A couple hundred dollars is too much for *just* glasses, unless you need some kind of extreme coke-bottle glasses.
You REEEAAAALLLY should look (ha ha) at some of the places selling prescription glasses online now, there's one that starts with a z but I forget the name. They are surprisingly inexpensive, if they have what you need. And they have a lot, and none of it costs anywhere near what you seem to be paying at the local eyeglasses place.
It is very presumptuous to claim one has invented a "new" bicycle just by rehashing normal parts. Millions of amateur inventors in every country in the world have been doing the same thing for 100+ years. Fans of vintage bicycles will tend to say that 'Everything ride-able--and a lot more things not--has already been done; I just can't find the picture'.
Vintage tandem bicycles that allowed a smaller rider in front were typically called "kangaroo" tandems.
I don't remember anything *exactly* like this, but I know I've seen a few that were very similar except for the handlebar arrangement.... -and I don't consider myself to be that great of a fan of vintage cycling. The vintage examples I recall vaguely had a more-complicated arrangement, which leads me to suspect that simpler ones were probably tried.
Not having a multiplayer element makes it MORE interesting to those that don't play online much (there is still a few of us)...
I managed to get Left For Dead 2 on Steam the day it was available for free.... the first new game I had played in a few years (I am rather beyond the typical game-buying demographic, most likely).
Due to a dated PC I tend to prefer playing single-player, but it has a few glaring problems when used that way. It is obvious that they intended it to be played by four people cooperating, and many situations involve coordination that bots can't or will not do. You almost need to resort to using cheat codes to get through many stages, as the bots are often more hindrance than help. And while there is a "last man on earth" variation to play, it doesn't present you with the usual assortment of enemies to fight.
If it tastes like meat, smells like meat, and looks like meat, then I won't refuse it on principle.
I would. "Carbs that taste like meat" is still carbs.
A few years back I tried eating low-carb out of curiosity (that is--high meat & fats). Best thing I ever did, and the regular medical checkups I get reflect that. It may not be what the AMA advises, but 5000 years of Eskimos trumps whatever the committee opinion is this year.
Besides, they could make the carb-meat "cheaper" just by placing a ridiculous tax on the real stuff.
I send my taxes on a paper 1040. The first year they had the free-E-filing I could not get it to work*, so I said 'fuck them' and mail paper every year. The issue I had with e-filing was that I could not do it, because I did not have a printer.
To use the free filing websites, you had to go to the federal one and it didn't give you a 1040-like form, it gave you an idiot question-and-answer format. So you could not capture screenshots of the form as it was being completed.... When I finished with the federal, a window popped up asking if I wanted to print, but it would not allow normal Windows.xps printing and did not allow viewing the print results on-screen, and I had no other virtual printer software. So I could not get any visual copy of the Federal return, and you need a couple numbers off that to do the state return. And you had to proceed directly from the federal free-e-file site to your state's free-e-file site, or else the state filing was not free.... and all the websites let you go all the way through and fill everything out and then tell you at the END that you will have to pay.
So I ended up filling out paper copies of both anyway, and have ever since. Fuck them and their idiot websites. Apparently they are still struggling with the concept of "paperless filing", since now you don't get to waste forms THEY provided, you have to print your OWN forms to waste.
If they just had a way to fill out and email a 1040 PDF, that would be great--but there is apparently no free way to do that.
So you want someone who is experienced, willing to work for dirt cheap in a boring shitty job, in a boring place, with no perks?...
This is really the problem with 'finding programmers in the St Louis area'..... --Or at least, it was ~10 years back when I tried getting into the field.
The educational requirements and experience that companies wanted was way out of line with what they were willing to pay, and they were generally unwilling to allow any flexibility in either regard.
The whole thing with the online course seems odd. It's just going to give local businesses more applications they already don't want.
How about some sort of shutter covering your license plate, which shuts or otherwise becomes opaque when the car is turned off? Would that be legal?
In some states it is already illegal to put any kind of cover over a car's license plates.
The law originated with the louvered covers that were designed to block off-angle observation (so that the stationary radar gun wagons by the side of the road could not get a clear pic of your license plate as you sped by).
NYC has decided that electric bikes, an overall great idea, are illegal, as they are sorta "motor vehicles", and as such, don't comply with motorcycle regulations...
This is really the 'problem' with motorized bicycles in the USA. There is no unified legislative support to allow them. Each state has its own rules.
Some states do allow both electric and gasoline-powered bicycles, with various restrictions and requirements. A few allow registering them as mopeds, plates and all. Other states don't allow them in any form.
Some states only allow electrics, and while that seems like an okay deal it isn't... It's like saying "you can own a car but it has to be all-electric",,, and what does that mean? Way higher cost and way less range than a comparable-powered gasoline option would be, despite all the Consumer Reports praise for the Tesla.
Also I tend to suspect that there are two invisible issues:
US cities really don't want to have to deal with all the problems that a huge increase in cyclists would cause. Also-
The US economy is inflationary and so the government isn't interested in anything getting cheaper than before. You trading your car for a motorized bicycle would be a savings of thousands of dollars a year for you--but for govt bureaucrats, it would be a loss of thousands of dollars spent into the economy each year. Why would they ever want that to happen?
Coding doesn't pay enough to offset the degree costs in the USA.
There is a few reasons for that, none of which you and I can do anything about,,, except for not playing the game at all, because whoever wins, isn't going to be us. The observation that young people seem to have realized that is a good thing (for the kids!), not a bad one.
My advice to young kids now is "don't go into debt for schooling to do anything that can be off-shored". That rules out a lot of technical fields at once, but it is the truth. Coding is becoming a third-world job skill, like medical transcription or making tennis shoes. You might like it, it might be difficult and you might be GREAT at it--but its usefulness as a source of income depends on economics you cannot control.
A US Supreme Court case found that if an employer was using skills testing that resulted in racial discrimination, then they were guilty of racial discrimination if they intended to be discriminating or not:
And what happens when an Amazon drone smacks into someone's face walking down the street?,,,,,,, Everything on amazon goes up $1 in price, that's what.;)
The drone-package-delivery story seems to be rather unrealistic to me, just for the liability reasons--considering the one guy who died after flying his own RC helicopter into his head.
More likely they would just hire local people to deliver stuff using their own cars for minimum wage (or not-much-more than minimum wage).
I was under the impression that (US) doctors had to maintain medical record security. If Google is able to monitor everything the glasses are used for, how would this be possible?
This was sort-of my understanding of the big popular tax software also,,,,, that if you use the online services or not, the package is still only going to function for one year. And it's no accident.
A friend spent a number of hours over a few weeks entering tax info into a (big-well-known) program they had purchased the previous tax-year, figuring they'd just print it out and mail everything in, because they couldn't e-file it because it wasn't a current version,,,, and guess what? "Sorry, you need an upgrade to print. Click here to go to our website" -- or something to that effect.
A few years back a PC of mine got a virus. The main thing that the AV software said was that it had the signature of the "fuckyou" virus.
So I went looking online for info on how it might be removed, and found...... almost nothing. Because most forum software automatically censors the word "fuck", as well as any of its close variants. As did most of the antivirus company websites. One of them didn't--one of the bigger ones, Norton or McAfee. That was the only place that had any info on it.
So get ready for the "childporn" viruses. As soon as that word becomes unsearchable, there is no reason for malware writers not to use it to their own benefit.
It is not useful to simply compare the rate of vehicle fires. That is important, but it is only half of the question.
What would be useful would be to also compare the rate of non-Tesla car fires originating from the battery, with that of Teslas.
It would not be advantageous for Teslas to have 'essentially eliminated" the risk of fuel fires, if doing so also include drastically increasing the risk of battery fires.
Plasmas were my last best hope--but when I went browsing online some months back, I couldn't find any dedicated PC monitors for sale and didn't want to pay for a TV.... -and couldn't find much of any high-quality CRTs either. Is there any PC screens (for desktop use) that don't have the LCD viewing angle issue?
{-that being, that the image at the top edge is never the same color as the image at the bottom edge-}
A few years ago I "upgraded" my CRT Viewsonic monitors to new-fangled fancy widescreen LCDs. The wide-screen part is nice, but I've come to realize that the LCD part sucks.
One of the news articles mentioned that merchants were supposed to record transactions manually and allow purchases up to $50....
The one I work for didn't. But then, they couldn't. There is no mode programmed into the (computerized) cash register system in the stores to allow such a thing (at least at the chain I work at).
Also, the lack of such a capability may be no accident. With no way to verify that a card was still good or had money on it, well, -the people might, um, forget how much they're really supposed to get? And get a lot more. Especially expensive stuff....
I am not in a position where I would make that decision--but I would presume that without a guarantee that the govt would cover 100% of all charges during such an outage, there's no way stores are going to take EBT cards they can't instantly verify. A lot of these same people already can't write checks, because the store's check-cashing system won't accept checks from them.
Where I work they have fingerprint scanners, so you swipe your ID card and then it asks you for one of the two registered fingerprints.
It don't work that well.... lots of false negatives, if your skin is dry... And occasionally I can use about seven of my eight fingers and get it to accept them, when only two of my fingers are supposed to work.
In this time-clock setup it is possible that the software involved is poor--and to that end, a device like a cellphone could get software updates pushed to it.
Ultimately it would make more sense to just scan the fingerprint, and upload the image to a more-powerful remote system for processing,,,, but then, that blows the whole "fingerprints don't get uploaded" thing out of the water, as well as allowing for cataloging them permanently.
So they're probably lying about that part. I would bet. Maybe not right now, but eventually.
I don't recall it being very "new-age-y" until the last year or so, when it got very thin and most of the articles were about alien 'stories', crystal healing, ect. There was always the beginning page of the one section about UFOs, but that was it--usually.
I also loved it,,,,, except for the declining era. Easily my favorite magazine growing up. It'd be fun to see it again but print is a tough business to be in. There are huge foundations behind the magazines that deliver quality stories and glossy content regularly, like Smithsonian and National Geographic. To attempt such a thing isn't a minor task.
I have read elsewhere that usually about 85% of a print magazine's income is advertising. The main reason they place the cover price at a given point is to help tailor the demographics (why the Robb Report costs $15 an issue, or is it higher now?). These days it seems like most geeks I know (including myself) are heavily predisposed to shopping online for most items. Whenever I pick up a magazine I sometimes glance at the ads and think "would I buy any of this stuff?" and my answer is usually "no, no, no, no, no,,,,"
I was going to write a serious comment, but then I remembered that at least 75% of Slashdot accounts are just people shilling for the king of Thailand.
If the government sinks a whole ship, it's "creating an artificial reef" ---- but if I throw an old shoe into the water, I am "polluting the environment"?
Slashdot Mirror
A couple hundred dollars is too much for *just* glasses, unless you need some kind of extreme coke-bottle glasses.
You REEEAAAALLLY should look (ha ha) at some of the places selling prescription glasses online now, there's one that starts with a z but I forget the name. They are surprisingly inexpensive, if they have what you need. And they have a lot, and none of it costs anywhere near what you seem to be paying at the local eyeglasses place.
It is very presumptuous to claim one has invented a "new" bicycle just by rehashing normal parts. Millions of amateur inventors in every country in the world have been doing the same thing for 100+ years. Fans of vintage bicycles will tend to say that 'Everything ride-able--and a lot more things not--has already been done; I just can't find the picture'.
Vintage tandem bicycles that allowed a smaller rider in front were typically called "kangaroo" tandems.
I don't remember anything *exactly* like this, but I know I've seen a few that were very similar except for the handlebar arrangement.... -and I don't consider myself to be that great of a fan of vintage cycling. The vintage examples I recall vaguely had a more-complicated arrangement, which leads me to suspect that simpler ones were probably tried.
Not having a multiplayer element makes it MORE interesting to those that don't play online much (there is still a few of us)...
I managed to get Left For Dead 2 on Steam the day it was available for free.... the first new game I had played in a few years (I am rather beyond the typical game-buying demographic, most likely).
Due to a dated PC I tend to prefer playing single-player, but it has a few glaring problems when used that way. It is obvious that they intended it to be played by four people cooperating, and many situations involve coordination that bots can't or will not do. You almost need to resort to using cheat codes to get through many stages, as the bots are often more hindrance than help. And while there is a "last man on earth" variation to play, it doesn't present you with the usual assortment of enemies to fight.
I would. "Carbs that taste like meat" is still carbs.
A few years back I tried eating low-carb out of curiosity (that is--high meat & fats). Best thing I ever did, and the regular medical checkups I get reflect that. It may not be what the AMA advises, but 5000 years of Eskimos trumps whatever the committee opinion is this year.
Besides, they could make the carb-meat "cheaper" just by placing a ridiculous tax on the real stuff.
I send my taxes on a paper 1040. The first year they had the free-E-filing I could not get it to work*, so I said 'fuck them' and mail paper every year. The issue I had with e-filing was that I could not do it, because I did not have a printer.
.xps printing and did not allow viewing the print results on-screen, and I had no other virtual printer software. So I could not get any visual copy of the Federal return, and you need a couple numbers off that to do the state return. And you had to proceed directly from the federal free-e-file site to your state's free-e-file site, or else the state filing was not free.... and all the websites let you go all the way through and fill everything out and then tell you at the END that you will have to pay.
To use the free filing websites, you had to go to the federal one and it didn't give you a 1040-like form, it gave you an idiot question-and-answer format. So you could not capture screenshots of the form as it was being completed.... When I finished with the federal, a window popped up asking if I wanted to print, but it would not allow normal Windows
So I ended up filling out paper copies of both anyway, and have ever since. Fuck them and their idiot websites. Apparently they are still struggling with the concept of "paperless filing", since now you don't get to waste forms THEY provided, you have to print your OWN forms to waste.
If they just had a way to fill out and email a 1040 PDF, that would be great--but there is apparently no free way to do that.
This is really the problem with 'finding programmers in the St Louis area'..... --Or at least, it was ~10 years back when I tried getting into the field.
The educational requirements and experience that companies wanted was way out of line with what they were willing to pay, and they were generally unwilling to allow any flexibility in either regard.
The whole thing with the online course seems odd. It's just going to give local businesses more applications they already don't want.
In some states it is already illegal to put any kind of cover over a car's license plates.
The law originated with the louvered covers that were designed to block off-angle observation (so that the stationary radar gun wagons by the side of the road could not get a clear pic of your license plate as you sped by).
This is really the 'problem' with motorized bicycles in the USA. There is no unified legislative support to allow them. Each state has its own rules.
Some states do allow both electric and gasoline-powered bicycles, with various restrictions and requirements. A few allow registering them as mopeds, plates and all. Other states don't allow them in any form.
Some states only allow electrics, and while that seems like an okay deal it isn't... It's like saying "you can own a car but it has to be all-electric",,, and what does that mean? Way higher cost and way less range than a comparable-powered gasoline option would be, despite all the Consumer Reports praise for the Tesla.
Also I tend to suspect that there are two invisible issues:
US cities really don't want to have to deal with all the problems that a huge increase in cyclists would cause. Also-
The US economy is inflationary and so the government isn't interested in anything getting cheaper than before. You trading your car for a motorized bicycle would be a savings of thousands of dollars a year for you--but for govt bureaucrats, it would be a loss of thousands of dollars spent into the economy each year. Why would they ever want that to happen?
Coding doesn't pay enough to offset the degree costs in the USA.
There is a few reasons for that, none of which you and I can do anything about,,, except for not playing the game at all, because whoever wins, isn't going to be us. The observation that young people seem to have realized that is a good thing (for the kids!), not a bad one.
My advice to young kids now is "don't go into debt for schooling to do anything that can be off-shored". That rules out a lot of technical fields at once, but it is the truth. Coding is becoming a third-world job skill, like medical transcription or making tennis shoes. You might like it, it might be difficult and you might be GREAT at it--but its usefulness as a source of income depends on economics you cannot control.
A US Supreme Court case found that if an employer was using skills testing that resulted in racial discrimination, then they were guilty of racial discrimination if they intended to be discriminating or not:
The court case is "Griggs vs. Duke Power"
For an explanation, see-
http://www.popecenter.org/commentaries/article.html?id=1749
The only kind of testing that US companies can use now without fear of discrimination lawsuits, is educational requirements. Ridiculous but true.
And what happens when an Amazon drone smacks into someone's face walking down the street? ,,,,,,, Everything on amazon goes up $1 in price, that's what. ;)
The drone-package-delivery story seems to be rather unrealistic to me, just for the liability reasons--considering the one guy who died after flying his own RC helicopter into his head.
More likely they would just hire local people to deliver stuff using their own cars for minimum wage (or not-much-more than minimum wage).
I was under the impression that (US) doctors had to maintain medical record security. If Google is able to monitor everything the glasses are used for, how would this be possible?
This was sort-of my understanding of the big popular tax software also,,,,, that if you use the online services or not, the package is still only going to function for one year. And it's no accident.
A friend spent a number of hours over a few weeks entering tax info into a (big-well-known) program they had purchased the previous tax-year, figuring they'd just print it out and mail everything in, because they couldn't e-file it because it wasn't a current version,,,, and guess what? "Sorry, you need an upgrade to print. Click here to go to our website" -- or something to that effect.
A few years back a PC of mine got a virus. The main thing that the AV software said was that it had the signature of the "fuckyou" virus.
So I went looking online for info on how it might be removed, and found...... almost nothing. Because most forum software automatically censors the word "fuck", as well as any of its close variants. As did most of the antivirus company websites. One of them didn't--one of the bigger ones, Norton or McAfee. That was the only place that had any info on it.
So get ready for the "childporn" viruses. As soon as that word becomes unsearchable, there is no reason for malware writers not to use it to their own benefit.
It is not useful to simply compare the rate of vehicle fires. That is important, but it is only half of the question.
What would be useful would be to also compare the rate of non-Tesla car fires originating from the battery, with that of Teslas.
It would not be advantageous for Teslas to have 'essentially eliminated" the risk of fuel fires, if doing so also include drastically increasing the risk of battery fires.
Pursuing pedophiles is the new Inquisition, it is the last bastion of the bureaucratic tyrant.
No right of law is as sacred, and no punishment is too severe for those accused.
Plasmas were my last best hope--but when I went browsing online some months back, I couldn't find any dedicated PC monitors for sale and didn't want to pay for a TV.... -and couldn't find much of any high-quality CRTs either. Is there any PC screens (for desktop use) that don't have the LCD viewing angle issue?
{-that being, that the image at the top edge is never the same color as the image at the bottom edge-}
A few years ago I "upgraded" my CRT Viewsonic monitors to new-fangled fancy widescreen LCDs. The wide-screen part is nice, but I've come to realize that the LCD part sucks.
The one I work for didn't. But then, they couldn't. There is no mode programmed into the (computerized) cash register system in the stores to allow such a thing (at least at the chain I work at).
Also, the lack of such a capability may be no accident. With no way to verify that a card was still good or had money on it, well, -the people might, um, forget how much they're really supposed to get? And get a lot more. Especially expensive stuff....
I am not in a position where I would make that decision--but I would presume that without a guarantee that the govt would cover 100% of all charges during such an outage, there's no way stores are going to take EBT cards they can't instantly verify. A lot of these same people already can't write checks, because the store's check-cashing system won't accept checks from them.
If they make this stuff, and it works, , , , just think? We can pour it into the ocean!
:O
And then we'll have OCEANS of gasoline!
Where I work they have fingerprint scanners, so you swipe your ID card and then it asks you for one of the two registered fingerprints.
It don't work that well.... lots of false negatives, if your skin is dry... And occasionally I can use about seven of my eight fingers and get it to accept them, when only two of my fingers are supposed to work.
In this time-clock setup it is possible that the software involved is poor--and to that end, a device like a cellphone could get software updates pushed to it. Ultimately it would make more sense to just scan the fingerprint, and upload the image to a more-powerful remote system for processing,,,, but then, that blows the whole "fingerprints don't get uploaded" thing out of the water, as well as allowing for cataloging them permanently.
So they're probably lying about that part. I would bet. Maybe not right now, but eventually.
I don't recall it being very "new-age-y" until the last year or so, when it got very thin and most of the articles were about alien 'stories', crystal healing, ect. There was always the beginning page of the one section about UFOs, but that was it--usually.
I also loved it,,,,, except for the declining era. Easily my favorite magazine growing up. It'd be fun to see it again but print is a tough business to be in. There are huge foundations behind the magazines that deliver quality stories and glossy content regularly, like Smithsonian and National Geographic. To attempt such a thing isn't a minor task.
I have read elsewhere that usually about 85% of a print magazine's income is advertising. The main reason they place the cover price at a given point is to help tailor the demographics (why the Robb Report costs $15 an issue, or is it higher now?). These days it seems like most geeks I know (including myself) are heavily predisposed to shopping online for most items. Whenever I pick up a magazine I sometimes glance at the ads and think "would I buy any of this stuff?" and my answer is usually "no, no, no, no, no,,,,"
I was going to write a serious comment, but then I remembered that at least 75% of Slashdot accounts are just people shilling for the king of Thailand.
That is because you are like stupid.
This would be totally rad to make signs with the next time hipsters wear the V masks and have one of those "Occupy Mall Street" things again.
But...... the fish LIKES the shoe! And my feet don't smell that bad!
If the government sinks a whole ship, it's "creating an artificial reef" ---- but if I throw an old shoe into the water, I am "polluting the environment"?