Who in the fuck would drive a 1988 Corolla if they could afford something better? Almost nobody needs an SUV, but it's an easy solution to a common problem - and it's one that the government inadvertently encouraged with the CAFE regulations.
As for the size of your family, it's up to you, but remember that kids usually acquire friends as they grow up. Moving three or four kids around happens even if you've only got one.
FACT: Your daily driver doesn't need to be your long range traveler.
Where are you going to put your distance traveler? How much will having an extra car cost? Theoretically, you're right - my wife and I would do just fine with two Smarts or similar vehicles as commuter cars (we each have commutes under 5 miles), an SUV for when we need to haul stuff around, and a nice big car for trips. But that's a lot of cars, a lot of money, and nowhere to put them in a 2-car garage (and I have a two-car garage but a one-car driveway, so the extras will be on the street where the risk of a break-in skyrockets).
It's popular to crap on suburban moms who drive a monster SUV with only themselves in it to the grocery store, but given the legal requirement that children be kept in car seats until much later than used to be the case, it's about the only way you can transport three or more children at once. And once you've bought the big SUV, why would you buy yet another vehicle (which has to be maintained, and registered, and taxed) just to do the short trips?
Not only that, the SUV with five people in it is actually more efficient per passenger-mile than a train. Not more efficient than a freight train, mind you, but passengers care when they get there. A fully-loaded SUV is actually a very efficient vehicle.
It's been at least a decade. I just checked out the website. Interesting to see how things have changed. Still much more toned down than the other stuff out there.
This is bizarre. Playboy is R-rated, not NC-17, and Apple already distributes music that carries the [EXPLICIT] tag. Hell, they sell and rent Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and there's nothing you can see in Playboy that's not in that movie, and nothing they say in Playboy that's not in American Pie.
The difficult part is regaining the sound range of an immediately prepubescent boy. An eleven-year-old no longer has a "childish" sound to their voice except the range is a bit high. As I discovered to my great amusement at that age, there's a good reason they get adult women to voice the parts of boys in movies and TV. As long as the entire business could be conducted over the phone, I had no problem convincing people that I was an adult woman rather than a preteen boy.
No. Most of your voice comes from your head - your sinuses, your nose, your mouth. The larynx can only really change the pitch at which you talk. Two examples:
1. The talking guitar (most famously, Peter Frampton's). The sound is produced by a guitar but modulated by his head and sent to a second microphone.
2. The little buzzers that produce a robot-like voice in people who have had a laryngectomy (Ned on South Park is probably the most famous fictional character I can think of with this, although that effect isn't actually created with one of the devices). The principle is that all you need is some constant tone that can be modulated by the head.
You know, I did that for a little while, got about 20 dvds... and other than the first season of Dexter, which we watched on a vacation, I've never watched one of those movies again. I can't think of more than a couple dozen movies that I have actually wanted to see more than twice (as opposed to watching because they were on, and wasn't that a good story, etc. - I mean seeking it out to watch it.)
It seems pretty clear that nobody in Washington is interested in controlling illegal immigration, so why do we continue to waste money on it? If you're going to build a fence, build a real fence that actually keeps people out.
Can't we at least get a better class of pork-barrel projects to funnel money to defense contractors? I'd appreciate getting at least some value for the money.
I should be able to update the software on my phone without worrying about whether it's going to make my phone "stop working"
Why? You bought it with a given set of features. If you don't like the features, DON'T BUY IT. You may do as you like with the phone - it's yours - but you can't expect the manufacturer to spend a lot of time and effort making sure that the software changes don't cripple the phone. I'm a reasonably technically sophisticated user, and I don't mind living on the bleeding edge every now and again - if Cyanogenmod crashes my phone, so be it. I would NEVER suggest this phone for my wife - she wants something that just works, all the time, and she's more than willing to accept limited functionality in return. She has a Blackberry, and it's absolutely perfect for how she uses it, because it does a few things well and doesn't ever crash.
If he's sensible, then he has stripped the DRM from the Kindle books, in which case he has them in unencrypted Mobipocket. That's a format for which there are numerous readers and converters. I'd call that owning the book and the software. (Calibre, for example, is released under the GPL.)
Well, here's a version that's a bit more explicit about it.
Who the fuck cares? I'm not going to buy something that I know comes broken to get the privilege of fixing it unless I'm at a garage sale. That's ridiculous.
I care, because it's a way to get good quality, legal electronic books. The alternatives are to pirate the books, in which case quality is often still quite poor, or to buy them from one of the tiny handful of non-DRM ebook sources, in which case there's no point because your selection sucks. I buy from the large-scale, legitimate store with an excellent selection of mostly very high quality ebooks that happen to come with a tiny bit of DRM that can be stripped out. Yes, I'd prefer they came without it, but when it's only an additional minute or two of work... it still takes less time than driving to the bookstore. That's why the fuck I care about stripping Kindle DRM.
It's called Topaz. It can be stripped; I've got the books in my Calibre library to prove it. You can easily distinguish the two by looking at the Amazon webpage describing the book. If it shows only the number of pages in the print version, it's a Topaz file. If it shows both pages and file size, it's in the original format.
Let me get this straight: your goal, presumably, is to convince me that I should avoid buying DRM in order to bring about the DRMerdammerung. In order to do so, you call me a fool.
This might not be the optimal way to get people to agree with you, particularly as I do, in fact, control every bit of the stuff I've purchased so far.
As long as I can get the underlying file, I don't care what you throw on it. If Amazon changes things so that I can't immediately decrypt my files, well, then I'll worry about that. I don't have to unlock it every time I use it, just once: if you can rip open the packaging with a knife, who cares about the stupid lock? It's not inferior to anything once I've pulled the DRM.
Practical choice: if I can turn it into a DRM-free file, I'll buy it. If I can't, I won't. Political choice: DRM is so wrong we should avoid any product with it, no matter how trivial the protection is. That is a political statement ("I reject DRM in all its forms") expressed as an economic action. The numerous economic boycotts of the civil rights era are one example of this; the economic boycotts of white South Africa and Rhodesia; the US embargo on Cuba; the various campaigns to get individuals or investors to make specific economic decisions in order to support a political point. You dislike DRM so much that you are willing to deprive yourself of e-books in order to avoid appearing to support it. I don't really care, so long as I can get rid of the DRM.
It's a political decision to you. It's a practical one to me. As long as I can get in, I don't care how. If they changed the DRM so I couldn't crack it, I'd quit buying from them.
Because I want to read books that don't have errors in them. An e-book straight from the publisher doesn't have errors - I know, I've bought quite a few. I'll strip the DRM and have my book free forever for five minutes' effort. If you don't want to do that, fine. Pirate, or ignore, or buy on paper - I don't care. You're not me, and I don't care what you do.
Then a Kindle is not for you. I'm cool with that; if you don't value the advantages that an e-reader offers, don't get one. They're certainly not for everyone.
Read your link. That is a MiFi or similar broadband device. The service for smartphones is unlimited.
This has been hashed out over and over and over again on the Android-specific fora. The plans for smartphones are unlimited. Period.
BTW, what's your source for that French plan? At Orange, I see a EUR55 plan that offers 20Mbit internet, 120 channels, and unlimited Orange in-network; if you want all numbers in France, it will be EUR110/mo. Nothing like $30/mo.
They really do offer unlimited transfer, but only on smartphones. It's not stupid, and it's not misleading. They do count on people not using the full capability of their hardware 24/7 in order to make the plans work, but if you violate those assumptions they do not punish you.
$80/mo for 10 GB of data is steep for an average Joe, but for a corporate road warrior or traveling salesman it's a dead easy investment. As a result, it's not unlike accommodations on the road: there are motels that cater to those who pay their own way, generally costing $45-$80/night and offering free WiFi, free local calls, and free parking. There is another category entirely of hotels that cater to those who are on an expense account, costing $130-$180/night with expensive WiFi, per-call charges for local calls, and pay parking. They can often be found within a fairly short distance of each other. They have simply segmented the market by identifying those who will pay more for a service and finding a way to extract the extra cash from them.
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Who in the fuck would drive a 1988 Corolla if they could afford something better? Almost nobody needs an SUV, but it's an easy solution to a common problem - and it's one that the government inadvertently encouraged with the CAFE regulations.
As for the size of your family, it's up to you, but remember that kids usually acquire friends as they grow up. Moving three or four kids around happens even if you've only got one.
FACT: Your daily driver doesn't need to be your long range traveler.
Where are you going to put your distance traveler? How much will having an extra car cost? Theoretically, you're right - my wife and I would do just fine with two Smarts or similar vehicles as commuter cars (we each have commutes under 5 miles), an SUV for when we need to haul stuff around, and a nice big car for trips. But that's a lot of cars, a lot of money, and nowhere to put them in a 2-car garage (and I have a two-car garage but a one-car driveway, so the extras will be on the street where the risk of a break-in skyrockets).
It's popular to crap on suburban moms who drive a monster SUV with only themselves in it to the grocery store, but given the legal requirement that children be kept in car seats until much later than used to be the case, it's about the only way you can transport three or more children at once. And once you've bought the big SUV, why would you buy yet another vehicle (which has to be maintained, and registered, and taxed) just to do the short trips?
Not only that, the SUV with five people in it is actually more efficient per passenger-mile than a train. Not more efficient than a freight train, mind you, but passengers care when they get there. A fully-loaded SUV is actually a very efficient vehicle.
It's been at least a decade. I just checked out the website. Interesting to see how things have changed. Still much more toned down than the other stuff out there.
This is bizarre. Playboy is R-rated, not NC-17, and Apple already distributes music that carries the [EXPLICIT] tag. Hell, they sell and rent Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and there's nothing you can see in Playboy that's not in that movie, and nothing they say in Playboy that's not in American Pie.
The difficult part is regaining the sound range of an immediately prepubescent boy. An eleven-year-old no longer has a "childish" sound to their voice except the range is a bit high. As I discovered to my great amusement at that age, there's a good reason they get adult women to voice the parts of boys in movies and TV. As long as the entire business could be conducted over the phone, I had no problem convincing people that I was an adult woman rather than a preteen boy.
No. Most of your voice comes from your head - your sinuses, your nose, your mouth. The larynx can only really change the pitch at which you talk. Two examples:
1. The talking guitar (most famously, Peter Frampton's). The sound is produced by a guitar but modulated by his head and sent to a second microphone.
2. The little buzzers that produce a robot-like voice in people who have had a laryngectomy (Ned on South Park is probably the most famous fictional character I can think of with this, although that effect isn't actually created with one of the devices). The principle is that all you need is some constant tone that can be modulated by the head.
You know, I did that for a little while, got about 20 dvds... and other than the first season of Dexter, which we watched on a vacation, I've never watched one of those movies again. I can't think of more than a couple dozen movies that I have actually wanted to see more than twice (as opposed to watching because they were on, and wasn't that a good story, etc. - I mean seeking it out to watch it.)
To be fair, remember that rural delivery was only to the nearest post office until just before the 20th century. Rural Free Delivery.
That was a profitable business back then. Now we have fax machines serving the same purpose.
It seems pretty clear that nobody in Washington is interested in controlling illegal immigration, so why do we continue to waste money on it? If you're going to build a fence, build a real fence that actually keeps people out.
Can't we at least get a better class of pork-barrel projects to funnel money to defense contractors? I'd appreciate getting at least some value for the money.
Holy shit, we agree wholeheartedly on something. CM is seriously slick work. What kernel do you use?
I should be able to update the software on my phone without worrying about whether it's going to make my phone "stop working"
Why? You bought it with a given set of features. If you don't like the features, DON'T BUY IT. You may do as you like with the phone - it's yours - but you can't expect the manufacturer to spend a lot of time and effort making sure that the software changes don't cripple the phone. I'm a reasonably technically sophisticated user, and I don't mind living on the bleeding edge every now and again - if Cyanogenmod crashes my phone, so be it. I would NEVER suggest this phone for my wife - she wants something that just works, all the time, and she's more than willing to accept limited functionality in return. She has a Blackberry, and it's absolutely perfect for how she uses it, because it does a few things well and doesn't ever crash.
If he's sensible, then he has stripped the DRM from the Kindle books, in which case he has them in unencrypted Mobipocket. That's a format for which there are numerous readers and converters. I'd call that owning the book and the software. (Calibre, for example, is released under the GPL.)
Who the fuck cares? I'm not going to buy something that I know comes broken to get the privilege of fixing it unless I'm at a garage sale. That's ridiculous.
I care, because it's a way to get good quality, legal electronic books. The alternatives are to pirate the books, in which case quality is often still quite poor, or to buy them from one of the tiny handful of non-DRM ebook sources, in which case there's no point because your selection sucks. I buy from the large-scale, legitimate store with an excellent selection of mostly very high quality ebooks that happen to come with a tiny bit of DRM that can be stripped out. Yes, I'd prefer they came without it, but when it's only an additional minute or two of work... it still takes less time than driving to the bookstore. That's why the fuck I care about stripping Kindle DRM.
It's called Topaz. It can be stripped; I've got the books in my Calibre library to prove it. You can easily distinguish the two by looking at the Amazon webpage describing the book. If it shows only the number of pages in the print version, it's a Topaz file. If it shows both pages and file size, it's in the original format.
Let me get this straight: your goal, presumably, is to convince me that I should avoid buying DRM in order to bring about the DRMerdammerung. In order to do so, you call me a fool.
This might not be the optimal way to get people to agree with you, particularly as I do, in fact, control every bit of the stuff I've purchased so far.
As long as I can get the underlying file, I don't care what you throw on it. If Amazon changes things so that I can't immediately decrypt my files, well, then I'll worry about that. I don't have to unlock it every time I use it, just once: if you can rip open the packaging with a knife, who cares about the stupid lock? It's not inferior to anything once I've pulled the DRM.
Practical choice: if I can turn it into a DRM-free file, I'll buy it. If I can't, I won't. Political choice: DRM is so wrong we should avoid any product with it, no matter how trivial the protection is. That is a political statement ("I reject DRM in all its forms") expressed as an economic action. The numerous economic boycotts of the civil rights era are one example of this; the economic boycotts of white South Africa and Rhodesia; the US embargo on Cuba; the various campaigns to get individuals or investors to make specific economic decisions in order to support a political point. You dislike DRM so much that you are willing to deprive yourself of e-books in order to avoid appearing to support it. I don't really care, so long as I can get rid of the DRM.
It's a political decision to you. It's a practical one to me. As long as I can get in, I don't care how. If they changed the DRM so I couldn't crack it, I'd quit buying from them.
Because I want to read books that don't have errors in them. An e-book straight from the publisher doesn't have errors - I know, I've bought quite a few. I'll strip the DRM and have my book free forever for five minutes' effort. If you don't want to do that, fine. Pirate, or ignore, or buy on paper - I don't care. You're not me, and I don't care what you do.
Then a Kindle is not for you. I'm cool with that; if you don't value the advantages that an e-reader offers, don't get one. They're certainly not for everyone.
You literally don't have access to a Windows machine? And it's not a political decision for you?
Let them do whatever they like inside their own nation.
What a noble foreign policy.
With an attitude like that, what exactly is your claim to moral superiority?
Read your link. That is a MiFi or similar broadband device. The service for smartphones is unlimited.
This has been hashed out over and over and over again on the Android-specific fora. The plans for smartphones are unlimited. Period.
BTW, what's your source for that French plan? At Orange, I see a EUR55 plan that offers 20Mbit internet, 120 channels, and unlimited Orange in-network; if you want all numbers in France, it will be EUR110/mo. Nothing like $30/mo.
They really do offer unlimited transfer, but only on smartphones. It's not stupid, and it's not misleading. They do count on people not using the full capability of their hardware 24/7 in order to make the plans work, but if you violate those assumptions they do not punish you.
$80/mo for 10 GB of data is steep for an average Joe, but for a corporate road warrior or traveling salesman it's a dead easy investment. As a result, it's not unlike accommodations on the road: there are motels that cater to those who pay their own way, generally costing $45-$80/night and offering free WiFi, free local calls, and free parking. There is another category entirely of hotels that cater to those who are on an expense account, costing $130-$180/night with expensive WiFi, per-call charges for local calls, and pay parking. They can often be found within a fairly short distance of each other. They have simply segmented the market by identifying those who will pay more for a service and finding a way to extract the extra cash from them.
You had a bad connection. I routinely download podcasts of 50+ MB with occasional 200MB+ without any slowdown on Verizon.