By finding "everyday uses" for it, such as in movies, people form a much more functional use for the language.
". . . may the horse be with you . . . use the horse, Luke, use the horse . .."
Despite the popularity of picturing Indians with horses, there were no horses on the American continents until they were brought here by the Europeans.
There have also been instances where a minor takes a picture of themselves nude, sends it to their boyfriend and then gets charged with distribution of child pornography. Ironically, they probably get tried as an adult.
Yahoo is offering between 600 and 800 million, not 300 million. It seems that Hulu is kind of playing a hide the numbers game after their last unsuccessful attempt to get bought, but back in 2011 they had a couple of quarters where they were profitable, but then they also made more like 700 million in revenue. It also wasn't mentioned just how profitable they were. I'm sure Yahoo has some visibility to those numbers that we don't, but as was the case with tumblr, this number looks far, far out of league with what a convention offer would be based on pure profitability. Tumblr was losing money, and for all we can tell now, Hulu is doing the same.
I haven't had any yahoo stock in about 15 years, but if I did, I would be selling now.
I have used 0 of the top 1, and 4 of the top 20 sites. I've used Yahoo in the past, but probably not in about 15 years.I would call myself a once a month user of Youtube.
If only some cars were capable of picking up handicapped drivers, but were otherwise more expensive to operate (i.e. higher fuel costs due to a larger size), the cab companies wouldn't use them. Also, the lack of a good city-wide dispatch system means handicapped people would have trouble finding a special cab if not all taxis could handle them. It's easily possible to provide a special type of service to those who need handicapped riding accommodations. But the profit motive in the current system means it won't happen unless it's pushed as a hard requirement. And the high price of obtaining a taxi medallion keeps all the owners very oriented toward turning a profit.
Oddly enough, in my city, they don't mandate what type of vehicle that cabs are allowed to run, and they run all kinds of vehicles, from midsized American cars to full size and even some foreign cars. They also run wheelchair accessible Dodge Caravans or similar. Although again, I think those are only BARELY wheelchair accessible and pale in comparison to a real van. But they do run different vehicles in the fleet and the handicapped are not left unserviced.
One company, Airport Express runs nothing but vans and minivans, mostly (probably 90%) full sized vans. The minivans are kind of cramped when trying to carry full sized people and luggage.
You guys don't know the half of it. I used to own a 4 cylinder Lotus Esprit. But the Esprit has about the same horsepower as the V8 Crown Vic and weighs much less than the Nissan NV200. My whole point is that you can't put an anemic 4 cylinder in a heavy van intended to carry heavy passengers and expect it to perform well. It's not a question of 4 cylinder versus V8. I'm not fan of throwing more block at something just because. I find it very telling that Lotus manages to get about the same performance out of a 4 cylinder as Ford gets out of a 5.0 V8.
It is suppose to accessible to wheelchair passengers. The summery says "poor accessibility for wheelchair users" but I don't see a source for that information anywhere. If you look at pictures of the new taxi it actually looks like it would be accessible, certainly more so than the current fleet of cars.
I don't understand why we need every single car to be wheelchair accessible, when there is such a small percentage of wheelchair bound people that would need access to one. These minivans, if they are wheelchair accessible at all, are going to be an extremely tight fit and uncomfortable. Why can they not just have a small percentage of full sized vans available for wheelchair customers, and let the rest of the public ride in a comfortable, full size sedan?
Are New Yorkers(Americans in general?) so fat that they need a truck to fit in?
That is not the reason they went with a minivan. Looking at the minivan, it is quite clear that it is not going to be more roomy or comfortable than a Crown Vic. It is less capable of hauling a fat American than the Crown Vic. It is purely a political decision.
How much fuel is wasted by slow moving, congested, low efficiency transportation?
I guess we will find out if they put these into place. The NV200 gets the same gas mileage on the highway as a Crown Vic, and only outperforms it in city driving, according to EPA. However, the EPA does not consider passengers. A Crown Vic with two passengers will barely see a dent it's mileage, while the undersized 4 cylinder in the NV200 is likely to see a 10% or more drop in it's mileage. As far as the slow moving comment, which is more likely to be slow? A 131 HP 4 cylinder weighing 3800 pounds with passengers, or a 239 HP V8 weighing 4700 with passengers?
A 2 litre engined vehicle that only manages 24mpg?
Well, it weighs 3200 pounds, so that 4 cylinder probably has to suck down all the gas it can get just to get the thing moving. Plus it will probably die early carrying around that much weight. Not something you would want for a taxi. Also, for being all that heavy, they don't have a lot of interior room. I sure wouldn't want to give up a Crown Vic for one of these things, even though the Crown Vic obviously sucks down much more gas. Oh, wait, not it doesn't. It sucks down only 4 more tablespoons of gas per mile than the anemic four cylinder in the Nissan in the city and gets the same mileage as the NV200 on the highway.
some acceptance of derived units might be wise, or do you want speedometers and signs calibrated to m/s? (- not personally opposed to this btw)
That seems reasonable to me. Then people would be more aware of how far they go when they "just took their eyes off the road for a second." For example, at 55 mph, you would go almost 81 feet in one second, or about 24 and a half meters. That is quite a long ways to go without looking.
I understand the need to add fees or increase rates.
I don't. They already have a bunch of sunk costs in equipment. Econ 101 says that each new customer's marginal cost is less than the last. So as they add customers, their price per customer goes down. So they are getting more and more profitable on each customer, and now want to heap profit on top of profit by increasing the price of service without increasing the service itself.
you mean they don't charge extra for that? here theres a an extra fee if you don't setup automatic payment via the bank
Well, there is probably not a fee for automatic payment, but if you call in to make a payment, they charge extra, and I don't know about AT&T but some carriers charge a "convenience fee" if you pay over the internet. It's insane. You save them money and they charge you for it.
How is it possible to add a surcharge on top of the contractually agreed charges?
Well, apparently, they can, so what is stopping you from doing the same thing? Introduce a new 64 cent "paying my bill" fee. Be sure and send them 30 days advance notification by certified mail so you know they got it.
Please tell me that you leave an "acceptable" tip for "acceptable" service,
I do, but I shouldn't. Instead, the restaurant owner should pay the employee compensation commensurate with expected performance. If I think the service was above and beyond expected performance, I should leave a tip. If I think the service was below expected performance, I should complain to the restaurant manager or owner and they should resolve the issue.
If I need to be managing their employees, then I expect to be paid in kind.
Many are grandfathered in on really old plans that they keep letting us carry forward each cycle! I pay like $78 per month for what on ATT or VZW now costs about $120 or so -
You think that is good, how about a really grandfathered plan? Back when I was growing up, a telephone line that the whole family could use cost about $15 a month including all usage charges. With all the advances in technology, it is probably practically free now. Oh, no wait, it is like $50 a month for a land line now.
I just recently started to take action against it. I recently canceled a phone plan and my former cable contract after I got notices that the terms had been updated, and contacted them to tell them I didn't agree to the changes. Their response was pretty much "Oh well, go somewhere else then". So I did.
That may work when there is competition, but in some areas there isn't any competition any they can do what they want. Cable is an excellent example of this. There is no competition due to the last mile problem. Utilities are another. Your only recourse to a utility company cheating you is to cut off service, at which point, they notify the city and the city condemns your house for not having utilities.
This is what happens when companies are allowed to run rough shod over the populace and competition into that market is arbitrarily restricted by the government.
FTFY
Restricted by the government and restricted by the fact that it costs a crap-ton of money to enter the market. Nobody who doesn't already own a wireless carrier can afford to create a new wireless carrier. Even if you started one extremely locally hoping to expand, you would fail because you would have to interface with the other carriers to get calls out of your area and they would just refuse to do business with you.
I can't say for 100% certain that a cell phone bill in collections won't hurt the actual credit score, but I can say for 100% certain that it shows up on the credit report. As a landlord, I have to pull credit frequently, and there are items on there that you wouldn't think would end up on there, utilities, cell phone bills, other landlord judgments, cable bills, gym memberships, payday loan outfits, etc.
The last time I dealt with AT&T was about 15 years ago when I was signing up for long distance service after a move. My dad had worked at AT&T Bell Labs so I had some loyalty to the company. The lady on the phone put me on a long distance plan with no monthly fee and 7 or 8 cents a minute, I forget what it was now. They also put me on an international plan (my wife is from Korea) that was about $4 a month and 40 cents a minute.
The next month I get a bill for about $600 in long distance. When I look at the bill, they were charging me about 60 cents a minute for long distance and several dollars a minute for international. When I called about this, they said that these were the default charges because I was not on a plan. I told them that I was signed up for a plan the previous month and the details of the plan. They said "I''m sorry, that plan is not available in your area". I said that is not my problem. I was sold that plan and that is the plan I want and nobody even bothered to call to tell me that the plan they sold me is not available and would I be interested in an alternate plan. No, they just quietly put me on no plan at all and let the charges go. They were completely unapologetic and just said that the plan is not available and offered me a couple of options which were about twice as expensive. In the end, they refused to honor the plan they sold me and refused to even reprice the previous bill back to the plan that they had sold me. They knocked like $100 off of the bill expecting me to pay 80% of the cost for a mistake which was 100% their fault. I said I was not going to pay it and that is when they started trotting out the "we'll report you to collections" line. I told them that that was fine, I had just moved and I simply can't afford to pay for your mistake at this time. Finally, they agreed to put me on monthly payments to pay them for their mistake. As soon as I had them paid back, I switched companies and will never, ever deal with them again.
Unfortunately, since that time, most of the other wireless carriers have joined them on the list of companies I won't deal with. Pretty soon i will be forced into Luddite status by the fact that there are no wireless companies left that have not completely screwed me over.
With all due respect to these talented, compassionate people, nothing short of anotherfuckingplacetolive.com* is going to cut it.
*I should know; I live here.:p
I can understand this mentality in a place that floods every single year and people every year say "we're going to rebuild". It''s quite another to say that in a place that experiences a once in a century hurricane, or a once in a century tornado (even if it experiences a once in a century tornado two times in fifteen years). If you lived only in place where it was not possible to have a once in a century event of some type, I think you would find that the Earth would suddenly become uninhabitable. There are meteorological, geothermal and geological events that when totaled up, pretty much cover the whole Earth. You have to live somewhere.
As the Earth becomes more populated, the chances of these events hitting a populated area increases.
Slashdot Mirror
By finding "everyday uses" for it, such as in movies, people form a much more functional use for the language.
". . . may the horse be with you . . . use the horse, Luke, use the horse . . ."
Despite the popularity of picturing Indians with horses, there were no horses on the American continents until they were brought here by the Europeans.
There have also been instances where a minor takes a picture of themselves nude, sends it to their boyfriend and then gets charged with distribution of child pornography. Ironically, they probably get tried as an adult.
This story, repeat though it is here, reminds me to be grateful for the marvelous lives we lead today, the best time in all of history to be alive.
And someday, people will look back at us now and think our lives sucked.
"healthcare today is top-notch"
Written by someone who has never been sick; you're probably quite young. Modern medicine is great, but it is very far from top-notch.
Written by someone with a sense of perspective, more like. Be grateful for what you've got, even if it could be better.
Yahoo is offering between 600 and 800 million, not 300 million. It seems that Hulu is kind of playing a hide the numbers game after their last unsuccessful attempt to get bought, but back in 2011 they had a couple of quarters where they were profitable, but then they also made more like 700 million in revenue. It also wasn't mentioned just how profitable they were. I'm sure Yahoo has some visibility to those numbers that we don't, but as was the case with tumblr, this number looks far, far out of league with what a convention offer would be based on pure profitability. Tumblr was losing money, and for all we can tell now, Hulu is doing the same.
I haven't had any yahoo stock in about 15 years, but if I did, I would be selling now.
I have used 0 of the top 1, and 4 of the top 20 sites. I've used Yahoo in the past, but probably not in about 15 years.I would call myself a once a month user of Youtube.
What human studies have been done into the negative health effects of "wireless power charging"?
It's so ridiculously inefficient that it can barely charge a cell phone sitting right on it nevermind cause any health issues.
If only some cars were capable of picking up handicapped drivers, but were otherwise more expensive to operate (i.e. higher fuel costs due to a larger size), the cab companies wouldn't use them. Also, the lack of a good city-wide dispatch system means handicapped people would have trouble finding a special cab if not all taxis could handle them. It's easily possible to provide a special type of service to those who need handicapped riding accommodations. But the profit motive in the current system means it won't happen unless it's pushed as a hard requirement. And the high price of obtaining a taxi medallion keeps all the owners very oriented toward turning a profit.
Oddly enough, in my city, they don't mandate what type of vehicle that cabs are allowed to run, and they run all kinds of vehicles, from midsized American cars to full size and even some foreign cars. They also run wheelchair accessible Dodge Caravans or similar. Although again, I think those are only BARELY wheelchair accessible and pale in comparison to a real van. But they do run different vehicles in the fleet and the handicapped are not left unserviced.
One company, Airport Express runs nothing but vans and minivans, mostly (probably 90%) full sized vans. The minivans are kind of cramped when trying to carry full sized people and luggage.
What do you have against small 4-cylinder car?
Ditto. Don't knock it until you've tried this.
You guys don't know the half of it. I used to own a 4 cylinder Lotus Esprit. But the Esprit has about the same horsepower as the V8 Crown Vic and weighs much less than the Nissan NV200. My whole point is that you can't put an anemic 4 cylinder in a heavy van intended to carry heavy passengers and expect it to perform well. It's not a question of 4 cylinder versus V8. I'm not fan of throwing more block at something just because. I find it very telling that Lotus manages to get about the same performance out of a 4 cylinder as Ford gets out of a 5.0 V8.
It is suppose to accessible to wheelchair passengers. The summery says "poor accessibility for wheelchair users" but I don't see a source for that information anywhere. If you look at pictures of the new taxi it actually looks like it would be accessible, certainly more so than the current fleet of cars.
I don't understand why we need every single car to be wheelchair accessible, when there is such a small percentage of wheelchair bound people that would need access to one. These minivans, if they are wheelchair accessible at all, are going to be an extremely tight fit and uncomfortable. Why can they not just have a small percentage of full sized vans available for wheelchair customers, and let the rest of the public ride in a comfortable, full size sedan?
Are New Yorkers(Americans in general?) so fat that they need a truck to fit in?
That is not the reason they went with a minivan. Looking at the minivan, it is quite clear that it is not going to be more roomy or comfortable than a Crown Vic. It is less capable of hauling a fat American than the Crown Vic. It is purely a political decision.
How much fuel is wasted by slow moving, congested, low efficiency transportation?
I guess we will find out if they put these into place. The NV200 gets the same gas mileage on the highway as a Crown Vic, and only outperforms it in city driving, according to EPA. However, the EPA does not consider passengers. A Crown Vic with two passengers will barely see a dent it's mileage, while the undersized 4 cylinder in the NV200 is likely to see a 10% or more drop in it's mileage. As far as the slow moving comment, which is more likely to be slow? A 131 HP 4 cylinder weighing 3800 pounds with passengers, or a 239 HP V8 weighing 4700 with passengers?
A 2 litre engined vehicle that only manages 24mpg?
Well, it weighs 3200 pounds, so that 4 cylinder probably has to suck down all the gas it can get just to get the thing moving. Plus it will probably die early carrying around that much weight. Not something you would want for a taxi. Also, for being all that heavy, they don't have a lot of interior room. I sure wouldn't want to give up a Crown Vic for one of these things, even though the Crown Vic obviously sucks down much more gas. Oh, wait, not it doesn't. It sucks down only 4 more tablespoons of gas per mile than the anemic four cylinder in the Nissan in the city and gets the same mileage as the NV200 on the highway.
some acceptance of derived units might be wise, or do you want speedometers and signs calibrated to m/s? (- not personally opposed to this btw)
That seems reasonable to me. Then people would be more aware of how far they go when they "just took their eyes off the road for a second." For example, at 55 mph, you would go almost 81 feet in one second, or about 24 and a half meters. That is quite a long ways to go without looking.
I understand the need to add fees or increase rates.
I don't. They already have a bunch of sunk costs in equipment. Econ 101 says that each new customer's marginal cost is less than the last. So as they add customers, their price per customer goes down. So they are getting more and more profitable on each customer, and now want to heap profit on top of profit by increasing the price of service without increasing the service itself.
you mean they don't charge extra for that? here theres a an extra fee if you don't setup automatic payment via the bank
Well, there is probably not a fee for automatic payment, but if you call in to make a payment, they charge extra, and I don't know about AT&T but some carriers charge a "convenience fee" if you pay over the internet. It's insane. You save them money and they charge you for it.
How is it possible to add a surcharge on top of the contractually agreed charges?
Well, apparently, they can, so what is stopping you from doing the same thing? Introduce a new 64 cent "paying my bill" fee. Be sure and send them 30 days advance notification by certified mail so you know they got it.
Please tell me that you leave an "acceptable" tip for "acceptable" service,
I do, but I shouldn't. Instead, the restaurant owner should pay the employee compensation commensurate with expected performance. If I think the service was above and beyond expected performance, I should leave a tip. If I think the service was below expected performance, I should complain to the restaurant manager or owner and they should resolve the issue.
If I need to be managing their employees, then I expect to be paid in kind.
And in some translations it is "a" root of all evil, not "the" root of all evil.
Many are grandfathered in on really old plans that they keep letting us carry forward each cycle!
I pay like $78 per month for what on ATT or VZW now costs about $120 or so -
You think that is good, how about a really grandfathered plan? Back when I was growing up, a telephone line that the whole family could use cost about $15 a month including all usage charges. With all the advances in technology, it is probably practically free now. Oh, no wait, it is like $50 a month for a land line now.
I just recently started to take action against it. I recently canceled a phone plan and my former cable contract after I got notices that the terms had been updated, and contacted them to tell them I didn't agree to the changes. Their response was pretty much "Oh well, go somewhere else then". So I did.
That may work when there is competition, but in some areas there isn't any competition any they can do what they want. Cable is an excellent example of this. There is no competition due to the last mile problem. Utilities are another. Your only recourse to a utility company cheating you is to cut off service, at which point, they notify the city and the city condemns your house for not having utilities.
This is what happens when companies are allowed to run rough shod over the populace and competition into that market is arbitrarily restricted by the government.
FTFY
Restricted by the government and restricted by the fact that it costs a crap-ton of money to enter the market. Nobody who doesn't already own a wireless carrier can afford to create a new wireless carrier. Even if you started one extremely locally hoping to expand, you would fail because you would have to interface with the other carriers to get calls out of your area and they would just refuse to do business with you.
I can't say for 100% certain that a cell phone bill in collections won't hurt the actual credit score, but I can say for 100% certain that it shows up on the credit report. As a landlord, I have to pull credit frequently, and there are items on there that you wouldn't think would end up on there, utilities, cell phone bills, other landlord judgments, cable bills, gym memberships, payday loan outfits, etc.
The last time I dealt with AT&T was about 15 years ago when I was signing up for long distance service after a move. My dad had worked at AT&T Bell Labs so I had some loyalty to the company. The lady on the phone put me on a long distance plan with no monthly fee and 7 or 8 cents a minute, I forget what it was now. They also put me on an international plan (my wife is from Korea) that was about $4 a month and 40 cents a minute.
The next month I get a bill for about $600 in long distance. When I look at the bill, they were charging me about 60 cents a minute for long distance and several dollars a minute for international. When I called about this, they said that these were the default charges because I was not on a plan. I told them that I was signed up for a plan the previous month and the details of the plan. They said "I''m sorry, that plan is not available in your area". I said that is not my problem. I was sold that plan and that is the plan I want and nobody even bothered to call to tell me that the plan they sold me is not available and would I be interested in an alternate plan. No, they just quietly put me on no plan at all and let the charges go. They were completely unapologetic and just said that the plan is not available and offered me a couple of options which were about twice as expensive. In the end, they refused to honor the plan they sold me and refused to even reprice the previous bill back to the plan that they had sold me. They knocked like $100 off of the bill expecting me to pay 80% of the cost for a mistake which was 100% their fault. I said I was not going to pay it and that is when they started trotting out the "we'll report you to collections" line. I told them that that was fine, I had just moved and I simply can't afford to pay for your mistake at this time. Finally, they agreed to put me on monthly payments to pay them for their mistake. As soon as I had them paid back, I switched companies and will never, ever deal with them again.
Unfortunately, since that time, most of the other wireless carriers have joined them on the list of companies I won't deal with. Pretty soon i will be forced into Luddite status by the fact that there are no wireless companies left that have not completely screwed me over.
With all due respect to these talented, compassionate people, nothing short of anotherfuckingplacetolive.com* is going to cut it.
*I should know; I live here. :p
I can understand this mentality in a place that floods every single year and people every year say "we're going to rebuild". It''s quite another to say that in a place that experiences a once in a century hurricane, or a once in a century tornado (even if it experiences a once in a century tornado two times in fifteen years). If you lived only in place where it was not possible to have a once in a century event of some type, I think you would find that the Earth would suddenly become uninhabitable. There are meteorological, geothermal and geological events that when totaled up, pretty much cover the whole Earth. You have to live somewhere.
As the Earth becomes more populated, the chances of these events hitting a populated area increases.