Just because some do doesn't mean all do. Read the fine print on some of the ones at stores you don't code for. Many of them are indeed non-replaceable.
Some stores do have much friendlier policies, but when I say that many don't I mean it and I'm right. Any easy way to get a friendlier policy is to either use Visa or MasterCard gift cards or deal with stores whose gift cards are handled as such. Many stores, however, still do not replace or refund stolen, lost, or destroyed gift cards (partially destroyed and still recognizable maybe), which is what I said and you're trying to argue against.
My town of about 40k has a decent bus system. It runs from about 7 or 8 am to 8 or 9 pm during the week and has a stop within about six blocks of anywhere, but the wait can be a while. The physical accommodations buses will pick you up and drop you off anywhere when they have the capacity available and you're physically disabled. Still, a car or even a bicycle is often more convenient than the non-handicap bus.
Free wifi on the buses here wouldn't make much difference for two reasons. For one, most non-handicapped people who ride the bus are lucky to afford rent, let alone a laptop. For another, the bus rides are usually too short to get much done unless you're going all the way across town. Now, if they had free wifi at all the bus stops, that'd be something neat.
The problem with that scenario is that if you have two warring factions, they could destroy the enemy ships with PLEX first if possible as a means to weaken the other faction. That they're not gaining the the PLEX doesn't mean they wouldn't be happy to cause the loss for their in-game enemies.
Many stores don't reprint gift cards if they are lost, stolen, or destroyed IRL. Why should CCP be responsible if this guy let them get destroyed in the game? Are we going to be suing over mounts and swords in WoW next?
In EVE, isk are currency. PLEXes are valuable commodities. They're about as good as in-game currency, and to heavy EVE players they're almost as good as real currency.
Just like some transactions IRL you can make in gold, stock, bonds, beer, or whatever you can get plenty of people to take PLEXes as payment in the game. Still, you can buy and sell PLEXes for isk.
Some players buy PLEXes with IRL currency and sell it for isk or trade it for other stuff in-game. Some players play enough and make enough in-game profit that they buy PLEXes in-game and don't pay real money for their subscriptions, at least not every month. Those are the players CCP wants to keep around anyway, as they make the high-level PvP game interesting for the other players.
Yeah, they did briefly mention that. I'd bet by the time they got around to it they'd realize that current networking kit just won't cut that log. Let them try it on this scale and work some issues out. Who knows, the networking industry might just get a jumpstart on equipment for huge mesh networks by following a gradual scale-up of something like this.
Getting all the livery cabs, taxi cabs, buses, and shuttle vans in the city to be hotspots for a 200 foot radius right now with what's available would be a nightmare, I agree. Getting the subway and the full-size buses to do wifi for riders would please lots of people and might encourage more mass transit trips. Maybe that's where the city should really be looking.
How often do you see livery cabs lined up for fares? Yellow taxis, sure, all the time. I'd bet it's a rare building that has a steady stream of call-ahead, pre-arranged, private rental cars with drivers pulling up. A livery cab isn't a taxi. You can't hail it. A livery cab is codified in NYC law as a "For Hire Vehicle" or "FHV".
You'll get a lot of liveries at JFK or LaGuardia, sure, and maybe at sports stadiums when there's a game. Most of the cabs in the city are taxi cabs, which in NYC are all yellow.
T-Mobile has horrible service here and Verizon has only leased coverage on other carriers' towers and won't sell me service. Thanks for the tip, though. If I ever move somewhere that T-Mobile doesn't suck and Verizon is an option, I'll keep it in mind.
My options here are AT&T (which is the one my wife is with with the porting issue), US Cellular (which I'm with and which has better coverage where we live than AT&T), Sprint (pretty good coverage but more expensive than USC), T-Mobile (which I mentioned sucks), Boost, Virgin, and a local place you've probably never heard mentioned anywhere else because it's local.
I think I'd rather have service I can actually use than unified billing.
Handguns are much easier and cheaper to store and lock away properly in a small apartment.
Semi-auto I don't think means what you think it means. Semi-auto just means that it fires one round when you pull the trigger. Single-action/bolt action/lever action/pump action means you have to cock something before firing. Double-action means you have to cock a hammer before firing, but that if you pull the trigger hard enough (harder than on a single action) it will cock then fire. Burst fire means that pulling the trigger fires some small number of rounds (usually three or five). Full auto means the system fires until you release the trigger or run out of ammunition.
Semi-auto includes a great deal of small-caliber sporting rifles that have so little power they can't be used to reliably hunt coyotes or deer and are considered illegally cruel to use for such.
Every firearm has a specific use. Anyone can be a hunter or sport shooter. Anyone can try to defend themselves against armed assailants, whether you choose to do so or not.
I'd rather live with the consequences of shooting an intruder to kill than not live because I chose not to shoot to kill. I'd much rather shoot to kill and live with the consequences than live knowing an intruder killed my wife or guests in our home because I didn't shoot to kill.
The problem with gun crime isn't guns. It's crime.
The number of times anti-gun nuts, pro-gun nuts and people between those extremes write the phrase "accidental gun deaths" on a page is not a count of anything more than exactly that. It's not a count of accidental deaths. It's not even a pro or anti argument related to guns. It's just a count of pages that contain that phrase. The phrase could be included in "accidental gun deaths aren't a major problem statistically", "the many horrors of runaway accidental gun deaths" or even "accidental gun deaths are good because they remove stupid people from the gene pool".
Your statistics mean nothing other than the popularity of a phrase, not how often there is an accidental gun death.
The supposed word "twarts" isn't even spelled correctly. Just spelling that correctly as "thwarts" returns a higher meaningless statistic than what you report for "twarts" and "stops" together.
Furthermore, "accidental gun deaths" is a coherent phrase that is a natural and quite likely phrasing for the idea. Prevention of a crime could be
"thwarts"
"stops"
"prevents"
"interrupts"
"curtails"
"mitigates"
or half a dozen other words in different orders:
"crime is prevented by a gun",
"gun mitigates a crime"
"hero interrupts commission of a crime"
or many more.
Also, crimes are many: robbery, murder, rape, burglary, theft, carjacking, kidnapping, assault... so searching for just "crime" doesn't even get you the useless statistic you're claiming you have.
Learn a bit about logic and reading comprehension before you try to move on to debate. Your whole argument is trash. Have a nice day.
I don't hate people in the EU, you stupid, arrogant prick. I said there are some snobs in the EU, and that some of them hold everything in the world to their experiences. Some people in the US do that too, but I'm not one of them.
The prick in question was saying that porting isn't a pain because of his experience, which holds relatively little weight in a discussion about porting US cell phone numbers since the governments, regulatory agencies, and often the companies bear little to no relation to one another. Yet this person was directly contradicting someone's experience with the experience in the US, which is a different experience from in the EU... because things work differently.... because the regulations are different... because the EU is not the US's master.
If you read what I wrote as hate, then I feel sorry for the students of your reading comprehensions classes. I hope most of them fared better than you at least. What I wrote was a pointed observation that the experiences of someone in a certain environment do not qualify that person to refute the experiences of people in a completely different environment when those differences bear on the experiences. Wait... let me simplify that for you: Someone who can't know what you went through can't tell you how bad it was.
I notice you're anon. That's a shame. Your harsh judgment of me for supposedly being judgmental of an entire continent instead of calling out the specific group I named ("some snobs in the EU") really deserved to be remembered as a counterexample (a counterexample is something you point out to others as something not to do).
Guess what? The shitty carrier that can't manage its own networks is AT&T. They're my wife's company that can't port my number and put it on her family plan.
When are livery cabs mostly parked in the same place? When the shift is over and they shut the car down? Or are you thinking of yellow taxi cabs rather than livery cabs?
Livery cabs can include limos. Livery cabs don't include the Yellow Taxi for which New York is famous. Anything that can be hailed at the curb by a random fair without prearranging the livery (literally the renting of a ride) is not a livery cab. Limos, Town Cars, minivans, or pretty much any vehicle can be a livery cab, and limos are a popular choice.
A livery cab is a cab for point-to-point rental. It is not a yellow taxi cab that you can hail from the curb. It's what you get when someone says, "I've called a car for you. You'll be dropped off at the client's at 10."
(For those who missed the joke, it comes in thirds:
a livery cab is a point-to-point cab service you can't hail. Assuming you're the passenger, you're going to be very unfortunate to not keep up with the signal, since the cab is coming to pick you up and drop you off.
cars in Manhattan rarely move very fast for very long, and with decent roaming another should be by shortly enough to give you at least a chance of picking it up
the comparison of livery cabs to handsome cabs, which are themselves carriages drawn by horses
Yeah, roses look nice,but people are talking down the expense and time of raising a dog. Have you ever tried to raise good-looking roses? Since the OP is in an apartment, planting anything in beds outside is probably out of the question, even if he is on the ground floor.
I live in an area where gun collecting, clay shooting, sport course shooting, still target shooting, hunting, and just putting ammo into cans are common hobbies. I remember far more deadly beating around here than accidental gun deaths.
Accidental deaths tend to be in the form of cars, motorcycles, ATVs, boats, and farm machinery. Accidental gun deaths are caused when people with no respect for the power and utility of firearms pick them up at the corner shop without sufficient training.
In 2001, 800 to 900 gun deaths were accidental in the US. About 11,000 were homicides, and the biggest number -- about 58% of all gun-related deaths in 2001 -- were suicides. Other sources have higher numbers, but I didn't find anything higher than 1,500 annually in a quip that sounds extremely anti-firearm in a top-ten list of accidental deaths.
Remember that top ten list I mentioned? Firearms accidents were listed at #7, although if using other sources for the number they would have fallen possibly at #8 or #9.
Death by gases (poisoning and asphyxiation) are in the same neighborhood as accidental gun deaths. Suffocation (choking blocking the respiratory tract or asphyxiation just due to lack of oxygen and not some other gas getting in its way) is double or more, as are fire-related deaths and drownings.
Roughly double the items in the previous paragraph to find 8,600 people per year lethally poisoned by solids or liquids including truly poisonous foods but not foods contaminated by infectious food-borne pathogens like salmonella.
Almost double that again to find that nearly 15,000 people plunge to untimely deaths each year.
Motor vehicle crashes (accounting for over 43,000 fatalities per year according to their unnamed sources) lead by a huge margin. That's more than suicides, homicides, and accidental deaths by gun put together.
I guess it's time to tell people about the dangers of letting their loved ones around ladders, stairs, food, and especially cars.
He gets a discount, as stated, on his insurance. F his discount has paid off the system, then he should know that. I'd like to know which insurance company he uses if that's the case, though.
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Just because some do doesn't mean all do. Read the fine print on some of the ones at stores you don't code for. Many of them are indeed non-replaceable.
Read Amazon's gift card policy or that of SeaWorld's gift card supplier. Wendy's gift cards cn be replaced if they are registered online before they are lost or stolen, but not otherwise. Ticketmaster will replace malfunctioning cards but not lost or stolen ones. Mom and Pop indeed...
Some stores do have much friendlier policies, but when I say that many don't I mean it and I'm right. Any easy way to get a friendlier policy is to either use Visa or MasterCard gift cards or deal with stores whose gift cards are handled as such. Many stores, however, still do not replace or refund stolen, lost, or destroyed gift cards (partially destroyed and still recognizable maybe), which is what I said and you're trying to argue against.
My town of about 40k has a decent bus system. It runs from about 7 or 8 am to 8 or 9 pm during the week and has a stop within about six blocks of anywhere, but the wait can be a while. The physical accommodations buses will pick you up and drop you off anywhere when they have the capacity available and you're physically disabled. Still, a car or even a bicycle is often more convenient than the non-handicap bus.
Free wifi on the buses here wouldn't make much difference for two reasons. For one, most non-handicapped people who ride the bus are lucky to afford rent, let alone a laptop. For another, the bus rides are usually too short to get much done unless you're going all the way across town. Now, if they had free wifi at all the bus stops, that'd be something neat.
I agree wholeheartedly with every part of your post except the word "unfortunately".
I can't imagine his alliance is any too happy with him, anyway.
Well, there are always casinos. You can lose real money trying to get real money rather than losing real money trying to get fake money.
The problem with that scenario is that if you have two warring factions, they could destroy the enemy ships with PLEX first if possible as a means to weaken the other faction. That they're not gaining the the PLEX doesn't mean they wouldn't be happy to cause the loss for their in-game enemies.
And if it is lost, stolen, or destroyed Best Buy doesn't have to honor or replace it.
Many stores don't reprint gift cards if they are lost, stolen, or destroyed IRL. Why should CCP be responsible if this guy let them get destroyed in the game? Are we going to be suing over mounts and swords in WoW next?
In EVE, isk are currency. PLEXes are valuable commodities. They're about as good as in-game currency, and to heavy EVE players they're almost as good as real currency.
Just like some transactions IRL you can make in gold, stock, bonds, beer, or whatever you can get plenty of people to take PLEXes as payment in the game. Still, you can buy and sell PLEXes for isk.
Some players buy PLEXes with IRL currency and sell it for isk or trade it for other stuff in-game. Some players play enough and make enough in-game profit that they buy PLEXes in-game and don't pay real money for their subscriptions, at least not every month. Those are the players CCP wants to keep around anyway, as they make the high-level PvP game interesting for the other players.
Yeah, they did briefly mention that. I'd bet by the time they got around to it they'd realize that current networking kit just won't cut that log. Let them try it on this scale and work some issues out. Who knows, the networking industry might just get a jumpstart on equipment for huge mesh networks by following a gradual scale-up of something like this.
Getting all the livery cabs, taxi cabs, buses, and shuttle vans in the city to be hotspots for a 200 foot radius right now with what's available would be a nightmare, I agree. Getting the subway and the full-size buses to do wifi for riders would please lots of people and might encourage more mass transit trips. Maybe that's where the city should really be looking.
Thanks for proving a negative. Care to update everyone's textbooks now?
How often do you see livery cabs lined up for fares? Yellow taxis, sure, all the time. I'd bet it's a rare building that has a steady stream of call-ahead, pre-arranged, private rental cars with drivers pulling up. A livery cab isn't a taxi. You can't hail it. A livery cab is codified in NYC law as a "For Hire Vehicle" or "FHV".
You'll get a lot of liveries at JFK or LaGuardia, sure, and maybe at sports stadiums when there's a game. Most of the cabs in the city are taxi cabs, which in NYC are all yellow.
T-Mobile has horrible service here and Verizon has only leased coverage on other carriers' towers and won't sell me service. Thanks for the tip, though. If I ever move somewhere that T-Mobile doesn't suck and Verizon is an option, I'll keep it in mind.
My options here are AT&T (which is the one my wife is with with the porting issue), US Cellular (which I'm with and which has better coverage where we live than AT&T), Sprint (pretty good coverage but more expensive than USC), T-Mobile (which I mentioned sucks), Boost, Virgin, and a local place you've probably never heard mentioned anywhere else because it's local.
I think I'd rather have service I can actually use than unified billing.
Handguns are much easier and cheaper to store and lock away properly in a small apartment.
Semi-auto I don't think means what you think it means. Semi-auto just means that it fires one round when you pull the trigger. Single-action/bolt action/lever action/pump action means you have to cock something before firing. Double-action means you have to cock a hammer before firing, but that if you pull the trigger hard enough (harder than on a single action) it will cock then fire. Burst fire means that pulling the trigger fires some small number of rounds (usually three or five). Full auto means the system fires until you release the trigger or run out of ammunition.
Semi-auto includes a great deal of small-caliber sporting rifles that have so little power they can't be used to reliably hunt coyotes or deer and are considered illegally cruel to use for such.
Every firearm has a specific use. Anyone can be a hunter or sport shooter. Anyone can try to defend themselves against armed assailants, whether you choose to do so or not.
I'd rather live with the consequences of shooting an intruder to kill than not live because I chose not to shoot to kill. I'd much rather shoot to kill and live with the consequences than live knowing an intruder killed my wife or guests in our home because I didn't shoot to kill.
The problem with gun crime isn't guns. It's crime.
ummmmmmmm.... no.
The number of times anti-gun nuts, pro-gun nuts and people between those extremes write the phrase "accidental gun deaths" on a page is not a count of anything more than exactly that. It's not a count of accidental deaths. It's not even a pro or anti argument related to guns. It's just a count of pages that contain that phrase. The phrase could be included in "accidental gun deaths aren't a major problem statistically", "the many horrors of runaway accidental gun deaths" or even "accidental gun deaths are good because they remove stupid people from the gene pool".
Your statistics mean nothing other than the popularity of a phrase, not how often there is an accidental gun death.
The supposed word "twarts" isn't even spelled correctly. Just spelling that correctly as "thwarts" returns a higher meaningless statistic than what you report for "twarts" and "stops" together.
Furthermore, "accidental gun deaths" is a coherent phrase that is a natural and quite likely phrasing for the idea. Prevention of a crime could be
or half a dozen other words in different orders:
or many more.
Also, crimes are many: robbery, murder, rape, burglary, theft, carjacking, kidnapping, assault... so searching for just "crime" doesn't even get you the useless statistic you're claiming you have.
Learn a bit about logic and reading comprehension before you try to move on to debate. Your whole argument is trash. Have a nice day.
I don't hate people in the EU, you stupid, arrogant prick. I said there are some snobs in the EU, and that some of them hold everything in the world to their experiences. Some people in the US do that too, but I'm not one of them.
The prick in question was saying that porting isn't a pain because of his experience, which holds relatively little weight in a discussion about porting US cell phone numbers since the governments, regulatory agencies, and often the companies bear little to no relation to one another. Yet this person was directly contradicting someone's experience with the experience in the US, which is a different experience from in the EU... because things work differently.... because the regulations are different... because the EU is not the US's master.
If you read what I wrote as hate, then I feel sorry for the students of your reading comprehensions classes. I hope most of them fared better than you at least. What I wrote was a pointed observation that the experiences of someone in a certain environment do not qualify that person to refute the experiences of people in a completely different environment when those differences bear on the experiences. Wait... let me simplify that for you: Someone who can't know what you went through can't tell you how bad it was.
I notice you're anon. That's a shame. Your harsh judgment of me for supposedly being judgmental of an entire continent instead of calling out the specific group I named ("some snobs in the EU") really deserved to be remembered as a counterexample (a counterexample is something you point out to others as something not to do).
I think you meant "disparate".
Guess what? The shitty carrier that can't manage its own networks is AT&T. They're my wife's company that can't port my number and put it on her family plan.
When are livery cabs mostly parked in the same place? When the shift is over and they shut the car down? Or are you thinking of yellow taxi cabs rather than livery cabs?
Livery cabs can include limos. Livery cabs don't include the Yellow Taxi for which New York is famous. Anything that can be hailed at the curb by a random fair without prearranging the livery (literally the renting of a ride) is not a livery cab. Limos, Town Cars, minivans, or pretty much any vehicle can be a livery cab, and limos are a popular choice.
A livery cab is a cab for point-to-point rental. It is not a yellow taxi cab that you can hail from the curb. It's what you get when someone says, "I've called a car for you. You'll be dropped off at the client's at 10."
(For those who missed the joke, it comes in thirds:
)
If you can't keep up with a livery cab, you need to get a faster horse for yourself.
Yeah, roses look nice,but people are talking down the expense and time of raising a dog. Have you ever tried to raise good-looking roses? Since the OP is in an apartment, planting anything in beds outside is probably out of the question, even if he is on the ground floor.
I'd like to see the citations for your numbers.
I live in an area where gun collecting, clay shooting, sport course shooting, still target shooting, hunting, and just putting ammo into cans are common hobbies. I remember far more deadly beating around here than accidental gun deaths.
Accidental deaths tend to be in the form of cars, motorcycles, ATVs, boats, and farm machinery. Accidental gun deaths are caused when people with no respect for the power and utility of firearms pick them up at the corner shop without sufficient training.
About 30% of Americans polled by Gallup own firearms personally and 40% say they have a gun in their home. 47% of men in some demographic groups personally own at least one firearm.
In 2001, 800 to 900 gun deaths were accidental in the US. About 11,000 were homicides, and the biggest number -- about 58% of all gun-related deaths in 2001 -- were suicides. Other sources have higher numbers, but I didn't find anything higher than 1,500 annually in a quip that sounds extremely anti-firearm in a top-ten list of accidental deaths.
Now, since there are around 300 million people in the US and around 300 million firearms, I'd say less than 1000 accidental deaths is much better than the situation for accidental death for motorists and passengers in cars (33,040 of whom died in 2005) or bicyclists (of whom 784 died in 2005, but at 3 to 11 times as many deaths per mile as those in cars).
About 5,000 people die from food poisoning each year in the US, with about 1,800 of those dying from known pathogens. Seventy-five percent of those known pathogens are strains of just three pathogens: Salmonella, Listeria, and Toxoplasma.
Remember that top ten list I mentioned? Firearms accidents were listed at #7, although if using other sources for the number they would have fallen possibly at #8 or #9.
Death by gases (poisoning and asphyxiation) are in the same neighborhood as accidental gun deaths. Suffocation (choking blocking the respiratory tract or asphyxiation just due to lack of oxygen and not some other gas getting in its way) is double or more, as are fire-related deaths and drownings.
Roughly double the items in the previous paragraph to find 8,600 people per year lethally poisoned by solids or liquids including truly poisonous foods but not foods contaminated by infectious food-borne pathogens like salmonella.
Almost double that again to find that nearly 15,000 people plunge to untimely deaths each year.
Motor vehicle crashes (accounting for over 43,000 fatalities per year according to their unnamed sources) lead by a huge margin. That's more than suicides, homicides, and accidental deaths by gun put together.
I guess it's time to tell people about the dangers of letting their loved ones around ladders, stairs, food, and especially cars.
He gets a discount, as stated, on his insurance. F his discount has paid off the system, then he should know that. I'd like to know which insurance company he uses if that's the case, though.