Yeah... During the last administration, dubya's critics and political opponents (Up to and including Ted Kennedy, for example.) just happened to mysteriously and "accidentally" find themselves accused of being terrorists and placed on the no-fly list.
Yup. No abuse of power or civil liberties there. Nosirrre bob.
> That's one thing that has them upset with the attempts by several states to legalize > marijuana. Since it can be grown and consumed locally, the Interstate Clause doesn't > necessarily apply.
Oh, they'll find a way to make interstate commerce apply to just about anything.
See Wickard v. Filburn for an example.
If you don't care to google, the short version is that some congressman had driven through the notion that there should be a minimum price for his constituents' grains. So congress imposed a quota on how much grain a farmer could grow. Filburn (another farmer) was growing grain (wheat, IIRC) in excess of his quota... for his family's personal and private consumption. In other words, this grain was never destined for commerce, interstate or otherwise.
He was fined and ordered to destroy his crops, fought it all the way to the SCOTUS, and lost. Their reasoning was that by growing his own grain he was not buying it on the open market, which could potentially include grain grown in other states. Therefore he was taking part in "interstate commerce" and could be regulated.
I don't know about Lyft; but Uber is actually more expensive than a taxi.
I use Uber instead of taxis because the service is vastly better. Uber cars actually show up when they're summoned and on they show up on the schedule promised in the app. They will actually come and pick you up when and where you want them, even if you're not at a hotel and going to SFO. They will take you out to the avenues without protest. The drivers are in general all-around more pleasant. And they don't stink of smoke, pee, or vomit (the cars OR the drivers).
Granted, all of the above is supposed to be true of medallioned taxis. But it's not... not by a long shot. That left a niche for Uber to come in as a premium service, for which they charge a premium. And it's a premium I'm happy to pay. The service really is just that much better.
1) There are enough it's-Apple-therefore-I-hate-it types out there that there will always be a market for an iTunes Radio alternative. Those people have existed ever since there WAS an Apple, they're not going away, and they listen to music too.
2) Spotify is fine for accessing music I already know about and like. But I have most of that in my iTunes library already. So I wound up canceling my premium account. Where Pandora really shines is in introducing me to new artists/songs/albums that I'll probably like based on my tastes. So Pandora is still one of my most-used.apps. I've no idea if iRadio will replace it. But it definitely fills a void that Spotify doesn't. So, no threat there.
I suspect that not being able to get a hotel room was more due to the "has no money" part. I think I was 16 the first time I ever booked a hotel room here in the US. This *was* long before 9/11 though. So I guess it is possible that there's some rule that's changed. But rules or no rules, "has no money" is going to be a major stumbling block.
That "office in Cupertino" is a campus the size of a small college plus satellite offices throughout the rest of town. It employs well over ten thousand people. And those are the high-value, well-paying jobs that propel people into the upper-middle class and beyond.
Really, what's with the obsession with the location that a widget is put together, when the design, programming, and engineering (The good, high-value jobs that I'd actually like to have.) are all done here?
> I've noticed weird trend among the middle classes to > feel entitled when it comes to eliciting the services > of those who they perceive as lower down in the > pecking order.
Bull. "Pecking orders" don't enter into it. And trying to make the Uber vs. cabbies issue into some sort of class warfare nonsense is just stupid.
I regularly do business with people *higher* than me on your so-called "pecking order". My doctor, dentist, lawyer, and probably financial planner all come to mind. I still expect all of them to provide the services I pay for.
We're talking about a business arrangement, pure and simple. Cab companies and Uber offer a service in exchange for money. If the company agrees to provide said service at a certain place and time to a customer who is making the arraignment in good faith, the business should be obligated to fulfill their half of the agreement. If a particular pitch-up makes the company less money than another, it should not agree to that pickup in the first place. If it does agree, than tough cookies. Get the car where it's supposed to be when it's supposed to be there. Period. Full stop.
People use and like Uber because taxis are just so bloody awful. Reserving or summoning a cab by calling the cab's dispatch number is a crapshoot at best, and more often an exercise in futility. And if/when a taxi will deign to pick you up, as often as not the cab will stink of vomit or cigarette smoke. One cab company here even has a bed bug infestation in its cabs recently.
I don't use Uber often. I try to plan things out so Muni will suffice. But when I do, the Uber car I summon shows up when and where it's scheduled to do so. They're clean and well-maintained, and generally better cars in the first place. The drivers are courteous, well-mannered, and well-dressed. And since all payment is handles through the app; they never try the "my credit card reader is out of order, cash only" scam.
Yes, it's more expensive. But Uber offers a vastly superior service that's well worth the extra monet.
> Why "kill" a device when you stand a good chance of getting it back?
Because you don't actually stand a good change of getting it back. You can already track iPhones to within a meter if it has line-of-sight to the open sky. Or you can track an indoor iPhone or a Macintosh to within half a block or so via wifi triangulation. But if your iPhone, iPad, Macbook, or whatever is stolen; just try calling the police and telling them "My iPhone was stolen and the thief is $here.". Unless your name is Apple and the phone is a prototype; the best you can hope for is that they'll let you come down to a station and file a report so you can claim it stolen if it was insured. They're certainly not going to bother to track down the thief and recover your property; even if you've done 95% of the work for them.
> Killing it does nobody any good,
It at least denies the thief his shiny or his money. Or it denies the scumbag who bought your stolen phone his shiny. Doing so may reduce the market for stolen hardware in the long run.
> and has lots of quite horrible abuse potential.
No more so than the remote wipe functionality that's already baked into iOS and Mac OS, and can be added to windows via plenty of third-party providers; and which you should already have set up on any and every mobile device anyway.
Nader is not a good example at all, as it's likely that had he not siphoned votes away from Gore, bush the lesser would never have been president, butterfly ballots and hanging chads notwithstanding.
And while my own politics may be somewhat closer to Nader (Though even Nader leaves a sour taste in my mouth on some issues.), Gore would sure as hell have been a damn sight better than the eight years of bush/cheney that we got out of that incident.
A better idea, I think, than shooting yourself in the foot and harming the country overall out of principle, as happenes in 2000; is a fundamental change in the structure of the government to eliminate the winner-take-all aspect of politics. Switching to something like a Westminster-style parliamentary system would be better, IMO. Such systems often require coalition governments to be formed and are better at forcing compromise and including the viewpoints of minority viewpoints that are completely marginalized in our current system in the US.
I'm as big a fan of the iPhone as anyone, but the tools you mention don't work for BYOD. They're great for company owned and managed devices. But it's not "Your Own Device" if you're letting someone else control it with those profiles or activesync connections. If I've paid for hardware with my own money, it's mine... period, full stop. No one else gets admin, root, remote-wipe, find my iPhone, or whatever privileges but me.
I'd allow a company-controlled encrypted partition or something. But *I* retain control of *my* device as a whole. Apple's tools don't yet allow such a solution.
No. It's just that there's a very loud anti-everything-Apple crowd on slashdot. And since iTunes is an Apple product, it's obviously the worst possible piece of software one could imagine for what it does.
Now, I'd agree that it's by no means the best piece of software has written, and there are large areas where it could be improved. I especially dislike the swiss-army-chainsaw approach they went with. I think it's be far better, for example, if Apple broke the media server aspects into a service controlled through System Preferences, broke out the store part and rolled it into the separate App Store software, resurrected iSync to handle iDevice syncing and management, and restored iTuned itself to its roots as a media player and playlist manager.
That said though, as bloated as its become with functionality that seems better placed elsewhere, iTunes is nowhere near as bad as all the hate directed at it would seem to indicate. I think it really is just more of the same mindless Apple-bashing that has been the norm for decades.
As with the other reply to you, I'd intended to add the exact point you just made.
I think high school english teachers, as a group, harbor a secret hatred of the literature they "teach" and want to kill it with fire; and harbor a not-so-secret hatred of children and do everything in their power to suck as much joy and happiness as possible out of their teenage years.
When I was forced, for example, to read 1984 and Brace New World for AP English in my sophomore year of HS, I thought they were a couple of tedious piles of suck, in retrospect mostly because of the way they were "taught". Years later... well after graduating college... I happened across my copies and flipped through them, mostly out of amusement that the bitter old shrew from HS would never have any authority over me again. To my dumbfounded surprise, I found myself accidentally reading large portions of them, finding them fantastic, and eventually reading both from cover to cover in short order.
Left to my own devices, I'd eventually have read both myself, later in life than HS no doubt, so I'd understand the cultural references from them that come up from day to day. That's how I wound up reading things like Ulysses and The Demolished Man. But I shudder at the thought of the damage a high school english teacher could do to an impressionable youth's opinion of James Joyce or Alfred Bester.
Likewise Shakespeare... I hated every minute of it until college; where I wound up with an English Lit & Comp professor who understood that things like Hamlet, Othello, and Julius Caesar were written to be performed, not read. Instead of reading them, he arranged for on-campus performances. And I found that a good theatre production of Shakespeare is pretty fantastic.
When I think back about all the joy I found, as a kid, in Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Niven, and Herbert; I'm absolutely appalled at the notion of their works being ruined by the lot who made it their mission to "teach" me literature when I was in high school.
Well, you can prove that the Ewoks are extinct mathematically, no need for a disease. It has to do with the small fact that a Death Star exploded in orbit around Endor and the tonnage of debris (about 1/4th of the total mass) that would inevitably rain down upon the surface. Imaginge the dinosaur-killer meteor strike thousands of times over. Considering the fact that Ewoks were not a spacefaring species...
> You're proposing that people be told it's safe to go > about their business as usual even though a > dangerous person is out there.
There's always a dangerous *something* out there. And yes, I do go about my business as usual.
I am, for example, *FAR* more likely to be run down by a taxi or MUNI bus while crossing the street downtown than I am to be killed in any kind of terrorist attack. And yet, I still leave the house every day, cross streets, ride busses, subways, and streetcars; and even drive in the city in the cases when public transit is unworkable. I even go out clubbing or bar-hopping at night and cross the street and walk down the sidewalk when it's quite likely that there are motorists driving around inebriated. All of those activities present far more danger to me than "teh terrorists" do. And yet I don't cower in my home in fear of an errant motor vehicle.
The scientists building *MY* unstoppable superweapon will not be sequestered in the fortress of doom, nestled in the mountains of despair, on the far side of the desert of death. They will be working in an anonymous office park in silicon valley. Their cover story will be that they are working for a bioinformatics startup, and can't talk about what they're doing in there because of both an NDA and HIPAA.
No one will ever notice until it's too late to stop me.
> What has Europe done to pay for its transgressions against China?
The generations that transgressed died off. The current generation has done nothing to them and should not be held to blame for the actions of old dead people to whom they happen to be related.
I know it's a cultural thing in some places to hold generations-long grudges against people for the "sins of their fathers". But I've never understood it. And I'll never accept it. And if that's one area where I'm just culturally-insensitive, that's one insensitivity I can live with.
> Remember Starcraft? The one that was such a big > success? The one with local LAN games and > dedicated servers?
I do. And we don't even have that anymore. Multiplayer is battle.net or nothing now. Thanks, but no thanks. I don't care about my ladder rankings, or the fancypants new achievements they've added. And I don't care how good they think their matchmaking scheme is. I can't stand the battle.net crowd. About 90% of the value of the original Starcraft was LAN games with my friends. By all rights, it should be even easier to get together with friends and play, now that we all have laptops... except Blizzard took that option away. Battle.net or no multiplayer. *sigh*
When all three campaigns are out in a Battlechest and marked down to $40 or so, I'll probably pick up a copy and play the 10% of the game that's left to me. The campaigns were pretty good in the original.
Whether he was a dick to her, or vice versa, is entirely irrelevant. There are only four facts that are relevant in any way, and they're all binary:
1) Was the information on the form incorrect, yes or no? 2) Did she tell him to nevertheless sign a form with incorrect information, yes or no? 3) Did he refuse to swear that information he knew to be false was true, yes or no? 4) After that, sis she seize the boat, yes or no?
She doesn't have to like him and he doesn't have to like her. If the answer to all four of the above questions is "yes" then she is entirely in the wrong needs to be slapped down... ideally terminated as unfit to serve the public in any capacity.
A speedbump on the road to a cash-free economy [...]
And that's an issue, because everyone wants cash-free, Shirley. Because, uhm, cash doesn't carry your name and isn't subject to chargebacks, hallmarks of, er, what exactly?
It's an issue because if my wallet is lost or stolen and all it has in it is a credit card, I just call up customer service to get it cancelled and I'm out at most $50. If it has cash in it, all of that cash is just gone forever.
I'm not overly concerned that a store might track my buying habits and throw some targeted advertising at me. Withdrawing and carrying $1,500 in cash if, for example, I'm going to go buy a new laptop or TV is more worrisome.
The problem is that for every "Yesterday's Enterprise" or "City on the Edge of Forever" there are another dozen examples where time travel was either a cop-out used to explain away sloppiness or lack of attention to details (The JJ Abrhams movie) or as an equally cheap way to contrive a "fish out of water" scenario for comedic relief (Voyager's crew going back to the 1990s, DS9's crew going back to The Trouble With Tribbles).
Time travel plots require a deft hand to actually be done well. And most writers and directors are not up to the task.
There are plenty of games in which you can play as the Nazis, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union in a hypothetical WW3, or even the confederacy during the civil war. And all of those are fairly universally considered to be the "bad guys". And Hitler and Stalin, in particular had body counts that OBL only matched in his wildest wet dreams.
So do you really imagine that there's something special about "the terrorists" that it would be too controversial or in such poor taste that no game maker will ever go there. You really think they're worse than the Nazis???
I don't. And honestly, I'm surprised that those games aren't here already.
> Really? I see. So, you won't mind if I publish a list > of everyone who has a jewelry insurance rider for > high-dollar valuables in their home, right?
Insurance riders are generally part of a private contract between an individual and another private, *non-government*, entity. That's completely a completely different situation from public records being... well... public, and available TO the public.
And the public certainly does have an interest in regulating firearms. It's even written into the second amendment... in the first half that you people seem to like to conveniently ignore.
The situation here is no different from somebody being able to goto the county records office and look up the easements that may be on land I own, or the assessed value thereof. Public records are public. Big surprise.
Thanks for the details that everyone else is ignoring. I gather, from your last paragraph, that you are fluent in both English and Italian. So I find myself wondering then:
>Note that the only people that Apple has to inform >are those buying Apple Care, because when selling >Apple Care, Apple has to accurately describe what >the customer is getting. In all other cases, the onus >is on the customer to inform himself about their laws.
Does something in the AppleCare documentation get lost in translation from English to Italian and become unclear? Or is it not a translation or localization, but fresh copy, written locally but poorly?
I ask because I've purchased AppleCare for multiple products myself. In no case did I find the English-language documentation confusing or ambiguous. I know and understand exactly what I get when I buy it, to the point that the differences between the coverage for different products (MacBooks vs. iOS devices, for example) jump right out to me very obviously.
I think you fell victim to a BS-artist's tall tales.
1) You might want to look into the differences between duct tape and speed tape. The former may make a better storey. But the latter is far, FAR, more likely.
2) Boeing 707s didn't burn avgas. (They may have been theoretically able to do so. Turbine engines are amazingly tolerant about what they burn, at least in the short term. But certainly no 707/engine combo was rated for avgas.) Like all other civilian turbine-driven aircraft, they were fueled with Jet A in the US, Jet A-1 in most of the rest of the world, and Jet B in extremely cold climates.
3) The fuel-dump outlets on the 707, and on pretty much every aircraft that has a fuel-dump system (Not all aircraft do.), are on the trailing edge of the wing. Fuel could not be pouring "out over the wings" unless the wing tanks were actually punctured and leaking.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah... During the last administration, dubya's critics and political opponents (Up to and including Ted Kennedy, for example.) just happened to mysteriously and "accidentally" find themselves accused of being terrorists and placed on the no-fly list.
Yup. No abuse of power or civil liberties there. Nosirrre bob.
> That's one thing that has them upset with the attempts by several states to legalize
> marijuana. Since it can be grown and consumed locally, the Interstate Clause doesn't
> necessarily apply.
Oh, they'll find a way to make interstate commerce apply to just about anything.
See Wickard v. Filburn for an example.
If you don't care to google, the short version is that some congressman had driven through the notion that there should be a minimum price for his constituents' grains. So congress imposed a quota on how much grain a farmer could grow. Filburn (another farmer) was growing grain (wheat, IIRC) in excess of his quota... for his family's personal and private consumption. In other words, this grain was never destined for commerce, interstate or otherwise.
He was fined and ordered to destroy his crops, fought it all the way to the SCOTUS, and lost. Their reasoning was that by growing his own grain he was not buying it on the open market, which could potentially include grain grown in other states. Therefore he was taking part in "interstate commerce" and could be regulated.
I don't know about Lyft; but Uber is actually more expensive than a taxi.
I use Uber instead of taxis because the service is vastly better. Uber cars actually show up when they're summoned and on they show up on the schedule promised in the app. They will actually come and pick you up when and where you want them, even if you're not at a hotel and going to SFO. They will take you out to the avenues without protest. The drivers are in general all-around more pleasant. And they don't stink of smoke, pee, or vomit (the cars OR the drivers).
Granted, all of the above is supposed to be true of medallioned taxis. But it's not... not by a long shot. That left a niche for Uber to come in as a premium service, for which they charge a premium. And it's a premium I'm happy to pay. The service really is just that much better.
1) There are enough it's-Apple-therefore-I-hate-it types out there that there will always be a market for an iTunes Radio alternative. Those people have existed ever since there WAS an Apple, they're not going away, and they listen to music too.
2) Spotify is fine for accessing music I already know about and like. But I have most of that in my iTunes library already. So I wound up canceling my premium account. Where Pandora really shines is in introducing me to new artists/songs/albums that I'll probably like based on my tastes. So Pandora is still one of my most-used.apps. I've no idea if iRadio will replace it. But it definitely fills a void that Spotify doesn't. So, no threat there.
I suspect that not being able to get a hotel room was more due to the "has no money" part. I think I was 16 the first time I ever booked a hotel room here in the US. This *was* long before 9/11 though. So I guess it is possible that there's some rule that's changed. But rules or no rules, "has no money" is going to be a major stumbling block.
Also, yes... United is just awful.
That "office in Cupertino" is a campus the size of a small college plus satellite offices throughout the rest of town. It employs well over ten thousand people. And those are the high-value, well-paying jobs that propel people into the upper-middle class and beyond.
Really, what's with the obsession with the location that a widget is put together, when the design, programming, and engineering (The good, high-value jobs that I'd actually like to have.) are all done here?
> I've noticed weird trend among the middle classes to
> feel entitled when it comes to eliciting the services
> of those who they perceive as lower down in the
> pecking order.
Bull. "Pecking orders" don't enter into it. And trying to make the Uber vs. cabbies issue into some sort of class warfare nonsense is just stupid.
I regularly do business with people *higher* than me on your so-called "pecking order". My doctor, dentist, lawyer, and probably financial planner all come to mind. I still expect all of them to provide the services I pay for.
We're talking about a business arrangement, pure and simple. Cab companies and Uber offer a service in exchange for money. If the company agrees to provide said service at a certain place and time to a customer who is making the arraignment in good faith, the business should be obligated to fulfill their half of the agreement. If a particular pitch-up makes the company less money than another, it should not agree to that pickup in the first place. If it does agree, than tough cookies. Get the car where it's supposed to be when it's supposed to be there. Period. Full stop.
People use and like Uber because taxis are just so bloody awful. Reserving or summoning a cab by calling the cab's dispatch number is a crapshoot at best, and more often an exercise in futility. And if/when a taxi will deign to pick you up, as often as not the cab will stink of vomit or cigarette smoke. One cab company here even has a bed bug infestation in its cabs recently.
I don't use Uber often. I try to plan things out so Muni will suffice. But when I do, the Uber car I summon shows up when and where it's scheduled to do so. They're clean and well-maintained, and generally better cars in the first place. The drivers are courteous, well-mannered, and well-dressed. And since all payment is handles through the app; they never try the "my credit card reader is out of order, cash only" scam.
Yes, it's more expensive. But Uber offers a vastly superior service that's well worth the extra monet.
> Why "kill" a device when you stand a good chance of getting it back?
Because you don't actually stand a good change of getting it back. You can already track iPhones to within a meter if it has line-of-sight to the open sky. Or you can track an indoor iPhone or a Macintosh to within half a block or so via wifi triangulation. But if your iPhone, iPad, Macbook, or whatever is stolen; just try calling the police and telling them "My iPhone was stolen and the thief is $here.". Unless your name is Apple and the phone is a prototype; the best you can hope for is that they'll let you come down to a station and file a report so you can claim it stolen if it was insured. They're certainly not going to bother to track down the thief and recover your property; even if you've done 95% of the work for them.
> Killing it does nobody any good,
It at least denies the thief his shiny or his money. Or it denies the scumbag who bought your stolen phone his shiny. Doing so may reduce the market for stolen hardware in the long run.
> and has lots of quite horrible abuse potential.
No more so than the remote wipe functionality that's already baked into iOS and Mac OS, and can be added to windows via plenty of third-party providers; and which you should already have set up on any and every mobile device anyway.
Nader is not a good example at all, as it's likely that had he not siphoned votes away from Gore, bush the lesser would never have been president, butterfly ballots and hanging chads notwithstanding.
And while my own politics may be somewhat closer to Nader (Though even Nader leaves a sour taste in my mouth on some issues.), Gore would sure as hell have been a damn sight better than the eight years of bush/cheney that we got out of that incident.
A better idea, I think, than shooting yourself in the foot and harming the country overall out of principle, as happenes in 2000; is a fundamental change in the structure of the government to eliminate the winner-take-all aspect of politics. Switching to something like a Westminster-style parliamentary system would be better, IMO. Such systems often require coalition governments to be formed and are better at forcing compromise and including the viewpoints of minority viewpoints that are completely marginalized in our current system in the US.
I'm as big a fan of the iPhone as anyone, but the tools you mention don't work for BYOD. They're great for company owned and managed devices. But it's not "Your Own Device" if you're letting someone else control it with those profiles or activesync connections. If I've paid for hardware with my own money, it's mine... period, full stop. No one else gets admin, root, remote-wipe, find my iPhone, or whatever privileges but me.
I'd allow a company-controlled encrypted partition or something. But *I* retain control of *my* device as a whole. Apple's tools don't yet allow such a solution.
No. It's just that there's a very loud anti-everything-Apple crowd on slashdot. And since iTunes is an Apple product, it's obviously the worst possible piece of software one could imagine for what it does.
Now, I'd agree that it's by no means the best piece of software has written, and there are large areas where it could be improved. I especially dislike the swiss-army-chainsaw approach they went with. I think it's be far better, for example, if Apple broke the media server aspects into a service controlled through System Preferences, broke out the store part and rolled it into the separate App Store software, resurrected iSync to handle iDevice syncing and management, and restored iTuned itself to its roots as a media player and playlist manager.
That said though, as bloated as its become with functionality that seems better placed elsewhere, iTunes is nowhere near as bad as all the hate directed at it would seem to indicate. I think it really is just more of the same mindless Apple-bashing that has been the norm for decades.
As with the other reply to you, I'd intended to add the exact point you just made.
I think high school english teachers, as a group, harbor a secret hatred of the literature they "teach" and want to kill it with fire; and harbor a not-so-secret hatred of children and do everything in their power to suck as much joy and happiness as possible out of their teenage years.
When I was forced, for example, to read 1984 and Brace New World for AP English in my sophomore year of HS, I thought they were a couple of tedious piles of suck, in retrospect mostly because of the way they were "taught". Years later... well after graduating college... I happened across my copies and flipped through them, mostly out of amusement that the bitter old shrew from HS would never have any authority over me again. To my dumbfounded surprise, I found myself accidentally reading large portions of them, finding them fantastic, and eventually reading both from cover to cover in short order.
Left to my own devices, I'd eventually have read both myself, later in life than HS no doubt, so I'd understand the cultural references from them that come up from day to day. That's how I wound up reading things like Ulysses and The Demolished Man. But I shudder at the thought of the damage a high school english teacher could do to an impressionable youth's opinion of James Joyce or Alfred Bester.
Likewise Shakespeare... I hated every minute of it until college; where I wound up with an English Lit & Comp professor who understood that things like Hamlet, Othello, and Julius Caesar were written to be performed, not read. Instead of reading them, he arranged for on-campus performances. And I found that a good theatre production of Shakespeare is pretty fantastic.
When I think back about all the joy I found, as a kid, in Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Niven, and Herbert; I'm absolutely appalled at the notion of their works being ruined by the lot who made it their mission to "teach" me literature when I was in high school.
Well, you can prove that the Ewoks are extinct mathematically, no need for a disease. It has to do with the small fact that a Death Star exploded in orbit around Endor and the tonnage of debris (about 1/4th of the total mass) that would inevitably rain down upon the surface. Imaginge the dinosaur-killer meteor strike thousands of times over. Considering the fact that Ewoks were not a spacefaring species...
> You're proposing that people be told it's safe to go
> about their business as usual even though a
> dangerous person is out there.
There's always a dangerous *something* out there. And yes, I do go about my business as usual.
I am, for example, *FAR* more likely to be run down by a taxi or MUNI bus while crossing the street downtown than I am to be killed in any kind of terrorist attack. And yet, I still leave the house every day, cross streets, ride busses, subways, and streetcars; and even drive in the city in the cases when public transit is unworkable. I even go out clubbing or bar-hopping at night and cross the street and walk down the sidewalk when it's quite likely that there are motorists driving around inebriated. All of those activities present far more danger to me than "teh terrorists" do. And yet I don't cower in my home in fear of an errant motor vehicle.
The scientists building *MY* unstoppable superweapon will not be sequestered in the fortress of doom, nestled in the mountains of despair, on the far side of the desert of death. They will be working in an anonymous office park in silicon valley. Their cover story will be that they are working for a bioinformatics startup, and can't talk about what they're doing in there because of both an NDA and HIPAA.
No one will ever notice until it's too late to stop me.
> What has Europe done to pay for its transgressions against China?
The generations that transgressed died off. The current generation has done nothing to them and should not be held to blame for the actions of old dead people to whom they happen to be related.
I know it's a cultural thing in some places to hold generations-long grudges against people for the "sins of their fathers". But I've never understood it. And I'll never accept it. And if that's one area where I'm just culturally-insensitive, that's one insensitivity I can live with.
> Remember Starcraft? The one that was such a big
> success? The one with local LAN games and
> dedicated servers?
I do. And we don't even have that anymore. Multiplayer is battle.net or nothing now. Thanks, but no thanks. I don't care about my ladder rankings, or the fancypants new achievements they've added. And I don't care how good they think their matchmaking scheme is. I can't stand the battle.net crowd. About 90% of the value of the original Starcraft was LAN games with my friends. By all rights, it should be even easier to get together with friends and play, now that we all have laptops... except Blizzard took that option away. Battle.net or no multiplayer. *sigh*
When all three campaigns are out in a Battlechest and marked down to $40 or so, I'll probably pick up a copy and play the 10% of the game that's left to me. The campaigns were pretty good in the original.
Whether he was a dick to her, or vice versa, is entirely irrelevant. There are only four facts that are relevant in any way, and they're all binary:
1) Was the information on the form incorrect, yes or no?
2) Did she tell him to nevertheless sign a form with incorrect information, yes or no?
3) Did he refuse to swear that information he knew to be false was true, yes or no?
4) After that, sis she seize the boat, yes or no?
She doesn't have to like him and he doesn't have to like her. If the answer to all four of the above questions is "yes" then she is entirely in the wrong needs to be slapped down... ideally terminated as unfit to serve the public in any capacity.
A speedbump on the road to a cash-free economy [...]
And that's an issue, because everyone wants cash-free, Shirley. Because, uhm, cash doesn't carry your name and isn't subject to chargebacks, hallmarks of, er, what exactly?
It's an issue because if my wallet is lost or stolen and all it has in it is a credit card, I just call up customer service to get it cancelled and I'm out at most $50. If it has cash in it, all of that cash is just gone forever.
I'm not overly concerned that a store might track my buying habits and throw some targeted advertising at me. Withdrawing and carrying $1,500 in cash if, for example, I'm going to go buy a new laptop or TV is more worrisome.
The problem is that for every "Yesterday's Enterprise" or "City on the Edge of Forever" there are another dozen examples where time travel was either a cop-out used to explain away sloppiness or lack of attention to details (The JJ Abrhams movie) or as an equally cheap way to contrive a "fish out of water" scenario for comedic relief (Voyager's crew going back to the 1990s, DS9's crew going back to The Trouble With Tribbles).
Time travel plots require a deft hand to actually be done well. And most writers and directors are not up to the task.
There are plenty of games in which you can play as the Nazis, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union in a hypothetical WW3, or even the confederacy during the civil war. And all of those are fairly universally considered to be the "bad guys". And Hitler and Stalin, in particular had body counts that OBL only matched in his wildest wet dreams.
So do you really imagine that there's something special about "the terrorists" that it would be too controversial or in such poor taste that no game maker will ever go there. You really think they're worse than the Nazis???
I don't. And honestly, I'm surprised that those games aren't here already.
> Really? I see. So, you won't mind if I publish a list
> of everyone who has a jewelry insurance rider for
> high-dollar valuables in their home, right?
Insurance riders are generally part of a private contract between an individual and another private, *non-government*, entity. That's completely a completely different situation from public records being... well... public, and available TO the public.
And the public certainly does have an interest in regulating firearms. It's even written into the second amendment... in the first half that you people seem to like to conveniently ignore.
The situation here is no different from somebody being able to goto the county records office and look up the easements that may be on land I own, or the assessed value thereof. Public records are public. Big surprise.
Thanks for the details that everyone else is ignoring. I gather, from your last paragraph, that you are fluent in both English and Italian. So I find myself wondering then:
>Note that the only people that Apple has to inform
>are those buying Apple Care, because when selling
>Apple Care, Apple has to accurately describe what
>the customer is getting. In all other cases, the onus
>is on the customer to inform himself about their laws.
Does something in the AppleCare documentation get lost in translation from English to Italian and become unclear? Or is it not a translation or localization, but fresh copy, written locally but poorly?
I ask because I've purchased AppleCare for multiple products myself. In no case did I find the English-language documentation confusing or ambiguous. I know and understand exactly what I get when I buy it, to the point that the differences between the coverage for different products (MacBooks vs. iOS devices, for example) jump right out to me very obviously.
I think you fell victim to a BS-artist's tall tales.
1) You might want to look into the differences between duct tape and speed tape. The former may make a better storey. But the latter is far, FAR, more likely.
2) Boeing 707s didn't burn avgas. (They may have been theoretically able to do so. Turbine engines are amazingly tolerant about what they burn, at least in the short term. But certainly no 707/engine combo was rated for avgas.) Like all other civilian turbine-driven aircraft, they were fueled with Jet A in the US, Jet A-1 in most of the rest of the world, and Jet B in extremely cold climates.
3) The fuel-dump outlets on the 707, and on pretty much every aircraft that has a fuel-dump system (Not all aircraft do.), are on the trailing edge of the wing. Fuel could not be pouring "out over the wings" unless the wing tanks were actually punctured and leaking.