Yeah, In Canada it's dead easy too. At least when I did it 3 years ago. Get a hard copy of your bill, bring some ID that matches the name on the bill, and you are set. You don't even have to call up and cancel your old service. But, on the other hand, you really shouldn't be switching carriers so often. If they suck so much that you want to switch after a couple months, you probably didn't read the contract close enough (hidden fees), or you didn't read reviews that would have told you how bad their service is.
Most Honest reviews of the surface are actually pretty positive. I think the main problem is that it's $650 by the time you add the touch cover. And most of the reviews say you need the Type cover to get a really good experience, which is even more expensive. For the price you can get a decent ultrabook that runs all your old windows programs, and is about the same size. Only thing missing is touch, which although nice, isn't a must-have feature. Most people are probably awaiting the Surface Pro, if they are thinking of buying a surface at all, because then you can run all your old Windows Software. If you can't run your old software, you could just get an iPad or a Nexus 7/10.
you will travel to Mars and die as soon as your food, water, or air supply runs out, whichever comes first. Not only that, due to some spacecraft malfunction, you may not even make it out of earth's atmosphere. There is no chance of coming back, ever.
and
you will travel across the ocean, it's very dangerious, and you may never make it, but if you reach land on the other side, there's a good chance you could live another 20 or 30 years over there, or possibly even make a return trip and see your friends and family again, and you will be treated like a hero by all.
I'm sure there are lots of patents on wheels. With a little bit of thought, you could probably come up with a lot of ways to make wheels perform better in certain situations, such as having more strength for less mass. Just a quick search yielded a bicycle wheel patented in 2002. But that's OK, with me, because its' a specific way of arranging the spokes, more precisely, with spokes from each side meeting at the same place on the rim. Anybody else is free to use the old method of arranging the spokes. That's also why I'm fine with this Apple wireless charging patent. It describes a specific method of charging devices wirelessly. None of the old methods infringe because they don't use the same method. Anything you, or I can come up with that improves on their method is also not in violation of the patent. Sure Apple has some stupid patents, but this isn't one of them.
Also, it's not really that expensive to go to university if you go to an "in-state" university. Everybody thinks they have to go to Harvard or Yale or MIT to get their money's worth, but really you can go to just about any school and get a pretty decent education. If you get top marks in your class, it doesn't matter which college you went to (within reason), employers are going to look at you. If you really think it's necessary to go to school in a specific state, go live there for a year, and become a resident. Work as a barista (which seems to be the occupation of the day) and get your "residency status" if a specific school is really all that important. It will be a year of your life well spent.
There's also an element of "right time, right place" here. No matter how hard you are driven, how smart you are, you aren't going to create the next Facebook with yourself and a couple friends. Even Google couldn't make a dent if Facebook. Sure you could come up with "the secret sauce" but it's highly unlikely. Same goes for MS. They got their start back in the days when very few people even had a computers, and there wasn't an established OS back then. You can't just program an OS in your basement and expect that it will be on every computer in the world within a couple years. So you can "make it big" but you have to come up with a completely new product. Which is getting exceedingly difficult.
Racing is only interesting if they are going at the limits of what matches the terrain. This is why you don't need to be going at 200 mph for a rally race to be exciting. But a 1/4 mile drag race that took 30 seconds would not be interesting, even if the cars were evenly matched. You could design a race track that would make watching stock Smart cars exciting but it wouldn't consist of a 1 km straightaway section. I think that F1 has lost it's edge specifically because it seems that they aren't really on the edge of the speed envelope where technology really allows them to be.
If they really wanted to level the playing field, they would all be driving the exact same car, and the cars would be matched to drivers by lottery minutes before the race so as to prevent problems with unfairness and sabotage. The mechanics and car builders would be completely unconnected to the driving teams. Of course, that's not really what they want. What the rules are going for is to allow freedom within one team to perform better without having Ferrari win every single race.
Yeah, they've actually done a lot to limit how fast the cars go in the last decade or so. They got rid of all the little winglets that let the car have extra downforce, without compromising speed. They limit the engines to a certain number of RPM (18000 I beleive). They even limit how many engines you can use for a season and how many sets of tires you can use. You can no longer replace your entire engine between qualifying and race day, which changes the dynamics quite a bit. It's definitely not a "no compromises" sort of thing.
they sell HDMI cables at my local dollar store for $2. They aren't the greatest quality but the work fine. 16 FBI SD card was only $10. I had 3 or 4 USB chargers lying around from old devices. even so you can get the power supply for $3 from Dx.com and the cable for $2. sure you could spend 45$ on all the extras butyou can easily get them for 20$. However you could also get one of those android TV sticks for $90 with all the accesories. so if you aren't going to use the GPIO pins you might be better off getting that.
Yeah, I went to Catholic school and they taught evolution (or at least never made a big deal and told us it was a lie, I was only in Catholic school through grade 8, hard to remember the exact course material). I'm also pretty sure we read some old greek mythology books and learned about their creation myths. Also, since we had quite a few kids bussed in from the local Native reservation, we spent some time learning about their Native creation myths. It's gives you quite a bit of perspective It was fun in highschool English class though. Those of us from Catholic school were much more able to understand the deeper meanings of a lot of the books, because we had a basic knowledge of what was in the bible. Which was major influence on a lot of what was written in the English Language, both older works and even quite a few newer ones.
Which I think is the main reason the Canadian dollar isn't higher than it is. I really don't think that the Canadian dollar being near par is a return to normal, but really a sign of how bad things are going in the US. Up until about 10 years ago, the Canadian dollar was on a constant downhill trend. Then in only 10 years, it went up 40 cents, or to put more emphasis on it, the value went up by 60%. That's quite a jump.
Well, MS and everybody else. All that bloatware that comes on the machine is paid for by Cyberlink, Symantec, McAffee, and other respective software makers. They pay because a certain percentage of the people upgrade to full fledged products. With Linux, these companies tend not to make software, or the software isn't needed, because Linux includes just about everything by default. Maybe it has something to do with licensing. With Linux, if you want to play DVDs, then you legally have to pay for the decoder license, However, on Windows, Cyberlink is happy to throw in PowerDVD for free, which already contains a license. Not to mention additional support costs and custom software development costs spread out over fewer users.
Maybe they will have to be like Ubuntu. Have a LTS version that they support for 5+ years, which should be used on servers and in a corporate environment, but have a regular version for consumers that gets new releases and new features every year.
I doubt that Apple could make a $350 MacBook any more impressive than a $350 HP laptop. The reason that the MacBook sells well, despite not having Windows, which most people are familiar with, is that it is such a beautiful machine. People are willing to get rid of Windows when they are getting a really nice machine in exchange. However, at $350, there really isn't much room to make the machine appealing. No sleek aluminium case. No solid state drive, no multi-touch touchpad, no retina display, no crazy long battery life, no custom motherboard that allows the machine to be.75 inches including screen. Basically throw out everything that makes a Mac appealing. If you're just going to have some cheap junky computer, you might as well have and OS that's familiar and runs all your old programs.
For many years, the Canadian dollar was pegged at a specific exchange rate with the US dollar. Only since 1970 has the Canadian dollar had a variable exchange rate. If you check out old exchange rates you'll see that around 1978 the Canadian dollar start to go down below 85 cents US, and doesn't really get much above there until the last 5 years or so. So, at least in my mind the on par is not the normal value, as only a few years after the rate was no longer fixed, the Canadian Dollar started to dip lower, and stayed that way for over 25 years.
Personally, I upgraded to windows 8 specifically because it was so cheap. At only $40, it was a steal compared what they've charged for previous versions of Windows. I'd be happy to pay $25 a year and always have the newest version of Windows.
Unless they can prove some kind of commercial gain, they really don't have much to go after you with. However, there are private trackers and such where users gain reputation based on how much they seed. In order to stay in the club and be allowed access to the torrents you need to seed a certain amount. Why one wouldn't be getting money per se from this, they would be receiving a service in return for uploading files to others. I'm sure some smart lawyer could convince a judge that the defendant was profitting from upload pirated material, even if they never received actual money for distribution.
$5000 currently equates to $5,036.67. That's right. As of right now when I'm writing this post, the Canadian dollar is actually worth more than the American Dollar. Hard to beleve considering only 10 years ago, the Canadian dollar was only worth 65 cents US.
Then there's the emergency brake. If that fails as well, removing your foot from the gas, putting the car in neutral will slow you down in not so long of a distance. If you are really worried for your life or others, and don't care about the transmission, you can throw the car into park if you want to.
Like I said. If they tried that, Symantec and other makers of crapware would probably cry foul and get a lawsuit brought against them. Besides. Who is to decide what is bloatware and what is valid software that the customers want? Windows doesn't play DVDs by itself, and most customers would probably complain if their new computer had to get extra software to play them. So the vendors (HP, Acer, et al) install Cyberlink PowerDVD on the machine so that the customer can play DVDs. If MS allowed HP to install MS Office, or even Amazon Kindle on the new PC but forbid them from installing Symantec Antivirus or CyberLink DVD then I would think that the owners of those two products would be quite irate.
This is my view of it. If you drive your car off the bridge, you have a very high chance of dieing. If you go head on into the bus, there's probably a higher chance that you will survive, as long as the speeds aren't too high. The people on the bus will be fine regardless because the vehicle is so much bigger than yours.
You are right about the 4 point restraints. I can't believe this isn't mandatory yet. They could be doing a lot they aren't doing to keep people safe, because they'd rather keep people comfortable. They could also refuse to start the car if the belt isn't buckled, but most cars don't do that either (Yes, I'm aware you're allowed to unbuckle in certain situations, such as reversing) If cyclists should have to wear helmets, then drivers should be forced to wear 4/5 point safety harnesses.
This is my exact reasoning why flying cars will never take off (pardon the pun). People keep their cars in terrible condition. If your car has an engine failure, worst case scenario, you pull over to the side of the road, or end up blocking traffic. In a flying vehicle, if your engine dies, It's very possible that you will die too. And if you are above a city, it's not impossible to imagine crashing into an innocent bystander.
I imagine the same will be for self driving cars. It will never happen because if the car is getting bad information from its sensors, then crazy things can happen. People can't be bothered to clean more than 2 square inches from their windshield in the winter. Do you really think they are going to go around cleaning the 10 different sensors of ice and snow every winter morning? Sure the car could refuse to operate if the sensors are blocked, but then I guess people would just not want to buy the car, or complain to the dealer about it.
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Yeah, In Canada it's dead easy too. At least when I did it 3 years ago. Get a hard copy of your bill, bring some ID that matches the name on the bill, and you are set. You don't even have to call up and cancel your old service. But, on the other hand, you really shouldn't be switching carriers so often. If they suck so much that you want to switch after a couple months, you probably didn't read the contract close enough (hidden fees), or you didn't read reviews that would have told you how bad their service is.
Most Honest reviews of the surface are actually pretty positive. I think the main problem is that it's $650 by the time you add the touch cover. And most of the reviews say you need the Type cover to get a really good experience, which is even more expensive. For the price you can get a decent ultrabook that runs all your old windows programs, and is about the same size. Only thing missing is touch, which although nice, isn't a must-have feature. Most people are probably awaiting the Surface Pro, if they are thinking of buying a surface at all, because then you can run all your old Windows Software. If you can't run your old software, you could just get an iPad or a Nexus 7/10.
I think there's a difference between
you will travel to Mars and die as soon as your food, water, or air supply runs out, whichever comes first. Not only that, due to some spacecraft malfunction, you may not even make it out of earth's atmosphere. There is no chance of coming back, ever.
and
you will travel across the ocean, it's very dangerious, and you may never make it, but if you reach land on the other side, there's a good chance you could live another 20 or 30 years over there, or possibly even make a return trip and see your friends and family again, and you will be treated like a hero by all.
Obilgatory XKCD.
I don't think they were green, but the Pequeninos were definitely porcine.
I'm sure there are lots of patents on wheels. With a little bit of thought, you could probably come up with a lot of ways to make wheels perform better in certain situations, such as having more strength for less mass. Just a quick search yielded a bicycle wheel patented in 2002. But that's OK, with me, because its' a specific way of arranging the spokes, more precisely, with spokes from each side meeting at the same place on the rim. Anybody else is free to use the old method of arranging the spokes. That's also why I'm fine with this Apple wireless charging patent. It describes a specific method of charging devices wirelessly. None of the old methods infringe because they don't use the same method. Anything you, or I can come up with that improves on their method is also not in violation of the patent. Sure Apple has some stupid patents, but this isn't one of them.
Also, it's not really that expensive to go to university if you go to an "in-state" university. Everybody thinks they have to go to Harvard or Yale or MIT to get their money's worth, but really you can go to just about any school and get a pretty decent education. If you get top marks in your class, it doesn't matter which college you went to (within reason), employers are going to look at you. If you really think it's necessary to go to school in a specific state, go live there for a year, and become a resident. Work as a barista (which seems to be the occupation of the day) and get your "residency status" if a specific school is really all that important. It will be a year of your life well spent.
There's also an element of "right time, right place" here. No matter how hard you are driven, how smart you are, you aren't going to create the next Facebook with yourself and a couple friends. Even Google couldn't make a dent if Facebook. Sure you could come up with "the secret sauce" but it's highly unlikely. Same goes for MS. They got their start back in the days when very few people even had a computers, and there wasn't an established OS back then. You can't just program an OS in your basement and expect that it will be on every computer in the world within a couple years. So you can "make it big" but you have to come up with a completely new product. Which is getting exceedingly difficult.
Racing is only interesting if they are going at the limits of what matches the terrain. This is why you don't need to be going at 200 mph for a rally race to be exciting. But a 1/4 mile drag race that took 30 seconds would not be interesting, even if the cars were evenly matched. You could design a race track that would make watching stock Smart cars exciting but it wouldn't consist of a 1 km straightaway section. I think that F1 has lost it's edge specifically because it seems that they aren't really on the edge of the speed envelope where technology really allows them to be.
If they really wanted to level the playing field, they would all be driving the exact same car, and the cars would be matched to drivers by lottery minutes before the race so as to prevent problems with unfairness and sabotage. The mechanics and car builders would be completely unconnected to the driving teams. Of course, that's not really what they want. What the rules are going for is to allow freedom within one team to perform better without having Ferrari win every single race.
Yeah, they've actually done a lot to limit how fast the cars go in the last decade or so. They got rid of all the little winglets that let the car have extra downforce, without compromising speed. They limit the engines to a certain number of RPM (18000 I beleive). They even limit how many engines you can use for a season and how many sets of tires you can use. You can no longer replace your entire engine between qualifying and race day, which changes the dynamics quite a bit. It's definitely not a "no compromises" sort of thing.
they sell HDMI cables at my local dollar store for $2. They aren't the greatest quality but the work fine. 16 FBI SD card was only $10. I had 3 or 4 USB chargers lying around from old devices. even so you can get the power supply for $3 from Dx.com and the cable for $2. sure you could spend 45$ on all the extras butyou can easily get them for 20$. However you could also get one of those android TV sticks for $90 with all the accesories. so if you aren't going to use the GPIO pins you might be better off getting that.
Yeah, I went to Catholic school and they taught evolution (or at least never made a big deal and told us it was a lie, I was only in Catholic school through grade 8, hard to remember the exact course material). I'm also pretty sure we read some old greek mythology books and learned about their creation myths. Also, since we had quite a few kids bussed in from the local Native reservation, we spent some time learning about their Native creation myths. It's gives you quite a bit of perspective It was fun in highschool English class though. Those of us from Catholic school were much more able to understand the deeper meanings of a lot of the books, because we had a basic knowledge of what was in the bible. Which was major influence on a lot of what was written in the English Language, both older works and even quite a few newer ones.
Which I think is the main reason the Canadian dollar isn't higher than it is. I really don't think that the Canadian dollar being near par is a return to normal, but really a sign of how bad things are going in the US. Up until about 10 years ago, the Canadian dollar was on a constant downhill trend. Then in only 10 years, it went up 40 cents, or to put more emphasis on it, the value went up by 60%. That's quite a jump.
Well, MS and everybody else. All that bloatware that comes on the machine is paid for by Cyberlink, Symantec, McAffee, and other respective software makers. They pay because a certain percentage of the people upgrade to full fledged products. With Linux, these companies tend not to make software, or the software isn't needed, because Linux includes just about everything by default. Maybe it has something to do with licensing. With Linux, if you want to play DVDs, then you legally have to pay for the decoder license, However, on Windows, Cyberlink is happy to throw in PowerDVD for free, which already contains a license. Not to mention additional support costs and custom software development costs spread out over fewer users.
Maybe they will have to be like Ubuntu. Have a LTS version that they support for 5+ years, which should be used on servers and in a corporate environment, but have a regular version for consumers that gets new releases and new features every year.
I doubt that Apple could make a $350 MacBook any more impressive than a $350 HP laptop. The reason that the MacBook sells well, despite not having Windows, which most people are familiar with, is that it is such a beautiful machine. People are willing to get rid of Windows when they are getting a really nice machine in exchange. However, at $350, there really isn't much room to make the machine appealing. No sleek aluminium case. No solid state drive, no multi-touch touchpad, no retina display, no crazy long battery life, no custom motherboard that allows the machine to be .75 inches including screen. Basically throw out everything that makes a Mac appealing. If you're just going to have some cheap junky computer, you might as well have and OS that's familiar and runs all your old programs.
For many years, the Canadian dollar was pegged at a specific exchange rate with the US dollar. Only since 1970 has the Canadian dollar had a variable exchange rate. If you check out old exchange rates you'll see that around 1978 the Canadian dollar start to go down below 85 cents US, and doesn't really get much above there until the last 5 years or so. So, at least in my mind the on par is not the normal value, as only a few years after the rate was no longer fixed, the Canadian Dollar started to dip lower, and stayed that way for over 25 years.
Personally, I upgraded to windows 8 specifically because it was so cheap. At only $40, it was a steal compared what they've charged for previous versions of Windows. I'd be happy to pay $25 a year and always have the newest version of Windows.
Unless they can prove some kind of commercial gain, they really don't have much to go after you with. However, there are private trackers and such where users gain reputation based on how much they seed. In order to stay in the club and be allowed access to the torrents you need to seed a certain amount. Why one wouldn't be getting money per se from this, they would be receiving a service in return for uploading files to others. I'm sure some smart lawyer could convince a judge that the defendant was profitting from upload pirated material, even if they never received actual money for distribution.
$5000 currently equates to $5,036.67. That's right. As of right now when I'm writing this post, the Canadian dollar is actually worth more than the American Dollar. Hard to beleve considering only 10 years ago, the Canadian dollar was only worth 65 cents US.
Then there's the emergency brake. If that fails as well, removing your foot from the gas, putting the car in neutral will slow you down in not so long of a distance. If you are really worried for your life or others, and don't care about the transmission, you can throw the car into park if you want to.
Like I said. If they tried that, Symantec and other makers of crapware would probably cry foul and get a lawsuit brought against them. Besides. Who is to decide what is bloatware and what is valid software that the customers want? Windows doesn't play DVDs by itself, and most customers would probably complain if their new computer had to get extra software to play them. So the vendors (HP, Acer, et al) install Cyberlink PowerDVD on the machine so that the customer can play DVDs. If MS allowed HP to install MS Office, or even Amazon Kindle on the new PC but forbid them from installing Symantec Antivirus or CyberLink DVD then I would think that the owners of those two products would be quite irate.
This is my view of it. If you drive your car off the bridge, you have a very high chance of dieing. If you go head on into the bus, there's probably a higher chance that you will survive, as long as the speeds aren't too high. The people on the bus will be fine regardless because the vehicle is so much bigger than yours.
You are right about the 4 point restraints. I can't believe this isn't mandatory yet. They could be doing a lot they aren't doing to keep people safe, because they'd rather keep people comfortable. They could also refuse to start the car if the belt isn't buckled, but most cars don't do that either (Yes, I'm aware you're allowed to unbuckle in certain situations, such as reversing) If cyclists should have to wear helmets, then drivers should be forced to wear 4/5 point safety harnesses.
This is my exact reasoning why flying cars will never take off (pardon the pun). People keep their cars in terrible condition. If your car has an engine failure, worst case scenario, you pull over to the side of the road, or end up blocking traffic. In a flying vehicle, if your engine dies, It's very possible that you will die too. And if you are above a city, it's not impossible to imagine crashing into an innocent bystander.
I imagine the same will be for self driving cars. It will never happen because if the car is getting bad information from its sensors, then crazy things can happen. People can't be bothered to clean more than 2 square inches from their windshield in the winter. Do you really think they are going to go around cleaning the 10 different sensors of ice and snow every winter morning? Sure the car could refuse to operate if the sensors are blocked, but then I guess people would just not want to buy the car, or complain to the dealer about it.