Way back when companies started live chat I thought it might be a good idea, since you can save the transcript and be sure you didn't forget to write anything down. But all I ever get back when I ask a question is the closest canned answer to my question. Not, mind you, an answer to my question, just an answer to a common question that has roughly the same words. For all I can tell there's just a primitive program on the other end which picks out the first four words from my query and then gives the FAQ response based on a simple match.
That's why the advice you always used to hear from expert Counterstrike players was "turn your resolution way down so enemies stick out".
Personally I think what makes it frustrating is the lack of a tool you use without thinking in the real world - depth perception. With my poor vision games have pretty much the same resolution as real life, but I still can't pick out patters as well because it's all flat.
If the FCC killed off data metering and didn't allow the carriers to raise their prices, the carriers would respond the same way landlords respond to rent control - they wouldn't put another damn dime into improving their networks. Ten years from now the rest of the world would be on, like, 8G while here in the US we'd still be using the exact same network we're using today. You'd end up getting about ten kilobits per second during peak hours as everyone else using the closest cell tries bittorrent the latest two star movie in super high def, and your voice calls would only go through because they drop down to 1x where they don't have to compete with data.
Yeah. I have a buddy who keeps flipping back and forth between Comcast and Astound. As soon as the promo period runs out he calls them up and demands they continue the discount. If they refuse he calls up the other company and gets their promo rate. He's been paying promo rates for years and years now.
...unless the total bundled cost is LESS than the price of internet alone. That's never the case.
Not true, at least where I live. "Basic" cable + internet is cheaper than just internet. The reason is basic cable includes all the broadcasters (like HSN and QVC) that pay the cable company to include their content.
These two new cases are reminiscent of the so-called 'Berlin patient,' the only person known to have been cured of infection from the human immunodeficiency virus.
There is some evidence to suggest "Berlin Patient" Timothy Ray Brown may not actually be cured of HIV. They just don't know for sure.
In this case tax receipts went up more than could be explained by growth and inflation. But that's not the point. The point is effective tax rates were never anywhere near 70%, so any argument based on that assertion is suspect.
You're confusing tax rates with tax receipts. People didn't actually pay those higher rates. The high marginal rate was really nothing more than a subsidy for cities and counties. If you had money to invest you put it in double-tax-free muni bonds so you didn't have to pay any taxes on it. That was the real reason tax receipts went up when the tax rates were lowered - people moved their money out of munis because you could make more money even after taxes.
Not only that, but there were all sorts of ways to shelter your money from taxes that have since been eliminated. Everybody who made any kind of money had controlling interest in an money losing oil well or chinchilla farm or some other BS business. They wrote off the family car and half the house. Also, it was a hell of a lot easier to do cash business. Currency reporting requirements didn't happen until 1985, so a lot of people were completely off the IRS's radar.
In short, those high tax rates didn't hurt the economy because nobody paid them. The Economist had an article about this a few years back (behind a pay wall, unfortunately). It turns out wealthy people all over the world pay at most about 25% tax on their income, even in places with very high marginal rates like Japan and Sweden. As tax rates go higher they change their behavior. They take fewer risks and spend more time dealing with taxes and less time trying to make money. Worst case they move their money out of the country and invest it where tax rates are lower.
Look at corporate taxes. The US now has the highest corporate tax rates in the world. And yet, corporations pay almost nothing in taxes, because they've adjusted their operations to account for the tax code.
Yeah, and there are probably at least, oh, ten people who can really justify the cost of a Concorde ticket for same-day meetings as opposed to having the second meeting the next day.
Oracle has better support? Bah. You know what we get from Oracle? Case numbers. Help, not much. Sure, the people are pleasant and understandable, but I can't remember the last time they were actually able to help us.
Pretty much the computer spits out a number which the mechanic looks up in a book and then replaces the part the book says to replace. There really isn't a lot of human analysis going on with automotive repair.
You wouldn't do that, not because US high school graduates are too expensive, but because a US high school degree isn't a good indication of literacy. Maybe in India a high school degree means something (I don't know one way or another). But in the US, a BS is the new high school diploma.
Apparently you have no imagination, which here in the U.S. anymore doesn't surprise me one bit, all the imagination, critical thinking skills, and initiative have been bred out of or trained out of just about everyone.
Maybe if you don't want people to treat you like an asshole you shouldn't act like one.
If by that you mean I'm an engineer who can actually analyze a concept without going all starry-eyed, well, that's true. Clearly you spent too much time reading science fiction and not enough studying actual science. It's fine to use your imagination, but at some point you need to leaven it with some connection with reality.
It is cheaper to put water into LEO from here, then it is from the moon.
There is U on the moon which can be bred into Pu. This can then be used for a number of devices in space. Not just for mankind, but rovers and sats.
Other minerals can be denied access to.
There isn't any reason to put water into LEO or breed plutonium on the moon. We have more plutonium than we know what to do with already, and if we run out we can make more here. You keep thinking we can use this or that resource on the moon because it's cheaper than sending it from earth, but you still haven't come up with a reason for us to go there to start with. That's why we never went back, by the way, not because we couldn't.
And has been pointed out by brilliant ppl the world over (hawking comes to mind), our staying on earth is simply putting all of our eggs in one basket. Life goes extinct every so often. Normally, it is about 27 million years, but we never know when else it will come. OTOH, by having mankind on Mars, it helps to isolate us from ELEs.
Hawking is a smart guy. In astrophysics.
If you're worried about extinction events it's orders of magnitude cheaper, easier, and more reliable to build a really deep bunker here on the earth. Pretty much no matter what happens to the earth it will be more hospitable to human life than anywhere else in the solar system. Think about that for a minute - even if we had a global thermonuclear war the earth would still be the best place for us to live. Also, as it stands we're not even close to having the technology to maintain an independent colony somewhere other than our home planet. If we were all wiped out the colonists would die soon after when their supplies stopped coming.
..and the AC has it. Did everyone else forget about The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress already?
Let's assume the Chinese build a mass driver (assuming you could actually build one) on the moon and threatened to drop heavy rocks on us. The proper response would be "If you do that, we're going to turn your country into a vast expanse of radioactive glass." Trillions of yuan wasted because they forgot we had nukes. Stupid Chinese!
Eh, there's plenty of water here on the earth. Plutonium isn't naturally occurring, so I'm not sure where you're getting that. "Other minerals" are also here on the earth. As far as HE3 is concerned, we don't know what to do with it, so I'm not sure why they would go to the moon to get it.
And the ability to live off world is useful how?
If that's your idea of "starters" I can't even imagine how useless the items further down the list are.
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This is wrong. Verizon has a 2G network. It doesn't
Way back when companies started live chat I thought it might be a good idea, since you can save the transcript and be sure you didn't forget to write anything down. But all I ever get back when I ask a question is the closest canned answer to my question. Not, mind you, an answer to my question, just an answer to a common question that has roughly the same words. For all I can tell there's just a primitive program on the other end which picks out the first four words from my query and then gives the FAQ response based on a simple match.
That's why the advice you always used to hear from expert Counterstrike players was "turn your resolution way down so enemies stick out".
Personally I think what makes it frustrating is the lack of a tool you use without thinking in the real world - depth perception. With my poor vision games have pretty much the same resolution as real life, but I still can't pick out patters as well because it's all flat.
If the FCC killed off data metering and didn't allow the carriers to raise their prices, the carriers would respond the same way landlords respond to rent control - they wouldn't put another damn dime into improving their networks. Ten years from now the rest of the world would be on, like, 8G while here in the US we'd still be using the exact same network we're using today. You'd end up getting about ten kilobits per second during peak hours as everyone else using the closest cell tries bittorrent the latest two star movie in super high def, and your voice calls would only go through because they drop down to 1x where they don't have to compete with data.
Did they ever offer unlimited 4G plans, though?
Yeah. I have a buddy who keeps flipping back and forth between Comcast and Astound. As soon as the promo period runs out he calls them up and demands they continue the discount. If they refuse he calls up the other company and gets their promo rate. He's been paying promo rates for years and years now.
...unless the total bundled cost is LESS than the price of internet alone. That's never the case.
Not true, at least where I live. "Basic" cable + internet is cheaper than just internet. The reason is basic cable includes all the broadcasters (like HSN and QVC) that pay the cable company to include their content.
These two new cases are reminiscent of the so-called 'Berlin patient,' the only person known to have been cured of infection from the human immunodeficiency virus.
There is some evidence to suggest "Berlin Patient" Timothy Ray Brown may not actually be cured of HIV. They just don't know for sure.
You've missed the point completely.
In this case tax receipts went up more than could be explained by growth and inflation. But that's not the point. The point is effective tax rates were never anywhere near 70%, so any argument based on that assertion is suspect.
You're confusing tax rates with tax receipts. People didn't actually pay those higher rates. The high marginal rate was really nothing more than a subsidy for cities and counties. If you had money to invest you put it in double-tax-free muni bonds so you didn't have to pay any taxes on it. That was the real reason tax receipts went up when the tax rates were lowered - people moved their money out of munis because you could make more money even after taxes.
Not only that, but there were all sorts of ways to shelter your money from taxes that have since been eliminated. Everybody who made any kind of money had controlling interest in an money losing oil well or chinchilla farm or some other BS business. They wrote off the family car and half the house. Also, it was a hell of a lot easier to do cash business. Currency reporting requirements didn't happen until 1985, so a lot of people were completely off the IRS's radar.
In short, those high tax rates didn't hurt the economy because nobody paid them. The Economist had an article about this a few years back (behind a pay wall, unfortunately). It turns out wealthy people all over the world pay at most about 25% tax on their income, even in places with very high marginal rates like Japan and Sweden. As tax rates go higher they change their behavior. They take fewer risks and spend more time dealing with taxes and less time trying to make money. Worst case they move their money out of the country and invest it where tax rates are lower.
Look at corporate taxes. The US now has the highest corporate tax rates in the world. And yet, corporations pay almost nothing in taxes, because they've adjusted their operations to account for the tax code.
Yeah, and there are probably at least, oh, ten people who can really justify the cost of a Concorde ticket for same-day meetings as opposed to having the second meeting the next day.
How many years have you worked as a mechanic?
Oracle has better support? Bah. You know what we get from Oracle? Case numbers. Help, not much. Sure, the people are pleasant and understandable, but I can't remember the last time they were actually able to help us.
Pretty much the computer spits out a number which the mechanic looks up in a book and then replaces the part the book says to replace. There really isn't a lot of human analysis going on with automotive repair.
You wouldn't do that, not because US high school graduates are too expensive, but because a US high school degree isn't a good indication of literacy. Maybe in India a high school degree means something (I don't know one way or another). But in the US, a BS is the new high school diploma.
It's weather when things are cooler and OMG GLOBAL WARMING!!!!! when it gets warmer.
Says the guy who wrote this:
Maybe if you don't want people to treat you like an asshole you shouldn't act like one.
If by that you mean I'm an engineer who can actually analyze a concept without going all starry-eyed, well, that's true. Clearly you spent too much time reading science fiction and not enough studying actual science. It's fine to use your imagination, but at some point you need to leaven it with some connection with reality.
They already have nukes. If that's what they're thinking it doesn't matter what happens on the moon.
That makes no sense.
There is U on the moon which can be bred into Pu. This can then be used for a number of devices in space. Not just for mankind, but rovers and sats.
Other minerals can be denied access to.
There isn't any reason to put water into LEO or breed plutonium on the moon. We have more plutonium than we know what to do with already, and if we run out we can make more here. You keep thinking we can use this or that resource on the moon because it's cheaper than sending it from earth, but you still haven't come up with a reason for us to go there to start with. That's why we never went back, by the way, not because we couldn't.
And has been pointed out by brilliant ppl the world over (hawking comes to mind), our staying on earth is simply putting all of our eggs in one basket. Life goes extinct every so often. Normally, it is about 27 million years, but we never know when else it will come. OTOH, by having mankind on Mars, it helps to isolate us from ELEs.
Hawking is a smart guy. In astrophysics.
If you're worried about extinction events it's orders of magnitude cheaper, easier, and more reliable to build a really deep bunker here on the earth. Pretty much no matter what happens to the earth it will be more hospitable to human life than anywhere else in the solar system. Think about that for a minute - even if we had a global thermonuclear war the earth would still be the best place for us to live. Also, as it stands we're not even close to having the technology to maintain an independent colony somewhere other than our home planet. If we were all wiped out the colonists would die soon after when their supplies stopped coming.
No it wouldn't. They wouldn't have any reason to sacrifice their country like that.
Let's assume the Chinese build a mass driver (assuming you could actually build one) on the moon and threatened to drop heavy rocks on us. The proper response would be "If you do that, we're going to turn your country into a vast expanse of radioactive glass." Trillions of yuan wasted because they forgot we had nukes. Stupid Chinese!
Eh, there's plenty of water here on the earth. Plutonium isn't naturally occurring, so I'm not sure where you're getting that. "Other minerals" are also here on the earth. As far as HE3 is concerned, we don't know what to do with it, so I'm not sure why they would go to the moon to get it.
And the ability to live off world is useful how?
If that's your idea of "starters" I can't even imagine how useless the items further down the list are.