Feurio - www.Feurio.de - and CDRWin - www.goldenhawk.com/ - The most powerful audio-CD burning apps I've found, each with their unique functions. Feurio automatically corrects for source files not properly cut on frame boundaries. CDRWin will properly burn a gapless DAO (or, more properly, SAO) audio session and open a new session for later addition of data files. Adaptec/Roxio's crapware never did get those fundamental clues, though they sure jumped on every other faddish feature demanded by brain-dead end-users. The sole worthwhile exception in their oeuvre being DirectCD, and even that is only marginally useful for my purposes.
How would the patches reuin the medical systems? Sure, there's a small chance the cruical security patch will mess something up, but what is that chance?
The thing is, sure, the chance of something going wrong is small, but in a regulated environment, the bar for risk acceptance is much higher. And, in reality, I've seen some firsthand examples of things going wrong and causing some havoc. Just about exactly a year ago, when the MSBlast worm was spreading wildly, and MS issued some of the first (to my knowledge) patches that shut down some of the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) vulnerabilities, I found a record in our company's internal problem-tracking database showing that basically as soon as that patch was installed on one particular server, a client system (literally thousands of miles away, and based on some old borderline DOS-based code) that relied (stupidly, but is it any surprise that some vendor code is crap?) on that particular RPC vulnerability mysteriously (at least, to its users) stopped working. I don't remember exactly which application it was any more, but I remember it talked to a database of some sort on the server, and probably used several stupid, unorthodox methods of winging its data back and forth. Fortunately, it wasn't a life-and-death situation, but I can very easily imagine such crucial situations existing.
Having spent 10 years working in the Medical Device/Biotech domain, I can tell you that the FDA really does govern these things. Unfortunately, their internal understanding of computer systems in general is frighteningly scarce. Essentially, the only body of legislation they have to go by is a small portion of a CFR (Code of Federal Regulations: 21CFR Part11) that was released in 1997, and the enforcement guidance documents that followed it. The Code is extremely ambiguous and realistically lumps "electronic documents" and "electronic signatures" together. The compliance issues resulting from the vague document and its (mis)interpretation and enforcement were enough for me to change industries. My heart goes out to all of the people still battling this.
I work with Part 11/ER-ES rules (which, to be fair, have recently been made a little less all-encompassing in scope and a little more sane in interpretation) and the rest of the FDA regs covering computer systems validation as part of current Good Manufacturing Practices (and Good Laboratory practices, and Good Documentation Practices, the whole GxP series), on contract at a Big Pharma Co.(TM), and all I can do when I hear about the hospitals pushing back against the mandatory security updates is nod my head and say, "I feel your pain."
It's hard for those outside of FDA-regulated industries to conceive of how many seemingly everyday actions (patching an OS, updating vendor software, changing a few little system settings, saving a little bit of data to a database (or not), etc.) have repercussions that strike fear into the hearts of better engineers/systems analysts than themselves, fear that one little action taken out of turn or without the proper approval could be the difference between your system working merrily along and an FDA auditor deciding to pull on that thread and dredge up enough evidence of "uncontrolled" behavior to deem a system out of compliance and no longer in a "validated state." Sounds melodramatic, I know, but it's real. After you live with it long enough, you develop a) enough experience to sort out the truly vital from the merely worrisome but really trivial, and b) a fatalistic shell that protects you from the worst effects of the stress of keeping all your confounded documentation up to date.
Ya wanna know why drugs are so expensive? It's not what you think.
I always wondered that. I've examined the doors closely and haven't seen any way for them to power the locks or communicate with them. I presume communication would be necessary to invalidate the access previously granted to lost or compromised cards.
Actually, many access control card schemes incorporate an "issue code" as part of the data on the card. Once a card with a "later" issue code in a sequence is used, the lock recognizes that "earlier" issue codes are no longer valid. No communication back to a server is needed, although any other offline locks to which a given card has access of course won't be updated until the new card is used in them. The sequence of available numbers for issues codes is simpply made large enough to make it impractical/improbable for someone to manage to cycle through the entire series just to cause an older card to become valid again.
And, on the subject of communications - some locks are fully "online" (and the communications and power cables are very unobtrusive), and others are offline (and communications may be done either manually on a periodic schedule, uploading the data from a reader via a PDA and then to a server, or wirelessly through an RF transmitter). In either case for offline locks, power can be supplied by a 'pack' of several rechargeable or replaceable AA batteries. If the hardware/processor/etc., in the door is optimized enough for power consumption, a single set of 4 AAs can last several months, making the maintenance sufficiently cheap.
I've just assumed that the power is delivered via hinges and wires buried in the door (which would mean custom doors or some sophisticated drilling to retrofit).
That retrofitting expense is why some facilities choose the wireless or offline versions.
If your account isn't verified, go to the All Activity view in your account, and search on all transactions back to an arbitrarily early date. You can at least see the date of your first transaction, and if it was fairly early, there'll be a "Bonus | From | New Account" transaction in the amount of $5.00, from when they were still giving the $5 bonus for opening an account. Mine was apparently opened 3-17-2000, though I'd've sworn it was earlier than that. But hey, I'm in the period specified for the settlement.
Since they did this I went back to using them for ebay transactions, but all they get is my cc number and the account will remain "unverified" until I have shoveled through it my limit
Do you know what the limit IS on unverified accounts? Maybe I've overlooked some obvious mention of it, but I only recently found out that there even IS an overall limit on unverified accounts, and I apparently haven't yet exceeded it in the 5+ years I've been using PP; I looked around a bit in their FAQ and related documentation, but haven't yet found the limit specified.
Is there a McDonalds across from a McDonalds somewhere?
Because there's already a Burger King on the other corner...
I don't think it's at all apocryphal that this is exactly how some chain fast food restaurants pick their locations:
McDonald's: Study traffic patterns, population demographics, civic boundaries and zoning, rental prices, conduct surveys and marketing studies, etc., and optimize all those factors before choosing a location for a new store.
Wendy's: Find a McDonald's, then plop down a new store in the nearest available lot.
To everyone in this sub-thread, I humbly suggest you seek out and try Douwe-Egbert's brand. I have the same distaste for Starbuck's, like Gevalia just fine in general, and to my taste-buds, D-E is significantly better than any Gevalia blend I've tried. The red-bag "full-aroma" blend is smooth, smooth, SMOOTH even at high strengths, without any bitterness or burnt taste at all. I'm not affiliated with www.bestcoffeebymail.com in any way, other than being happy with their service, and knowing that they're the first online place I could find to buy Douwe-Egbert's.
I wonder the same thing! On a couple of occasions, I've bought Starbucks' house coffee and it tasted hyper-burnt.
I usually notice that about Starbucks -- not that I drink their coffee more than once or twice a year. I just don't like it that much, for exactly that reason, as well as that it's overpriced.
For my money, Douwe-Egbert's red-bag blend ( www.bestcoffeebymail.com ) is the best coffee in existence - it's smooth and mellow while still being full-bodied and man-enough to stand up to serious additives (turbinado sugar, dairy products, Bailey's, carpet fuzz, paper clips, shards of glass).
Back to the article - this guy's a tool. There've got to be more interesting chainstores to visit worldwide.
and once great-for-quick-rebates-turnaounds OfficeMax has gone down the crapper recently for denying legitimate rebate submissions
I've noticed this, too. A few weeks ago, Office Max had a rebate deal on CD-RWs (I think), and I noticed what appeared to be a scam going on. Other items I bought that week with rebates had a sort of item code on the receipt, vaguely of the format XXXXXXX-#####, where the ##### part was unique to the item and the XXXXXXX part may or may not have been. BUT, the CD-RWs' receipts printed out with only the XXXXXXX- part. For the first one, I shrugged it off, and sent in the rebate form, etc., since at that particular store, the receipt was printed in an equi-spaced font, and I wondered if the formatting of the receipt form had just knocked the last field off.
But when my girlfriend bought the same item at another Office Max store and the receipt was a proper printout with the proper font and everything, and the ##### part was still missing, I got a little more concerned. Stupidly, I didn't save photocopies of the rebate materials (I usually do, or maybe I just lost them this time around), and sure enough, those two were denied.
I may or may not take the rebate-bait at Office Max again, but if I do, I'll be giving those receipts a close look, and asking annoying questions if anything looks suspicious.
Not to skirt the question, but is this really "absurd overkill?" I'm sure that USB pens/watches/etc have been a boon to corporate espionage.
I'm not yet sure if it's going to fall into the category of "absurd overkill," but at my workplace (a large FDA-regulated manufacturing and research facility), we've just disabled USB support entirely on the machines comprising our HVAC distributed control system. The reasons behind this are partly due to, first, questionable processes of vendor-support technicians using their USB thumb-drives to move system configuration files around from one network instance to another (which is perfectly reasonable and needed sometimes, it's just that they're doing it ad hoc without supervision and, under FDA regs, this raises the questions of 'how much control do we really have over our system?' and 'has the system's "validated" state been disturbed by this laxness?'), and second, as far as we've been able to tell, the anti-virus software we use doesn't automatically scan, say, thumb-drives when they mount (though it really seems that it should, and I still need to do some investigation there in my copious free time).
On the side of the argument calling it all "absurd overkill" - this clamp-down just makes it that much more inconvenient for people using the system to do their job, while not really tightening security up that much, since most people who have access to the system in the first place can figure out plenty of work-arounds. (Hell, part of my job is figuring out those work-arounds - it's why they pay me the Big Bucks(TM), (yeah, right).)
All true. I've accumulated a few Playboys from the 60's and 70's off eBay just for articles/stories/interviews by/with specific people who interest me, and whenever another one arrives, I end up spending an hour or so staring at the ads for the then-cutting-edge-and-now-comically-klunky "hi-fi" systems/other electronics/cars/what-have-you. Then I'll read the article I bought it for, and then inevitablyl get caught up in some of the other articles, especially the news/political analysis/editorials - and find that there was really quite a lot of pretty reasonable, forward-thinking writing going on there.
A big exception, in my mind, has always been their music reviews. They tend to review the most banal, white-bread, mainstream, unadventurous, uninteresting crap I can imagine, and there's always one or two "critics" who give it a high score. Ah, well.
Back to the original question in the thread: Magazines I read, in no particular order:
2600;-)
Skeptic
Skeptical Inquirer
Smithsonian
Scientific American
The Mag. of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Newsweek
Popular Science (occasionally)
Mojo
ICE Magazine (current CD/DVD/music releases)
Consumer Reports
The Big Takeover (edgy rock music-geek mag)
Relix (jam-scene music mag, 'cos I got a free subscription somehow)
occasional guitar/music mags, depending on who's on the cover,
occasional computer mags, depending on what I'm interested in buying,
occasional political mags, depending on what issue comes along and pisses me off, . . . that kinda stuff.
And you'd still have to calibrate your liquid mass flow metre just as often as the petrol station pumps are calibrated
Well, just as often, based on actual usage time/volume, not real-time. Those gas pumps are used for probably the equivalent of several hours per day, I'd guess - at least, a helluva lot more than your own meter, which would be used only as often as you personally pump gas. (Insert obligatory snarky, "providing you don't drive a Hummer" comment here.)
Another easy way to check consistency of measure from a gas pump without using scientifically precise and accurate measuring devices: Just buy five or six identical 2-gallon plastic cans (or a dozen one-gallon ones, if you're really ambitious), and fill them all up to the same volume in the same session. It should be pretty easy to compare their weights to uncover a variance as egregious as 5-10% - and this would also get you around the 1-, 5- and 10-gallon "accurate points" if they're even really there.
Grin, the only redeeming thing about Terre Haute is Rose-Hulman, my only reason for being there
I always used to joke with my friends that when you enter Clay County, they should have speakers set up on the roads to start playing "Dueling banjos", or perhaps institute a "seatbelt and bible law". Maybe even formalize the penalty for a DWB (Driving While Black).
I GREW UP in Clay County, and I won't really argue with you there. There are a lot of outwardly "nice" people there, but scratch the surface, and you find a lot of blinkered, parochial mentality that's a throwback to the fifties - the EIGHTEEN fifties. I also went to Rose-Hulman, got the hell out of TH in favor of a big co-ed school (Rose was still all-male in '90) for my M.S., and am now back in Indianapolis consulting for a big IT-intensive scientific/manufacturing co. It's not such a bad place - lotta good restaurants.
I saw Douglas at Butler U in Indianapolis (a speaking engagement, along with Ray Bradbury) not that long before he died. I had DNA sign a copy of the first edition of The Meaning of Liff:
http://tinyurl.com/29txv
...(even before it was re-titled, re-tooled and revised into The Deeper Meaning of Liff
http://tinyurl.com/2m68y )
- possibly his most obscure book, and one of the funniest things I've ever read. He seemed very tired and a bit harried at the time, and now, looking back, I kinda wish I'd bought (another copy of) one of the books they were also selling at the merch table at the time.
Douglas is missed; in his memory, I make it a point to always know where my towel is.
I just sent three emails from my GMail account to my (free) Hotmail account, and one of them showed up. Make of that what you will, but at least the blockage isn't 100% complete.
new Beastie Boys album....
I tried to rip it in CDex like I did with the Cat Empire CD, but I couldn't see any audio tracks - just data tracks - even after turning off Autoplay.
Have you tried ExactAudioCopy? Download it from www.exactaudiocopy.de and give it a try. Report back if you feel like it - I'd be curious to know if it works.
Hour 1: Purchased, dear child breaks seal on package on the way home, which includes nearly an hour of late rush-hour traffic.
Hour 2: Get home, make dinner for treacherous little ankle-biter, contemplate said ankle-biter's rapidly approaching bedtime and narrowing window for actually watching the stupid DVD.
Hour 3: Debate sequence and timing of bath/DVD/bedtime with yard-ape, watch as yard-ape, already tired and fatigued, becomes progressively more irrational; give in on "bath" item, proposing to start DVD immediately. Do so.
Hour 3.1: Grubby little yard-ape falls sound asleep immediately following opening credits. Carry little bastard upstairs, deposit in bed. Give up for the evening.
Next day - try to convince store that you deserve another copy gratis 'cos you didn't watch the one you had when you had the chance. They've never heard this story before.
Is there a way to tell from the expired disc, whether it was played or not? Highly unlikely. Real bright idea, Flexplay.
Recycling is expensive because so much energy is required to seperate the various components of the garbage from the pile.
Speaking of which, has anybody heard of any more recent developements with the Thermal Depolymerization pilot plant operations? This scheme, if it works, would seriously reduce the amount of sorting/separation of materials needed prior to recycling. Seems like I saw a blurb about new developments on a public TV station, but didn't get a chance to see the whole report.
I don't believe this for one second. Glass recycling schemes predate the whole green thing by decades. In the UK back when virtually every soft drink came in glass bottle form, virtually every bottle had a rebate available to people who returned the bottle. This was 20-30 years ago (and probably earlier, I'm only 32.) Milk deliveries used to pretty much insist your empty bottles be left on the doorstep, if you routinely didn't you'd be charged for their replacement.
This is reuse, not recycling. Pop bottles here in the US used to be reused many times over, as evidenced by the fact that one could still occasionally find a bottle "in circulation" that was twenty or thirty years old. They weren't melted down and *recycled* between uses, only cleaned and reused directly. The deposit you could get refunded was just a way of making it more desirable for the end-user to participate in the program - to bring the bottles back to the store when they bought more.
Slashdot Mirror
Deodorant
A razor
A comb
Air-freshener
A sign that says, "No camping allowed."
Oh, wait - that's my anti-Phish-FAN tool-kit.
(Before ya get your mellow all harshed, I AM a Phish fan, to a degree. ;-) )
Maybe so - they'd certainly be able to reproduce the entire works of William Shakespeare considerably faster than that OTHER million monkeys, too.
Feurio - www.Feurio.de - and CDRWin - www.goldenhawk.com/ - The most powerful audio-CD burning apps I've found, each with their unique functions. Feurio automatically corrects for source files not properly cut on frame boundaries. CDRWin will properly burn a gapless DAO (or, more properly, SAO) audio session and open a new session for later addition of data files. Adaptec/Roxio's crapware never did get those fundamental clues, though they sure jumped on every other faddish feature demanded by brain-dead end-users. The sole worthwhile exception in their oeuvre being DirectCD, and even that is only marginally useful for my purposes.
The thing is, sure, the chance of something going wrong is small, but in a regulated environment, the bar for risk acceptance is much higher. And, in reality, I've seen some firsthand examples of things going wrong and causing some havoc. Just about exactly a year ago, when the MSBlast worm was spreading wildly, and MS issued some of the first (to my knowledge) patches that shut down some of the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) vulnerabilities, I found a record in our company's internal problem-tracking database showing that basically as soon as that patch was installed on one particular server, a client system (literally thousands of miles away, and based on some old borderline DOS-based code) that relied (stupidly, but is it any surprise that some vendor code is crap?) on that particular RPC vulnerability mysteriously (at least, to its users) stopped working. I don't remember exactly which application it was any more, but I remember it talked to a database of some sort on the server, and probably used several stupid, unorthodox methods of winging its data back and forth. Fortunately, it wasn't a life-and-death situation, but I can very easily imagine such crucial situations existing.
I work with Part 11/ER-ES rules (which, to be fair, have recently been made a little less all-encompassing in scope and a little more sane in interpretation) and the rest of the FDA regs covering computer systems validation as part of current Good Manufacturing Practices (and Good Laboratory practices, and Good Documentation Practices, the whole GxP series), on contract at a Big Pharma Co.(TM), and all I can do when I hear about the hospitals pushing back against the mandatory security updates is nod my head and say, "I feel your pain."
It's hard for those outside of FDA-regulated industries to conceive of how many seemingly everyday actions (patching an OS, updating vendor software, changing a few little system settings, saving a little bit of data to a database (or not), etc.) have repercussions that strike fear into the hearts of better engineers/systems analysts than themselves, fear that one little action taken out of turn or without the proper approval could be the difference between your system working merrily along and an FDA auditor deciding to pull on that thread and dredge up enough evidence of "uncontrolled" behavior to deem a system out of compliance and no longer in a "validated state." Sounds melodramatic, I know, but it's real. After you live with it long enough, you develop a) enough experience to sort out the truly vital from the merely worrisome but really trivial, and b) a fatalistic shell that protects you from the worst effects of the stress of keeping all your confounded documentation up to date.
Ya wanna know why drugs are so expensive? It's not what you think.
Burned, hell - maybe some of them will be invalidated by prior art in these just-re-found X-patents!
Actually, many access control card schemes incorporate an "issue code" as part of the data on the card. Once a card with a "later" issue code in a sequence is used, the lock recognizes that "earlier" issue codes are no longer valid. No communication back to a server is needed, although any other offline locks to which a given card has access of course won't be updated until the new card is used in them. The sequence of available numbers for issues codes is simpply made large enough to make it impractical/improbable for someone to manage to cycle through the entire series just to cause an older card to become valid again.
And, on the subject of communications - some locks are fully "online" (and the communications and power cables are very unobtrusive), and others are offline (and communications may be done either manually on a periodic schedule, uploading the data from a reader via a PDA and then to a server, or wirelessly through an RF transmitter). In either case for offline locks, power can be supplied by a 'pack' of several rechargeable or replaceable AA batteries. If the hardware/processor/etc., in the door is optimized enough for power consumption, a single set of 4 AAs can last several months, making the maintenance sufficiently cheap.
I've just assumed that the power is delivered via hinges and wires buried in the door (which would mean custom doors or some sophisticated drilling to retrofit).
That retrofitting expense is why some facilities choose the wireless or offline versions.
If your account isn't verified, go to the All Activity view in your account, and search on all transactions back to an arbitrarily early date. You can at least see the date of your first transaction, and if it was fairly early, there'll be a "Bonus | From | New Account" transaction in the amount of $5.00, from when they were still giving the $5 bonus for opening an account. Mine was apparently opened 3-17-2000, though I'd've sworn it was earlier than that. But hey, I'm in the period specified for the settlement.
Do you know what the limit IS on unverified accounts? Maybe I've overlooked some obvious mention of it, but I only recently found out that there even IS an overall limit on unverified accounts, and I apparently haven't yet exceeded it in the 5+ years I've been using PP; I looked around a bit in their FAQ and related documentation, but haven't yet found the limit specified.
Ah, a relief map!
Or an IP search?
Shuttin' up.
Because there's already a Burger King on the other corner...
I don't think it's at all apocryphal that this is exactly how some chain fast food restaurants pick their locations:
McDonald's: Study traffic patterns, population demographics, civic boundaries and zoning, rental prices, conduct surveys and marketing studies, etc., and optimize all those factors before choosing a location for a new store.
Wendy's: Find a McDonald's, then plop down a new store in the nearest available lot.
To everyone in this sub-thread, I humbly suggest you seek out and try Douwe-Egbert's brand. I have the same distaste for Starbuck's, like Gevalia just fine in general, and to my taste-buds, D-E is significantly better than any Gevalia blend I've tried. The red-bag "full-aroma" blend is smooth, smooth, SMOOTH even at high strengths, without any bitterness or burnt taste at all. I'm not affiliated with www.bestcoffeebymail.com in any way, other than being happy with their service, and knowing that they're the first online place I could find to buy Douwe-Egbert's.
I usually notice that about Starbucks -- not that I drink their coffee more than once or twice a year. I just don't like it that much, for exactly that reason, as well as that it's overpriced.
For my money, Douwe-Egbert's red-bag blend ( www.bestcoffeebymail.com ) is the best coffee in existence - it's smooth and mellow while still being full-bodied and man-enough to stand up to serious additives (turbinado sugar, dairy products, Bailey's, carpet fuzz, paper clips, shards of glass).
Back to the article - this guy's a tool. There've got to be more interesting chainstores to visit worldwide.
I've noticed this, too. A few weeks ago, Office Max had a rebate deal on CD-RWs (I think), and I noticed what appeared to be a scam going on. Other items I bought that week with rebates had a sort of item code on the receipt, vaguely of the format XXXXXXX-#####, where the ##### part was unique to the item and the XXXXXXX part may or may not have been. BUT, the CD-RWs' receipts printed out with only the XXXXXXX- part. For the first one, I shrugged it off, and sent in the rebate form, etc., since at that particular store, the receipt was printed in an equi-spaced font, and I wondered if the formatting of the receipt form had just knocked the last field off.
But when my girlfriend bought the same item at another Office Max store and the receipt was a proper printout with the proper font and everything, and the ##### part was still missing, I got a little more concerned. Stupidly, I didn't save photocopies of the rebate materials (I usually do, or maybe I just lost them this time around), and sure enough, those two were denied.
I may or may not take the rebate-bait at Office Max again, but if I do, I'll be giving those receipts a close look, and asking annoying questions if anything looks suspicious.
I'm not yet sure if it's going to fall into the category of "absurd overkill," but at my workplace (a large FDA-regulated manufacturing and research facility), we've just disabled USB support entirely on the machines comprising our HVAC distributed control system. The reasons behind this are partly due to, first, questionable processes of vendor-support technicians using their USB thumb-drives to move system configuration files around from one network instance to another (which is perfectly reasonable and needed sometimes, it's just that they're doing it ad hoc without supervision and, under FDA regs, this raises the questions of 'how much control do we really have over our system?' and 'has the system's "validated" state been disturbed by this laxness?'), and second, as far as we've been able to tell, the anti-virus software we use doesn't automatically scan, say, thumb-drives when they mount (though it really seems that it should, and I still need to do some investigation there in my copious free time).
On the side of the argument calling it all "absurd overkill" - this clamp-down just makes it that much more inconvenient for people using the system to do their job, while not really tightening security up that much, since most people who have access to the system in the first place can figure out plenty of work-arounds. (Hell, part of my job is figuring out those work-arounds - it's why they pay me the Big Bucks(TM), (yeah, right).)
A big exception, in my mind, has always been their music reviews. They tend to review the most banal, white-bread, mainstream, unadventurous, uninteresting crap I can imagine, and there's always one or two "critics" who give it a high score. Ah, well.
Back to the original question in the thread: Magazines I read, in no particular order:
2600 ;-)
Skeptic
Skeptical Inquirer
Smithsonian
Scientific American
The Mag. of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Newsweek
Popular Science (occasionally)
Mojo
ICE Magazine (current CD/DVD/music releases)
Consumer Reports
The Big Takeover (edgy rock music-geek mag)
Relix (jam-scene music mag, 'cos I got a free subscription somehow)
occasional guitar/music mags, depending on who's on the cover,
occasional computer mags, depending on what I'm interested in buying,
occasional political mags, depending on what issue comes along and pisses me off, . . . that kinda stuff.
Well, just as often, based on actual usage time/volume, not real-time. Those gas pumps are used for probably the equivalent of several hours per day, I'd guess - at least, a helluva lot more than your own meter, which would be used only as often as you personally pump gas. (Insert obligatory snarky, "providing you don't drive a Hummer" comment here.)
Another easy way to check consistency of measure from a gas pump without using scientifically precise and accurate measuring devices: Just buy five or six identical 2-gallon plastic cans (or a dozen one-gallon ones, if you're really ambitious), and fill them all up to the same volume in the same session. It should be pretty easy to compare their weights to uncover a variance as egregious as 5-10% - and this would also get you around the 1-, 5- and 10-gallon "accurate points" if they're even really there.
You don't live in Indiana, right? That'd be pronounced "pitchers" by roughly 75% of the indigenous population. ;^p~~
I always used to joke with my friends that when you enter Clay County, they should have speakers set up on the roads to start playing "Dueling banjos", or perhaps institute a "seatbelt and bible law". Maybe even formalize the penalty for a DWB (Driving While Black).
I GREW UP in Clay County, and I won't really argue with you there. There are a lot of outwardly "nice" people there, but scratch the surface, and you find a lot of blinkered, parochial mentality that's a throwback to the fifties - the EIGHTEEN fifties. I also went to Rose-Hulman, got the hell out of TH in favor of a big co-ed school (Rose was still all-male in '90) for my M.S., and am now back in Indianapolis consulting for a big IT-intensive scientific/manufacturing co. It's not such a bad place - lotta good restaurants.
http://tinyurl.com/29txv
...(even before it was re-titled, re-tooled and revised into The Deeper Meaning of Liff
http://tinyurl.com/2m68y )
- possibly his most obscure book, and one of the funniest things I've ever read. He seemed very tired and a bit harried at the time, and now, looking back, I kinda wish I'd bought (another copy of) one of the books they were also selling at the merch table at the time.
Douglas is missed; in his memory, I make it a point to always know where my towel is.
I just sent three emails from my GMail account to my (free) Hotmail account, and one of them showed up. Make of that what you will, but at least the blockage isn't 100% complete.
Have you tried ExactAudioCopy? Download it from www.exactaudiocopy.de and give it a try. Report back if you feel like it - I'd be curious to know if it works.
Right on, but even more likely,...
Hour 1: Purchased, dear child breaks seal on package on the way home, which includes nearly an hour of late rush-hour traffic.
Hour 2: Get home, make dinner for treacherous little ankle-biter, contemplate said ankle-biter's rapidly approaching bedtime and narrowing window for actually watching the stupid DVD.
Hour 3: Debate sequence and timing of bath/DVD/bedtime with yard-ape, watch as yard-ape, already tired and fatigued, becomes progressively more irrational; give in on "bath" item, proposing to start DVD immediately. Do so.
Hour 3.1: Grubby little yard-ape falls sound asleep immediately following opening credits. Carry little bastard upstairs, deposit in bed. Give up for the evening.
Next day - try to convince store that you deserve another copy gratis 'cos you didn't watch the one you had when you had the chance. They've never heard this story before.
Is there a way to tell from the expired disc, whether it was played or not? Highly unlikely. Real bright idea, Flexplay.
Speaking of which, has anybody heard of any more recent developements with the Thermal Depolymerization pilot plant operations? This scheme, if it works, would seriously reduce the amount of sorting/separation of materials needed prior to recycling. Seems like I saw a blurb about new developments on a public TV station, but didn't get a chance to see the whole report.
This is reuse, not recycling. Pop bottles here in the US used to be reused many times over, as evidenced by the fact that one could still occasionally find a bottle "in circulation" that was twenty or thirty years old. They weren't melted down and *recycled* between uses, only cleaned and reused directly. The deposit you could get refunded was just a way of making it more desirable for the end-user to participate in the program - to bring the bottles back to the store when they bought more.