The contamination isn't from nuclear power. It's from producing nuclear weapons, and general experiments. You must remember, a large amount of our nation's nuclear research was done at Hanford, including the world's first man-made, sustained nuclear reaction. The mess is from this activity, conducted decades ago when we didn't know as much as we do now.
This has nothing to do with nuclear power generation.
This entire article is based on a study by one person, no doubt with a political agenda.
I've lived next to Hanford since I was 3 years old, and work a couple of miles from the nuke plant. I've toured the site many times. I've followed local news, which reports on every boring little detail since they have nothing better to do, my entire life.
Are there problems? Sure. I remember when the single walled tanks started leaking, and they pumped everything into new double-wall tanks. Will there be problems in the future? Sure. Will those problems affect me? No. The accidents that take place may be major to the people working on that particular project, but are not catastrophic in the grand scheme of things.
Look: The Hanford site has been operational for decades. The number of serious accidents is tiny, and said accidents have only affected the workers directly involved with that given project, not the rest of us. Yes, there are environmental concerns. No, they aren't as horrible as this article makes them out to be. We swim in and eat fish from the river. Our water comes from the river and local groundwater. None is contaminated enough to be detectible, let alone harm somebody. And I'm right here, a fraction of a mile downstream from the site.
Even if the clean-up goes according to plan, Boldt claims there will still be 260 square kilometres of groundwater exceeding drinking water safety limits for over 10,000 years.
He's full of himself. This is nothing more than paranoid scare tactics.
In what conceivable economic circumstance could it be worthwhile to ship cows from one planet to another by putting them in the cargo hold of a spaceship?
When shipping cows is illegal, hence black market, hence gangsters are paying good money to get their hands on said cows.
Let's rephrase your question: In what conceivable economic circumstance could it be worthwhile to move pot into the United States by putting it in the cargo hold of an airplane? The answer is the same: When it's illegal to do so, and people with money want it done anyway.
But the last two items I sold where huge and heavy. I stated in my listing terms, "buyer is to pay UPS ground + $10 handling". That is legal.
That's also ethical. I have no problem paying handling fees that are listed up front; I don't think anybody has a right to complain if they know what the costs are in advance. I've sold many items on eBay as well, and I always list all fees in the auction like you did here. To hide extra costs is dishonest and scummy.
I could also have _legally_ stated nothing! In that case, it is the buyer's responsibility to ask.
Sellers may not charge eBay buyers an additional fee for their use of ordinary forms of payment, including acceptance of checks, money orders, electronic transfers or credit cards. Such costs should be built into the price of the item. This policy reduces the potential for confusion among bidders about the true cost of an item. Further, some forms of payment surcharges, such as credit card surcharges, are forbidden under the laws of many states, including California.
There are three exceptions to this rule:
* Sellers may add a reasonable shipping and handling fee to the final price of their item, providing that this fee is disclosed up-front in the listing. A shipping and handling fee can cover the seller's reasonable costs for mailing, packaging and handling the item. Shipping and handling fees cannot be listed as a percentage of the final sale price.
* Sellers may pass along the costs associated with using a third-party escrow service, if the buyer chooses to use an escrow service.
* Sellers may choose to accept payment in a different currency than the currency listed on eBay. If the buyer chooses this optional payment method, the seller may pass along to the buyer any costs associated with the currency exchange, provided that the costs are disclosed and agreed to in advance by the buyer.
Please note that some types of payment surcharges are permitted on some of eBay's international sites.
Now do you see why I was upset over this? I had assumed eBay would enforce their own policies. According to their rules, you can NOT simply tack on random charges after the item sells. You MUST disclose them in the listing. However, since the rules aren't enforced, apparently you CAN do this...
As I said, it's unethical at best, outright fraud at worst. eBay should enforce their policies in this matter.
Blaming eBay for your ignorance is foolish. Learn the rules before you play.
It's not "my ignorance" or not "learning the rules". I followed the damn rules but eBay decided they didn't matter. I'll explain:
eBay's policies state that sellers can't just randomly tack on fees after the auction ends. Other than normal shipping fees, they must list these things in their auctions. I assumed that eBay's policy in this matter actually had teeth. In other words, I should have been able to say, "Sorry, that's bullshit, you violated eBay's policy and I'm not paying", and eBay should have busted him for not listing this handling fee in the auction. No harm done.
Had eBay played the game according to their own rules, this wouldn't have been an issue. I wouldn't have paid for the item and the seller would have been slapped for violating listing rules. Instead, eBay participates in "extortion" by forcing me to pay under threat of my account.
My ignorance wasn't in bidding on that item without knowing about this fee. It was in assuming eBay would enforce their own rules.
What if it had sold for the opening bid of $5? Is charging $70 S&H wrong? That was the true cost.
This guy tried to charge $40 in shipping fees. He paid less than $10 to ship the item to me. The price was right there on the box when it arrived. To make it a fair comparison, "What if (your item) had sold for the opening bid of $5? Is charging $280 S&H wrong? It's only 4x the true cost, and that stupid bidder should have asked first, right?"
When I'm told that I'll be paying for shipping, I figure I'm paying within a few bucks of what the shipper is going to charge unless the item requires special shipping or packaging (large/heavy/delicate/etc). That's the moral and ethical way to do business. If you're going to charge a huge handling fee, it needs to be stated UP FRONT, so there are no surprises.
These people won't do that because they're trying to screw you. They'll take an item that retails for $20, sell it to you for $5, and tack on $40 in shipping costs. Others just randomly tack on a bunch of handling fees after the fact to make up for their item selling for less than they expected. It's unethical at best, if not outright fraud. You know it, I know it, and eBay knows it. Yet eBay lets it happen and people like you blame the buyer.
When I posted this to one of eBay's boards while the situation was ongoing, I heard from a hundred people just like you. They called ME a "no good non-paying bidder". Yeah, with nearly 200 transactions worth tens of thousands of dollars, all 100% positive, suddenly I'm a deadbeat bidder on a $10 win from a guy with a small handful of transactions. That's bullshit and you know it.
The trick with that is that if you have it shipped certified and it shows up at their address and has their signature on the line, they really can't argue with it.
That's right. I ship nothing without a tracking number and insurance. This means all of my shipments routinely go via UPS, since both tracking and up to $100 insurance is included.
Then when they come back with "I never received it", you produce the tracking number (hence, proof of delivery) and the seller's claim is thrown out.
In case I want something I'd rather buy it new. If I can't afford something new, I just won't buy it.
Easy to say for you. I'm into high end home automation equipment. A touchpanel that would cost me $3,000 new can be had for $200 on eBay. Control modules that run $3,000 - $5,000+ new? $150 - $800. I just bought two cool expansion units for $20 each. Retail price is $400 each.
As much as I hate eBay as a company, without them, I would have to give up one of my favorite hobbies.
A bunch of bullshit, too. I bought a $10 item and the seller added $20 for shipping (I expected $15, but whatever, I'll pay his overcharge), but then tacked a $20 "handling fee" on top of that! This was NOT mentioned in the auction!
eBay has a rule about this, so I complained to them, but they refused to enforce it because his auction said "seller pays shipping and handling". They also kindly informed me that if I didn't pay, my account would be subject to disciplinary action. I asked, "So, the seller could make up whatever number he wanted - $1,000, perhaps - and if I didn't pay, you would trash MY account?" The response: "Yes."
When I complained further, they pulled the "we're just a venue" bullshit, and compared themselves to the classifieds section of the newspaper. But they're not "just a venue". They have proactively taken steps to remove troublesome users and to create a large base of rules governing transactions. The fact that they go around slapping people who don't pay, no matter what the circumstances, proves they're not "just a venue."
eBay pisses me off. I still use it, because there aren't any other choices. But they're a bunch of asshats. Either you're a venue or not. Either you enforce rules or you don't have them at all. You can't have it both ways.
(I ended up paying half the seller's extortion fee and letting him keep some of the items in the lot that I didn't need, and making a note to never, ever bid on anything that doesn't have all shipping & handling costs clearly listed in the auction.)
That is correct. It is illegal for anyone - even apartment complex owners - to deny you the right to have a dish. They CAN deny:
1. Putting it in common areas (hallways, shared porch, etc)
2. Drilling into or otherwise damaging their property.
However, if you have a window, "private" porch only accessible from your apartment, or if you have a ground floor apartment with a concrete pad or other "private" area, you can place a dish there and there's not a damn thing they can do about it.
Poor logic. It would be trivial to use such a plane carrying explosives, or spraying gas/nerve agent over the White House, the Pentagon, New York in general etc. How are you going to do that in a van? Hell, a handful of coins would kill people from a few thounsand feet up.
Right. Because someone spraying nerve gas over the white house is going to give a damn about FAA regulations. "Sweet! The FAA has relaxed their restrictions on pilots! Now I can legally fly my nerve gas over NYC."
Come on, now. Use your head. These policy changes mean jack when it comes to terrorist activity. Just like gun control laws mean jack to someone hell bent on shooting up a school. If someone is going to release deadly gas from a plane, I somehow doubt they'll bother with the whole legal requirements of flying the aircraft.
I find it hard to believe that nobody even acknowledges the fact that, while the pilot was at fault, the builder of the plane was at fault too.
No, he wasn't. The builder put the switch where he thought it should go. He had no problem with it. If the pilot couldn't safely operate the aircraft with the switch in that location, he shouldn't have done so. It was his fault. Period.
If I had to reach under my dash board to turn on my radio, even if I became an expert at doing so, would I probably have an accident once in a while? Yes.
You've obviously never flown an aircraft. There is no reason why you cannot reach behind your seat, under your dash, behind your head, etc, and flip a switch while flying. Flying a straight line requires much less concentration than driving a car down a freeway.
You can access the filesystem directly and copy your files over.
Not if you want to listen to them on the iPod, you can't. You need to put them in a specific order and add them to the iPod's database. The iPod will not automatically index songs that are just dropped onto it's hard drive, and thus you won't be able to access them on-the-go.
I'm with you. My city officials threatened to fine me $500 per day, and when it hit $10k (20 days), to take my house away from me and sell it at auction. Why? Because I parked my RV on the side of my house, on dirt. That's illegal.
When I called one of my city council members to complain, here's how the conversation went:
Me: "This is insane. Why can't I park on dirt?" Her: "Because, weeds grow on dirt." Me: "But I keep my weeds pulled." Her: "You may be responsible, but others aren't." Me: "So why not make a law against weeds?" Her: "We already have one." Me: "So why do you need the law against parking on dirt?" Her (extremely frustrated): "Sir, it's for your own protection!" Me: "Uhm, do you think people really want the government protecting them from weeds that may or may not grow around a parked vehicle?"
She didn't want to talk to me anymore after that.
I have to echo what you said: "Fucking paternalistic government." As is often said, next thing they'll be wiping our asses for us. Won't that be fun?
Actually, I do tend to speed more after playing vice city or one of my racing games
You think that's bad... I drive a sports car with almost twice the horsepower it came with (custom engine swap) and great cornering abilities. We went out and raced high powered "Indy Kart" Go-Karts on a couple of occasions. Driving my car home after several hours of that was quite the experience. Damn near lost control taking a corner because I was still "high" on the Go-Kart's vastly superior handling.
"If by 2030 we have invented a matter duplicator that's as cheap as copying a CD today, will we outlaw it and drive it underground? So that farmers can make a living keeping food expensive, so that furniture makers can make a living preventing people from having beds and chairs that would cost a dollar to duplicate, so that builders won't be reduced to poverty because a comfortable house can be duplicated for a few hundred dollars? Yes, such developments would cause economic dislocations for sure. But should we drive them underground and keep the world impoverished to save these peoples' jobs? And would they really stay underground, or would the natural advantages of the technology cause the "underground" to rapidly overtake the rest of society?"
you can paintball in many more environments than you can lasertag
Uh, what? No you can't. Try taking your paintball equipment down to a public park, see how fast you get arrested. Or around your neighborhood. Or indoors. Or anywhere there might possibly be non-participants, buildings, or other things that people wouldn't want to see covered in colored in paintball fluids.
Lasertag is infinitely more flexible in where you can play.
It seems like most folks fit into one or the other, but rarely both.
I owned paintball gear for about a year. Played maybe on half a dozen different occasions. The best part? It's "real". Hurts when you get hit and you tend to act like you're in a real war. I enjoyed it, but I sold the gear for a few reasons:
1. Expensive to play. I'd drop $20-$40 on supplies for half a day of play.
2. Can't just play anywhere. We tried to play in a big, deserted canyon once. Someone in a house at the top of the hill threatened to call the cops. This was empty public property but we didn't want any trouble, so we left.
3. The places you CAN play aren't usually very fun. Lots of dirt, tumbleweeds, stickers, etc, that I had to pick out of my clothes when I was done.
4. Protective gear made for uncomfortable play. Especially on a 100 degree day.
5. Some people are assholes. I had a guy light me up from maybe 20 feet away, even though I had my hands up and was asking him which team he was on (he'd JUST entered in the middle of a game). He just kept shooting, wouldn't stop. Hurt like HELL. I was ready for a fist fight with that f***er. Anyone who has ever played paintball can share a similar story.
Laser tag appeals to me. You can play anywhere (nice, grassy public parks, etc), no need for protective gear, it's cheap, and it's fun. I can easily buy enough gear for half a dozen friends for what I paid for my paintball equipment, and it's easy to talk them into a quick one hour game.
80 dollars for a case? This isn't a gaming rig, you can get a decent case for 30. Hell, I've known people who use empty pop boxes, but spending more than 30 on a case is insane.
I forgot, this is Slashdot. Some people have nice living rooms. We don't want an ugly box sitting amongst our nice A/V equipment. That $80 case is small, black, and looks like a stereo component. It's also dirt cheap for a good looking HTPC case. If you want to use a typical ugly case or an empty pop box, that's fine, but I like my living room to look nice.
You don't need 512 MB of RAM, and you can get it cheaper than that.
Sure, you can get cheaper RAM, if you want your system to give you problems. Try running memtest on your cheap RAM and watch all of the beautiful errors that pop up. I bought Corsair memory. Top of the line. Will help prevent those annoying and unexplainable crashes in the middle of my favorite show.
You don't need a DVD-ROM 16x for this. All you need the DVD rom for is installing linux. Possibly for playing DVDs if you don't have a dedicated player. 16x is overkill.
It was also cheap. You might save $10 by getting a cheaper one.
Power supply? Overkill.
Antec TRUEPower PSUs are some of the best you can buy. After dealing with others, I'll never go back. These are silent, with multiple fans, and will automatically crank up the airflow if temps get too high. Buy a cheap PSU and it's going to be louder and cause more system instability.
Sound card- I have a SoundBlaster Live Value! thats 3 years old. Bought it for 15 back then. Sounds great.
I'll give you that the SB Live sounds great. I have several of them here. Nice, cheap cards. But we're talking about an HTPC. I have 7.1 channel surround in my living room. You can't even get 5.1 out of the SB Live Value. Who watches DVDs with 2 channel audio anymore?
Dear fuckign god, 120 dollars for a keyboard and mouse?
Fully wireless. You hold the mouse in the air and wave it around. Gyroscopes sense the position and move the pointer. Overkill? Not really. Again, we get back to this idea about having a nice home, with a nice living room. Maybe some people can have cables running across the floor from the TV to the half empty pizza box that they use for a mousing surface. That's not an option for most of us.
Your problem is twofold. First, you're using New-Egg. They aren't a bad group, but they're far from the cheapest. You're trading price for convenience by shopping at one place.
Not really. NewEgg has damn good prices. Can they be beat? Yeah, I probably could have saved $20 on the total order by carefully getting things from a dozen different retailers and watching my shipping.
Your solution is cheap, and I'm sure it works fine for geek bachelors who don't care much about aesthetics and can deal with lockups and crashes caused by the use of substandard components. I'm not dissing you here - I used to be a geek bachelor myself. Now I'm a professional geek with a nice house, a wife and children. We have other couples over to our home for dinner, movies, BBQs, etc. Having an ugly beige tower with big long keyboard & mouse cables running across the floor, sitting next to my 65" widescreen display and nice AV equipment is not acceptable to me. Nor is it acceptable to the vast majority of people.
Even forgetting aesthetics, using cheap components causes more headaches than it's worth. I've been there, done that. I don't build PCs with the cheapest crap I can dig up anymore. The little unsolvable bugs, lockups, and crappy support from cheap manufacturers aren't worth it. I should note, however, that the components I selected aren't particularly expensive. Quite frankly I built this box on a pretty small budget and I consider it barely scraping by.
Can you send me any info you have on MCE 2004? I'm thinking links to forums, add-ons, and other sites that provide info for people building their own MCE boxes. Thank you!
leaving a computer or two on at home 24/7 is such a miniscule part of my powerbill compared to the part contributed by running my A/C....
Just for laughs, you should get a meter and measure things. I bought one of those Kill-A-Watt meters, and a few quick calculations shows my computer running me about $10 a month to leave on.
That's not much, but my server runs another $10. My wife's computer, another $10. So out of my $120 total electrical bill, about $30 is just computers. That's not even adding the power of the monitors, which shut themselves off when not in use.
It adds up fast. We've been powering down our workstations when not in use - now only the server runs 24/7.
I'm sorry, but you're going WAY too cheap here. I just built what I consider to be a REALLY BASIC HTPC, with relatively cheap components. Parts will arrive this Friday. Here's what I got:
Total price: $451.00, and all from NewEgg. I shopped around, these were some of the best prices to be found.
Gyration wireless keyboard & mouse ran me another $120 + shipping. SPDIF board for the Shuttle motherboard was another $20 + shipping. And I haven't even touched video input yet, nor have I included the cost of the hard drive which I already own! This is just to PLAY BACK quality video!
I'm sorry, but if you're building a HTPC with components priced as cheap as you listed, that's going to be one shitty little box. A $10 sound card? LOL. Good luck playing back audio worth hearing over that. Really, good luck with that. I'm using the MB's on-board audio and hoping it's tolerable, which is bad enough. I'm also using the built-in video. If I added good video & sound that would tack another $150 - $300 onto this project.
A decent HTPC will run you $500 - $800 at a minimum. That's a pretty bare-bones system.
Slashdot Mirror
Weren't we telling the nuclear power industry
The contamination isn't from nuclear power. It's from producing nuclear weapons, and general experiments. You must remember, a large amount of our nation's nuclear research was done at Hanford, including the world's first man-made, sustained nuclear reaction. The mess is from this activity, conducted decades ago when we didn't know as much as we do now.
This has nothing to do with nuclear power generation.
This entire article is based on a study by one person, no doubt with a political agenda.
I've lived next to Hanford since I was 3 years old, and work a couple of miles from the nuke plant. I've toured the site many times. I've followed local news, which reports on every boring little detail since they have nothing better to do, my entire life.
Are there problems? Sure. I remember when the single walled tanks started leaking, and they pumped everything into new double-wall tanks. Will there be problems in the future? Sure. Will those problems affect me? No. The accidents that take place may be major to the people working on that particular project, but are not catastrophic in the grand scheme of things.
Look: The Hanford site has been operational for decades. The number of serious accidents is tiny, and said accidents have only affected the workers directly involved with that given project, not the rest of us. Yes, there are environmental concerns. No, they aren't as horrible as this article makes them out to be. We swim in and eat fish from the river. Our water comes from the river and local groundwater. None is contaminated enough to be detectible, let alone harm somebody. And I'm right here, a fraction of a mile downstream from the site.
Even if the clean-up goes according to plan, Boldt claims there will still be 260 square kilometres of groundwater exceeding drinking water safety limits for over 10,000 years.
He's full of himself. This is nothing more than paranoid scare tactics.
In what conceivable economic circumstance could it be worthwhile to ship cows from one planet to another by putting them in the cargo hold of a spaceship?
When shipping cows is illegal, hence black market, hence gangsters are paying good money to get their hands on said cows.
Let's rephrase your question: In what conceivable economic circumstance could it be worthwhile to move pot into the United States by putting it in the cargo hold of an airplane? The answer is the same: When it's illegal to do so, and people with money want it done anyway.
5) Will the patent office be flooded with new alien claims to gifs, automatic software download and Linux? Maybe aliens created ELF?
I can't believe you're siding with McBride & company.
That's also ethical. I have no problem paying handling fees that are listed up front; I don't think anybody has a right to complain if they know what the costs are in advance. I've sold many items on eBay as well, and I always list all fees in the auction like you did here. To hide extra costs is dishonest and scummy.
I could also have _legally_ stated nothing! In that case, it is the buyer's responsibility to ask.
No, here you're wrong:
Now do you see why I was upset over this? I had assumed eBay would enforce their own policies. According to their rules, you can NOT simply tack on random charges after the item sells. You MUST disclose them in the listing. However, since the rules aren't enforced, apparently you CAN do this...
As I said, it's unethical at best, outright fraud at worst. eBay should enforce their policies in this matter.
Blaming eBay for your ignorance is foolish. Learn the rules before you play.
It's not "my ignorance" or not "learning the rules". I followed the damn rules but eBay decided they didn't matter. I'll explain:
eBay's policies state that sellers can't just randomly tack on fees after the auction ends. Other than normal shipping fees, they must list these things in their auctions. I assumed that eBay's policy in this matter actually had teeth. In other words, I should have been able to say, "Sorry, that's bullshit, you violated eBay's policy and I'm not paying", and eBay should have busted him for not listing this handling fee in the auction. No harm done.
Had eBay played the game according to their own rules, this wouldn't have been an issue. I wouldn't have paid for the item and the seller would have been slapped for violating listing rules. Instead, eBay participates in "extortion" by forcing me to pay under threat of my account.
My ignorance wasn't in bidding on that item without knowing about this fee. It was in assuming eBay would enforce their own rules.
What if it had sold for the opening bid of $5? Is charging $70 S&H wrong? That was the true cost.
This guy tried to charge $40 in shipping fees. He paid less than $10 to ship the item to me. The price was right there on the box when it arrived. To make it a fair comparison, "What if (your item) had sold for the opening bid of $5? Is charging $280 S&H wrong? It's only 4x the true cost, and that stupid bidder should have asked first, right?"
When I'm told that I'll be paying for shipping, I figure I'm paying within a few bucks of what the shipper is going to charge unless the item requires special shipping or packaging (large/heavy/delicate/etc). That's the moral and ethical way to do business. If you're going to charge a huge handling fee, it needs to be stated UP FRONT, so there are no surprises.
These people won't do that because they're trying to screw you. They'll take an item that retails for $20, sell it to you for $5, and tack on $40 in shipping costs. Others just randomly tack on a bunch of handling fees after the fact to make up for their item selling for less than they expected. It's unethical at best, if not outright fraud. You know it, I know it, and eBay knows it. Yet eBay lets it happen and people like you blame the buyer.
When I posted this to one of eBay's boards while the situation was ongoing, I heard from a hundred people just like you. They called ME a "no good non-paying bidder". Yeah, with nearly 200 transactions worth tens of thousands of dollars, all 100% positive, suddenly I'm a deadbeat bidder on a $10 win from a guy with a small handful of transactions. That's bullshit and you know it.
You wouldn't buy a used car over the net would you?
I've bought several, including my most recent purchase, a 1981 DMC DeLorean.
The trick with that is that if you have it shipped certified and it shows up at their address and has their signature on the line, they really can't argue with it.
That's right. I ship nothing without a tracking number and insurance. This means all of my shipments routinely go via UPS, since both tracking and up to $100 insurance is included.
Then when they come back with "I never received it", you produce the tracking number (hence, proof of delivery) and the seller's claim is thrown out.
Yep. I once sold a laptop 5 times before I actually got a paying bidder. Each time the listing fee was $5.
This was several years ago. I think eBay refunds listing fees now, if you relist the item...
In case I want something I'd rather buy it new. If I can't afford something new, I just won't buy it.
Easy to say for you. I'm into high end home automation equipment. A touchpanel that would cost me $3,000 new can be had for $200 on eBay. Control modules that run $3,000 - $5,000+ new? $150 - $800. I just bought two cool expansion units for $20 each. Retail price is $400 each.
As much as I hate eBay as a company, without them, I would have to give up one of my favorite hobbies.
They stick with their 'venue' status
A bunch of bullshit, too. I bought a $10 item and the seller added $20 for shipping (I expected $15, but whatever, I'll pay his overcharge), but then tacked a $20 "handling fee" on top of that! This was NOT mentioned in the auction!
eBay has a rule about this, so I complained to them, but they refused to enforce it because his auction said "seller pays shipping and handling". They also kindly informed me that if I didn't pay, my account would be subject to disciplinary action. I asked, "So, the seller could make up whatever number he wanted - $1,000, perhaps - and if I didn't pay, you would trash MY account?" The response: "Yes."
When I complained further, they pulled the "we're just a venue" bullshit, and compared themselves to the classifieds section of the newspaper. But they're not "just a venue". They have proactively taken steps to remove troublesome users and to create a large base of rules governing transactions. The fact that they go around slapping people who don't pay, no matter what the circumstances, proves they're not "just a venue."
eBay pisses me off. I still use it, because there aren't any other choices. But they're a bunch of asshats. Either you're a venue or not. Either you enforce rules or you don't have them at all. You can't have it both ways.
(I ended up paying half the seller's extortion fee and letting him keep some of the items in the lot that I didn't need, and making a note to never, ever bid on anything that doesn't have all shipping & handling costs clearly listed in the auction.)
That is correct. It is illegal for anyone - even apartment complex owners - to deny you the right to have a dish. They CAN deny:
1. Putting it in common areas (hallways, shared porch, etc)
2. Drilling into or otherwise damaging their property.
However, if you have a window, "private" porch only accessible from your apartment, or if you have a ground floor apartment with a concrete pad or other "private" area, you can place a dish there and there's not a damn thing they can do about it.
http://www.fcc.gov/mb/facts/otard.html
Also, they aren't allowed to charge you any fees or deposits for using your dish.
Poor logic. It would be trivial to use such a plane carrying explosives, or spraying gas/nerve agent over the White House, the Pentagon, New York in general etc. How are you going to do that in a van? Hell, a handful of coins would kill people from a few thounsand feet up.
Right. Because someone spraying nerve gas over the white house is going to give a damn about FAA regulations. "Sweet! The FAA has relaxed their restrictions on pilots! Now I can legally fly my nerve gas over NYC."
Come on, now. Use your head. These policy changes mean jack when it comes to terrorist activity. Just like gun control laws mean jack to someone hell bent on shooting up a school. If someone is going to release deadly gas from a plane, I somehow doubt they'll bother with the whole legal requirements of flying the aircraft.
I find it hard to believe that nobody even acknowledges the fact that, while the pilot was at fault, the builder of the plane was at fault too.
No, he wasn't. The builder put the switch where he thought it should go. He had no problem with it. If the pilot couldn't safely operate the aircraft with the switch in that location, he shouldn't have done so. It was his fault. Period.
If I had to reach under my dash board to turn on my radio, even if I became an expert at doing so, would I probably have an accident once in a while? Yes.
You've obviously never flown an aircraft. There is no reason why you cannot reach behind your seat, under your dash, behind your head, etc, and flip a switch while flying. Flying a straight line requires much less concentration than driving a car down a freeway.
You can access the filesystem directly and copy your files over.
Not if you want to listen to them on the iPod, you can't. You need to put them in a specific order and add them to the iPod's database. The iPod will not automatically index songs that are just dropped onto it's hard drive, and thus you won't be able to access them on-the-go.
Fucking paternalistic government.
I'm with you. My city officials threatened to fine me $500 per day, and when it hit $10k (20 days), to take my house away from me and sell it at auction. Why? Because I parked my RV on the side of my house, on dirt. That's illegal.
When I called one of my city council members to complain, here's how the conversation went:
Me: "This is insane. Why can't I park on dirt?"
Her: "Because, weeds grow on dirt."
Me: "But I keep my weeds pulled."
Her: "You may be responsible, but others aren't."
Me: "So why not make a law against weeds?"
Her: "We already have one."
Me: "So why do you need the law against parking on dirt?"
Her (extremely frustrated): "Sir, it's for your own protection!"
Me: "Uhm, do you think people really want the government protecting them from weeds that may or may not grow around a parked vehicle?"
She didn't want to talk to me anymore after that.
I have to echo what you said: "Fucking paternalistic government." As is often said, next thing they'll be wiping our asses for us. Won't that be fun?
Actually, I do tend to speed more after playing vice city or one of my racing
games
You think that's bad... I drive a sports car with almost twice the horsepower it came with (custom engine swap) and great cornering abilities. We went out and raced high powered "Indy Kart" Go-Karts on a couple of occasions. Driving my car home after several hours of that was quite the experience. Damn near lost control taking a corner because I was still "high" on the Go-Kart's vastly superior handling.
I'm sure these '3D copying machines' would become heavily regulated, much like handguns.
Quoting John Gilmore:
"If by 2030 we have invented a matter duplicator that's as cheap as copying a CD today, will we outlaw it and drive it underground? So that farmers can make a living keeping food expensive, so that furniture makers can make a living preventing people from having beds and chairs that would cost a dollar to duplicate, so that builders won't be reduced to poverty because a comfortable house can be duplicated for a few hundred dollars? Yes, such developments would cause economic dislocations for sure. But should we drive them underground and keep the world impoverished to save these peoples' jobs? And would they really stay underground, or would the natural advantages of the technology cause the "underground" to rapidly overtake the rest of society?"
Note that last sentence.
you can paintball in many more environments than you can lasertag
Uh, what? No you can't. Try taking your paintball equipment down to a public park, see how fast you get arrested. Or around your neighborhood. Or indoors. Or anywhere there might possibly be non-participants, buildings, or other things that people wouldn't want to see covered in colored in paintball fluids.
Lasertag is infinitely more flexible in where you can play.
It seems like most folks fit into one or the other, but rarely both.
I owned paintball gear for about a year. Played maybe on half a dozen different occasions. The best part? It's "real". Hurts when you get hit and you tend to act like you're in a real war. I enjoyed it, but I sold the gear for a few reasons:
1. Expensive to play. I'd drop $20-$40 on supplies for half a day of play.
2. Can't just play anywhere. We tried to play in a big, deserted canyon once. Someone in a house at the top of the hill threatened to call the cops. This was empty public property but we didn't want any trouble, so we left.
3. The places you CAN play aren't usually very fun. Lots of dirt, tumbleweeds, stickers, etc, that I had to pick out of my clothes when I was done.
4. Protective gear made for uncomfortable play. Especially on a 100 degree day.
5. Some people are assholes. I had a guy light me up from maybe 20 feet away, even though I had my hands up and was asking him which team he was on (he'd JUST entered in the middle of a game). He just kept shooting, wouldn't stop. Hurt like HELL. I was ready for a fist fight with that f***er. Anyone who has ever played paintball can share a similar story.
Laser tag appeals to me. You can play anywhere (nice, grassy public parks, etc), no need for protective gear, it's cheap, and it's fun. I can easily buy enough gear for half a dozen friends for what I paid for my paintball equipment, and it's easy to talk them into a quick one hour game.
Sweet. Thanks for the response.
I forgot, this is Slashdot. Some people have nice living rooms. We don't want an ugly box sitting amongst our nice A/V equipment. That $80 case is small, black, and looks like a stereo component. It's also dirt cheap for a good looking HTPC case. If you want to use a typical ugly case or an empty pop box, that's fine, but I like my living room to look nice.
Sure, you can get cheaper RAM, if you want your system to give you problems. Try running memtest on your cheap RAM and watch all of the beautiful errors that pop up. I bought Corsair memory. Top of the line. Will help prevent those annoying and unexplainable crashes in the middle of my favorite show.
It was also cheap. You might save $10 by getting a cheaper one.
Antec TRUEPower PSUs are some of the best you can buy. After dealing with others, I'll never go back. These are silent, with multiple fans, and will automatically crank up the airflow if temps get too high. Buy a cheap PSU and it's going to be louder and cause more system instability.
I'll give you that the SB Live sounds great. I have several of them here. Nice, cheap cards. But we're talking about an HTPC. I have 7.1 channel surround in my living room. You can't even get 5.1 out of the SB Live Value. Who watches DVDs with 2 channel audio anymore?
Fully wireless. You hold the mouse in the air and wave it around. Gyroscopes sense the position and move the pointer. Overkill? Not really. Again, we get back to this idea about having a nice home, with a nice living room. Maybe some people can have cables running across the floor from the TV to the half empty pizza box that they use for a mousing surface. That's not an option for most of us.
Not really. NewEgg has damn good prices. Can they be beat? Yeah, I probably could have saved $20 on the total order by carefully getting things from a dozen different retailers and watching my shipping.
Your solution is cheap, and I'm sure it works fine for geek bachelors who don't care much about aesthetics and can deal with lockups and crashes caused by the use of substandard components. I'm not dissing you here - I used to be a geek bachelor myself. Now I'm a professional geek with a nice house, a wife and children. We have other couples over to our home for dinner, movies, BBQs, etc. Having an ugly beige tower with big long keyboard & mouse cables running across the floor, sitting next to my 65" widescreen display and nice AV equipment is not acceptable to me. Nor is it acceptable to the vast majority of people.
Even forgetting aesthetics, using cheap components causes more headaches than it's worth. I've been there, done that. I don't build PCs with the cheapest crap I can dig up anymore. The little unsolvable bugs, lockups, and crappy support from cheap manufacturers aren't worth it. I should note, however, that the components I selected aren't particularly expensive. Quite frankly I built this box on a pretty small budget and I consider it barely scraping by.
Can you send me any info you have on MCE 2004? I'm thinking links to forums, add-ons, and other sites that provide info for people building their own MCE boxes. Thank you!
leaving a computer or two on at home 24/7 is such a miniscule part of my powerbill compared to the part contributed by running my A/C....
Just for laughs, you should get a meter and measure things. I bought one of those Kill-A-Watt meters, and a few quick calculations shows my computer running me about $10 a month to leave on.
That's not much, but my server runs another $10. My wife's computer, another $10. So out of my $120 total electrical bill, about $30 is just computers. That's not even adding the power of the monitors, which shut themselves off when not in use.
It adds up fast. We've been powering down our workstations when not in use - now only the server runs 24/7.
I'm sorry, but you're going WAY too cheap here. I just built what I consider to be a REALLY BASIC HTPC, with relatively cheap components. Parts will arrive this Friday. Here's what I got:
CoolerMaster MicroATX case: $80
AMD Athlon XP 2500+: $80
512MB RAM: $84
DVD-ROM 16x: $31
Antec TRUE330 quiet power supply: $47
Shuttle MN31L MB: $76
Floppy drive: $11
+ odds & ends (cables, etc)
+ $28 for shipping
Total price: $451.00, and all from NewEgg. I shopped around, these were some of the best prices to be found.
Gyration wireless keyboard & mouse ran me another $120 + shipping. SPDIF board for the Shuttle motherboard was another $20 + shipping. And I haven't even touched video input yet, nor have I included the cost of the hard drive which I already own! This is just to PLAY BACK quality video!
I'm sorry, but if you're building a HTPC with components priced as cheap as you listed, that's going to be one shitty little box. A $10 sound card? LOL. Good luck playing back audio worth hearing over that. Really, good luck with that. I'm using the MB's on-board audio and hoping it's tolerable, which is bad enough. I'm also using the built-in video. If I added good video & sound that would tack another $150 - $300 onto this project.
A decent HTPC will run you $500 - $800 at a minimum. That's a pretty bare-bones system.