I made the switch a few weeks ago after BoA announced the debit card fee stunt. I don't care that they've reversed the decision, their customer "your call is important to us and will be answered in the order in which it was received" service is shockingly bad. They don't deserve my money, even if the girls who work in the local branch are hot.
I closed my checking and savings account and switched to a local credit union, but not before doing a search on Yelp to find a good one. I was surprised to find a local credit union (which was part of a larger network and had an impressively professional looking website) getting uniformly bad reviews for its customer service, so I searched a little more until I found one with positive reviews.
I kept my BoA credit card account open even though I've cut the card up and have no intention of using it. Closing credit card accounts can hurt your credit rating.
No. Credit unions operate the way banks are supposed to, by keeping your money on deposit and investing it in the form of loans. They pay out a lower rate of interest (or "dividend" in CU parlance) on your deposited money than they charge on the money they lend out. So they make a bit of a profit (or "surplus" in not-for-profit parlance), but instead of raking in huge amounts via high interest and sneaky little fees and giving it to shareholders, they reinvest the money back into the credit union. That's why they're a better place to go to for loans than banks. They're not out to make money, they're out to give people access to credit and to help people save.
These observations show a level of precision equivalent to spotting individual grains of sand on the surface of the Moon.
Hubble probably wasn't designed for this sort of thing, but imagine a space telescope that's designed for observing objects inside our solar system. It'd be like putting the moon under a microscope, or exploring Mars and getting detailed survey results without the time and expense of sending a probe there. Is it possible? Is it being planned?
Is anyone else disappointed that it is the BBC that has to cover this rather than an American source? I'm not saying that they aren't great reporters, just that it is disappointing that there is so little interest in America.
MSNBC, Forbes, and Wired have it and, er, that's it. On the one hand it is disappointing to see such a lack of interest, however on the other hand I fear that more mainstream sources would pay more attention to the cost while conveniently overlooking the benefits or feasibility, so maybe the less they say about it the better. This is the kind of thing that congressional Republicans get up in arms about because it sounds nice and vague, something pie-in-the-sky that they can spin as "more government waste" rather than an invaluable contribution to human development.
Oh of course. The Jacobite rebellion was no different, it was a royal pissing contest between two people who wanted to be absolute monarchs. Took the English civil war to finally limit the power of the monarch and put parliament in charge. Parliament has been supreme ever since.
Rosocosmos seems like a name someone would come up with if there were making a parody of the Russian space program. Even so, at least some countries still take there space programs seriously.
Ha fucking ha. Let's laugh at all these funny foreign names.
Get used to it, buddy. Your country has been hijacked by people who think that the only things worth spending money on are unprovoked foreign wars, locking up everyone caught with a joint, fences in the desert to keep people out of the nation of immigrants, and the biggest military toy collection in the world. Meanwhile America's dominance in the space industry is over. You're going to see a lot more foreign names up there, so you can laugh all you want from below while India, China, and Russia push on above your laughing head.
Me too. Halloween has just become another commercialized spend-fest where everyone has been conditioned into thinking they have to spend money on costumes, candy, pumpkins and other nonsense. I'll be sitting in the house watching horror movies and not much else.
No, citizens have rights and responsibilities which both go hand in hand. The libertarian point of view (which seems to be so fashionable on/. for some reason) is that rights are all that matters and responsibilities (or any attempt to enforce them) must be discarded.
Some parents might get it into their heads that seat belts are dangerous and choose to not strap their children in. Do we allow it? No.
With vaccines it's even more important that we force the issue and mandate vaccinations because of the risk to the rest of the population that is caused by idiots who "exercise their right to choose" to expose themselves and the rest of society to these diseases.
It means for those in Europe figuring out how to get out from under Brussels - best of luck, I don't know your politics.
Frankfurt (home of the European Central Bank) is more of a problem than Brussels (home of the European Commission). EU membership is fine, that's all about opening up the place to free trade without small businessmen having to comply with 27 different sets of regulations if they want to export to all of the member countries. But if you're a member of the Eurozone and you're not France or Germany then you're screwed if you want to escape the debt burden quickly by devaluing your currency to boost competitiveness. If you're locked in a currency union with the Germans you no longer have that option, and you're going to become a debt servicing machine for the next few decades.
Sorry, but any student who still lives with his parents while at college is a loser in more ways than one. Living away from home for the first time and having to do all your own cooking/laundry/ironing/cleaning and generally picking up enough of the skills of independence is one of the biggest parts of higher education. If you're still living with your mom then you're missing out on the whole point of higher education.
I wouldn't get a Mustang if you paid me not for environmental reasons but purely on engineering grounds. They're rubbish! They have a live rear axle for God's sake! A live rear axle! In this day and age! You can't get the damn thing to go around corners! And the tacky interiors are full of unsophisticated plastic. The Top Gear crew are pretty condescending when it comes to American cars, and for good reason. It's by no accident that the Detroit automakers (except for Ford) had to be bailed out. They were taking advantage of a corrupt political system for too long. They thought that it was better to buy a congressman than to fix their business model, and as a result of their laziness the quality of their products and their engineering lagged way behind Europe and Japan.
The problem with your point about lack of competitiveness at the DMV is that you say there's no incentive for them to improve their service, and yet over the last ten years they have improved their service immensely. The theory that public sector bodies don't have an incentive to improve therefore they don't improve just doesn't seem to hold any water. In fact budget cuts are a very potent motivator for public sector bodies to get more productivity out of the same resources, and that shows.
And if Bank of America were really motivated by competition then they wouldn't be losing customers in droves like they are now, so the cut and thrust of competition doesn't seem to be making much of an impact there.
On a side note, can you please learn the difference between 'lose' and 'loose'. It's irritating enough to see it once, but three times in the same post? Ugh!
I actually disagree with a lot of what Clarkson says, but I still enjoy listening to him, particularly when he's gushing over an Aston Martin or the latest "Jaaaag". My only gripe is that when he's coming up with blatant mistruths or reading from dubious "trains cause more pollution per passenger mile than cars" research, I wish James May would act like his hippie character and call him on it. The banter between the characters is supposed to be a means of conveying technical information in an entertaining manner, I wish they would use it when it comes to the positive side of alternative power sources.
The DMV is often held up as a synonym for government inefficiency. And yet I can be in and out of Santa Clara DMV in under 20 minutes when I need to renew my license, less if I have an appointment. And with each passing year they add more services to their website, so the crowds going to the physical office keep getting smaller. Not bad for a place where you had to bring a good book and resign yourself to spending half the day only ten years ago.
On the other hand I've been known to be kept waiting in a branch of that paragon of private sector competitiveness, Bank of America, for over half an hour for relatively straightforward services. And God help you if you need to call up their customer service helpline; I needed to stop a recurring payment that was coming out of my account in error thanks to a bug in their inept website and was kept on the line for over an hour being passed around to six different people and with each incompetent rep I had to start at the top from proving who I was and regurgitating the same story, none of which I ever had to do with the HSBC bank.
There are efficient and inefficient government operations, there are efficient and inefficient private operations. The "public sector bad, private sector good" doctrine gets kinda tiresome after a while.
I recently read Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime and my head is still abuzz with speculation over the coming technological singularity. Consequently, I can't help but see these attempts at predicting the tech of a century hence as the equivalent of ancient Romans speculating on how many could fly. Just as we now laugh at the beliefs of the ancients (or even folks in the 19th century) for their belief that flight would be accomplished by flapping wings, surely these conceptions of spaceflight will seem naive in a few decades or a century. Sure, maybe AI and limitless energy won't arrive so soon, so one feels a need to do such engineering now, but it may all prove superfluous.
Ornithopters are possible and have been built, even a few manned versions. With a bit more development, with new materials and new technology they probably could be made more efficient but we've found better ways of achieving flight using the technology that we had in the 20th century, hence that is where most of the development has gone and that type of technology is more advanced.
I wouldn't be too hard on old sci-fi predictions, some got it right as well. Didn't Jules Verne envision a future Paris full of people getting around the streets in powered vehicles with easy-to-use controls? Didn't he predict the submarine? Didn't he predict a mysterious power source that could keep a vessel in motion for years at a time without refueling long before nuclear physics were understood? Didn't Star Trek predict the handheld communication device that responds to voice commands, and the handheld computing device with a touch-sensitive screen? Didn't Things To Come predict the devastating effect of aerial bombing on civilians from large fixed wing aircraft?
It's okay to dream. Sci Fi is exciting because it's possible, and it inspires people to become engineers and try to make things happen.
If I'm looking for a long-term relationship, I expect Mary to put out by the third date or so, and if she doesn't, I'll find my long-term relationship with Susan, who *will* put out.
Or, you know, I might realize that in any successful long-term relationship, there's a lot of factors that matter more than how quickly I can get my partner into bed. For instance, do I enjoy spending time with Mary? Do we have some common interests? Do we have good and meaningful conversations? Can we figure out a way of working when work needs to get done? If this relationship really does well, and we end up hitched for the rest of our lives, we're going to spend far more time dealing with that stuff than whether Mary put out on the third date.
One thing counts. The ratio of her rack to her waist. Everything else is polite conversation.
Seriously, it's not like it's some passing fad either. I know they're an obsessive people by nature, but Jesus Christ, for decades now they've been CRAZY about robots (and technology in general, but ESPECIALLY robots). I mean they're fucking INSANE about robots. Granted, I guess it's a better obsession for them to have than empire-building, but wouldn't more varied interests be a little more healthy?
What's a "more valid" interest? Celebrity gossip? Sports? Reality TV?
What's so unhealthy about being interested in robotics?
Apple fans can take comfort from this evidence that while Steve Jobs may no longer be with us in the flesh, he lives on in the hearts of journalists. And the reality distortion field is still fully operational.
Slashdot Mirror
I made the switch a few weeks ago after BoA announced the debit card fee stunt. I don't care that they've reversed the decision, their customer "your call is important to us and will be answered in the order in which it was received" service is shockingly bad. They don't deserve my money, even if the girls who work in the local branch are hot.
I closed my checking and savings account and switched to a local credit union, but not before doing a search on Yelp to find a good one. I was surprised to find a local credit union (which was part of a larger network and had an impressively professional looking website) getting uniformly bad reviews for its customer service, so I searched a little more until I found one with positive reviews.
I kept my BoA credit card account open even though I've cut the card up and have no intention of using it. Closing credit card accounts can hurt your credit rating.
No. Credit unions operate the way banks are supposed to, by keeping your money on deposit and investing it in the form of loans. They pay out a lower rate of interest (or "dividend" in CU parlance) on your deposited money than they charge on the money they lend out. So they make a bit of a profit (or "surplus" in not-for-profit parlance), but instead of raking in huge amounts via high interest and sneaky little fees and giving it to shareholders, they reinvest the money back into the credit union. That's why they're a better place to go to for loans than banks. They're not out to make money, they're out to give people access to credit and to help people save.
Quoth TFA:
These observations show a level of precision equivalent to spotting individual grains of sand on the surface of the Moon.
Hubble probably wasn't designed for this sort of thing, but imagine a space telescope that's designed for observing objects inside our solar system. It'd be like putting the moon under a microscope, or exploring Mars and getting detailed survey results without the time and expense of sending a probe there. Is it possible? Is it being planned?
Is anyone else disappointed that it is the BBC that has to cover this rather than an American source? I'm not saying that they aren't great reporters, just that it is disappointing that there is so little interest in America.
MSNBC, Forbes, and Wired have it and, er, that's it. On the one hand it is disappointing to see such a lack of interest, however on the other hand I fear that more mainstream sources would pay more attention to the cost while conveniently overlooking the benefits or feasibility, so maybe the less they say about it the better. This is the kind of thing that congressional Republicans get up in arms about because it sounds nice and vague, something pie-in-the-sky that they can spin as "more government waste" rather than an invaluable contribution to human development.
Oh of course. The Jacobite rebellion was no different, it was a royal pissing contest between two people who wanted to be absolute monarchs. Took the English civil war to finally limit the power of the monarch and put parliament in charge. Parliament has been supreme ever since.
Rosocosmos seems like a name someone would come up with if there were making a parody of the Russian space program. Even so, at least some countries still take there space programs seriously.
Ha fucking ha. Let's laugh at all these funny foreign names.
Get used to it, buddy. Your country has been hijacked by people who think that the only things worth spending money on are unprovoked foreign wars, locking up everyone caught with a joint, fences in the desert to keep people out of the nation of immigrants, and the biggest military toy collection in the world. Meanwhile America's dominance in the space industry is over. You're going to see a lot more foreign names up there, so you can laugh all you want from below while India, China, and Russia push on above your laughing head.
Guy Fawkes. Shame they burn him in effigy. He was the only man to enter Parliament with honest intentions.
Me too. Halloween has just become another commercialized spend-fest where everyone has been conditioned into thinking they have to spend money on costumes, candy, pumpkins and other nonsense. I'll be sitting in the house watching horror movies and not much else.
No, citizens have rights and responsibilities which both go hand in hand. The libertarian point of view (which seems to be so fashionable on /. for some reason) is that rights are all that matters and responsibilities (or any attempt to enforce them) must be discarded.
he individual is more important than the society. If this notion is lost, then the society is not worth anything
How meaningless. Utterly utterly meaningless.
Some parents might get it into their heads that seat belts are dangerous and choose to not strap their children in. Do we allow it? No.
With vaccines it's even more important that we force the issue and mandate vaccinations because of the risk to the rest of the population that is caused by idiots who "exercise their right to choose" to expose themselves and the rest of society to these diseases.
It means for those in Europe figuring out how to get out from under Brussels - best of luck, I don't know your politics.
Frankfurt (home of the European Central Bank) is more of a problem than Brussels (home of the European Commission). EU membership is fine, that's all about opening up the place to free trade without small businessmen having to comply with 27 different sets of regulations if they want to export to all of the member countries. But if you're a member of the Eurozone and you're not France or Germany then you're screwed if you want to escape the debt burden quickly by devaluing your currency to boost competitiveness. If you're locked in a currency union with the Germans you no longer have that option, and you're going to become a debt servicing machine for the next few decades.
Sorry, but any student who still lives with his parents while at college is a loser in more ways than one. Living away from home for the first time and having to do all your own cooking/laundry/ironing/cleaning and generally picking up enough of the skills of independence is one of the biggest parts of higher education. If you're still living with your mom then you're missing out on the whole point of higher education.
I wouldn't get a Mustang if you paid me not for environmental reasons but purely on engineering grounds. They're rubbish! They have a live rear axle for God's sake! A live rear axle! In this day and age! You can't get the damn thing to go around corners! And the tacky interiors are full of unsophisticated plastic. The Top Gear crew are pretty condescending when it comes to American cars, and for good reason. It's by no accident that the Detroit automakers (except for Ford) had to be bailed out. They were taking advantage of a corrupt political system for too long. They thought that it was better to buy a congressman than to fix their business model, and as a result of their laziness the quality of their products and their engineering lagged way behind Europe and Japan.
The problem with your point about lack of competitiveness at the DMV is that you say there's no incentive for them to improve their service, and yet over the last ten years they have improved their service immensely. The theory that public sector bodies don't have an incentive to improve therefore they don't improve just doesn't seem to hold any water. In fact budget cuts are a very potent motivator for public sector bodies to get more productivity out of the same resources, and that shows.
And if Bank of America were really motivated by competition then they wouldn't be losing customers in droves like they are now, so the cut and thrust of competition doesn't seem to be making much of an impact there.
On a side note, can you please learn the difference between 'lose' and 'loose'. It's irritating enough to see it once, but three times in the same post? Ugh!
I actually disagree with a lot of what Clarkson says, but I still enjoy listening to him, particularly when he's gushing over an Aston Martin or the latest "Jaaaag". My only gripe is that when he's coming up with blatant mistruths or reading from dubious "trains cause more pollution per passenger mile than cars" research, I wish James May would act like his hippie character and call him on it. The banter between the characters is supposed to be a means of conveying technical information in an entertaining manner, I wish they would use it when it comes to the positive side of alternative power sources.
The DMV is often held up as a synonym for government inefficiency. And yet I can be in and out of Santa Clara DMV in under 20 minutes when I need to renew my license, less if I have an appointment. And with each passing year they add more services to their website, so the crowds going to the physical office keep getting smaller. Not bad for a place where you had to bring a good book and resign yourself to spending half the day only ten years ago.
On the other hand I've been known to be kept waiting in a branch of that paragon of private sector competitiveness, Bank of America, for over half an hour for relatively straightforward services. And God help you if you need to call up their customer service helpline; I needed to stop a recurring payment that was coming out of my account in error thanks to a bug in their inept website and was kept on the line for over an hour being passed around to six different people and with each incompetent rep I had to start at the top from proving who I was and regurgitating the same story, none of which I ever had to do with the HSBC bank.
There are efficient and inefficient government operations, there are efficient and inefficient private operations. The "public sector bad, private sector good" doctrine gets kinda tiresome after a while.
I recently read Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime and my head is still abuzz with speculation over the coming technological singularity. Consequently, I can't help but see these attempts at predicting the tech of a century hence as the equivalent of ancient Romans speculating on how many could fly. Just as we now laugh at the beliefs of the ancients (or even folks in the 19th century) for their belief that flight would be accomplished by flapping wings, surely these conceptions of spaceflight will seem naive in a few decades or a century. Sure, maybe AI and limitless energy won't arrive so soon, so one feels a need to do such engineering now, but it may all prove superfluous.
Ornithopters are possible and have been built, even a few manned versions. With a bit more development, with new materials and new technology they probably could be made more efficient but we've found better ways of achieving flight using the technology that we had in the 20th century, hence that is where most of the development has gone and that type of technology is more advanced.
I wouldn't be too hard on old sci-fi predictions, some got it right as well. Didn't Jules Verne envision a future Paris full of people getting around the streets in powered vehicles with easy-to-use controls? Didn't he predict the submarine? Didn't he predict a mysterious power source that could keep a vessel in motion for years at a time without refueling long before nuclear physics were understood? Didn't Star Trek predict the handheld communication device that responds to voice commands, and the handheld computing device with a touch-sensitive screen? Didn't Things To Come predict the devastating effect of aerial bombing on civilians from large fixed wing aircraft?
It's okay to dream. Sci Fi is exciting because it's possible, and it inspires people to become engineers and try to make things happen.
House of Cards, a single original series that the company is backing
Au contraire.
Of course, there's never been a sci-fi movie using such technology as a plot device...
Au contraire, the alien healing device in Babylon 5 sounds kinda close.
Follow the links to a more balanced story.
If I'm looking for a long-term relationship, I expect Mary to put out by the third date or so, and if she doesn't, I'll find my long-term relationship with Susan, who *will* put out.
Or, you know, I might realize that in any successful long-term relationship, there's a lot of factors that matter more than how quickly I can get my partner into bed. For instance, do I enjoy spending time with Mary? Do we have some common interests? Do we have good and meaningful conversations? Can we figure out a way of working when work needs to get done? If this relationship really does well, and we end up hitched for the rest of our lives, we're going to spend far more time dealing with that stuff than whether Mary put out on the third date.
One thing counts. The ratio of her rack to her waist. Everything else is polite conversation.
Seriously, it's not like it's some passing fad either. I know they're an obsessive people by nature, but Jesus Christ, for decades now they've been CRAZY about robots (and technology in general, but ESPECIALLY robots). I mean they're fucking INSANE about robots. Granted, I guess it's a better obsession for them to have than empire-building, but wouldn't more varied interests be a little more healthy?
What's a "more valid" interest? Celebrity gossip? Sports? Reality TV?
What's so unhealthy about being interested in robotics?
Jeez!
Go right ahead. Please do. I insist.
Apple fans can take comfort from this evidence that while Steve Jobs may no longer be with us in the flesh, he lives on in the hearts of journalists. And the reality distortion field is still fully operational.
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.