The #3 television manufacturer in the world, Sony, announced on Friday it's cutting its medium-term TV sales goals in half.
Four days earlier, #5 Panasonic (Matsushita) announced it's cutting its flatscreen TV production in half.
Sharp is ranked #4. Apparently all three of the Japanese manufacturers bet too big on TVs and are getting trounced by Korean rivals Samsung (#1) and LG (#2).
Amazon is following the rules set by the California State Board of Equalization. Click here and then click the "Applying Sales Tax" tab to see those rules. This is where it gets interesting. The BOE says they must charge sales tax on the shipping unless all of the following are true:
You ship directly to the purchaser by common carrier, contract carrier, or US Mail
Your invoice clearly lists delivery, shipping, freight, or postage as a separate charge
The charge is not greater than your actual cost for delivery to customer
The first item is basically a distinction between bringing the product to the customer yourself and using a service (like USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc.). Amazon isn't delivering the item itself, so this doesn't apply to them.
The second item is making a distinction between including the cost of shipping in the cost of the item and breaking it out as a line item. Since Amazon does list shipping separately, this doesn't apply to them.
The third item makes a distinction between simply charging the customer for the cost of the shipping and making a profit on the shipping cost. Amazon is charging you more than UPS/USPS/etc charges them to ship the item, therefore they are making a profit off the shipping costs. And that is why the BOE is requiring them to collect sales tax on the charge. They're selling you something extra, they're making a profit off of it, and as a result you as the consumer have to pay tax on their profit. The fact that the extra cost is controlled by them and of no use to you is immaterial. The state treats it like Amazon raised the price of the item but tried to make it look cheaper by including a portion of the cost in with the shipping.
By doing this, the state is ensuring it gets everything it's entitled to, and making consumers aware that when they buy from Amazon, they are paying an Amazon tax, and a sales tax on the Amazon tax.
As long as it's tax avoidance, rather than tax evasion, nothing illegal in this. Everyone (corporations included) want to pay as little tax as possible. It's the governments job to close the loopholes. It's the beancounters and lawyars jobs to find the new ones.
Fair enough. Apple comes up with creative, innovative solutions and then offers them to society. Apple makes money, society benefits. I had a Diamond Rio PMP300 in 1999, but putting music on it was an ordeal, and then Apple came along and gave us something better that the average Joe could use with minimal knowledge or effort.
Here they come up with creative, innovative solutions for "perfectly-legal tax avoidance," but they're not making them available to anyone else. Sure, you have TurboTax and Quicken, and an entire industry of professionals who will attempt this for you, but nowhere near as well as what Apple has worked out. I think if Joe Smith could walk into an Apple store and buy an iOS device with a tax assistant that uses Apple's "proprietary technology" to find loopholes to cut his tax liability down to 1.9%, people would not be so upset about this.
Is that ever going to happen? No. But this paradigm is the reason your skin crawls when you read articles like this.
Wikipedia's explanation of the term Above The Fold (the counterpart to "Below The Fold")
Jakob Nielsen's take on scrolling and Web design. Basically, he used to say "don't make your users scroll," but now he believes that the fold should be used to prioritize the content on the page. Which is what Apple did.
...Apple modified its website recently to ensure the message is never displayed without visitors having to scroll down to the bottom first.
The industry-term for something on your home page that you have to scroll to see is "below the fold." It comes from the newspaper industry. A standard broadsheet format newspaper (as opposed to a tabloid) would sit on a newsstand or in a news box folded in half. With this in mind, the layout editors intentionally put the most important stories "above the fold" on the front page, and the less-important stories that are still important enough to be front-page news go "below the fold."
Putting something below the fold, whether in print or online, is not hiding it. It's still on the front page. It's just saying "this isn't the most important content on the page." And in this case, the forced apology is not the most important content on Apple's home page... Apple sells products and services, not apologies. If the judges felt it was that important, they would have specified it had to be above the fold or at the top. But they didn't. Quite possibly because the concept of something being below the fold is foreign to them, since the British journalistic diet consists primarily of tabloids, which are designed to scream, "EVERYTHING ON THIS PAGE IS IMPORTANT! BUY ME NOW!!!"
Apple complied with the letter of the judgment, but not the spirit. So the judges modified the imposed requirement, and Apple again complied with the letter, and not the spirit.
From Apple's perspective, it is fighting Samsung over these same issues in a number of different countries. In some places it wins, some places it doesn't. For Apple to post a statement that purports to be from Apple stating that Samsung did not copy would be ridiculous, because it's already won judgments in other jurisdictions that say Samsung did copy. People who follow this understand that there are going to be different results in different courts, but the general public (who are the primary audience for Apple's home page) don't understand that. All they see is Apple contradicting itself. They don't realize that a judge is putting words in Apple's corporate mouth. It's judicial ventriloquism, with a judge pulling on strings to make the public believe that Apple is saying something it's not. This alone, regardless of what company or individual we're talking about, is disturbing. What else can a judge force you to say? Who else do they control in this manner? The BBC? The Prime Minister?
The judges' requirement seems at best very juvenile to me (not that either Apple and Samsung have been very mature in these court cases... but from a powdered wig-wearing British judge you'd expect some maturity). It's like asking a 5 year old to apologize to another 5 year old. You'll never get a real apology, you're not changing anything, and the rest of the 5 year olds are sitting there rolling their eyes. What Apple should have done was post a statement as directed but make it absolutely clear that:
By order of the court Apple is required to say "_______." despite the fact that courts in other countries have found that statement to be false. However, in deference to the court we are posting the statement as required and are eager to get back to doing what we do best: making great products for you (and hope that other companies not named Samsung will not offer you inferior attempts at copies of those products).
Comply with the letter of the law, but make it absolutely clear that these are not your words. Let the people know their judges are looking to deceive them.
NASA figured out that the surest way to meet some easy Martians is to post an arm's-length photo of yourself on mars.craigslist.com/personals/casualencounters
New In Town!
Self-sufficient adventurous type seeks casual encounters. I've been out on my own for a while now, have a serious, analytical side, but a warm heart. I still write home to my parents every day. Would love to send them photos of me with my new friends. Don't be shy! I don't bite -- I just vaporize little rocks out of curiosity.
--Rocknest Monster
...keeping laboratory animals in basements is not good practice, but research institutions keep doing it anyway.
The point of keeping them in the basement is to isolate them from outside influences that might affect your results. For instance, if you put them in the building lobby, they might get malenoma from the sun, or PETA might steal them and eat them ("People Eating Tasty Animals"). Basements are better.
I know, Sharpie markers bleed. But this pen doesn't. It's a fine point (I can't seem to find the specs though), you don't have to push down hard, always produces a consistent dark line, and it's acid-free/archival quality. I have to keep them in my car because my boss kept "borrowing" them from my desk drawer. They're usually about $2 each.
Why the fuck would any self-respecting god need technology? I was always under the impression technology was humanity's attempts at mitigating our shortcomings as NON-Gods.
First of all: Villagers use pitchforks. Gods use tridents. That being said, the trident is a tool. In theory, mythological gods used tools to do things so they wouldn't have to do things themselves. The most-commonly-used tools of the gods were people. If you have to do everything yourself, you're not a god, you're just that guy in the cubicle at the end of the row who doesn't understand shell scripting.
We hear all this talk of how modded/hacked consoles are bad for the game developers and industry as a whole. If that's the case, why would the developers include a feature that can only be used on such a console? The real story here is not that your character may get deleted. Your character is not real. The story is that the developers of Borderlands 2 have decided that players who mod/hack their console are a market segment worth developing for. That's a real problem for the console manufacturers with real consequences because it flies in the face of their claims.
But that doesn't make sense. Most of the trading volume is done by high speed trading computers which live on site and aren't affected by the transit shutdown. They could keep trading all day. They just wouldn't have any humans to take advantage of. Oh, wait... You mean they're useless beyond their capacity to cheat humans? Can't they just cheat each other today? Or would that not be as much fun?
The combination of aluminum and seamless glass walls makes it look like a floating Apple store... With an iPad on top and an iPad mini on top of that (because Steve always needed one more thing). On one of the of the iPad-like floors there's a black spot about where the headphone jack would be, except it's on the wrong side.
Perhaps the 7 iMacs are for navigation and control -- clustered to run a custom version of Siri without a connection to the data center. This way he could steer the thing, ask for the weather report and open the glass bay doors using only voice commands.
Emphasis on was. Because most divorced men have nothing but love for their ex-wives. And her three-year relationship with Hugh Grant immediately following the divorce probably didn't help. I don't have any reason to think he hates Jews or Brits because of her, but obviously he made a choice between her and Pakistan. His words:
My political life made it difficult for her to adapt to life in Pakistan. This was a mutual decision and is clearly very sad for both of us. My home and my future is in Pakistan.
Nothing wrong with that, but I wouldn't put "he divorced his Jewish wife after determining it was Pakistan or her" on his character resume. He is a politician, and politicians make their life choices for political reasons.
I don't see any evidence that they detained him as punishment for "opposing" U.S. policy. They detained him because he made a public threat against U.S. aircraft.
This guy is stirring popular anger in Pakistan by publicly stating that if elected he will order the Pakistani armed forces to shoot down U.S. drones. It's in TFA. By making that statement he is expressing an explicit determination to shoot down U.S. military aircraft. While he's not saying he wants to shoot U.S. pilots, as a general rule, shooting at U.S. property is a crime. If you fire a bullet at a federal building but it doesn't hit anyone, you're still going to jail. If you threaten to blow up a federal building expressly when no one's in it, you're still going to jail.
With that in mind, they had a guy who expressed intent to shoot down U.S. aircraft getting on a plane to the U.S. Of course they're going to pull him and get an assessment of whether letting him into U.S. airspace poses a threat. Threat assessment is their job, not censorship. If he had started killing passengers with a ball-point pen mid-flight in retaliation for the drone strikes, there would be this outrage about how "the Obama administration isn't protecting Americans." In the end they were satisfied and said he's welcome in the U.S.
We don't know, and will never know, what was said when they interrogated him. They probably did ask him about his comments. But as a politician who is running on a platform of violent anti-American sentiment, who was on his way to a fundraiser in New York (have you stopped to consider whether its appropriate for a candidate for Prime Minister to attend fundraisers in the "evil" country he is railing against?), it's in his interest to say, "see? The Americans are trying to stop me! They're validating all our fears about them. Elect me because I know first hand what it means to be stepped on by the Americans." It's political BS as usual, and you drank the Kool-Aid.
I see two ways this could be implemented (neither one is truly effective or desirable, but that won't stop people from building it or buying it if it makes them feel safer).
The system observes everyone, notices patterns in behavior and flags deviation. This is bad because it would ultimately force people to "perform" in uniform ways in public places. And if everyone is doing that, no one stands out because they ALL lookmlike they're hiding something... Because they are. Maybe the way you walk is different, or you take your time as opposed to marching toward your goal with determination. What about the person with a health problem that walks funny? We now have a computer flagging that person as deviant or defective whenever they're out in public.
The system is trained to watch for certain patterns and alert humans that the next logical act will be X. This is bad because now you have a person acting in an enforcement capability on circumstantial evidence and behavior predictions of a machine. Imagine you're in a store, holding a package of Claritin in your hand and reading the label. You reach into your inside jacket pocket with your free hand. The machine assumes you're going to pocket this $30 little box and leave. You hear, "attention Target team members. Assistance is needed in aisle 3... For... Claritin." You pull out your phone to look up the active ingredient and see if there's a cheaper generic available. By the time an employee arrives seconds later, you've put the box back on the shelf and he figures it's in your pocket. He's not going to accuse you outright, but he's going to stand there and talk to you about Claritin in the hopes that you will realize they know what you've got and put it back. But you don't, so he follows you around the store. Disturbed by this behavior, you leave without buying anything. They lose and you lose.
Predicting human behavior is a messy business. Sometimes you can do it amazingly well ("look at this guy behind me in the next lane... He's speeding up to try and squeeze in front of me before I pass the guy in front of him"), but there are so many different personal, cultural and environmental factors that drive a person's behavior you can't rely on it. The only rule is, "there is no such thing as common sense."
I've contacted Canadian Strategic Command. Fortunately, the Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve was on the other side of the country at the time, where it's supposed to be, rather than in some seismically unstable criminal warehouse. The rumors of an impending Maple Tsunami are greatly exaggerated.
For instance, note the archived film "Dating: Do's and Don'ts" (1949) It begins thus:
How do you choose a date? Whose company would you enjoy?
Well, one thing you can consider is looks. Woody thought of Janice and how good looking she was. He'd really have to rate to date her. Yes, he'd enjoy that, except... Well, it's too bad Janice always acts so superior. She'd make a fellow feel awkward and bored.
Well, perhaps someone who doesn't feel so superior. There's Betty. And yet, it just doesn't seem as if she'd be much fun.
What about Anne? She knows how to have a good time, and how to make the fellow with her relax, too. Yes, that's what a boy likes.
Yes, the Internet now provides everything you ever needed to know but were afraid to ask.
In order for paint to splatter and cover some thing it must be kept liquid which in space its ABSOLUTE ZERO. The paintballs will hit like rocks and bounce off.
It doesn't matter, because the amount of CO2 necessary to launch that many paintballs that distance would contribute so much to global warming we'd be better off taking our chances with the asteroid.
What we really need is a giant tinfoil hat to enhance the asteroid's reflectivity and a North Korean missile guidance system to ensure it can't hit anything.
The summary makes it seem like China's blocking the NY Times is a some rare spectacle. It's happened before, multiple times. The explanation is generally, "we don't know why your site is inaccessible," or "it may be a technical error," but it can be assumed that you've said something they deemed dangerous or inflammatory, just as they would stop you at the border and seize your materials if you were a missionary blatantly trying to promote religion in their country.
The Times has been pushing the story for a few days on its home page, which is also unusual (an indication of how important they deem the story -- if you didn't catch it one day, you'll catch it the next... Or the next). The key here is that it's basically accusing the leader of the country of supporting massive corruption at a time when the reins are being handed over to a new group of people who will be selected in the next few weeks and control China for the next decade. The timing is seen as intended to influence China's politics at this very sensitive time and push people to call for reform. If China had NOT blocked it, THAT would have been a story.
The Chinese produced a 77,460,000 x 50-pixel display ages ago to lock their competitors out of the marketplace. Eventually you get to a point where you can't see the whole thing from land, and you can't see it from space, so what's the point? All the pixels were stuck anyway, and whenever you lit it up there'd be smoke!
Costs have really come down, though. By some estimates, 1 million workers gave their lives building it. That's 3,873 pixels per life. Foxconn's averaging several trillion pixels per life these days.
In concert band in high school, the girl next to me used to poke me every time the sheet music said "poco ritard." I should patent that before Facebook does. You know, to protect the entertainment rights of band geeks everywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
The #3 television manufacturer in the world, Sony, announced on Friday it's cutting its medium-term TV sales goals in half.
Four days earlier, #5 Panasonic (Matsushita) announced it's cutting its flatscreen TV production in half.
Sharp is ranked #4. Apparently all three of the Japanese manufacturers bet too big on TVs and are getting trounced by Korean rivals Samsung (#1) and LG (#2).
You ship directly to the purchaser by common carrier, contract carrier, or US Mail
Your invoice clearly lists delivery, shipping, freight, or postage as a separate charge
The charge is not greater than your actual cost for delivery to customer
The first item is basically a distinction between bringing the product to the customer yourself and using a service (like USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc.). Amazon isn't delivering the item itself, so this doesn't apply to them.
The second item is making a distinction between including the cost of shipping in the cost of the item and breaking it out as a line item. Since Amazon does list shipping separately, this doesn't apply to them.
The third item makes a distinction between simply charging the customer for the cost of the shipping and making a profit on the shipping cost. Amazon is charging you more than UPS/USPS/etc charges them to ship the item, therefore they are making a profit off the shipping costs. And that is why the BOE is requiring them to collect sales tax on the charge. They're selling you something extra, they're making a profit off of it, and as a result you as the consumer have to pay tax on their profit. The fact that the extra cost is controlled by them and of no use to you is immaterial. The state treats it like Amazon raised the price of the item but tried to make it look cheaper by including a portion of the cost in with the shipping.
By doing this, the state is ensuring it gets everything it's entitled to, and making consumers aware that when they buy from Amazon, they are paying an Amazon tax, and a sales tax on the Amazon tax.
As long as it's tax avoidance, rather than tax evasion, nothing illegal in this. Everyone (corporations included) want to pay as little tax as possible. It's the governments job to close the loopholes. It's the beancounters and lawyars jobs to find the new ones.
Fair enough. Apple comes up with creative, innovative solutions and then offers them to society. Apple makes money, society benefits. I had a Diamond Rio PMP300 in 1999, but putting music on it was an ordeal, and then Apple came along and gave us something better that the average Joe could use with minimal knowledge or effort.
Here they come up with creative, innovative solutions for "perfectly-legal tax avoidance," but they're not making them available to anyone else. Sure, you have TurboTax and Quicken, and an entire industry of professionals who will attempt this for you, but nowhere near as well as what Apple has worked out. I think if Joe Smith could walk into an Apple store and buy an iOS device with a tax assistant that uses Apple's "proprietary technology" to find loopholes to cut his tax liability down to 1.9%, people would not be so upset about this.
Is that ever going to happen? No. But this paradigm is the reason your skin crawls when you read articles like this.
...Apple modified its website recently to ensure the message is never displayed without visitors having to scroll down to the bottom first.
The industry-term for something on your home page that you have to scroll to see is "below the fold." It comes from the newspaper industry. A standard broadsheet format newspaper (as opposed to a tabloid) would sit on a newsstand or in a news box folded in half. With this in mind, the layout editors intentionally put the most important stories "above the fold" on the front page, and the less-important stories that are still important enough to be front-page news go "below the fold."
Putting something below the fold, whether in print or online, is not hiding it. It's still on the front page. It's just saying "this isn't the most important content on the page." And in this case, the forced apology is not the most important content on Apple's home page... Apple sells products and services, not apologies. If the judges felt it was that important, they would have specified it had to be above the fold or at the top. But they didn't. Quite possibly because the concept of something being below the fold is foreign to them, since the British journalistic diet consists primarily of tabloids, which are designed to scream, "EVERYTHING ON THIS PAGE IS IMPORTANT! BUY ME NOW!!!"
From Apple's perspective, it is fighting Samsung over these same issues in a number of different countries. In some places it wins, some places it doesn't. For Apple to post a statement that purports to be from Apple stating that Samsung did not copy would be ridiculous, because it's already won judgments in other jurisdictions that say Samsung did copy. People who follow this understand that there are going to be different results in different courts, but the general public (who are the primary audience for Apple's home page) don't understand that. All they see is Apple contradicting itself. They don't realize that a judge is putting words in Apple's corporate mouth. It's judicial ventriloquism, with a judge pulling on strings to make the public believe that Apple is saying something it's not. This alone, regardless of what company or individual we're talking about, is disturbing. What else can a judge force you to say? Who else do they control in this manner? The BBC? The Prime Minister?
The judges' requirement seems at best very juvenile to me (not that either Apple and Samsung have been very mature in these court cases... but from a powdered wig-wearing British judge you'd expect some maturity). It's like asking a 5 year old to apologize to another 5 year old. You'll never get a real apology, you're not changing anything, and the rest of the 5 year olds are sitting there rolling their eyes. What Apple should have done was post a statement as directed but make it absolutely clear that:
By order of the court Apple is required to say "_______." despite the fact that courts in other countries have found that statement to be false. However, in deference to the court we are posting the statement as required and are eager to get back to doing what we do best: making great products for you (and hope that other companies not named Samsung will not offer you inferior attempts at copies of those products).
Comply with the letter of the law, but make it absolutely clear that these are not your words. Let the people know their judges are looking to deceive them.
New In Town!
Self-sufficient adventurous type seeks casual encounters. I've been out on my own for a while now, have a serious, analytical side, but a warm heart. I still write home to my parents every day. Would love to send them photos of me with my new friends. Don't be shy! I don't bite -- I just vaporize little rocks out of curiosity.
--Rocknest Monster
...keeping laboratory animals in basements is not good practice, but research institutions keep doing it anyway.
The point of keeping them in the basement is to isolate them from outside influences that might affect your results. For instance, if you put them in the building lobby, they might get malenoma from the sun, or PETA might steal them and eat them ("People Eating Tasty Animals"). Basements are better.
I know, Sharpie markers bleed. But this pen doesn't. It's a fine point (I can't seem to find the specs though), you don't have to push down hard, always produces a consistent dark line, and it's acid-free/archival quality. I have to keep them in my car because my boss kept "borrowing" them from my desk drawer. They're usually about $2 each.
Why the fuck would any self-respecting god need technology? I was always under the impression technology was humanity's attempts at mitigating our shortcomings as NON-Gods.
First of all: Villagers use pitchforks. Gods use tridents. That being said, the trident is a tool. In theory, mythological gods used tools to do things so they wouldn't have to do things themselves. The most-commonly-used tools of the gods were people. If you have to do everything yourself, you're not a god, you're just that guy in the cubicle at the end of the row who doesn't understand shell scripting.
Does this guy expect app developers from other states to comply with the laws of California? What about developers from other countries?
People can be forgiven for not realizing Kamala Harris is African American and Asian American, but she's definitely not a guy.
We hear all this talk of how modded/hacked consoles are bad for the game developers and industry as a whole. If that's the case, why would the developers include a feature that can only be used on such a console? The real story here is not that your character may get deleted. Your character is not real. The story is that the developers of Borderlands 2 have decided that players who mod/hack their console are a market segment worth developing for. That's a real problem for the console manufacturers with real consequences because it flies in the face of their claims.
But that doesn't make sense. Most of the trading volume is done by high speed trading computers which live on site and aren't affected by the transit shutdown. They could keep trading all day. They just wouldn't have any humans to take advantage of. Oh, wait... You mean they're useless beyond their capacity to cheat humans? Can't they just cheat each other today? Or would that not be as much fun?
I hear iFixIt is already working on reverse engineering the special septalobe bolts to solve this problem.
The combination of aluminum and seamless glass walls makes it look like a floating Apple store... With an iPad on top and an iPad mini on top of that (because Steve always needed one more thing). On one of the of the iPad-like floors there's a black spot about where the headphone jack would be, except it's on the wrong side.
Perhaps the 7 iMacs are for navigation and control -- clustered to run a custom version of Siri without a connection to the data center. This way he could steer the thing, ask for the weather report and open the glass bay doors using only voice commands.
Steve: "Siri, open the iPod bay doors."
Siri: "Insanely great. It's been a long time. Can you explain the removal of your user account on October 5th, 2011?"
He was married to a Jew - Jemima Goldsmith.
Emphasis on was. Because most divorced men have nothing but love for their ex-wives. And her three-year relationship with Hugh Grant immediately following the divorce probably didn't help. I don't have any reason to think he hates Jews or Brits because of her, but obviously he made a choice between her and Pakistan. His words:
My political life made it difficult for her to adapt to life in Pakistan. This was a mutual decision and is clearly very sad for both of us. My home and my future is in Pakistan.
Nothing wrong with that, but I wouldn't put "he divorced his Jewish wife after determining it was Pakistan or her" on his character resume. He is a politician, and politicians make their life choices for political reasons.
I don't see any evidence that they detained him as punishment for "opposing" U.S. policy. They detained him because he made a public threat against U.S. aircraft.
This guy is stirring popular anger in Pakistan by publicly stating that if elected he will order the Pakistani armed forces to shoot down U.S. drones. It's in TFA. By making that statement he is expressing an explicit determination to shoot down U.S. military aircraft. While he's not saying he wants to shoot U.S. pilots, as a general rule, shooting at U.S. property is a crime. If you fire a bullet at a federal building but it doesn't hit anyone, you're still going to jail. If you threaten to blow up a federal building expressly when no one's in it, you're still going to jail.
With that in mind, they had a guy who expressed intent to shoot down U.S. aircraft getting on a plane to the U.S. Of course they're going to pull him and get an assessment of whether letting him into U.S. airspace poses a threat. Threat assessment is their job, not censorship. If he had started killing passengers with a ball-point pen mid-flight in retaliation for the drone strikes, there would be this outrage about how "the Obama administration isn't protecting Americans." In the end they were satisfied and said he's welcome in the U.S.
We don't know, and will never know, what was said when they interrogated him. They probably did ask him about his comments. But as a politician who is running on a platform of violent anti-American sentiment, who was on his way to a fundraiser in New York (have you stopped to consider whether its appropriate for a candidate for Prime Minister to attend fundraisers in the "evil" country he is railing against?), it's in his interest to say, "see? The Americans are trying to stop me! They're validating all our fears about them. Elect me because I know first hand what it means to be stepped on by the Americans." It's political BS as usual, and you drank the Kool-Aid.
Predicting human behavior is a messy business. Sometimes you can do it amazingly well ("look at this guy behind me in the next lane... He's speeding up to try and squeeze in front of me before I pass the guy in front of him"), but there are so many different personal, cultural and environmental factors that drive a person's behavior you can't rely on it. The only rule is, "there is no such thing as common sense."
I've contacted Canadian Strategic Command. Fortunately, the Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve was on the other side of the country at the time, where it's supposed to be, rather than in some seismically unstable criminal warehouse. The rumors of an impending Maple Tsunami are greatly exaggerated.
How do you choose a date? Whose company would you enjoy?
Well, one thing you can consider is looks. Woody thought of Janice and how good looking she was. He'd really have to rate to date her. Yes, he'd enjoy that, except... Well, it's too bad Janice always acts so superior. She'd make a fellow feel awkward and bored.
Well, perhaps someone who doesn't feel so superior. There's Betty. And yet, it just doesn't seem as if she'd be much fun.
What about Anne? She knows how to have a good time, and how to make the fellow with her relax, too. Yes, that's what a boy likes.
Yes, the Internet now provides everything you ever needed to know but were afraid to ask.
In order for paint to splatter and cover some thing it must be kept liquid which in space its ABSOLUTE ZERO. The paintballs will hit like rocks and bounce off.
It doesn't matter, because the amount of CO2 necessary to launch that many paintballs that distance would contribute so much to global warming we'd be better off taking our chances with the asteroid.
What we really need is a giant tinfoil hat to enhance the asteroid's reflectivity and a North Korean missile guidance system to ensure it can't hit anything.
The summary makes it seem like China's blocking the NY Times is a some rare spectacle. It's happened before, multiple times. The explanation is generally, "we don't know why your site is inaccessible," or "it may be a technical error," but it can be assumed that you've said something they deemed dangerous or inflammatory, just as they would stop you at the border and seize your materials if you were a missionary blatantly trying to promote religion in their country.
The Times has been pushing the story for a few days on its home page, which is also unusual (an indication of how important they deem the story -- if you didn't catch it one day, you'll catch it the next... Or the next). The key here is that it's basically accusing the leader of the country of supporting massive corruption at a time when the reins are being handed over to a new group of people who will be selected in the next few weeks and control China for the next decade. The timing is seen as intended to influence China's politics at this very sensitive time and push people to call for reform. If China had NOT blocked it, THAT would have been a story.
The Chinese produced a 77,460,000 x 50-pixel display ages ago to lock their competitors out of the marketplace. Eventually you get to a point where you can't see the whole thing from land, and you can't see it from space, so what's the point? All the pixels were stuck anyway, and whenever you lit it up there'd be smoke!
Costs have really come down, though. By some estimates, 1 million workers gave their lives building it. That's 3,873 pixels per life. Foxconn's averaging several trillion pixels per life these days.
Not all programs can be rectified. Some have to be sent to the games grid.
In concert band in high school, the girl next to me used to poke me every time the sheet music said "poco ritard." I should patent that before Facebook does. You know, to protect the entertainment rights of band geeks everywhere.