I have been a loyal T-Mobile customer for 8 years, and I've NEVER regretted the move for a single second.
I pay $50 a month for nation-wide no roaming coverage, 500 texts, IM, international calling, 600 free anytime minutes and free nights and weekends. NOBODY has a deal as good as that for what you get. Not Verizon, not AT&T, not Sprint...nobody.
I loved that T-Mobile would sign contracts with "small fry" to extend their coverage to areas previously untouched. When I moved, my cellphone said "Sun-Com" for nearly 2 years, but I never paid a penny more. They finally put a T-M tower in my area, and service has been outstanding!
If you keep calm enough to think logically, you can survive any event that doesn't immediately remove sufficient body mass to cause death within 24 hours.
This has been demonstrated over and over again, from tens of thousands of "survival stories" from all cultures, all walks of life.
If you'd like a serious education in this, look up the Ray Mears Collection on various torrent sites.
No matter what knowledge you carry with you, and no matter what tools, weapons or supplies you might have: if you lose your calm, you are dead.
Anything after that, such as stockpiling or prepping an emergency kit, is just making the ordeal that much easier and more comfortable.
Encounter #1: Driving on I-95, going to from New York to Washington DC. Somewhere around the NJ/PA border, the GPS tells me to take the exit off 95. I look at the instructions, and it's telling me to get off the highway, go down a side-street, turn around, then get BACK ON 95 and continue. WTF?! I ignore it and drive past. It goes through it's "recalculating" thing, then tries to tell me to do it again. This continued for about 50 miles until I got far enough away from the alien machine intelligence rays that were telling it to try and kill me by routing me through the worst neighborhoods of Philadelphia and Baltimore.
Encounter #2: Interstate travel again. I follow it, and it takes me onto a "major highway" that goes through towns, villages and more stoplights than I have ever seen in my entire life. ALL of them red. I check through the settings, and apparently this route is the "shortest distance". I change that to "fastest" and recalculate. Oh, look! I've got to backtrack 4 miles to the turnpike.
Encounter #3: I wanna avoid Baltimore like the plague, so I route north along the loop to 70, then up to 81. I then take 81 to Binghamton. Straight shot, clear as a bell and lickety-split! The damn GPS keeps trying to route me onto 15 off Frederick, which is a 55 road of money-starved towns with lots of cops. I ignore it and carry on to Hagerstown to pick up 81, but it KEEPS TRYING TO BRING ME BACK TO 15!! I finally gave up and turned it off, since I knew where I was going, I was just using it for mileage tracking and timing. I later learned about "block zones", where you can eliminate areas you don't want the auto-route feature to go.
It is my opinion that the GPS manufacturers are:
1. In league with the petro companies, to get you to use up as much fuel as possible.
2. In league with big pharma, because by the time you get where you're going, you're going to need medication.
3. In league with the alien machine intelligence, which is thinning the herd of useless bipeds who are too stupid or too stressed out to survive the coming invasion and subsequent processing into energy pods.
100,000 joules of heat will put you in intensive care for 3rd degree burns with a 10% chance of survival, and only requires having the bad luck of some other idiot plowing into my car at sufficient speed to rupture the gas tank.
Your magical bucket requires someone to be standing in front of a cannon.
If the force applied to the tank in question is sufficient to cause a catastrophic rupture/explosion, then I would hazard to say that none of the parties directly involved in the collision are likely to care, as they're already dead.
Simply piercing the sides won't do it, you'd have to completely crush it. And considering the location and construction materials used, that's not going to be easy to do.
Batteries and liquid fuels have the huge advantage that when they blow up, most of the energy is released as heat.
I dunno about you, but 99.9999% of the world's population considers that to be a very serious DISadvantage in an accident.
If the pressure cylinder can be held in place, then the sudden, explosive release of an inert gas, such as Nitrogen, might actually be of some value in an accident. Fire suppression, perhaps?
Yes, but the Dutch take extreme insult at inefficiency and incompetence, not to mention corruption and graft. They will pay a lot for quality work, but by God, it had BETTER be quality work, or there will be Hell to pay.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world carries on with the business of fucking each other over pennies.
That's possible, but it's certainly NOT "free and clear".
Here's how you do it, in a VERY simplified form.
1. Open an escrow account and place your monthly mortgage payment, plus interest, into that account. 2. File a small claims suit with your local county, against the mortgage company holding your mortgage. Make it for the monthly amount of the mortgage, plus interest. You are filing suit for them to provide a signed and notarized copy of the deed, as well as any copies of the bill of sale for ALL of the transactions they made with the property. 3. Pay a process server to serve the holder the papers, or at least try. 4. Hire a court recorder. Chances are good that the court will try to simply dump you once it becomes apparent what you're doing. The court reporter will keep them honest. 5. Keep EXCELLENT records of every penny spent, as well as all transactions and communications with the process server and the court. 6. Show up in court on the appointed day.
Now here's where it gets tricky.
The mortgage holder, if they can even be found, probably won't bother to send a lawyer for such a small sum. They'll simply ignore it, and you win by default. If they DO show up, they have to produce the paperwork. Again, chances are good they can't. If they produce a robo-signed copy, they'll be charged with forgery. The odds are stacked in your favor.
If the unlikely event happens that they can prove that the debt is valid, simply resume paying the mortgage and carry on as normal. That's what the escrow account is for.
If nobody shows up, take the money you won in the small claims suit and place THAT into the escrow account too. This shows good faith on your part.
7. File a new small-claims suit again for the next month. Follow steps 1-7, for six months or more. Six months is probably best. 8. On the sixth court appearance, ask the court to nullify the debt. You can...
a. Show you fully intend to pay all debts if the paperwork is provided. (The escrow account again) b. Show you can cover all interest, penalties and fees if the paperwork is provided and you have to resume paying. c. Show that you can cover all costs of the court. d. Show that you paid the process server. e. Show you followed due process and due diligence.
And the mortgage holder has shown nothing but negligence and dereliction of their obligations.
The court will hand you the property with a clean deed.
BUT WAIT!!!!!
Remember that escrow account? DO NOT SPEND IT!!!
You're going to need that money to pay CAPITAL GAINS TAXES, because a new house will constitute a huge jump in your income, and that mortgage payment write-off is going bye-bye too.
You can tack this on as Step 8f: You can show ability to pay all federal, state and local taxes once the house is yours.
Bonus: If the mortgage holder sends your debt to collections while the court cases are pending, they're in violation of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, and can be slapped with a heavy fine on top of losing the mortgage.
You're assuming that they're being pressured by some political agency.
Don't. They are the, single biggest financial organization in the world next to the Federal Reserve. Not even the World Bank is as big as MC.
MC can look every single world leader directly in the eye, whip out their privates right in front of the cameras, and urinate directly into those eyes, one at a time, and nobody would DARE do or say anything. More than a few would swallow.
They're doing this because they found a way to make it profitable.
I was in the US Navy for nine years, and the system we were using was WinNT.
That was later shifted to an OS called "IT-21". It was a custom version of WinNT that had been cobbled together by SPAWAR. MS actually let them have the source code, so they could customize it. There were all kinds of tweaks, dibbles and fidgets added to it, but the biggest was to disable the USB ports, COM ports, and prevent the system from writing any info to the pagefile.
Now, blocking off the pagefile was a touch of brilliance, but blocking the COM ports meant we couldn't hook a teletype to the computer. So when we were doing HF teletype exercises, messages either had to be loaded using Win98 or done by hand.
And once the newer printers started coming out, blocking the USB ports gave everyone conniptions.
For a while there, they played around with preventing the OS from writing anything at all to the floppy drive, but that lasted all of 1 day when comms shacks all over the WORLD started calling SPAWAR support, screaming about how they couldn't load the CO's traffic to disk.
Soon, the patches came out, and IT-21 became just another hunk of crap we had to deal with. As time went on, we dumped it for Win2K. Before I left, I saw people using Vista Premium for classified traffic, so I doubt things have changed all that much.
At the end of the day, it comes down to three things:
1. Don't do shit that will make your people question your ethics. 2. Screen out people who are, themselves, unethical. 3. Trust but verify.
So if anything would happen to these guys that would piss them off enough, they'd just release the keys and boom, thousands of users would have this data.
Assange: "If the unencrypted files are distributed, world governments will fall."
Uncle Sam: "Even if it is unencrypted, it would take a number beyond reckoning — thousands — to distribute them all."
Assange: "Tens of thousands."
Uncle Sam: "But my lord there is no such force."
[They walk to the balcony of the tower Wikileaks and Uncle Sam looks in awe at the sheer number of Pirate Bay downloaders. A horn sounds and the pirates cheer.]
Assange: "A new power is rising. Its victory is at hand. This night, the land will be cleansed with the light of truth! March to Washington DC! Leave none unimpeached! To war!"
Slashdot Mirror
They're watching all the end-of-humanity movies to make sure they get their killer robots right.
so responding to customer inquiries in other than the traditional ways (like post and in-person) could get banks in trouble.
And nothing of value was lost.
I have been a loyal T-Mobile customer for 8 years, and I've NEVER regretted the move for a single second.
I pay $50 a month for nation-wide no roaming coverage, 500 texts, IM, international calling, 600 free anytime minutes and free nights and weekends. NOBODY has a deal as good as that for what you get. Not Verizon, not AT&T, not Sprint...nobody.
I loved that T-Mobile would sign contracts with "small fry" to extend their coverage to areas previously untouched. When I moved, my cellphone said "Sun-Com" for nearly 2 years, but I never paid a penny more. They finally put a T-M tower in my area, and service has been outstanding!
Now I have to move to the Death Star?
And be lied to, over-charged and spied upon?
Fuck you, AT&T.
Maybe I should go pre-paid.
Don't panic.
If you keep calm enough to think logically, you can survive any event that doesn't immediately remove sufficient body mass to cause death within 24 hours.
This has been demonstrated over and over again, from tens of thousands of "survival stories" from all cultures, all walks of life.
If you'd like a serious education in this, look up the Ray Mears Collection on various torrent sites.
No matter what knowledge you carry with you, and no matter what tools, weapons or supplies you might have: if you lose your calm, you are dead.
Anything after that, such as stockpiling or prepping an emergency kit, is just making the ordeal that much easier and more comfortable.
They can still do it, but they'd have to shift all of their ground-based gear off GPS, and go back to good olde fashioned Cesium or Rubidium.
The only problem with that, is that those devices are frightfully expensive compared to GPS.
WHOOOSH!
It used to be that wanking would make just YOU go blind.
But now, our eyes will be able to record the act of us wanking, so OTHER people can go blind along with us.
That looks like an awesome skeet target. And I'm sure anyone being observed by one in a warzone will agree.
I was thinking the exact same thing.
Put Uwe Boll's name on it, and money will appear out of nowhere. It's almost magical, which isn't surprising, since Uwe is one of the Three Brothers.
Encounter #1: Driving on I-95, going to from New York to Washington DC. Somewhere around the NJ/PA border, the GPS tells me to take the exit off 95. I look at the instructions, and it's telling me to get off the highway, go down a side-street, turn around, then get BACK ON 95 and continue. WTF?! I ignore it and drive past. It goes through it's "recalculating" thing, then tries to tell me to do it again. This continued for about 50 miles until I got far enough away from the alien machine intelligence rays that were telling it to try and kill me by routing me through the worst neighborhoods of Philadelphia and Baltimore.
Encounter #2: Interstate travel again. I follow it, and it takes me onto a "major highway" that goes through towns, villages and more stoplights than I have ever seen in my entire life. ALL of them red. I check through the settings, and apparently this route is the "shortest distance". I change that to "fastest" and recalculate. Oh, look! I've got to backtrack 4 miles to the turnpike.
Encounter #3: I wanna avoid Baltimore like the plague, so I route north along the loop to 70, then up to 81. I then take 81 to Binghamton. Straight shot, clear as a bell and lickety-split! The damn GPS keeps trying to route me onto 15 off Frederick, which is a 55 road of money-starved towns with lots of cops. I ignore it and carry on to Hagerstown to pick up 81, but it KEEPS TRYING TO BRING ME BACK TO 15!! I finally gave up and turned it off, since I knew where I was going, I was just using it for mileage tracking and timing. I later learned about "block zones", where you can eliminate areas you don't want the auto-route feature to go.
It is my opinion that the GPS manufacturers are:
1. In league with the petro companies, to get you to use up as much fuel as possible.
2. In league with big pharma, because by the time you get where you're going, you're going to need medication.
3. In league with the alien machine intelligence, which is thinning the herd of useless bipeds who are too stupid or too stressed out to survive the coming invasion and subsequent processing into energy pods.
100,000 joules of heat will put you in intensive care for 3rd degree burns with a 10% chance of survival, and only requires having the bad luck of some other idiot plowing into my car at sufficient speed to rupture the gas tank.
Your magical bucket requires someone to be standing in front of a cannon.
Thanks for playing.
If the force applied to the tank in question is sufficient to cause a catastrophic rupture/explosion, then I would hazard to say that none of the parties directly involved in the collision are likely to care, as they're already dead.
Simply piercing the sides won't do it, you'd have to completely crush it. And considering the location and construction materials used, that's not going to be easy to do.
Batteries and liquid fuels have the huge advantage that when they blow up, most of the energy is released as heat.
I dunno about you, but 99.9999% of the world's population considers that to be a very serious DISadvantage in an accident.
If the pressure cylinder can be held in place, then the sudden, explosive release of an inert gas, such as Nitrogen, might actually be of some value in an accident. Fire suppression, perhaps?
Throw in one of these, and you're looking at truly ridiculous amounts of pain if you lose your phone.
In before PETA drama!
*reads comments in the FA* ...crap.
"...although this also runs into problems when the servers are based outside of your jurisdiction."
No, it doesn't.
Yes, but the Dutch take extreme insult at inefficiency and incompetence, not to mention corruption and graft. They will pay a lot for quality work, but by God, it had BETTER be quality work, or there will be Hell to pay.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world carries on with the business of fucking each other over pennies.
Once Microsoft and Facebook find out that the furries are also known as "furry fans", they'll drop the claim.
And run away, screaming.
"...but the truth is people lie. A lot."
There. Fixed that for you.
That's possible, but it's certainly NOT "free and clear".
Here's how you do it, in a VERY simplified form.
1. Open an escrow account and place your monthly mortgage payment, plus interest, into that account.
2. File a small claims suit with your local county, against the mortgage company holding your mortgage. Make it for the monthly amount of the mortgage, plus interest. You are filing suit for them to provide a signed and notarized copy of the deed, as well as any copies of the bill of sale for ALL of the transactions they made with the property.
3. Pay a process server to serve the holder the papers, or at least try.
4. Hire a court recorder. Chances are good that the court will try to simply dump you once it becomes apparent what you're doing. The court reporter will keep them honest.
5. Keep EXCELLENT records of every penny spent, as well as all transactions and communications with the process server and the court.
6. Show up in court on the appointed day.
Now here's where it gets tricky.
The mortgage holder, if they can even be found, probably won't bother to send a lawyer for such a small sum. They'll simply ignore it, and you win by default. If they DO show up, they have to produce the paperwork. Again, chances are good they can't. If they produce a robo-signed copy, they'll be charged with forgery. The odds are stacked in your favor.
If the unlikely event happens that they can prove that the debt is valid, simply resume paying the mortgage and carry on as normal. That's what the escrow account is for.
If nobody shows up, take the money you won in the small claims suit and place THAT into the escrow account too. This shows good faith on your part.
7. File a new small-claims suit again for the next month. Follow steps 1-7, for six months or more. Six months is probably best.
8. On the sixth court appearance, ask the court to nullify the debt. You can...
a. Show you fully intend to pay all debts if the paperwork is provided. (The escrow account again)
b. Show you can cover all interest, penalties and fees if the paperwork is provided and you have to resume paying.
c. Show that you can cover all costs of the court.
d. Show that you paid the process server.
e. Show you followed due process and due diligence.
And the mortgage holder has shown nothing but negligence and dereliction of their obligations.
The court will hand you the property with a clean deed.
BUT WAIT!!!!!
Remember that escrow account? DO NOT SPEND IT!!!
You're going to need that money to pay CAPITAL GAINS TAXES, because a new house will constitute a huge jump in your income, and that mortgage payment write-off is going bye-bye too.
You can tack this on as Step 8f: You can show ability to pay all federal, state and local taxes once the house is yours.
Bonus: If the mortgage holder sends your debt to collections while the court cases are pending, they're in violation of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, and can be slapped with a heavy fine on top of losing the mortgage.
You can spend that.
Slashdot needs a new tag for stories like this?
I nominate "bitchslap".
You're assuming that they're being pressured by some political agency.
Don't. They are the, single biggest financial organization in the world next to the Federal Reserve. Not even the World Bank is as big as MC.
MC can look every single world leader directly in the eye, whip out their privates right in front of the cameras, and urinate directly into those eyes, one at a time, and nobody would DARE do or say anything. More than a few would swallow.
They're doing this because they found a way to make it profitable.
Well, at least they're just stealing the stuff? It's not like you can sell this sort of thing on eBay or Craigslist, so it's probably a prank.
Things could be a much worse.
I was in the US Navy for nine years, and the system we were using was WinNT.
That was later shifted to an OS called "IT-21". It was a custom version of WinNT that had been cobbled together by SPAWAR. MS actually let them have the source code, so they could customize it. There were all kinds of tweaks, dibbles and fidgets added to it, but the biggest was to disable the USB ports, COM ports, and prevent the system from writing any info to the pagefile.
Now, blocking off the pagefile was a touch of brilliance, but blocking the COM ports meant we couldn't hook a teletype to the computer. So when we were doing HF teletype exercises, messages either had to be loaded using Win98 or done by hand.
And once the newer printers started coming out, blocking the USB ports gave everyone conniptions.
For a while there, they played around with preventing the OS from writing anything at all to the floppy drive, but that lasted all of 1 day when comms shacks all over the WORLD started calling SPAWAR support, screaming about how they couldn't load the CO's traffic to disk.
Soon, the patches came out, and IT-21 became just another hunk of crap we had to deal with. As time went on, we dumped it for Win2K. Before I left, I saw people using Vista Premium for classified traffic, so I doubt things have changed all that much.
At the end of the day, it comes down to three things:
1. Don't do shit that will make your people question your ethics.
2. Screen out people who are, themselves, unethical.
3. Trust but verify.
So if anything would happen to these guys that would piss them off enough, they'd just release the keys and boom, thousands of users would have this data.
Assange: "If the unencrypted files are distributed, world governments will fall."
Uncle Sam: "Even if it is unencrypted, it would take a number beyond reckoning — thousands — to distribute them all."
Assange: "Tens of thousands."
Uncle Sam: "But my lord there is no such force."
[They walk to the balcony of the tower Wikileaks and Uncle Sam looks in awe at the sheer number of Pirate Bay downloaders. A horn sounds and the pirates cheer.]
Assange: "A new power is rising. Its victory is at hand. This night, the land will be cleansed with the light of truth! March to Washington DC! Leave none unimpeached! To war!"
Uncle Sam: [A tear rolls down his cheek.]
Assange: "There will be no dawn for lies."