They've increased storage space over the years, but this is still one thing I wish they'd improve upon. I don't expect them to offer gigs and gigs of space, nor do I intend to basically store my music collection on their servers, but the 600MB mailbox quota and 100MB file storage limit might be increased a little bit.
Go Enhanced ($40/year instead of $20), and you get 6 gigs of mailbox and 2 gigs of file space.
Another thing that is bothersome is that my main account uses the.fm.
When I signed up (several years ago), I picked mailbox.com as my domain. Now I have my own domain, but the base address it points to is still in the mailbox.com domain, and my wife uses mailhaven.com. Didn't you know about the dozens of alternate domains they offer? They have.net,.com and.org domains, as well as others. And, of course, you can always set up your own domain (mine costs me about $10/year from 1and1.com), and host it at FastMail.
As for the.edu, I think registrars are pretty strict about who gets those; I think you have to prove you represent an accredited educational institution. I don't think FM can help you with that.:)
I think that's a very good point. While I was mildly disappointed Chicago didn't make it from a personal perspective (I was born there, though we moved to the other side of Illinois when I was very young), I understood that only one city was going to make it, the IOC wants to move the Olympics around to different parts of the world, and they had never been held in South America before. I thought Rio was a very reasonable choice, and I'm happy for them. It wasn't really a matter of the IOC disliking Chicago so much as it was a matter of their liking Rio.
I don't think the IOC was trying to send any messages, or spite Obama or the US. I think they just made a decision the best way they knew how, and they happened to choose Rio rather than Chicago. You can't win 'em all.:)
The question is, what type of driving are we talking about? You said your car "can get around 440km of urban driving off a single tank." That comes out to 273.40 miles. So are you saying your own mileage is "pathetic", since it's less than 300 miles on a single fill? TFA, unfortunately, didn't really go into whether they were talking about highway mileage or city mileage; the numbers are likely to be different. I expect that the majority of the driving done in the US is urban driving: short trips with lots of speed changes, stops and starts, and the attendant idling. All cars are more efficient when driven on the highway at a constant speed.
Depends on how generous the maternity leave policy is. I don't know offhand what schools do (and it probably varies widely from state to state), but I know of companies that only offer a couple of weeks of paid maternity leave. If the school system in question only offered that, it would make a lot more sense to shoot for a May birth, and leverage the summer break to care for the baby for the first 3 months of its life.
LDS. Do they teach their kids the ways of the church? Yes. Have I ever encountered a group of religious adherents that do it so openly and without coercion? No.
Just because coercion is subtle doesn't mean it's not coercion. For the other side of the story, check out http://www.exmormon.org/. Of course, active LDS folks will take one look at it, call it "anti-Mormon" and decide they don't have to pay any attention to it. But there are lots of stories there about the pain that the LDS church can and does inflict on people who dare to think about the religion.
Everything breaks down. Materials age and parts rubbing against each other wear out. Proper maintenance will go a long way toward keeping things running, but eventually, something is going to go wrong. Now, things may go wrong faster than they should, given shoddy workmanship or substandard materials, and it's entirely possible that manufacturers could be slacking in those areas. But even with the best practices available, a car is going to break down some day.
I'm sorry, again, for implying that all cases of this (and other food allergies) are purely mental, or trendy. But MOST of them are
If I had to guess, I'd say perhaps around 5-10% of people who claim odd food problems actually have a real problem, the rest are just morons looking for some way to be special, or ways to justify whatever idiotic special dietary trend there is at the moment.
On what are you basing those assertions? There's nothing special about being gluten intolerant or having celiac disease. I'm familiar with a couple of organizations that try to promote awareness of the condition, so that it can be more readily diagnosed and so that food producers and restaurants will make better accommodations for people who have it, but I've never encountered anyone who uses it to get attention or claim some sort of superiority because of it.
Though I do have a problem if you try to influence my food choices, since then the odds of you having a problem drops exponentially, and your chances of having the holier-than-thou illness increases by a similar rate.
Are you saying that you've had people try to get you to stop eating gluten? I've never heard of anyone doing anything like that. Nobody in the circles I've traveled in is on a campaign to convince people that gluten is evil and should be avoided by everyone. Diagnosis, better labeling and better understanding of what celiacs need, yes. When I was first diagnosed, I attended some meetings with fellow celiacs, where I heard that on average, it took about 5-10 years for someone to be diagnosed with celiac disease. I had to learn how to decode food labels and avoid anything that might contain gluten. At a restaurant, I would have to explain exactly what ingredients I had to avoid, and speak directly to the chef. Now, it's a bit easier, as restaurant personnel are more educated about the condition, doctors have learned to look for it, and food manufacturers are required to explicitly indicate when their products contain gluten.
I (and other celiacs) might, in a social situation, try to influence the choice of a restaurant so we don't have to either sit there hungry watching other people eat, or pass on the opportunity to go out with the others in the group. But I'm not about to tell a non-celiac that he should do without the things that are forbidden to me. It's not a moral or religious principle; I avoid gluten because it is harmful to my health.
I do understand being resentful of people who try to dictate others' food choices; my reaction to the "meat is murder" crowd is, "life feeds on life - get over it!" But I find myself very skeptical that you've encountered anyone claiming to be a celiac who has tried to persuade you to avoid gluten. I miss being able to go to a pizzeria or a Chinese restaurant (standard soy sauce contains wheat), and I miss regular pastas and breads. The substitutes I have to use aren't quite as good as what I used to eat before my diagnosis, and they cost a lot more. I find it very difficult to believe that someone who had a choice would choose my diet.
With celiac disease, that's often exactly how it presents itself: "insubstantial complaints". I was diagnosed with it about 10 years ago, but I spent several years with various digestive and bowel problems that were dismissed by my doctor as nothing serious, just transient issues. It was caught almost by accident, because my doctor noticed that for a couple of consecutive annual checkups, I got blood work back showing a slightly elevated white blood cell count. He referred me to a hematologist for further study. She said the white blood cell count wasn't actually high enough to worry about, but noticed that A) my doctor had put me on iron supplements for over a year, and B) I was still just barely above anemic. She said that my body should have more iron than it knows what to do with, and for an American male to be anemic indicated something wrong, that either I wasn't absorbing the iron I was getting or I was losing it due to internal bleeding (i.e., cancer was a possibility). She referred me to a gastroenterologist, who ran me through a battery of tests, and one of them indicated celiac disease, which was later confirmed via an endoscopy.
While my immediate reaction to gluten is not a big deal (enough of it will give me a stomach ache, a little might just give me gas/indigestion), the concern is the long-term damage. Repeated exposure to gluten will damage my intestines and predispose me to various cancers and other diseases.
It's not a fad, and it's not a choice. If I had a choice, I'd rather not have to relentlessly quiz servers, cooks and managers at restaurants or people who have me over for dinner about the ingredients of the food they're offering me. I'd rather not pay 3-5 times as much for gluten free pastas, breads, etc. as I would for the ordinary varieties. It's a fucking pain in the ass, and it's expensive!
I was wondering where those Js were coming from! I'd recently noticed them popping up in emails from people, where a smiley emoticon was clearly intended (given the tone of the preceding comment). I thought maybe someone decided a J looked like a smile of some sort, but I thought it just looked dumb.
1. This assumes that the credit report is 100% accurate.
2. Circumstances are not always so cut-and-dried. You speak of someone who puts themselves a paycheck away from disaster, but sometimes, you can have 6-12 month's salary socked away but find yourself in a position where you need even more than that. I was laid off from HP in 2005, and figured it would be a piece of cake to find another IT job within 6 months or so, given my experience. How wrong I was! I survived on savings, my severance package and unemployment for a year and a half (and didn't start falling behind on my bills for nearly a year) before accepting a security guard job out of sheer desperation in 2007. By that time, my home was foreclosed on and I ended up filing for bankruptcy. Tell me again how my credit report is such a good indicator of my personal character. All it says is that I fell behind on my bills, and ended up welshing on my creditors by declaring bankruptcy. It doesn't say one damned thing about why it happened!
Culture is the wrong term. You mean "political system", or perhaps "nation". In any event, none has survived indefinitely, period. Emperors, kings and dictators have been overthrown, while democracies and republics have decayed over time. Nothing lasts forever.
Not that voting access to the public trough is a good thing. But it's not the only problem.
Yeah. I've been checking Verizon FIOS availability in my neighborhood on nearly a daily basis. I saw their trucks doing what appears to be extensive work around here a few weeks ago, so I'm hoping that means they are bringing FIOS here.
I don't even care whether they're better than Comcrap right now. I just want to be able to cancel my service and let them know they have competition.
I work Midnight-8am, 15 miles away from where I live. I'm not going to bike that commute (which would take me at least twice as long as driving) even in good weather, and certainly not in the winter.
If you really wanted to put a stop to it you'd educate the followers as politely and as positively as you can, and show them it's a bunch of bullshit.
Nice thought, but it's not gonna happen. As Heinlein put it (in Friday), "The great trouble with religion - any religion - is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence." The kind of person who embraces religion is not generally the kind of person who will be swayed by logic. The basis of their belief is emotional, not rational, and their emotions will nearly always trump any evidence you can throw at them. They may think they are being rational, and will easily see and accept evidence which refutes a religion other than the one they embrace, but then turn a blind eye to equally good evidence against their own.
Howard Stringer is the CEO of Sony Corporation of America. Michael Lynton is CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment. It's probably a bit imprecise to refer to either of them as just plain "Sony".
Sedation is a little different from anesthesia. I was sedated several years ago when I had an endoscopy to check for celiac disease (which turned out positive). To this day, there is a complete blank spot in my mind from the time I lay down on the examining table to the time I found myself talking to my wife in the recovery room. I remember being in mid-sentence when I snapped out of it, and couldn't remember what I had started to say. According to the doctor and her, I was conscious and responsive the whole time, but I have absolutely no recollection of anything that went on during the procedure. I gather I could feel pain/discomfort, but I don't remember any of it.
It's not as effective as paper for you, for me, and for anyone who knows better than to take the bait. However, because the cost of sending emails is so small, they don't need very many suckers to recoup their costs. Spam exists because on some level, it works. There are idiots out there buying their crap, and they make it profitable for them, even though they know that 99,999 out of 100,000 people are passing their emails straight into the trash unread (numbers made up, but whatever the real ones are, these are sufficient to illustrate the point). They don't care that you are throwing it away; they're looking for that one sucker in 100,000 who won't and who pays for the whole operation.
Well, if everyone did that, it might work, but good luck getting everyone to stand up to them. The problem is, most writers feel they have to "pay their dues", and accept getting screwed initially in order to gain the stature of a Stephen King and be able to dictate favorable terms for themselves later. Only when the studios feel they have to have a particular writer's work are they willing to relent. A relatively unknown writer will just get laughed at.
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They've increased storage space over the years, but this is still one thing I wish they'd improve upon. I don't expect them to offer gigs and gigs of space, nor do I intend to basically store my music collection on their servers, but the 600MB mailbox quota and 100MB file storage limit might be increased a little bit.
Go Enhanced ($40/year instead of $20), and you get 6 gigs of mailbox and 2 gigs of file space.
Another thing that is bothersome is that my main account uses the .fm.
When I signed up (several years ago), I picked mailbox.com as my domain. Now I have my own domain, but the base address it points to is still in the mailbox.com domain, and my wife uses mailhaven.com. Didn't you know about the dozens of alternate domains they offer? They have .net, .com and .org domains, as well as others. And, of course, you can always set up your own domain (mine costs me about $10/year from 1and1.com), and host it at FastMail.
As for the .edu, I think registrars are pretty strict about who gets those; I think you have to prove you represent an accredited educational institution. I don't think FM can help you with that. :)
-Mike
I think that's a very good point. While I was mildly disappointed Chicago didn't make it from a personal perspective (I was born there, though we moved to the other side of Illinois when I was very young), I understood that only one city was going to make it, the IOC wants to move the Olympics around to different parts of the world, and they had never been held in South America before. I thought Rio was a very reasonable choice, and I'm happy for them. It wasn't really a matter of the IOC disliking Chicago so much as it was a matter of their liking Rio.
I don't think the IOC was trying to send any messages, or spite Obama or the US. I think they just made a decision the best way they knew how, and they happened to choose Rio rather than Chicago. You can't win 'em all. :)
-Mike
I don't believe he ever "starred" in an episode, but he did have a minor role in A Quality of Mercy.
-Mike
The question is, what type of driving are we talking about? You said your car "can get around 440km of urban driving off a single tank." That comes out to 273.40 miles. So are you saying your own mileage is "pathetic", since it's less than 300 miles on a single fill? TFA, unfortunately, didn't really go into whether they were talking about highway mileage or city mileage; the numbers are likely to be different. I expect that the majority of the driving done in the US is urban driving: short trips with lots of speed changes, stops and starts, and the attendant idling. All cars are more efficient when driven on the highway at a constant speed.
-Mike
Depends on how generous the maternity leave policy is. I don't know offhand what schools do (and it probably varies widely from state to state), but I know of companies that only offer a couple of weeks of paid maternity leave. If the school system in question only offered that, it would make a lot more sense to shoot for a May birth, and leverage the summer break to care for the baby for the first 3 months of its life.
-Mike
Just because coercion is subtle doesn't mean it's not coercion. For the other side of the story, check out http://www.exmormon.org/. Of course, active LDS folks will take one look at it, call it "anti-Mormon" and decide they don't have to pay any attention to it. But there are lots of stories there about the pain that the LDS church can and does inflict on people who dare to think about the religion.
-Mike
Everything breaks down. Materials age and parts rubbing against each other wear out. Proper maintenance will go a long way toward keeping things running, but eventually, something is going to go wrong. Now, things may go wrong faster than they should, given shoddy workmanship or substandard materials, and it's entirely possible that manufacturers could be slacking in those areas. But even with the best practices available, a car is going to break down some day.
-Mike
On what are you basing those assertions? There's nothing special about being gluten intolerant or having celiac disease. I'm familiar with a couple of organizations that try to promote awareness of the condition, so that it can be more readily diagnosed and so that food producers and restaurants will make better accommodations for people who have it, but I've never encountered anyone who uses it to get attention or claim some sort of superiority because of it.
Are you saying that you've had people try to get you to stop eating gluten? I've never heard of anyone doing anything like that. Nobody in the circles I've traveled in is on a campaign to convince people that gluten is evil and should be avoided by everyone. Diagnosis, better labeling and better understanding of what celiacs need, yes. When I was first diagnosed, I attended some meetings with fellow celiacs, where I heard that on average, it took about 5-10 years for someone to be diagnosed with celiac disease. I had to learn how to decode food labels and avoid anything that might contain gluten. At a restaurant, I would have to explain exactly what ingredients I had to avoid, and speak directly to the chef. Now, it's a bit easier, as restaurant personnel are more educated about the condition, doctors have learned to look for it, and food manufacturers are required to explicitly indicate when their products contain gluten.
I (and other celiacs) might, in a social situation, try to influence the choice of a restaurant so we don't have to either sit there hungry watching other people eat, or pass on the opportunity to go out with the others in the group. But I'm not about to tell a non-celiac that he should do without the things that are forbidden to me. It's not a moral or religious principle; I avoid gluten because it is harmful to my health.
I do understand being resentful of people who try to dictate others' food choices; my reaction to the "meat is murder" crowd is, "life feeds on life - get over it!" But I find myself very skeptical that you've encountered anyone claiming to be a celiac who has tried to persuade you to avoid gluten. I miss being able to go to a pizzeria or a Chinese restaurant (standard soy sauce contains wheat), and I miss regular pastas and breads. The substitutes I have to use aren't quite as good as what I used to eat before my diagnosis, and they cost a lot more. I find it very difficult to believe that someone who had a choice would choose my diet.
-Mike
With celiac disease, that's often exactly how it presents itself: "insubstantial complaints". I was diagnosed with it about 10 years ago, but I spent several years with various digestive and bowel problems that were dismissed by my doctor as nothing serious, just transient issues. It was caught almost by accident, because my doctor noticed that for a couple of consecutive annual checkups, I got blood work back showing a slightly elevated white blood cell count. He referred me to a hematologist for further study. She said the white blood cell count wasn't actually high enough to worry about, but noticed that A) my doctor had put me on iron supplements for over a year, and B) I was still just barely above anemic. She said that my body should have more iron than it knows what to do with, and for an American male to be anemic indicated something wrong, that either I wasn't absorbing the iron I was getting or I was losing it due to internal bleeding (i.e., cancer was a possibility). She referred me to a gastroenterologist, who ran me through a battery of tests, and one of them indicated celiac disease, which was later confirmed via an endoscopy.
While my immediate reaction to gluten is not a big deal (enough of it will give me a stomach ache, a little might just give me gas/indigestion), the concern is the long-term damage. Repeated exposure to gluten will damage my intestines and predispose me to various cancers and other diseases.
It's not a fad, and it's not a choice. If I had a choice, I'd rather not have to relentlessly quiz servers, cooks and managers at restaurants or people who have me over for dinner about the ingredients of the food they're offering me. I'd rather not pay 3-5 times as much for gluten free pastas, breads, etc. as I would for the ordinary varieties. It's a fucking pain in the ass, and it's expensive!
My turn for a cranky rant. :)
-Mike
I was wondering where those Js were coming from! I'd recently noticed them popping up in emails from people, where a smiley emoticon was clearly intended (given the tone of the preceding comment). I thought maybe someone decided a J looked like a smile of some sort, but I thought it just looked dumb.
-Mike
1. This assumes that the credit report is 100% accurate.
2. Circumstances are not always so cut-and-dried. You speak of someone who puts themselves a paycheck away from disaster, but sometimes, you can have 6-12 month's salary socked away but find yourself in a position where you need even more than that. I was laid off from HP in 2005, and figured it would be a piece of cake to find another IT job within 6 months or so, given my experience. How wrong I was! I survived on savings, my severance package and unemployment for a year and a half (and didn't start falling behind on my bills for nearly a year) before accepting a security guard job out of sheer desperation in 2007. By that time, my home was foreclosed on and I ended up filing for bankruptcy. Tell me again how my credit report is such a good indicator of my personal character. All it says is that I fell behind on my bills, and ended up welshing on my creditors by declaring bankruptcy. It doesn't say one damned thing about why it happened!
-Mike
Culture is the wrong term. You mean "political system", or perhaps "nation". In any event, none has survived indefinitely, period. Emperors, kings and dictators have been overthrown, while democracies and republics have decayed over time. Nothing lasts forever.
Not that voting access to the public trough is a good thing. But it's not the only problem.
-Mike
If "Chris Mason" makes you think "porn star", you have a very strange mind. I can't even begin to follow your reasoning there....
-Mike
Yeah. I've been checking Verizon FIOS availability in my neighborhood on nearly a daily basis. I saw their trucks doing what appears to be extensive work around here a few weeks ago, so I'm hoping that means they are bringing FIOS here.
I don't even care whether they're better than Comcrap right now. I just want to be able to cancel my service and let them know they have competition.
-Mike
Because horny teenagers can be stupid? :)
-Mike
Because it's for SCIENCE!!! You know, Buttology! Er, Assology? Derrieratrics? Hmm....
-Mike
The people who thought up this scheme are obviously stupid. How do people get into Management?
I thought stupidity was a prerequisite?
-Mike
I work Midnight-8am, 15 miles away from where I live. I'm not going to bike that commute (which would take me at least twice as long as driving) even in good weather, and certainly not in the winter.
-Mike
If you really wanted to put a stop to it you'd educate the followers as politely and as positively as you can, and show them it's a bunch of bullshit.
Nice thought, but it's not gonna happen. As Heinlein put it (in Friday), "The great trouble with religion - any religion - is that a religionist, having accepted certain propositions by faith, cannot thereafter judge those propositions by evidence." The kind of person who embraces religion is not generally the kind of person who will be swayed by logic. The basis of their belief is emotional, not rational, and their emotions will nearly always trump any evidence you can throw at them. They may think they are being rational, and will easily see and accept evidence which refutes a religion other than the one they embrace, but then turn a blind eye to equally good evidence against their own.
-Mike
Howard Stringer is the CEO of Sony Corporation of America. Michael Lynton is CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment. It's probably a bit imprecise to refer to either of them as just plain "Sony".
-Mike
Sedation is a little different from anesthesia. I was sedated several years ago when I had an endoscopy to check for celiac disease (which turned out positive). To this day, there is a complete blank spot in my mind from the time I lay down on the examining table to the time I found myself talking to my wife in the recovery room. I remember being in mid-sentence when I snapped out of it, and couldn't remember what I had started to say. According to the doctor and her, I was conscious and responsive the whole time, but I have absolutely no recollection of anything that went on during the procedure. I gather I could feel pain/discomfort, but I don't remember any of it.
-Mike
No, no, no, Senor Fawlty! Uno, dos, tres!
It's not as effective as paper for you, for me, and for anyone who knows better than to take the bait. However, because the cost of sending emails is so small, they don't need very many suckers to recoup their costs. Spam exists because on some level, it works. There are idiots out there buying their crap, and they make it profitable for them, even though they know that 99,999 out of 100,000 people are passing their emails straight into the trash unread (numbers made up, but whatever the real ones are, these are sufficient to illustrate the point). They don't care that you are throwing it away; they're looking for that one sucker in 100,000 who won't and who pays for the whole operation.
-Mike
Well, if everyone did that, it might work, but good luck getting everyone to stand up to them. The problem is, most writers feel they have to "pay their dues", and accept getting screwed initially in order to gain the stature of a Stephen King and be able to dictate favorable terms for themselves later. Only when the studios feel they have to have a particular writer's work are they willing to relent. A relatively unknown writer will just get laughed at.
-Mike
Yes, you are.
-Mike