ehh, for video distribution, I can see cost savings in having a data center several miles away from the house. I would prefer unlimited, unfiltered local data, and limited and restricted long distance data. But, most people don't seem willing to make a big hassle over ~$30/month for cable & internet.
Wow. I might kill for a price like that, although I'd demand a no-tv discount. $50/month for 60/5 Mb/s internet-only from the only cable supplier, Charter. AT&T is worse, but even if they were cheaper I'd open a vein in a warm bath before I'd go back to AT&T.
Our non-representatives used to at least determine whether our letters were pro or con something and send an appropriate automatic response. Now the response is the same no matter what you OR THEY think or wrote.
Only crazy people PRINT photos. My cheap (under $100) Brother laser printer (newer versions are cheaper and better) has been working since 2009 and cartridges (I've bought 2 for under $30 each and I don't need to install the second one quite yet, although the yellow light blinks occasionally) are cheap. Taxes, program listings, the occasional letter, etc. I'm really pissed at HP for doing stuff like this.
In California you pay extra when you buy monitors, computers, etc. No idea where the money goes -- probably into the inflated pensions of retired state employees.
Although it's an old technology, older than the 3.5 mm audio jack even, the ordinary mousetrap is humane, effective, reusable, and available in multiple sizes. They kill instantly; you'll never find a mousetrap with a live rodent wiggling around in it.
WRONG! I once caught a mouse by the snout -- when I tried to pick up the trap the mouse JUMPED at me. If I was thinking clearly I would have taken it outside and hit it with a shovel, but what I did do was put the whole thing, trap and all, in a plastic bag and throw it into the trash. I'm still ashamed.
FWIW, I used to fill in Ipsos surveys. I'd spend maybe 10 minutes on one before it decided I wasn't a suitable respondent for that particular survey, and the questions were frequently just WRONG based on my previous answers. I finally quit because they were a waste of my time. YMMV, of course.
I obey Murphy's Law religiously. I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that as soon as I need to lay my hands on a particular statement for some critical reason my ISP will go down for 24 hours due to the need to repair something somewhere. While the paper might be hard to find, I can probably find it sooner than my ISP can fix whatever problem it has. Same reason I don't get e-bills.
Even if there were NO graft this would be an absolutely useless project. There are so many better ways that the money could be spent that the only possible reason for its existence has to be bribery and corruption. So much for Jesuit training...
No, it's not a good thing, but it exists. Norwegian grandmothers didn't bring down the twin towers. If you can't check everyone you have to play the odds. Humans draw conclusions from what they observe. Those conclusions aren't always correct, but they're all we have and they've kept us alive for quite a while. Until McVeigh, white guys with trucks full of fertilizer in the middle of a city didn't set off alarm bells; now they do.
It's not Islamophobia, it's "crazy assholes who want to wipe out western civilization" -phobia. Who are the people mostly likely to be those crazy assholes? Take a guess, and NO, it's not Norwegian grandmothers.
A person with a middle-eastern name tries to bring a ticking electronic thingy on board a plane. Does anyone actually think he wouldn't have been wrestled to the ground, possibly injured, and put on the do-not-fly list before they even figured out what the thing was? Are school administrators any smarter or less wary? The kid showed extremely poor judgment. Period. He's lucky he's still alive.
1. Tax stuff is serious shit. I want it HERE on MY computer, not in some ephemeral cloud only available when I actually have internet access or where somebody else might hack into it. I also save.pdf files in several places. I print only enough paper to make it easy to deal with next year (for extremely low values of 'easy').
1a. One year I tried to submit electronically via TurboTax on April 13. I got ambiguous acknowledgments back, so I sent paper forms -- I checked later and the electronic version never got through. Never again.
2. California charges $20 to submit tax forms electronically. This is insane, but so is the rest of our government.
3. I'd rather have my tax software on linux than windows. I trust windows as much as I trust the cloud.
I just received an acknowledgment from whitehouse.gov indicating that I voted exactly opposite to what I would have voted. Not happy about this. Apparently it's possible to sign these petitions without any sort of confirmation whatsoever.
"Perhaps someday someone will implement a reliable and innovative social platform that allows users to opt-in, or not, to exposing personal information to the company running the show and/or others."
They added 'under god' when I was in elementary school. That's the day I stopped saying the pledge.
Much earlier I hid a tooth under my pillow without telling anyone. The next morning I accused my parents of making up the Tooth Fairy story and threw in the Easter Bunny and Jesus along with it. They 'fessed up. Good for them.
Look, 5-year-olds aren't stupid. In third world countries they may be responsible for caring for their 3-year-old siblings. I wouldn't have left a 5-YO at home deliberately, but I inadvertently left my 4-YO at the drugstore when I had a carfull of kids (including the neighbors') with me and just, well, miscounted. Hey, he was really little, it could happen to anybody. He was playing in the toy department and didn't even know we'd gone. When I was 5 I walked a couple of miles to get home because the nun giving me piano lessons scared me. I'd never done that before, but we'd gone there by car and I knew the way.
Yeah, I think that BadAnalogyGuy was joking, but we really used to be a LOT more sensible about things than we are now. When we went anywhere in the car I stood up in the front seat so I could see out the window. My kids used those Maggie Simpson carseats, sometimes in a 2-door car whose seatback had no lock. AND WE ALL TALKED TO STRANGERS!
"I've had a Samsung ML-1710 laser printer for several years. It's only monochrome (which satisfies my limited requirements) but it has a very small footprint and is 100% reliable and is reasonably fast for a consumer-grade machine. And it works perfectly with CUPS. No proprietary hocus required."
Well, except for the reliability thing, yeah. Mine would crumple up perhaps 10% of the paper (all weights) fed through it unless I pushed on the paper tray (it pushed back) during printing, and it never handled envelopes right. Final straw was replacing the toner cartridge (which I bought with the printer and was out of warranty) and immediately getting a thick black line down the center along with smaller streaks on every printed page. I bought a Brother HL2170W ($70+tax, refurb) which seems to be working out nicely. USB and ethernet, linux-install on the CD.
Possibly useful information: 99-Cents-Only Stores generally have USB cables for -- wait for it-- 99 cents. Sometimes the nice Belkins with blinkylights, sometimes not. I pity the poor easterners who have to buy their cheap Chinese crap in dark alleys instead of clean bright stores.
Every once in a while the 99-Cents-Only stores sell 6' Belkin USB cables (nice, braided, with cute little lights on the ends, the ones that are $19 at Fry's) for 99 cents. Just useful information...
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ehh, for video distribution, I can see cost savings in having a data center several miles away from the house. I would prefer unlimited, unfiltered local data, and limited and restricted long distance data. But, most people don't seem willing to make a big hassle over ~$30/month for cable & internet.
Wow. I might kill for a price like that, although I'd demand a no-tv discount. $50/month for 60/5 Mb/s internet-only from the only cable supplier, Charter. AT&T is worse, but even if they were cheaper I'd open a vein in a warm bath before I'd go back to AT&T.
Our non-representatives used to at least determine whether our letters were pro or con something and send an appropriate automatic response. Now the response is the same no matter what you OR THEY think or wrote.
Only crazy people PRINT photos. My cheap (under $100) Brother laser printer (newer versions are cheaper and better) has been working since 2009 and cartridges (I've bought 2 for under $30 each and I don't need to install the second one quite yet, although the yellow light blinks occasionally) are cheap. Taxes, program listings, the occasional letter, etc. I'm really pissed at HP for doing stuff like this.
When we got ours smiles were forbidden.
In California you pay extra when you buy monitors, computers, etc. No idea where the money goes -- probably into the inflated pensions of retired state employees.
Although it's an old technology, older than the 3.5 mm audio jack even, the ordinary mousetrap is humane, effective, reusable, and available in multiple sizes. They kill instantly; you'll never find a mousetrap with a live rodent wiggling around in it.
WRONG! I once caught a mouse by the snout -- when I tried to pick up the trap the mouse JUMPED at me. If I was thinking clearly I would have taken it outside and hit it with a shovel, but what I did do was put the whole thing, trap and all, in a plastic bag and throw it into the trash. I'm still ashamed.
FWIW, I used to fill in Ipsos surveys. I'd spend maybe 10 minutes on one before it decided I wasn't a suitable respondent for that particular survey, and the questions were frequently just WRONG based on my previous answers. I finally quit because they were a waste of my time. YMMV, of course.
I obey Murphy's Law religiously. I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that as soon as I need to lay my hands on a particular statement for some critical reason my ISP will go down for 24 hours due to the need to repair something somewhere. While the paper might be hard to find, I can probably find it sooner than my ISP can fix whatever problem it has. Same reason I don't get e-bills.
We let them live. Is there a really GOOD reason that civil governments must recognize superstitions?
I made my own bird-flip jpg. Working on "asshole" right now. Hard to do it without being vulgar :-(
And trial transcripts belong to the court reporters, who have to be paid if you want a transcript. That seems even wronger.
Even if there were NO graft this would be an absolutely useless project. There are so many better ways that the money could be spent that the only possible reason for its existence has to be bribery and corruption. So much for Jesuit training...
No, it's not a good thing, but it exists. Norwegian grandmothers didn't bring down the twin towers. If you can't check everyone you have to play the odds. Humans draw conclusions from what they observe. Those conclusions aren't always correct, but they're all we have and they've kept us alive for quite a while. Until McVeigh, white guys with trucks full of fertilizer in the middle of a city didn't set off alarm bells; now they do.
It's not Islamophobia, it's "crazy assholes who want to wipe out western civilization" -phobia. Who are the people mostly likely to be those crazy assholes? Take a guess, and NO, it's not Norwegian grandmothers.
A person with a middle-eastern name tries to bring a ticking electronic thingy on board a plane. Does anyone actually think he wouldn't have been wrestled to the ground, possibly injured, and put on the do-not-fly list before they even figured out what the thing was? Are school administrators any smarter or less wary? The kid showed extremely poor judgment. Period. He's lucky he's still alive.
1. Tax stuff is serious shit. I want it HERE on MY computer, not in some ephemeral cloud only available when I actually have internet access or where somebody else might hack into it. I also save .pdf files in several places. I print only enough paper to make it easy to deal with next year (for extremely low values of 'easy').
1a. One year I tried to submit electronically via TurboTax on April 13. I got ambiguous acknowledgments back, so I sent paper forms -- I checked later and the electronic version never got through. Never again.
2. California charges $20 to submit tax forms electronically. This is insane, but so is the rest of our government.
3. I'd rather have my tax software on linux than windows. I trust windows as much as I trust the cloud.
2K years ago = Jesus. I'm pretty sure they could tie knots by then.
I just received an acknowledgment from whitehouse.gov indicating that I voted exactly opposite to what I would have voted. Not happy about this. Apparently it's possible to sign these petitions without any sort of confirmation whatsoever.
I've been running Slackware since 2001 -- earlier than that, if you count the dialup ISP I had starting in1994. Carry on.
"Perhaps someday someone will implement a reliable and innovative social platform that allows users to opt-in, or not, to exposing personal information to the company running the show and/or others."
Anybody remember usenet?
They added 'under god' when I was in elementary school. That's the day I stopped saying the pledge.
Much earlier I hid a tooth under my pillow without telling anyone. The next morning I accused my parents of making up the Tooth Fairy story and threw in the Easter Bunny and Jesus along with it. They 'fessed up. Good for them.
Look, 5-year-olds aren't stupid. In third world countries they may be responsible for caring for their 3-year-old siblings. I wouldn't have left a 5-YO at home deliberately, but I inadvertently left my 4-YO at the drugstore when I had a carfull of kids (including the neighbors') with me and just, well, miscounted. Hey, he was really little, it could happen to anybody. He was playing in the toy department and didn't even know we'd gone. When I was 5 I walked a couple of miles to get home because the nun giving me piano lessons scared me. I'd never done that before, but we'd gone there by car and I knew the way.
Yeah, I think that BadAnalogyGuy was joking, but we really used to be a LOT more sensible about things than we are now. When we went anywhere in the car I stood up in the front seat so I could see out the window. My kids used those Maggie Simpson carseats, sometimes in a 2-door car whose seatback had no lock. AND WE ALL TALKED TO STRANGERS!
"I've had a Samsung ML-1710 laser printer for several years. It's only monochrome (which satisfies my limited requirements) but it has a very small footprint and is 100% reliable and is reasonably fast for a consumer-grade machine. And it works perfectly with CUPS. No proprietary hocus required."
Well, except for the reliability thing, yeah. Mine would crumple up perhaps 10% of the paper (all weights) fed through it unless I pushed on the paper tray (it pushed back) during printing, and it never handled envelopes right. Final straw was replacing the toner cartridge (which I bought with the printer and was out of warranty) and immediately getting a thick black line down the center along with smaller streaks on every printed page. I bought a Brother HL2170W ($70+tax, refurb) which seems to be working out nicely. USB and ethernet, linux-install on the CD.
Possibly useful information: 99-Cents-Only Stores generally have USB cables for -- wait for it-- 99 cents. Sometimes the nice Belkins with blinkylights, sometimes not. I pity the poor easterners who have to buy their cheap Chinese crap in dark alleys instead of clean bright stores.
We thank you for your courtesy and will graciously allow you to live just a bit longer.
Every once in a while the 99-Cents-Only stores sell 6' Belkin USB cables (nice, braided, with cute little lights on the ends, the ones that are $19 at Fry's) for 99 cents. Just useful information...