I'm about to return to the United States after living in the UK for 3 years, and enjoying the benefits of its highly competitive GSM cellular market
It's sort of OK, but (perhaps because of the obscene overvaluation of 3G licences when they were sold for over £20b, years ago) I only get 1GB of data per month for £25/mo, with Three - the network that boasts about how great its 3G internet is. Just don't try to really use it for a day. I've already used 950MB and I'm only halfway through the month.
I'm interested in how common a practice this is; I take it you're in the US? What part? Have you found that employers everywhere allow working from home 1 day a week or is it limited to certain areas?
Here where I live - central England - there are very few companies (although more than zero) that will allow anything like that, unfortunately. It's *very* standard to have 9:00 - 17:30, and pretty hard to convince any employers to be any less rigid.
I think the main point of it was suggesting that the bible was to be taken mostly metaphorically and we should just see the message underneath and live it. Which is pretty much what I think religion is meant to be.
Which sucks, because:
a) No religious text I'm aware of is remotely near morally perfect. b) Even if we thought it was, its immutability means that we can't improve on it if we decide to change our morality in the light of new information, which we get all the time.
Not if you define seperate species as species that are unable to interbreed. Various lines of Homo could have descended separately down the evolutionary tree for a while, but not diverged enough that when they came together again, they were unable to interbreed.
What does "democracy" even mean these days, though? Most countries I see described as "democratic" afford very little power (if any) to the voter. It's really just describing one method of preventing civil wars while allowing the real overlords (the rich, the powerful, the elite) to continue to govern behind the scenes.
I don't condone driving while holding 2 mobile phones, but my blood pressure is rather raised by people like you who exhibit a righteous attitude towards drivers who are caught slightly over the speed limit, without taking into account the specific location and conditions.
MANY drivers are slapped with an infringement of the law, without its having ANYTHING to do with actual road safety. If you choose to believe that every speeding fine and points are legit, that's your delusion.
However the saddest part is, this punishment will not stick, he'll be back on the road in a few weeks with an exemption license (whatever the UK equivalent is)
No he won't. Driving in the UK isn't considered a right as it is in the US. There is no UK equivalent. If you're banned for a year, you're banned for a year.
Incidentally, this is why some of us hate speed cameras so much. IMHO because UK banning is so absolute, it should be reserved for people who drive TRULY dangerously, not those who got caught out going 5mph over the limit by a sneaky speed camera van operative 4 times in 3 years.
The ban on using mobile phones while driving isn't down to people taking their hands off the wheel, it's because studies have shown that it causes drivers to take their attention away from the road, thereby causing accidents.
I have a car which pairs with a Bluetooth phone and which I use for in-car telephone conversations. Put that in your holier-than-thou pipe and smoke it.
Possibly, but I object to your comment about its being 'perfectly possible to live without a car'. I am sure you're someone living in a major city with good, regular public transport. However, you only need to go out to the suburbs of, say, Northampton, before public transport becomes utterly abysmal. Throw in the fact that you may be commuting daily to a village and public transport becomes utterly impractical, as does walking or cycling. Taxis? Way too expensive.
In fact, they're very aware that banning you from driving after 'totting up' to 12 points for extremely minor speeding infractions causes extreme inconvenience, and in some cases may make you lose your job. They do it anyway.
OK, so what if I'd quite like to continue using Gecko and the XUL/JS extension infrastructure, but ditch the Mozilla Firefox dev team headed by Asa Dotzler, one of the world's biggest jerks?
What are the alternatives out there?
Is SeaMonkey any better with regards to versioning? IceWeasel? Some other fork of Firefox?
If you're connecting all those peripherals, it's not really as portable as all that, is it? What you're really saying is that you want a regular PC that you can sometimes disconnect and carry around with you. The price of that is that you will probably get a weaker CPU/graphics, and it's hard to put a decent amount of storage in it. Fair enough I suppose, but I'd rather avoid those limitations, and use my Internet-enabled smartphone for when I need to do the odd thing on-the-go. For me, a laptop (or a netbook) falls between two stools; too small to be a good 'proper' computer, too big to be truly 'portable' as my smartphone is.
I recently used my mum's laptop for a while when I went round her house. Cramped, small screen, got hot when I used it, crappy small keyboard, trackpad instead of a mouse, tinny sound, slow, small hard drive, less memory, weak CPU, short battery life. etc.
I'll stick with my PC for anything where I want a comfortable, immersive experience.
I just bought an HTC Desire S, my first Smartphone, instead of an iPhone - mainly because I have a moral problem with Apple. I actually thought the experience would be a little worse than an iPhone.
Actually, I'm finding this thing smoother, more open, and NICER than my brother's iPhone! And, it's obviously cheaper than the iPhone 4 (what isn't?) I'm ultra-glad I didn't go with Apple now. Muahahaha.
Every now and then, when entering/exiting a room/cave in Secret of Evermore, in ZSNES the game just hangs at a black screen. For this reason (and various other important accuracy issues mentioned in byuu's page), I started using bsnes as my SNES emulator and never looked back.
I would like to see bsnes have recording functionality but you can't have everything.;-)
I have an Athlon 64 and I can just about play SNES games smoothly with bsnes... so it's definitely usable. Things will only get better as CPU speeds increase.
I've been saying for a long time that Virgin's cable network should be regulated by OFCOM and forcibly opened up to competition, like BT's was. I don't give a shit if it hits Virgin's bottom line; it's in the public interest. Seems Virgin are doing their utmost to prove me right.
I'm a proud liberal, I support abortion rights; but I was horrified to hear that around a fifth of all pregnancies end in abortion [wikimedia.org] (I should thank a right wing zealot for pointing that out by the way). No-one supports that. I don't happen to support criminalizing women for having abortions, but it does not mean that I consider fetuses to be "low value".
Honestly, why not? Assuming we're talking about early fetuses, they have - by all intents and purposes - as much sentience as the cells that form my gums. It's an utterly irrational religious tradition that places more value of fetus cells because of their 'potential'. But any set of particles has the 'potential' to become a human being if arranged in exactly the right way. It's ludicrous to place a higher value on them unless they actually have been.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the *first* one was Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter.
I'm about to return to the United States after living in the UK for 3 years, and enjoying the benefits of its highly competitive GSM cellular market
It's sort of OK, but (perhaps because of the obscene overvaluation of 3G licences when they were sold for over £20b, years ago) I only get 1GB of data per month for £25/mo, with Three - the network that boasts about how great its 3G internet is. Just don't try to really use it for a day. I've already used 950MB and I'm only halfway through the month.
I'm interested in how common a practice this is; I take it you're in the US? What part? Have you found that employers everywhere allow working from home 1 day a week or is it limited to certain areas?
Here where I live - central England - there are very few companies (although more than zero) that will allow anything like that, unfortunately. It's *very* standard to have 9:00 - 17:30, and pretty hard to convince any employers to be any less rigid.
How, pray tell, would you apply science to say law, love, justice, literature, art, or a very large number of other subjects I could list.
How would you apply religion to it in a way which would be more useful than philosophy and humanism?
I think the main point of it was suggesting that the bible was to be taken mostly metaphorically and we should just see the message underneath and live it. Which is pretty much what I think religion is meant to be.
Which sucks, because:
a) No religious text I'm aware of is remotely near morally perfect.
b) Even if we thought it was, its immutability means that we can't improve on it if we decide to change our morality in the light of new information, which we get all the time.
Not if you define seperate species as species that are unable to interbreed. Various lines of Homo could have descended separately down the evolutionary tree for a while, but not diverged enough that when they came together again, they were unable to interbreed.
What does "democracy" even mean these days, though? Most countries I see described as "democratic" afford very little power (if any) to the voter. It's really just describing one method of preventing civil wars while allowing the real overlords (the rich, the powerful, the elite) to continue to govern behind the scenes.
You know what? You're a fuckwit. Don't ever bother reading what you respond to, it's just a waste of time to you. Nice strategy.
I don't condone driving while holding 2 mobile phones, but my blood pressure is rather raised by people like you who exhibit a righteous attitude towards drivers who are caught slightly over the speed limit, without taking into account the specific location and conditions.
MANY drivers are slapped with an infringement of the law, without its having ANYTHING to do with actual road safety. If you choose to believe that every speeding fine and points are legit, that's your delusion.
However the saddest part is, this punishment will not stick, he'll be back on the road in a few weeks with an exemption license (whatever the UK equivalent is)
No he won't. Driving in the UK isn't considered a right as it is in the US. There is no UK equivalent. If you're banned for a year, you're banned for a year.
Incidentally, this is why some of us hate speed cameras so much. IMHO because UK banning is so absolute, it should be reserved for people who drive TRULY dangerously, not those who got caught out going 5mph over the limit by a sneaky speed camera van operative 4 times in 3 years.
The ban on using mobile phones while driving isn't down to people taking their hands off the wheel, it's because studies have shown that it causes drivers to take their attention away from the road, thereby causing accidents.
I have a car which pairs with a Bluetooth phone and which I use for in-car telephone conversations. Put that in your holier-than-thou pipe and smoke it.
Possibly, but I object to your comment about its being 'perfectly possible to live without a car'. I am sure you're someone living in a major city with good, regular public transport. However, you only need to go out to the suburbs of, say, Northampton, before public transport becomes utterly abysmal. Throw in the fact that you may be commuting daily to a village and public transport becomes utterly impractical, as does walking or cycling. Taxis? Way too expensive.
In fact, they're very aware that banning you from driving after 'totting up' to 12 points for extremely minor speeding infractions causes extreme inconvenience, and in some cases may make you lose your job. They do it anyway.
Don't try telling me you never need a car.
OK, so what if I'd quite like to continue using Gecko and the XUL/JS extension infrastructure, but ditch the Mozilla Firefox dev team headed by Asa Dotzler, one of the world's biggest jerks?
What are the alternatives out there?
Is SeaMonkey any better with regards to versioning? IceWeasel? Some other fork of Firefox?
And the program icon is much nicer looking, too. That fox was getting old.
Erm, are you referring to the 'nightly' icon? You realize that when this FF8 is a final release, it will be branded with the fox icon, right?
6 figures in dollars? That's pretty much what it'll be costing to go on a full UK university course.
If you're connecting all those peripherals, it's not really as portable as all that, is it? What you're really saying is that you want a regular PC that you can sometimes disconnect and carry around with you. The price of that is that you will probably get a weaker CPU/graphics, and it's hard to put a decent amount of storage in it. Fair enough I suppose, but I'd rather avoid those limitations, and use my Internet-enabled smartphone for when I need to do the odd thing on-the-go. For me, a laptop (or a netbook) falls between two stools; too small to be a good 'proper' computer, too big to be truly 'portable' as my smartphone is.
I recently used my mum's laptop for a while when I went round her house. Cramped, small screen, got hot when I used it, crappy small keyboard, trackpad instead of a mouse, tinny sound, slow, small hard drive, less memory, weak CPU, short battery life. etc.
I'll stick with my PC for anything where I want a comfortable, immersive experience.
Word processing - if you think RSS is an issue with a standard keyboard that has moving keys, try tapping away on a pad for 8 hours a day.
It would last 30 minutes before it needed recharging. And the recharging cable would make it more inconvenient to use than a standard PC. :-)
I just bought an HTC Desire S, my first Smartphone, instead of an iPhone - mainly because I have a moral problem with Apple. I actually thought the experience would be a little worse than an iPhone.
Actually, I'm finding this thing smoother, more open, and NICER than my brother's iPhone! And, it's obviously cheaper than the iPhone 4 (what isn't?) I'm ultra-glad I didn't go with Apple now. Muahahaha.
Please, for the sake of our lives, CLOSE ALL SCHOOLS IMMEDIATELY before they can release EVEN MORE CRIMINALS upon us!
Hey, give them time! They're trying. And to begin with, they're at least making it prohibitively expensive to go to university.
Every now and then, when entering/exiting a room/cave in Secret of Evermore, in ZSNES the game just hangs at a black screen. For this reason (and various other important accuracy issues mentioned in byuu's page), I started using bsnes as my SNES emulator and never looked back.
I would like to see bsnes have recording functionality but you can't have everything. ;-)
I have an Athlon 64 and I can just about play SNES games smoothly with bsnes... so it's definitely usable. Things will only get better as CPU speeds increase.
I've been saying for a long time that Virgin's cable network should be regulated by OFCOM and forcibly opened up to competition, like BT's was. I don't give a shit if it hits Virgin's bottom line; it's in the public interest. Seems Virgin are doing their utmost to prove me right.
Gaygirlie...
So it kind of makes sense.
I'm a proud liberal, I support abortion rights; but I was horrified to hear that around a fifth of all pregnancies end in abortion [wikimedia.org] (I should thank a right wing zealot for pointing that out by the way). No-one supports that. I don't happen to support criminalizing women for having abortions, but it does not mean that I consider fetuses to be "low value".
Honestly, why not? Assuming we're talking about early fetuses, they have - by all intents and purposes - as much sentience as the cells that form my gums. It's an utterly irrational religious tradition that places more value of fetus cells because of their 'potential'. But any set of particles has the 'potential' to become a human being if arranged in exactly the right way. It's ludicrous to place a higher value on them unless they actually have been.