I don't travel often and generally refuse to fly when I do, seeing how air travel has devolved to treating passengers like livestock over the past couple decades. Is there even a "safe" way to travel in and out of the U.S. with any devices (laptops, cellphones) at all? Seems one would be better served by carrying *nothing*, and procuring necessary (disposable) devices when at destination, and discarding them before return trip. If I have nothing on me or in my luggage that has digital content at all, then nothing to search, right?
Seems highly inconvenient, but no way would I be willing to submit so a search of my hardware, for all the many reasons noted elsewhere in this thread...
Yep, same here, though more like 2-3x/week for me. Quit cigs after 30 years in '09, switched to occasional pipe or cigar a year later, never looked back and my lungs are *much* happier for it. I do notice, though, that I have zero tolerance for a smoke-filled room, so never smoke indoors, and would rather not be around other indoor smokers either.
Problem is, what's going to drive the witch hunt against tobacco is increasingly going to come from the Tyranny of Capital, as represented by health insurance providers and organizations who use them to underwrite employer-provided insurance: with ACA, insurance providers can't charge more than a 50% surcharge for smokers, but have no interest in distinguishing between a 2 pack a day cigarette smoker heading fast toward a future of emphysema and oxygen supplementation (or worse) and an occasional user of older forms of tobacco usage which have demonstrably lower health risk profiles. Want to enjoy tobacco in any form? Then pay for your own health care out of pocket; you're not wanted in any insurance risk pool.
Yeah, too bad, that. I bailed from Sprint's awful service and even worse smarmy lame customer service to T-Mobile, and now I tremble in fear that the one reasonable nationwide carrier may be swallowed and I'll get to choose between 3 flavors of scumbags. I love consumer choice!
I really really hope this acquisition is blocked, just as the attempt by AT&T was blocked a couple years ago.
Yep. Also, because it's so heavily "processed", much of its nutritional value (vitamins, minerals, other trace nutrients we may not even know about yet) are destroyed, and when manufacturers even care to correct this they "fortify" the end product to try to replace the missing/destroyed nutrients, resulting in a completely different composition than the original raw food materials had, further contributing to the mess, and probably contributing to 'binge eating' in many cases as the body craves something that is missing from the processed foods being consumed, triggering further consumption.
Meh, since the fundamental file block size is based on 1K == 1024 bytes, all multiples should use the same consistent multiplier, so that 1M == 1024^2, 1G == 1024^3 and so on. Anything else is, well, inconsistent and illogical.
Or are we now going to change disk formats so that the fundamental block sizes are multiples of 1000? That'd be way efficient... there are programmatic (and hardware) reasons why disk blocks have sizes that are multiples of 2, not 10.
Unfortunately they won't go out of business over stuff like this. Most consumers don't care about consequences of their purchasing choices, the reasons for which are numerous -- too dumb, busy, or simply apathetic. "The customer is (almost) always right" only applies if the available customer pool is small enough for that to matter; once a market grows beyond a certain size, companies only have to make X % of their customers happy, and marginalize or ignore the rest.
I'd love for things to be different, for for a completely DRM-free eBook to be available, but I'm also too cynical to believe this could ever happen.
I have a '07 Charger R/T with perf. pkg, and am lucky to get 14-15 mpg around town (lots of short trips, stop-n-go doesn't help.)
During a recent long distance trip, first leg I cruised 80mph and noticed MDS didn't kick in much; I got 19 mpg. Later on I kept speed to 70-75 and averaged about 23 mpg the rest of the way. I don't doubt I could get the EPA rated 25mpg if I had the patience to drive 60-65...
True, but their service is rather pricey. I haven't minded that much, because the extra cost gets me rock solid bandwidth and direct access to knowledgeable support staff on the *very* rare occasion I need them for anything, rather than the increasingly frequent issues and horrid first level support drones imposed by a certain large telco in my area before I made the switch.
The service life of CFBs and regular bulbs makes me suspicious. CFBs do not last much longer than incandescent bulbs used to. I've had 2 of 12 burn out over a year or so despite the 5 year promise on the box. Incandescent bulbs used to be that good and halogen incandescent bulbs still last longer than CFBs. Ask yourself when the last time you changed your car headlights was.
There are big quality differences between manufacturers. I converted much of my home lighting to CFBs when they first appeared several years ago; all of the GE or Philips bulbs are still burning 6-7 years later (including a couple I've left on continuously), whereas all of the 'Feit Electric' bulbs (a brand sold at Costco in my state) burned out within a year or so.
but there is also the chance that the logs alone would be deemed sufficient. That the courts deem clicking a "clearly illegal link" is sufficient for a search warrant suggests we're already down that slippery slope where the logs alone, reflecting the IP address mapped to the hijacked network, would be enough for significant harrasment, let alone indictment.
Bingo. Not too different, either, from a big contributor to obscene property prices in some areas: real estate speculators, people who buy up all the properties they can in order to 'flip them'; enough iterations of this and prices are out of sight of the rest of us.
A number of years ago energy distribution was 'deregulated' here in California, with much hype about "increased choices to the consumer means better value". Something like 300 providers were to supply energy to CA's grid. The result was, of course, higher prices, fueled by providers who when they saw big demand increases jacked prices up by orders of magnitude -- Enron, among others, was connected with this. The resulting blackouts and some bad high-level purchasing decisions (so no, the blame was not entirely on the part of the providers!) eventually cost the then-governor his job.
Not that anything was really fixed; with a moratorium on nuclear plant construction -- another decision demonstrating an astounding lack of foresight -- utilities look for band-aids like the remote control thermostat proposal which could just as easily be used as a form of 'demand clipping' to push back on energy providers' price increases.
Speculation, and other mechanisms of abusing markets -- whether energy in any of its forms, real estate, or (gosh!) mortgage credit -- for short-term gain, really amount to nothing more than rape. A few benefit at the expense of the rest of us.
I managed to score an 'early adopter discount' through somebody at work (75% off) and signed up. I know the risks, but am not terribly worried -- though, having just read Crichton's novel "Next" perhaps I should be -- but am very curious. Was tempted at the announced list price, but getting in at a discount is even better.
I got a sample kit for a friend as well... fair warning to others who might be tempted to buy this service for those other than themselves, all sample kits are grouped together as a single order, no option to separately ship each kit to a different address, so the kits will be sent to me and I'll need to send my friend hers... and it looks like there won't be any partitioning of access, either; e.g. she and I will be able to see both of our analysis results. I had to buy both at once because the discount code was limited to a single purchase (of up to 5 kits). Good thing my friend and I both trust each other implicitly.;)
What would be very informative would be to see if the selective "insurance" surcharges are applied to the upper management / executive staff. I've got a hunch that they're exempt... It wouldn't matter even if they weren't. They're getting paid far far more than the average workers, so any extra surcharges wouldn't even be noticed, fair or not. That's the problem with taxation solutions (or similar payment schemes) to regulate any problem behaviors; they won't have any impact on those affluent enough to easily absorb any additional cost to them.
Wrong. I work for an Internet media company and must be available 24/7. A cellphone is an absolute requirement, and yes, my employer reimburses my cellphone bill, and provides cellphones for employees lacking one, so in one sense you're right, I don't have to pay for it myself.
I wonder how many of those "excessive calls over billing issues" might have been related to the new online billing system they switched to after the Sprint/Nextel merger, which was, ahem, suboptimally planned and implemented.
I had problems getting past bills online for several weeks; from the time they initially switched over (to Nextel's backend system, presumably) it took well over a month for past bills to be available again as PDFs, which wasn't well thought through for those customers who had elected electronic billing and received no paper statements in the first place. After three long and miserable support calls during which their staff were singularly unhelpful and completely lacking in follow-through (sending me past statements in paper again, needed to expense my cellphone bill from my employer; it's not like I needed paper statements just to have them...), I gave up dealing with them and procrastinated pushing the issue, then suddenly the past bills were available again. Nearly two months later.
That whole merger could have been handled better, and I can't imagine I was the only customer having those problems.
"With all of the government-sponsored selling out of The People that has been going on in the past, say, 6 or so years, one has to wonder when or even if it is going to stop."
Thus, the original article invites commentary related to government involvement. G.W. Bush is at the head of the government, and therefore is responsible for its actions.
Or are we now embarking on a "new enlightenment" where leaders are no longer considered responsible or accountable in any way for actions of their organizations?
Would the Czech Budweiser be using locally grown hops? I can't claim any connoisseur cred here; my only experience of Czech beers here in the U.S. is Pilsner Urquell, but I'm partial to pilsners and I love Urquell. If that's typical of Czech hops then... perhaps I should move...
wanna bet they didn't do comprehensive testing? Regression? Did McAfee lay off QA people lately because the cost of rigorous testing couldn't be justified in a nice, concise business case? Or was it just an "honest mistake" that led to this screwup, which, one hopes, won't be repeated any time soon (and, one further hopes, will remind McAfee that potentially dangerous software requires comprehensive and effective testing *always*, which certainly would have caught this particular bug.)
Wouldn't the source still be "verbatim" if, possessing the key, you could decrypt it into its cleartext, presumably correct form?
If the SSSCA and other laws of its ilk should pass, wouldn't growing numbers of free software packages be forced "underground" if they are to continue to exist, necessitating ugly tools like encryption (and other techniques used to hide during transmission, for example) to even be able to share them?
This is all quite sinister and horrible, and admittedly a worst case scenario, but what are the alternatives, really?
It's likely he actually *was* "researching new technologies and assessing problems reporting by others", and that there was quite a bit of reading/coding going on that onlookers might not be aware of. The surface "entertainment" might have been there to occupy roof-brain while pondering problems in an ongoing project.
I don't dispute the "single point of failure" issue, though.
IT is chock full of people whose claimed expertise is in some vague conglomeration of "project management and business strategy", but when faced with need for hard answers to real problems, they're clueless.
Recessions are a good way to trim some of this "fat". Unfortunately good people sometimes get burned, too.
IIRC the Model II had 8" drives. The Model 4 had dual 5-1/4" units, and was also available in a portable version, the 4P. I managed to buy the first 4P to appear in Key West FL that had a real "green" screen; spent many happy hours hacking Z80 assembler on that little beast.
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I don't travel often and generally refuse to fly when I do, seeing how air travel has devolved to treating passengers like livestock over the past couple decades. Is there even a "safe" way to travel in and out of the U.S. with any devices (laptops, cellphones) at all? Seems one would be better served by carrying *nothing*, and procuring necessary (disposable) devices when at destination, and discarding them before return trip. If I have nothing on me or in my luggage that has digital content at all, then nothing to search, right?
Seems highly inconvenient, but no way would I be willing to submit so a search of my hardware, for all the many reasons noted elsewhere in this thread...
Yep, same here, though more like 2-3x/week for me. Quit cigs after 30 years in '09, switched to occasional pipe or cigar a year later, never looked back and my lungs are *much* happier for it. I do notice, though, that I have zero tolerance for a smoke-filled room, so never smoke indoors, and would rather not be around other indoor smokers either.
Problem is, what's going to drive the witch hunt against tobacco is increasingly going to come from the Tyranny of Capital, as represented by health insurance providers and organizations who use them to underwrite employer-provided insurance: with ACA, insurance providers can't charge more than a 50% surcharge for smokers, but have no interest in distinguishing between a 2 pack a day cigarette smoker heading fast toward a future of emphysema and oxygen supplementation (or worse) and an occasional user of older forms of tobacco usage which have demonstrably lower health risk profiles. Want to enjoy tobacco in any form? Then pay for your own health care out of pocket; you're not wanted in any insurance risk pool.
Yeah, too bad, that. I bailed from Sprint's awful service and even worse smarmy lame customer service to T-Mobile, and now I tremble in fear that the one reasonable nationwide carrier may be swallowed and I'll get to choose between 3 flavors of scumbags. I love consumer choice!
I really really hope this acquisition is blocked, just as the attempt by AT&T was blocked a couple years ago.
Yep. Also, because it's so heavily "processed", much of its nutritional value (vitamins, minerals, other trace nutrients we may not even know about yet) are destroyed, and when manufacturers even care to correct this they "fortify" the end product to try to replace the missing/destroyed nutrients, resulting in a completely different composition than the original raw food materials had, further contributing to the mess, and probably contributing to 'binge eating' in many cases as the body craves something that is missing from the processed foods being consumed, triggering further consumption.
Meh, since the fundamental file block size is based on 1K == 1024 bytes, all multiples should use the same consistent multiplier, so that 1M == 1024^2, 1G == 1024^3 and so on. Anything else is, well, inconsistent and illogical.
Or are we now going to change disk formats so that the fundamental block sizes are multiples of 1000? That'd be way efficient... there are programmatic (and hardware) reasons why disk blocks have sizes that are multiples of 2, not 10.
Unfortunately they won't go out of business over stuff like this. Most consumers don't care about consequences of their purchasing choices, the reasons for which are numerous -- too dumb, busy, or simply apathetic. "The customer is (almost) always right" only applies if the available customer pool is small enough for that to matter; once a market grows beyond a certain size, companies only have to make X % of their customers happy, and marginalize or ignore the rest.
I'd love for things to be different, for for a completely DRM-free eBook to be available, but I'm also too cynical to believe this could ever happen.
I have a '07 Charger R/T with perf. pkg, and am lucky to get 14-15 mpg around town (lots of short trips, stop-n-go doesn't help.)
During a recent long distance trip, first leg I cruised 80mph and noticed MDS didn't kick in much; I got 19 mpg. Later on I kept speed to 70-75 and averaged about 23 mpg the rest of the way. I don't doubt I could get the EPA rated 25mpg if I had the patience to drive 60-65...
True, but their service is rather pricey. I haven't minded that much, because the extra cost gets me rock solid bandwidth and direct access to knowledgeable support staff on the *very* rare occasion I need them for anything, rather than the increasingly frequent issues and horrid first level support drones imposed by a certain large telco in my area before I made the switch.
The service life of CFBs and regular bulbs makes me suspicious. CFBs do not last much longer than incandescent bulbs used to. I've had 2 of 12 burn out over a year or so despite the 5 year promise on the box. Incandescent bulbs used to be that good and halogen incandescent bulbs still last longer than CFBs. Ask yourself when the last time you changed your car headlights was.
There are big quality differences between manufacturers. I converted much of my home lighting to CFBs when they first appeared several years ago; all of the GE or Philips bulbs are still burning 6-7 years later (including a couple I've left on continuously), whereas all of the 'Feit Electric' bulbs (a brand sold at Costco in my state) burned out within a year or so.Bingo. Not too different, either, from a big contributor to obscene property prices in some areas: real estate speculators, people who buy up all the properties they can in order to 'flip them'; enough iterations of this and prices are out of sight of the rest of us.
A number of years ago energy distribution was 'deregulated' here in California, with much hype about "increased choices to the consumer means better value". Something like 300 providers were to supply energy to CA's grid. The result was, of course, higher prices, fueled by providers who when they saw big demand increases jacked prices up by orders of magnitude -- Enron, among others, was connected with this. The resulting blackouts and some bad high-level purchasing decisions (so no, the blame was not entirely on the part of the providers!) eventually cost the then-governor his job.
Not that anything was really fixed; with a moratorium on nuclear plant construction -- another decision demonstrating an astounding lack of foresight -- utilities look for band-aids like the remote control thermostat proposal which could just as easily be used as a form of 'demand clipping' to push back on energy providers' price increases.
Speculation, and other mechanisms of abusing markets -- whether energy in any of its forms, real estate, or (gosh!) mortgage credit -- for short-term gain, really amount to nothing more than rape. A few benefit at the expense of the rest of us.
I managed to score an 'early adopter discount' through somebody at work (75% off) and signed up. I know the risks, but am not terribly worried -- though, having just read Crichton's novel "Next" perhaps I should be -- but am very curious. Was tempted at the announced list price, but getting in at a discount is even better.
;)
I got a sample kit for a friend as well... fair warning to others who might be tempted to buy this service for those other than themselves, all sample kits are grouped together as a single order, no option to separately ship each kit to a different address, so the kits will be sent to me and I'll need to send my friend hers... and it looks like there won't be any partitioning of access, either; e.g. she and I will be able to see both of our analysis results. I had to buy both at once because the discount code was limited to a single purchase (of up to 5 kits). Good thing my friend and I both trust each other implicitly.
"You don't HAVE to even have a cell phone!"
Wrong. I work for an Internet media company and must be available 24/7. A cellphone is an absolute requirement, and yes, my employer reimburses my cellphone bill, and provides cellphones for employees lacking one, so in one sense you're right, I don't have to pay for it myself.
I wonder how many of those "excessive calls over billing issues" might have been related to the new online billing system they switched to after the Sprint/Nextel merger, which was, ahem, suboptimally planned and implemented.
I had problems getting past bills online for several weeks; from the time they initially switched over (to Nextel's backend system, presumably) it took well over a month for past bills to be available again as PDFs, which wasn't well thought through for those customers who had elected electronic billing and received no paper statements in the first place. After three long and miserable support calls during which their staff were singularly unhelpful and completely lacking in follow-through (sending me past statements in paper again, needed to expense my cellphone bill from my employer; it's not like I needed paper statements just to have them...), I gave up dealing with them and procrastinated pushing the issue, then suddenly the past bills were available again. Nearly two months later.
That whole merger could have been handled better, and I can't imagine I was the only customer having those problems.
Heh. What a great name for a rock concert venue. "Sleeptrain Pavilion welcomes [insert name of energetic metal band]" is... a little suboptimal.
And I've seen some great shows there, back when it was just the "Concord Pavilion".
I beg to differ.
"With all of the government-sponsored selling out of The People that has been going on in the past, say, 6 or so years, one has to wonder when or even if it is going to stop."
Thus, the original article invites commentary related to government involvement. G.W. Bush is at the head of the government, and therefore is responsible for its actions.
Or are we now embarking on a "new enlightenment" where leaders are no longer considered responsible or accountable in any way for actions of their organizations?
I agree. Once I got over any remaining residual "OMG Pink??" inner responses it's actually very easy on the eyes.
Would the Czech Budweiser be using locally grown hops? I can't claim any connoisseur cred here; my only experience of Czech beers here in the U.S. is Pilsner Urquell, but I'm partial to pilsners and I love Urquell. If that's typical of Czech hops then... perhaps I should move...
wanna bet they didn't do comprehensive testing? Regression? Did McAfee lay off QA people lately because the cost of rigorous testing couldn't be justified in a nice, concise business case? Or was it just an "honest mistake" that led to this screwup, which, one hopes, won't be repeated any time soon (and, one further hopes, will remind McAfee that potentially dangerous software requires comprehensive and effective testing *always*, which certainly would have caught this particular bug.)
Wouldn't the source still be "verbatim" if, possessing the key, you could decrypt it into its cleartext, presumably correct form?
If the SSSCA and other laws of its ilk should pass, wouldn't growing numbers of free software packages be forced "underground" if they are to continue to exist, necessitating ugly tools like encryption (and other techniques used to hide during transmission, for example) to even be able to share them?
This is all quite sinister and horrible, and admittedly a worst case scenario, but what are the alternatives, really?
It's likely he actually *was* "researching new technologies and assessing problems reporting by others", and that there was quite a bit of reading/coding going on that onlookers might not be aware of. The surface "entertainment" might have been there to occupy roof-brain while pondering problems in an ongoing project.
I don't dispute the "single point of failure" issue, though.
Actually I think the taste is largely from the phosphoric acid. Yum!!
IT is chock full of people whose claimed expertise is in some vague conglomeration of "project management and business strategy", but when faced with need for hard answers to real problems, they're clueless.
Recessions are a good way to trim some of this "fat". Unfortunately good people sometimes get burned, too.
Never ever let go of your curiosity!
IIRC the Model II had 8" drives. The Model 4 had dual 5-1/4" units, and was also available in a portable version, the 4P. I managed to buy the first 4P to appear in Key West FL that had a real "green" screen; spent many happy hours hacking Z80 assembler on that little beast.