To me, that's like saying a Porsche is ridculously priced compared to a Kia. Both companies are providing a good product at a fair price, and neither company is out of line profitable. But the Porsche is an amazing sports car, and the Kia is just (mostly) dependable generic transportation.
I've had SSDs since the 120GB versions could be had for $120 on sale, which is almost 2 years now. It was the best money I've ever spent on a computer. Now I have an external hard drive for the really big files I need to keep. But I'd never give up the SSD as a main drive just to get more space.
Why do you say ridiculous? It is just a different technology that is much more expensive to manufacture per GB than a HDD, but has some awesome advantages, and at least one big disadvantage on the price, and questions about longevity. But are SDD much more profitable to manufacturers (ignoring Intel)?
You can get those woven stainless steel billfolds for pretty cheap on ebay now. They used to be $100 or more from name brand retailers. I plan on buying one at some point.
That is a hugely expensive tax. Currently the cost to transmit a gigabyte is around 10 cents. There are 1,024 megs in a gig. So a 1/10 cent tax per meg would mean $1.02 in taxes per gig, or ten times the cost of service. Also, I understand that it used to be much more expensive to communicate (stamp and mail), and a 1 cent per email tax would be cheap for personal uses. But legitimate businesses who send hundreds of millions of requested emails (advertising to shopping club members, notification of bills ready to be paid, local governments notifying citizens of community events/news) would find that tax incredibly expensive, and greatly reduce their communication that customers have requested. That's not an (internet) world I'd want to live in. I like my almost free communication, and the problem seems solved. Google keeps almost all SPAM out of my email box.
If you're thinking "their children can protest if they pay the fine, why can't they", you're thinking about it the wrong way.
I think you as well. Protesting shouldn't be illegal, and a citizen of the US should never be fined for doing it. If you are on private property then it is tresspassing. If your activity is unsafe or otherwise disrupts other's lawful activites, there are other relevant charges. But protesting in the USA should always be legal for US citizens. Now, I'd rather see protesting be legal for anyone here lawfully. I want people here on visas, or green cards, who are wronged by the US government to have a public voice as well. But I'm willing to accept there may be good reasons to not do this.
I am confused by what grandparent says about his relatives are naturalized but not citizens. I thought naturalization by definition is becoming a citizen of a country in which you were not born. If they can't protest and they are naturalized citizens, I am really concerned. But if they are green card holders but not citizens, then again I'd rather they could lawfully protest, but can understand otherwise.
It wasn't always comprehensive. But it was useful in that it got the unrelated cruft out of a regular Google search, while sometimes missing a small retailer that didn't provide their product feed to Google. I generally searched Amazon, Google Product Search, and then a general Google search. Guess I'll drop the Product Search.
Not that the USA is anything to aspire to. But it sounds like you have underground utilites with ground level service boxes painted neutral colors. Most of us would love to have that. Only the nicest and richest neighborhoods in the USA have underground utilites. Most neighborhoods have all utilites on poles on the front street. Lucky neighborhoods have the utilites on poles in the alley, so you only see the poles/utilites on crossing streets.
If it was me, I'd set up a survellence camera on the boxes and send the video to the police when they get tagged, and then go out and repaint them green with some exterior paint real fast. We don't have a problem with camoflauging these boxes with plant material or something easy to move, as long as you don't complain to the service company when the plants get torn up.
I don't have a dog in this game, but it doesn't seem arrogant to me. If the neighbors wanted BT and thought the boxes were ugly, the council/neighborhood should have offered to pay a reasonable amount for them to be camoflauged. Why should BT pay when they don't pay to camoflauge them in poor residential neighborhoods? Now if they did offer and BT refused or said it would cost them big daddy warbucks, then it does seem arrogant of BT.
Interesting that Samsung has such well regarded hard drives. The only Samsung item i've ever been impressed with was my first flat panel monitor from them 11 years ago. Since then, everything else Samsung I've bought has died before its time shortly after the warranty expired, or had functionality problems Samsung knew about and refused to provide firmware fixes or offer merchandise credits or rebates.
Nitrous Oxides can be handled by the catalytic converter. If the exhaust gas temp gets too low, or if there is an integrated engine stop feature, they might need a backup heater in the converter. I don't have time to find the citation right now, but I read a research article about a heavily instrumented aviation engine where they discovered that a little lean of stoich did drive up engine and exhaust gas temps, but after that point, temps began to fall and there was a small window where the mix remained reliably ignitable even with old fuel injection technology and very high powered spark ignition system.
Regarding your other post, yes I'd like to be able to allocate my tax money among broad government programs/goals, but I'm not holding my breath for that to come to fruition.
Regarding forcing someone out of the country because of taxation, it is a false analogy. You can chose to leave your birth country if you no longer share its goals or ideas. But our country has been taxing income for the last 99 years at various levels that generally increase during and after wars to pay for them. I doubt you were born pre-1913 where you can argue the social contract has substantially changed in your lifetime. Right now we have very low income taxes in modern history, and they've been much higher until the late 1980's, while the government massively increased spending in the 2000's. I don't want to see taxes raise back to their former levels. But we have to massively cut government spending on the order of 1/3rd or more for that to happen, and realistically we'll still need to collect more revenue due to mistakes and missteps by Bush administration and to a lesser extent Clinton. And the only way to do that will be cutting defense, reducing SS and medicare (especially part-D that was a Bush era unfunded tack on), and getting the country to grow economically again to reduce programatic spending. To get the economy to grow, both private and public investment will have to be spent in education and infrastructure and research that has been sorely neglected with the rise of the military industrial complex post 9/11.
Some people in Europe are rioting not because they were promised other people's money, but because their banking system was mismanaged like ours, and their countries are being forced to pay for private industry's mistakes to prevent a wider economic catastrophy, and in order to afford this, the governments are being forced in to large cuts to their social programs. These social programs are part of their societal contract of high taxes and high government services. I'd be pissed too if I was paying high taxes and not getting the benefits.
I don't know any modern and successful country or large community that has opt-in taxation. For social cohesion on a scale outside of a small town where everyone knows each other and can use peer pressure to influence behavior, taxation for certain public resources are necessary and it must be mandatory or you will get too many freeloaders (e.g. Greece and the social acceptability of evading taxes and low enforcement rate). But for everyone to be happy with the arrangement, you need shared goals. Unfortunately there is a gulf in goals between Republicans/Democrats/Libertarians/other Moderates is very wide right now.
But research indicates people don't hang up a phone, or put down the burger, or turn down the radio. They crash while they are distracted by those things in approximately the same frequency as being intoxicated over.08 BAC. So the results are ths same, and there is nothing idiotic about pointing that fact out, in fact it is idiotic not to.
She is young and might not have known her rights. But she could have told them again that no, she won't go through the scanner but would be happy to submit to a pat-down. They can't treat you any differently in that case. I know, I do that every time I travel. Alternatively she could have refused screening entirely, and potentially been given a ticket or arrested. But they can't force you to go through a scanner.
My point was that we already treat it as a right (though we don't formalize the sentiment), and it is already paid for through taxation, and we already have healthcare of poor quality as measured by lifetimes and quality of life compared to several countries with universal care. I don't agree with forming societies for poor people because putting a bunch of poor people together and underfunding their support services does nothing to help them.
We as a society already impose duties on others, it is called government. It is an onerous duty on me that my tax money paid for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I had almost zero say in the matter. I would have much rather that 500 billion to 1 trillion dollars gone to infrastructure in the USA, funding education better, funding the space program better, funding financial regulators with actual teeth, ensuring no kids in the US are starving and all have health care. I think we as a country would have been in a much better place if we had done that.
The problem is we as a culture already treat universal healthcare as a universal right. If you walk into almost any hospital in the country without insurance or money with a critical health problem, you will be treated. Media circuses have gone crazy when this occasionally doesn't happen. In the end, most of the cost of your treatment will be paid for by taxpayers at public hospitals, or by writing off the bad debt and rolling it into everyone else's bills at private hospitals. Most of those critcal health problems could have been drastically reduced in severity and cost by half-decent early intervention and care.
I think it is time to explicitly accept this fact, develop a universal health care program with decent basic preventative and interventional care and cost controls, and allow the private insurance market to provide coverage for the cadillac care that wealthy people want and can afford.
I don't care, nor did I bring up, what the voice controls are capable of doing, since when I tried to use them I frequently had to repeat myself several times to get it to understand me or for me to figure out the exact key words. I wanted button access when I got tired playing with the voice control. The music controls specifically, as you point out, responded instantly like any other radio, though again I didn't complain or discuss the music controls specifically. Using button controls for all the other menus and features of Sync was a pain. So you are wrong, your reply was not germane, only tangential.
I don't have to resort to petty name calling to win arguments, when facts suffice.
No I assure you that was a quite purposeful omission. I am convinced you are intelligent enough to know properly operating electronic equipment is outside the grasp of untrained monkeys, despite what one might think from reading your replies to me.
Quite amusing that you attempt to pinch me on reading comprehension, when this whole thread started because I complained about the physical controls and screen UI in Sync, and you responded tartly and completely off topic on the voice controls.
What a snide and irrelevant comment. I'm not a programmer. I manage people and have to support them with automation when our technology team can't, due to other priorities. There is nothing wrong with Access and VBA for that kind of use, and when the person tries to use them in a responsible way. The disdain for them is juvenile IT snobbery. Everyone has aspects of their job they don't like. I'm sure it sucks having to come in, detangle, and implement in a more robust process for what has become a business essential process. But you know what, that's part of the job of IT. Don't hate the tool, hate the carpenter.
And perhaps a trained monkey could use Sync, but that's because trained monkeys learn to do only a few things. Normal people have a lot more to memorize and tools to remember how to use than an overwrought, inflexible, half baked car info system.
Nice that you replied on something I didn't complain about it. One of my job duties is writing some fairly sophisticated vba and access queries, so I'm no technophobe. Though I do have fairly high standards for usability that Microsoft regularly fails to meet. It was the lack of responsiveness and the fact that control actions were inconsistient across screens. Maybe that has been improved. I was mistaken it was a new 2011 not 2012. However, I wasn't impressed with the voice controls either. There was a very specific set of key words you had to learn and use, where it would have been very easy for it to respond to- call mom, or phone mom, or dial mom, or telephone mom, etc. That gets complicated when you have 2 cars and a parrot hands free kit, and a wireless headset that all use different key words.
You can say that again. The first Samsung product I bought (and the only one I still like) was my first LCD computer monitor. Everything else our family bought since then, two DVD players, a DVD recorder, a CRT TV, a LCD TV, and a Galaxy smart phone either died before their time, or wasn't fully functional from the factory. The CRT TV was supposed to do clear-QAM reception, but it doesn't due to a Samsung known glitch. The DVD recorder also fails to successfully record on a disc 95% of the time due to a Samsung known glitch that they decided not to recall. The Galaxy feels cheesy in the hand, asks me if I want to mount the flash memory or use the Samsung sync suite every time I plug in the charger, and takes a long time to get a GPS lock, and it is always about 30 meters due west of the actual location.
It still surprises me that HTC fell from grace. I loved my G1, my brother's Nexus One, and my 3G Slide, and G2. They feel substantial, are still reasonable dimensions, and actually work, especially the G1, 3G and G2 on Cyanogen which came much faster than the Galaxy version.The One series looks super nice. But I really want smaller screens and a physical keyboard.
I used it for a week in a rental 2012 Focus. I loved the car, but thought Ford SYNC was a steaming pile of a turd. I'd pay them to take it out of my car. It's been so long ago (2012's had just come out and I had to be the first renter of it), that I don't remember all of my complaints. But I do remember that the controls were slow and inconsistient, and to do simple actions required many button presses and much more attention than a carputer should require - ala so many Microsoft apps.
Actually the replacement was more efficient because it operated at higher pressure. But it also was more prone to leakage, was a much more potent greenhouse gas, and the manufacturers were unsure if they'd be able to recover the R&D and unknown reliability expense through higher prices to consumers.
There aren't any "hidden" gear ratios in transmissions. I'm guessing it must be that originally the car only engaged overdrive in 3rd or 4th gear (whichever is the highest normal gear) meaning it was called a 4 or 5 gear transmission.) Shifting sequence would go 1,2,3,4,4od. The firmware update probably enabled overdrive engagement in the 2nd to lowest gear as well, so you could call it a 5 or 6 gear transmission. The shifting sequence would be 1,2,3,3od,4,4od.
What change to chip and pin cards in the USA? Besides McDonalds, I don't know of any other large company doing a chip card reader deployment to their stores.
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To me, that's like saying a Porsche is ridculously priced compared to a Kia. Both companies are providing a good product at a fair price, and neither company is out of line profitable. But the Porsche is an amazing sports car, and the Kia is just (mostly) dependable generic transportation. I've had SSDs since the 120GB versions could be had for $120 on sale, which is almost 2 years now. It was the best money I've ever spent on a computer. Now I have an external hard drive for the really big files I need to keep. But I'd never give up the SSD as a main drive just to get more space.
Why do you say ridiculous? It is just a different technology that is much more expensive to manufacture per GB than a HDD, but has some awesome advantages, and at least one big disadvantage on the price, and questions about longevity. But are SDD much more profitable to manufacturers (ignoring Intel)?
You can get those woven stainless steel billfolds for pretty cheap on ebay now. They used to be $100 or more from name brand retailers. I plan on buying one at some point.
That is a hugely expensive tax. Currently the cost to transmit a gigabyte is around 10 cents. There are 1,024 megs in a gig. So a 1/10 cent tax per meg would mean $1.02 in taxes per gig, or ten times the cost of service. Also, I understand that it used to be much more expensive to communicate (stamp and mail), and a 1 cent per email tax would be cheap for personal uses. But legitimate businesses who send hundreds of millions of requested emails (advertising to shopping club members, notification of bills ready to be paid, local governments notifying citizens of community events/news) would find that tax incredibly expensive, and greatly reduce their communication that customers have requested. That's not an (internet) world I'd want to live in. I like my almost free communication, and the problem seems solved. Google keeps almost all SPAM out of my email box.
Shoot I thought you were going to say to throw out the KD and mix the beef and kale. I may have to try kale and beef. Kraft is dreck.
I think you as well. Protesting shouldn't be illegal, and a citizen of the US should never be fined for doing it. If you are on private property then it is tresspassing. If your activity is unsafe or otherwise disrupts other's lawful activites, there are other relevant charges. But protesting in the USA should always be legal for US citizens. Now, I'd rather see protesting be legal for anyone here lawfully. I want people here on visas, or green cards, who are wronged by the US government to have a public voice as well. But I'm willing to accept there may be good reasons to not do this.
I am confused by what grandparent says about his relatives are naturalized but not citizens. I thought naturalization by definition is becoming a citizen of a country in which you were not born. If they can't protest and they are naturalized citizens, I am really concerned. But if they are green card holders but not citizens, then again I'd rather they could lawfully protest, but can understand otherwise.
It wasn't always comprehensive. But it was useful in that it got the unrelated cruft out of a regular Google search, while sometimes missing a small retailer that didn't provide their product feed to Google. I generally searched Amazon, Google Product Search, and then a general Google search. Guess I'll drop the Product Search.
Not that the USA is anything to aspire to. But it sounds like you have underground utilites with ground level service boxes painted neutral colors. Most of us would love to have that. Only the nicest and richest neighborhoods in the USA have underground utilites. Most neighborhoods have all utilites on poles on the front street. Lucky neighborhoods have the utilites on poles in the alley, so you only see the poles/utilites on crossing streets.
If it was me, I'd set up a survellence camera on the boxes and send the video to the police when they get tagged, and then go out and repaint them green with some exterior paint real fast. We don't have a problem with camoflauging these boxes with plant material or something easy to move, as long as you don't complain to the service company when the plants get torn up.
I don't have a dog in this game, but it doesn't seem arrogant to me. If the neighbors wanted BT and thought the boxes were ugly, the council/neighborhood should have offered to pay a reasonable amount for them to be camoflauged. Why should BT pay when they don't pay to camoflauge them in poor residential neighborhoods? Now if they did offer and BT refused or said it would cost them big daddy warbucks, then it does seem arrogant of BT.
Interesting that Samsung has such well regarded hard drives. The only Samsung item i've ever been impressed with was my first flat panel monitor from them 11 years ago. Since then, everything else Samsung I've bought has died before its time shortly after the warranty expired, or had functionality problems Samsung knew about and refused to provide firmware fixes or offer merchandise credits or rebates.
Nitrous Oxides can be handled by the catalytic converter. If the exhaust gas temp gets too low, or if there is an integrated engine stop feature, they might need a backup heater in the converter. I don't have time to find the citation right now, but I read a research article about a heavily instrumented aviation engine where they discovered that a little lean of stoich did drive up engine and exhaust gas temps, but after that point, temps began to fall and there was a small window where the mix remained reliably ignitable even with old fuel injection technology and very high powered spark ignition system.
Regarding your other post, yes I'd like to be able to allocate my tax money among broad government programs/goals, but I'm not holding my breath for that to come to fruition.
Regarding forcing someone out of the country because of taxation, it is a false analogy. You can chose to leave your birth country if you no longer share its goals or ideas. But our country has been taxing income for the last 99 years at various levels that generally increase during and after wars to pay for them. I doubt you were born pre-1913 where you can argue the social contract has substantially changed in your lifetime. Right now we have very low income taxes in modern history, and they've been much higher until the late 1980's, while the government massively increased spending in the 2000's. I don't want to see taxes raise back to their former levels. But we have to massively cut government spending on the order of 1/3rd or more for that to happen, and realistically we'll still need to collect more revenue due to mistakes and missteps by Bush administration and to a lesser extent Clinton. And the only way to do that will be cutting defense, reducing SS and medicare (especially part-D that was a Bush era unfunded tack on), and getting the country to grow economically again to reduce programatic spending. To get the economy to grow, both private and public investment will have to be spent in education and infrastructure and research that has been sorely neglected with the rise of the military industrial complex post 9/11.
Some people in Europe are rioting not because they were promised other people's money, but because their banking system was mismanaged like ours, and their countries are being forced to pay for private industry's mistakes to prevent a wider economic catastrophy, and in order to afford this, the governments are being forced in to large cuts to their social programs. These social programs are part of their societal contract of high taxes and high government services. I'd be pissed too if I was paying high taxes and not getting the benefits.
I don't know any modern and successful country or large community that has opt-in taxation. For social cohesion on a scale outside of a small town where everyone knows each other and can use peer pressure to influence behavior, taxation for certain public resources are necessary and it must be mandatory or you will get too many freeloaders (e.g. Greece and the social acceptability of evading taxes and low enforcement rate). But for everyone to be happy with the arrangement, you need shared goals. Unfortunately there is a gulf in goals between Republicans/Democrats/Libertarians/other Moderates is very wide right now.
But research indicates people don't hang up a phone, or put down the burger, or turn down the radio. They crash while they are distracted by those things in approximately the same frequency as being intoxicated over .08 BAC. So the results are ths same, and there is nothing idiotic about pointing that fact out, in fact it is idiotic not to.
She is young and might not have known her rights. But she could have told them again that no, she won't go through the scanner but would be happy to submit to a pat-down. They can't treat you any differently in that case. I know, I do that every time I travel. Alternatively she could have refused screening entirely, and potentially been given a ticket or arrested. But they can't force you to go through a scanner.
My point was that we already treat it as a right (though we don't formalize the sentiment), and it is already paid for through taxation, and we already have healthcare of poor quality as measured by lifetimes and quality of life compared to several countries with universal care. I don't agree with forming societies for poor people because putting a bunch of poor people together and underfunding their support services does nothing to help them.
We as a society already impose duties on others, it is called government. It is an onerous duty on me that my tax money paid for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I had almost zero say in the matter. I would have much rather that 500 billion to 1 trillion dollars gone to infrastructure in the USA, funding education better, funding the space program better, funding financial regulators with actual teeth, ensuring no kids in the US are starving and all have health care. I think we as a country would have been in a much better place if we had done that.
The problem is we as a culture already treat universal healthcare as a universal right. If you walk into almost any hospital in the country without insurance or money with a critical health problem, you will be treated. Media circuses have gone crazy when this occasionally doesn't happen. In the end, most of the cost of your treatment will be paid for by taxpayers at public hospitals, or by writing off the bad debt and rolling it into everyone else's bills at private hospitals. Most of those critcal health problems could have been drastically reduced in severity and cost by half-decent early intervention and care.
I think it is time to explicitly accept this fact, develop a universal health care program with decent basic preventative and interventional care and cost controls, and allow the private insurance market to provide coverage for the cadillac care that wealthy people want and can afford.
I don't care, nor did I bring up, what the voice controls are capable of doing, since when I tried to use them I frequently had to repeat myself several times to get it to understand me or for me to figure out the exact key words. I wanted button access when I got tired playing with the voice control. The music controls specifically, as you point out, responded instantly like any other radio, though again I didn't complain or discuss the music controls specifically. Using button controls for all the other menus and features of Sync was a pain. So you are wrong, your reply was not germane, only tangential.
I don't have to resort to petty name calling to win arguments, when facts suffice.
No I assure you that was a quite purposeful omission. I am convinced you are intelligent enough to know properly operating electronic equipment is outside the grasp of untrained monkeys, despite what one might think from reading your replies to me.
Quite amusing that you attempt to pinch me on reading comprehension, when this whole thread started because I complained about the physical controls and screen UI in Sync, and you responded tartly and completely off topic on the voice controls.
What a snide and irrelevant comment. I'm not a programmer. I manage people and have to support them with automation when our technology team can't, due to other priorities. There is nothing wrong with Access and VBA for that kind of use, and when the person tries to use them in a responsible way. The disdain for them is juvenile IT snobbery. Everyone has aspects of their job they don't like. I'm sure it sucks having to come in, detangle, and implement in a more robust process for what has become a business essential process. But you know what, that's part of the job of IT. Don't hate the tool, hate the carpenter.
And perhaps a trained monkey could use Sync, but that's because trained monkeys learn to do only a few things. Normal people have a lot more to memorize and tools to remember how to use than an overwrought, inflexible, half baked car info system.
Nice that you replied on something I didn't complain about it. One of my job duties is writing some fairly sophisticated vba and access queries, so I'm no technophobe. Though I do have fairly high standards for usability that Microsoft regularly fails to meet. It was the lack of responsiveness and the fact that control actions were inconsistient across screens. Maybe that has been improved. I was mistaken it was a new 2011 not 2012. However, I wasn't impressed with the voice controls either. There was a very specific set of key words you had to learn and use, where it would have been very easy for it to respond to- call mom, or phone mom, or dial mom, or telephone mom, etc. That gets complicated when you have 2 cars and a parrot hands free kit, and a wireless headset that all use different key words.
You can say that again. The first Samsung product I bought (and the only one I still like) was my first LCD computer monitor. Everything else our family bought since then, two DVD players, a DVD recorder, a CRT TV, a LCD TV, and a Galaxy smart phone either died before their time, or wasn't fully functional from the factory. The CRT TV was supposed to do clear-QAM reception, but it doesn't due to a Samsung known glitch. The DVD recorder also fails to successfully record on a disc 95% of the time due to a Samsung known glitch that they decided not to recall. The Galaxy feels cheesy in the hand, asks me if I want to mount the flash memory or use the Samsung sync suite every time I plug in the charger, and takes a long time to get a GPS lock, and it is always about 30 meters due west of the actual location.
It still surprises me that HTC fell from grace. I loved my G1, my brother's Nexus One, and my 3G Slide, and G2. They feel substantial, are still reasonable dimensions, and actually work, especially the G1, 3G and G2 on Cyanogen which came much faster than the Galaxy version.The One series looks super nice. But I really want smaller screens and a physical keyboard.
I used it for a week in a rental 2012 Focus. I loved the car, but thought Ford SYNC was a steaming pile of a turd. I'd pay them to take it out of my car. It's been so long ago (2012's had just come out and I had to be the first renter of it), that I don't remember all of my complaints. But I do remember that the controls were slow and inconsistient, and to do simple actions required many button presses and much more attention than a carputer should require - ala so many Microsoft apps.
Actually the replacement was more efficient because it operated at higher pressure. But it also was more prone to leakage, was a much more potent greenhouse gas, and the manufacturers were unsure if they'd be able to recover the R&D and unknown reliability expense through higher prices to consumers.
There aren't any "hidden" gear ratios in transmissions. I'm guessing it must be that originally the car only engaged overdrive in 3rd or 4th gear (whichever is the highest normal gear) meaning it was called a 4 or 5 gear transmission.) Shifting sequence would go 1,2,3,4,4od. The firmware update probably enabled overdrive engagement in the 2nd to lowest gear as well, so you could call it a 5 or 6 gear transmission. The shifting sequence would be 1,2,3,3od,4,4od.
What change to chip and pin cards in the USA? Besides McDonalds, I don't know of any other large company doing a chip card reader deployment to their stores.