Part of the whole reason for rebates was that many people never sent them in (I've seen numbers in the 90's showing about 5% of people would send them in). This allowed retailers to put a really low price on the shelf, but in fact make far more money for the item. Disregarding the outright fraudulent rebate scams, this practice wasn't fraudulent but it was obvious that the retailers are simply hoping that few people will actually send the documentation in to get the rebate.
With rebates taken at the register, expect them to be far more in line with a standard sale discount.
When I was a kid, and possibly now, the cops in my hometown (about 8000 people) would walk main street each night starting at about 2AM and check all the business' doors to make sure they were locked. It's really not too wacky an idea- I'd rather the cop find out than a thief.
Laws don;t exist in a vacuum; they are designed (or they should be) to protect you.
That's right, but they do so passively, not actively. In other words, I am protected every time a criminal is removed from the general population and locked up. On the other hand, if someone breaks into my house while I'm home, I have to protect myself. SCOTUS has ruled twice recently that the police have no legal obligation to protect you. There is no law that says I have to be protected from criminals by the government.
I told her not to tell them anything. For one, its none of their business.
It apparently is their business, otherwise they wouldn't have been asking her.
they are two faced scumbags looking for anything to prosecute her who has nothing to do with anything
Really? When was the last time you heard of a Dollar General cashier being arrested for selling cell phones? Do you think the FBI has nothing better to do than talk to your girlfriend in an effort to entrap her on some bogus charge? Seriously?
They were probably doing a terrorism investigation. The phones can be used for calling anonymously overseas to foreign handlers, or for remote bomb triggers. Thanks to your idiocy, their investigation will be a little more difficult.
They used to say the same things about Mac OS 9 and Netscape Navigator 4...
And in both cases a complete, ground-up rewrite was the fix. Given that Microsoft is finally finishing up a new product, such a strategy would take a few years.
The funiest part is that in WA we have tribal gambling, lotteries, and you can even have actual poker rooms off the reservation if you get the permits etc.
So gambling is apparently fine, it's the online part that is illegal.
"When we launched the legacy MINDSTORMS platform in 1998, the community found ways to do these things on their own, and we were faced with the question of whether to allow it, which we decided to embrace and encourage."
No, you weren't faced with that question. You had no legal, ethical, or moral basis (emphasis on "legal") to "disallow" people from doing whatever they wanted to their own piece of hardware.
What, exactly, is so difficult to grasp about this situation? I'm glad that sane people prevailed, as the programming tools that came with the original brick were a bit lame and the open source stuff that grew up around it rocked. But it should be self-evident that getting a community to write your code is cheaper and results in better code in the end.
Sometimes government just doesn't seem very representative any more, and sometimes it just doesn't seem just.
What's "representative" about the FCC? It's a bunch of unelected beaurocrats with nothing better to do. Seriously, how much effort does it take to manage the radio spectrum for the US, particularly now that it's pretty much all been doled out? A couple of guys with a decent software application?
You are paying for the privilege of learning from an expert in a subject. If something is interfering with her teaching, she has every right to remove it from her classroom.
No, I'm buying a service, and I expect the employees to treat me as a paying customer should be treated. If I'm not interfering with the other customers or her class, then it's absolutely none of her business what I'm doing.
Now, if she wants to claim that the laptops interfere with the other customers or the class, fine, they can move to the back row(s). I have no problem with that. Anything short of that and we would be chatting with the dean.
The sooner we get away from the starry-eyed view of god-like professors and get into the view of "I'm a customer and I need some service", the better.
The gap between the rich and the poor in this country is widening every day, and there's really no middle class anymore; we're a country of haves and have-nots.
And, yet a million Mexicans risk their lives swimming the Rio Grande and running through 100 miles of desert each year to become one of these poor "have-nots".
The individual wealth in this country continues to rise, even for the "have-nots". And, what, exactly, do they "not have"? Everything they want? Seriously.
There is no dictionary-definition poverty in the US. Period. There are people who want more than they can afford, but that isn't poverty. Shit, when I was young being "poor" meant that you didn't own a car. My father was a grocer near a poor neighborhood, and many of the people walked to our store.
They had no car, their houses were small, and they weren't wearing the latest fashions. They were poor.
But they had enough money to pay the rent/mortgage and eat. By definition, that's not poverty, as they were able to meet their basic needs.
In contrast, about 60 million children die every year from malnutrition afound the world. Many others end up blind or with other significant health problems.
Whaddya bet those kids wouldn't mind a taste of American-style "poverty"?
The American definition of poverty: I can't buy everything that I want.
Like most Americans, you need to get out of the country now and then to see what most of the world lives like.
At my kids' school, they use Linux in one "lab" and Windows 95 (you read that right) in another. Somebody donated a bunch of machines with 95 on them and they don't care to upgrade them. I probably don't have to tell you which lab is cheaper to run by an order of magnitude than the other.
Now, it's Win95 so that's not a fair comparison as opposed to XP. But, even so, the other arguments are bunk. The kids learn just fine using Linux, and the lab is much cheaper to run since it's all running off a central server. The individual workstations are basically crap that people have donated over the years.
Maybe it's because this school has an intelligent administrator for the computer labs. I don't know. The bottom line is that it works fine, and he doesn't have to worry about viruses and all the other joys that windows brings.
BTW: all the teachers have powerbooks. He's a Mac guy, too.
Your few hours of sporadically monitored GPS performance don't mean anything statistically.
No, but 15 years of handheld cell phones being carried onto planes while "on" and not resulting in one single crash (or even instrument oddities that I know of) means a lot statistically. It means that cell phones don't cause plane crashes. Period.
The amazing thing to me is that people argue this from the point of "these things cause crashes, we have to keep them off planes". Wrong. If a plane can be brought down by someone's cell phone, and I can't make these letters big enough: THEN YOU NEED TO FIX THE FUCKING PLANE!
Seriously. This is a problem with the plane, not the phone. Of course, as we learned in my first paragraph, this actually isn't a problem with the plane, it's a fantasy.
I can't believe people keep bringing this up. If a cell phone were able to bring down a plane, imagine what a thunderstorm would do to every plane within 100 miles.
I certainly don't want government institiutions making it easy for people to get such lists out of them, although it should be possible.
And that's exactly what this case was about. Nees believes that the mayor had done just that: used a list of people subscribing to a city newsletter as his own political spam list. There's no way to prove it without comparing the lists. So, Nees asked for the lists.
I agree with what you're saying, and hopefully the legislature will plug that hole. However, that means the mayor doesn't get the list, either.
Slashdot Mirror
Who the hell says "phonograph" any more? :-)
Apparently the same people who are scared to death of the internet.
Part of the whole reason for rebates was that many people never sent them in (I've seen numbers in the 90's showing about 5% of people would send them in). This allowed retailers to put a really low price on the shelf, but in fact make far more money for the item. Disregarding the outright fraudulent rebate scams, this practice wasn't fraudulent but it was obvious that the retailers are simply hoping that few people will actually send the documentation in to get the rebate.
With rebates taken at the register, expect them to be far more in line with a standard sale discount.
So, now everybody here who keeps saying "Ken Lay did blah blah blah and never faced any jail time" is actually right.
I hope BSD isn't really dying...
When I was a kid, and possibly now, the cops in my hometown (about 8000 people) would walk main street each night starting at about 2AM and check all the business' doors to make sure they were locked. It's really not too wacky an idea- I'd rather the cop find out than a thief.
You're not familiar with recent US history, eh? Go to iTunes, type "ohio" in the search, and listen to the 30 second clip.
That's right, but they do so passively, not actively. In other words, I am protected every time a criminal is removed from the general population and locked up. On the other hand, if someone breaks into my house while I'm home, I have to protect myself. SCOTUS has ruled twice recently that the police have no legal obligation to protect you. There is no law that says I have to be protected from criminals by the government.
Did they say it was illegal?
It apparently is their business, otherwise they wouldn't have been asking her.
Really? When was the last time you heard of a Dollar General cashier being arrested for selling cell phones? Do you think the FBI has nothing better to do than talk to your girlfriend in an effort to entrap her on some bogus charge? Seriously?
They were probably doing a terrorism investigation. The phones can be used for calling anonymously overseas to foreign handlers, or for remote bomb triggers. Thanks to your idiocy, their investigation will be a little more difficult.
And in both cases a complete, ground-up rewrite was the fix. Given that Microsoft is finally finishing up a new product, such a strategy would take a few years.
It's not surprising:
http://www.theagitator.com/archives/026550.php#026 550
From the article:
Probably won't surprise you to learn that the bill's sponsor is heavily supported by Washington State's thriving bricks-and-mortar casino industry.
Simply trying to protect their business. I am just waiting for the day that our bought and paid for legislators are kicked out of office.
Excuse me, but is this Forbes "employer of Daniel Lyons"?
No, you weren't faced with that question. You had no legal, ethical, or moral basis (emphasis on "legal") to "disallow" people from doing whatever they wanted to their own piece of hardware.
What, exactly, is so difficult to grasp about this situation? I'm glad that sane people prevailed, as the programming tools that came with the original brick were a bit lame and the open source stuff that grew up around it rocked. But it should be self-evident that getting a community to write your code is cheaper and results in better code in the end.
What's "representative" about the FCC? It's a bunch of unelected beaurocrats with nothing better to do. Seriously, how much effort does it take to manage the radio spectrum for the US, particularly now that it's pretty much all been doled out? A couple of guys with a decent software application?
I'm sure everybody here can empathize with the poor windows luser.
Anybody who has the ability to weigh risks is already using firefox.
You are paying for the privilege of learning from an expert in a subject. If something is interfering with her teaching, she has every right to remove it from her classroom.
No, I'm buying a service, and I expect the employees to treat me as a paying customer should be treated. If I'm not interfering with the other customers or her class, then it's absolutely none of her business what I'm doing.
Now, if she wants to claim that the laptops interfere with the other customers or the class, fine, they can move to the back row(s). I have no problem with that. Anything short of that and we would be chatting with the dean.
The sooner we get away from the starry-eyed view of god-like professors and get into the view of "I'm a customer and I need some service", the better.
Socialism is in fact designed to be freedom, freedom from poverty and medical expenses as well as personal freedom.
How about freedom to open a private medical practice? Oops. Isn't it funny how socialism is so great that it has to destroy the competition?
The gap between the rich and the poor in this country is widening every day, and there's really no middle class anymore; we're a country of haves and have-nots.
And, yet a million Mexicans risk their lives swimming the Rio Grande and running through 100 miles of desert each year to become one of these poor "have-nots".
The individual wealth in this country continues to rise, even for the "have-nots". And, what, exactly, do they "not have"? Everything they want? Seriously.
There is no dictionary-definition poverty in the US. Period. There are people who want more than they can afford, but that isn't poverty. Shit, when I was young being "poor" meant that you didn't own a car. My father was a grocer near a poor neighborhood, and many of the people walked to our store.
They had no car, their houses were small, and they weren't wearing the latest fashions. They were poor.
But they had enough money to pay the rent/mortgage and eat. By definition, that's not poverty, as they were able to meet their basic needs.
In contrast, about 60 million children die every year from malnutrition afound the world. Many others end up blind or with other significant health problems.
Whaddya bet those kids wouldn't mind a taste of American-style "poverty"?
The American definition of poverty: I can't buy everything that I want.
Like most Americans, you need to get out of the country now and then to see what most of the world lives like.
is a patent troll with $600M in the bank.
At my kids' school, they use Linux in one "lab" and Windows 95 (you read that right) in another. Somebody donated a bunch of machines with 95 on them and they don't care to upgrade them. I probably don't have to tell you which lab is cheaper to run by an order of magnitude than the other.
Now, it's Win95 so that's not a fair comparison as opposed to XP. But, even so, the other arguments are bunk. The kids learn just fine using Linux, and the lab is much cheaper to run since it's all running off a central server. The individual workstations are basically crap that people have donated over the years.
Maybe it's because this school has an intelligent administrator for the computer labs. I don't know. The bottom line is that it works fine, and he doesn't have to worry about viruses and all the other joys that windows brings.
BTW: all the teachers have powerbooks. He's a Mac guy, too.
Your few hours of sporadically monitored GPS performance don't mean anything statistically.
No, but 15 years of handheld cell phones being carried onto planes while "on" and not resulting in one single crash (or even instrument oddities that I know of) means a lot statistically. It means that cell phones don't cause plane crashes. Period.
The amazing thing to me is that people argue this from the point of "these things cause crashes, we have to keep them off planes". Wrong. If a plane can be brought down by someone's cell phone, and I can't make these letters big enough: THEN YOU NEED TO FIX THE FUCKING PLANE!
Seriously. This is a problem with the plane, not the phone. Of course, as we learned in my first paragraph, this actually isn't a problem with the plane, it's a fantasy.
I can't believe people keep bringing this up. If a cell phone were able to bring down a plane, imagine what a thunderstorm would do to every plane within 100 miles.
what kind of frame rate does it pull on HL2?
And that's exactly what this case was about. Nees believes that the mayor had done just that: used a list of people subscribing to a city newsletter as his own political spam list. There's no way to prove it without comparing the lists. So, Nees asked for the lists.
I agree with what you're saying, and hopefully the legislature will plug that hole. However, that means the mayor doesn't get the list, either.
I don't need to read any more. Oh:
BS-o-meter just went up in smoke :(
Ouch.
Found this via the spam kings blog, absolutely hilarious:e r_attack_spammer_begs_for_1.html
http://spamkings.oreilly.com/archives/2006/01/und
Honestly, I still believe that vigilante tactics combined with laws such as ours in TN (making spam a civil action) are the only realistic way to go.