for the incredibly lazy, click here for a click-and-drag map" - Which conspicuously didn't actually include any sort of link?
With capacity like this they could put in a RAID0 option which halves the capacity but increases the reliability by orders of magnitude.
SSDs don't tend to fail quite the same way that HDDs do, which I suspect leads to the (erroneous) belief that they fail more often (others in this discussion have already linked to large-scale studies that found a 1.5% failure rate in the warranty period vs 5% for HDDs).
When HDDs fail, you have usually had literally months of fair warning - SMART failures you ignored, weird noises, occasional checksum errors in the logs and eventually periodic bluescreens... And when they die, you can usually still recover 99.9% of the data on them.
When SSDs fail, the lights just go out. One millisecond you have it working fine, the next, it just doesn't exist anymore as a device in your computer. And on reboot, it might come back as an actual visible device, but it has nothing left on it (no doubt you could theoretically recover data by removing the chips and reading them one by one, but not many people have that as a realistic option).
That said, you could buy two at half the size each and RAID0 them - But I don't think you could have that done transparently within the device itself and have it work as intended.
You were warned not to let kids play with guns for literally years, and now April 8th came, you're still letting them play with guns.
Except, a dozen years ago, I bought a Nerf dart "gun". Feed it red paper tape, and it makes satisfying but harmless "bangs". Nerf never pointed out, back in 2002, that as of April 8th, 2014, my harmless foam darts would suddenly and randomly turn into armor-piercing explosive rounds.
Sure, if you worked in enterprise IT and looked at the fine print, you'd know that Microsoft's greatest-most-secure-OS-ever-now-with-automatic-no-hassle-updating-of-bugs had a planned 10 year support window.
Grandma neither works in IT nor can she make out the fine print through her trifocals, these days. And since she still thinks she lives in the Great Depression, she won't spend the extra $0.10 to get name-brand bread, never mind blowing a Benjamin upgrading to this newfangled "Winnate" thing all her younger friends say they got with their new computers and hate soooo much.
You think there is going to be an active community of people fixing flaws in Windows XP?
Yes, they go by the name "Microsoft".
MS already has extended support contracts in place that require it to continue keeping XP alive for those customers with deep enough pockets to pay for it. The GP simply meant that those patches will inevitably get leaked to the public, albeit not in a reliable, consistent manner.
If there is anything worse than linking the monetary system to governments, if you would be linking them the corporations that even worse about selfishness and tilting the playing field towards themselves at all costs.
As the bigger problem here, Paul's solution to this "problem" would effectively allow third parties to create equity in a company out of thin air. Something tells me Walmart/IBM/whomever wouldn't take kindly to every Bitcoin miner on the planet diluting their stock value.
This would only work if it functioned essentially like corporate scrip, where Walmart alone could create Bitcoins, and they could then give customers their change in BTC. Even then, they probably wouldn't want to do so, because again, it directly dilutes their stock - Or put another way, it makes "giving change" roughly equivalent to paying a microdividend (albeit in the form of a liability whose value they have some influence over, equity in themselves).
While in theory 100% transparency in gov't sounds like a good idea, in practice it's a recipe for gridlock.
While in theory, a functional government sounds like a good idea, in practice, a state of perpetual gridlock means they do the least harm over time.
Beautiful. Only on Slashdot could posting the actual background information of the case at hand count as "trolling".
We've got a debate here that has two sides. 1. "We think there's a higher principal to uphold as a society" 2. *Comes in shouting about how little they care about the issue*
Although we have a lot more than two sides here, I have to point out that "not caring" very neatly does take a contrary stance to some crap about applying higher principals to the dispatching of rabid dogs. Some would take the stance that we shouldn't kill people, period; others completely disregard that as a baseless stance.
That said, I most assuredly didn't say I don't care about the issue. I consider this "accidental" suffering nothing short of karma injecting a tiny slice of justice back into this particular case.
First, why does the US still allow a death penalty?
.
Some people, you can't "rehabilitate". Some people (like Lockett), you don't even want to try. You just want them out of the picture. And put bluntly, life in prison costs too much - Scum like this doesn't deserve room, board, and free cable on the taxpayers' dime for life. They deserve...
Well, they deserve worse than he got, but we compromise with our squeamishness about actually giving his victims justice by trying to put them down more-or-less peacefully. Kinda ironic, actually, that Europe's refusal to sell us thiopental unintentionally caused Lockett to taste a tiny slice of actual justice
Next, and relates to the first is that the Prison systems in the US have become a for profit business
Entirely separate issue. Yes, we have waaay too damned many people in a cage for nonviolent victimless offenses. Gleefully raping and murdering people doesn't compare well to getting high on the "wrong" intoxicants, however.
We tend to argue how much a prisoner costs society, but rarely discuss the morality of executing people.
Where does any moral dilemma come into the picture? Yes, Virginia, you can do things so bad that you effectively forfeit your right to basic human dignity, much less your life and comfort. Lockett did so.
Oklahoma killed a monster today. No moral issues apply.
This waste of oxygen rounded up two friends and went to beat up a guy who owed him a few bucks.
Girlfriend and another female friend just happen to drop by at the wrong moment.
Good round of beatings, all three wastes of oxygen rape the female friend.
He not-quite-fatally shoots the girlfriend twice. They fucking bury her alive.
Do you want to know exactly how bad I feel that this guy suffered for an hour?
Yes, we have some grey area in death penalty cases. This ain't one of them.
Oh, and if you want to really feel good about humanity today, the second execution that they stopped because of Lockett squirming a little? Raped and murdered an 11 month old baby. Real paragons of virtues, these guys.
There's this marvelous service called a safe deposit box that banks offer...
Or your parents/kids/trusted friend's house, for alternatives that don't cost a monthly fee. Plenty of offsite options.
I honestly don't quite understand the problem from TFS - You can get duplicate social security cards and birth certificates trivially; I have about a dozen photo IDs from over the years, some on the older side but barring a facially-disfiguring disaster, I still look sufficiently like "me".
Keep a duplicate SS and BC, your passport (when not in use) or an old license/work/student ID, and (if you can afford it) a few hundred in cash at Mom's house. Done. You have a "backup" of everything you need to live the two weeks it takes to get all the regular contents of your wallet reissued.
How does not being in debt make you have a low credit score.
It doesn't. Most people have no clue how that works (and most people have crap credit scores to prove it).
If you have never taken on any debt that you paid off more-or-less on time and never had an electric/cell/cable bill then yes, you will have a crap credit rating. If you have a mountain of debt repeatedly past due then yes, you will have a crap credit rating. But even just having a single credit card that you use for nothing but buying gas and pay in full every month will give you a pretty decent credit rating. Combine that with a modest car loan once a decade, a student loan you didn't ignore for 20 years, and a few utilities that actually report on you (many actually don't, oddly enough), and you can get into the upper 700s without ever taking on any "real" debt.
I fit pretty much exactly that situation when I bought my first home, and with the exception of a small student loan, had never owed more than I could pay off immediately; and even at the peak of the housing crash, I had banks begging me to take a mortgage in the ballpark of half a percent below (with no points) the market average.
Printed documents have value, particularly financial, medical, and legal documents; scans of them do not.
I scan and shred every (worth-keeping) bit of mail I get. Period.
Financial? Every financial institution with which I do business (banks, credit cards, stock trading) sends my statements electronically already. Medical document producers annoyingly refuse to send me things electronically, but it makes zero difference whether I know my cholesterol levels because of reading it off a printed page or a PDF. As for legal documents, my 1040 counts as the single most important legal document I deal with each year, and Yes, Virginia, I fill it out and file it electronically, and store only a digital copy of my filing. As the sole exception to that, the deed to my home they physically handed to me at closing - But the paper has no actual value, only the fact that my town office has the transfer of ownership on file really matters.
Physical mail has outlived its usefulness. Let the USPS go under, and we can all move on from killing so many trees in the name of Direct Marketing. The only things I physically receive that I actually wouldn't rather have emailed to me me, I ordered from Amazon.
Your public bathhouse example is terrible.
So, you didn't make it all the way down to my "tldr" summary, eh?
"Need" has nothing to do with it. But you've already stopped reading.
But really...it's about drugs. You don't need to sell Beanie Babies anonymously.
And showering in a public bathhouse takes fewer resources than doing it in your own bathroom. You don't need to shower privately.
I would also point out that cash has more anonymity than any digital currency ever created. Why do you need cash, you goddamned drug-dealing terrorist?
/ tldr: "Need" has nothing to do with it. Uncle Sam has no business in my business.
China. Not Russia. Yes, I am a fucking moron.
:)
But I ninja'd all the haters who will now repeat this correction, at least.
Okay, I can understand political and crime/legal dramas (wouldn't want people accidentally thinking they have legal rights). But tBBT?
What, does Putin happen to favor String Theory, and Sheldon's recent abandonment of it (oh BTW, spoilers, sweetie!) pushed him in to a prostitute-killing rage?
Yeah, one of those four doesn't quite make sense.
An "urban legend" refers to something that sounds true, but may or may not actually have happened (though usually not, and when actually real, usually they blend several unrelated events into one narrative). It usually has a moralistic component to it, where somehow the naughty teenagers or the careless company or what-have-you gets their just desserts.
By contrast, the burial of ET in the desert meets none of those criteria. Atari dumped millions of cartridges in the New Mexico desert to dispose of them, we have an abundance of documentation from the era that it really happened, and the only "moral" to the story involves not expecting your developers to cover your $12M bet with their own asses in the month before Christmas.
Otherwise - Very cool, to see these recovered. Now they can properly recycle them as eWaste, rather than just letting them slowly leach lead into the ground.
Why not use a mass transit service like subway or tram?
I suspect you meant that tongue-in-cheek, but if not...
The nearest subway stop to me: 213 miles.
The nearest passenger train stop: 90 miles.
The nearest bus stop? 24 miles.
Hell, the nearest taxi service won't even come to my house unless I prepay by credit card.
And although you could fairly say that I live in the middle of nowhere, I actually live in a fairly densely populated region of the country, just not inside an actual city. The US just plain has fuck-all for realistic public transportation.
Sure, management wouldn't let him make the change and that is bad.
With this going so high that congress dragged the CEO in to lie to them that this involved anything more than "cheaper to let you die", by naming these two engineers, GM has just given them the power to completely ruin the company.
"We tried to do the right thing and management thwarted us at every turn". Done in one, the CEO just perjured herself before congress, and the class action liability suits put GM (back) into bankruptcy (where they belong).
Unfortunately in this case, engineers tend to have too strong of a "boyscout" streak in them, and the ones implicated here will probably just do their best to ignore the fact that GM just threw them under the bus for following orders.
Or put another way - I don't work in an industry that seriously puts people's lives in danger, and legal would goose-step me out of the goddamned building before they let me do something like GM claims these two engineers did "on their own". So an entire multinational supply and manufacturing chain of command just quietly went along with the whims of two peons that massively violated protocol? Bullshit.