Ooo, is that what your parents charge you for the room above the garage?
I pay a $1800/month mortgage on 4 acres. BFD.
Would you wear shorts and a tanktop to a typical job interview or sales presentation? Probably not.
But I don't get off on impressing people. It's more fun just to walk into a store, knowing what I want or close enough, and leaving with it after paying for it. Unless the guy seems fairly knowledgeable, it's not fun talking to them, and I'm not fun to talk to.
I've gotten the spiel with the cell phones I've purchased, too. "You know, Li- batteries do wear out". Yep. So?
The coolest thing, though, was with a relative's phone, one of those Motorola units that was built around the battery, when he got a new phone, they pulled this little chip out of it, put it in the new phone, and voila, all contacts, etc. were in the chip.
they would publish sales in the paper or on-line, but of course have about one item in-stock, offer rain checks, which might or might not get honored down the road, etc.
They want the "bait", and as much of the "switch" as they can get away with.
If there is no money in being a big-box retailer, then hurry up and go out of business. Don't stoop to stilly pricing games, pissing off your customers, etc.
Besides, if you get those "20% bad customers" to not shop at your store, who becomes the riff-raff then?
The idea is to cut the standard B&O tax a couple of tenths of a percentage, and add a tax on telecommunications, including pagers, cell phones and landlines. They want to get it to include VoIP as well.
Of course, what this will do is make the companies a little mad, because they have to keep track of it and collect the $$$ on behalf of the government taxing body, but the telcos will of course pass those costs onto the consumer...
Oh well. It's not like there are already various state and county taxes on the phone lines, cell phone towers, etc.
Credit card return... generally, challenging a credit card charge, the amount has to be over $50, and you only get credited back the amount over $50 you initially spent...
The woman in the article may not realize it, but even with the $2,000 a year she spends, she may be far less profitable than a person who spends $200 on a single splurge purchase once.
Oh, I don't know. Cash flow is cash flow. Companies of most retailers' size probably have "sweep accounts" for their daily cash register deposits. The till income is swept into an interest-bearing money market account daily. Actually, it doesn't officially earn interest, but some sort of funky credit system with the bank, that offsets costs on other accounts and transactions, etc.
The longer it takes you to return the item, the more short-term interest they've made off of it, or they've been able to use your return to leverage against more long-term (and more profitable) instruments.
But the system is set up to rook the consumer more and more. Think Check-21. Will the average consumer ever be able to set up a Net-30 or Net-60 account with a store? Nope. Consumers don't get float anymore, but companies will always have it...
Yes, especially with homeowner's insurance, you have to figure out if the long-term costs of making a non-catstrophic claim like that are worth paying for or financing the problem out of your own pocket.
I personally think it's a form of fraud for an insurance company to do what Allstate (and it's not just Allstate that does this) does.
At least the premiums shouldn't stay tripled for the lifetime of the mortgage, and will come down eventually.
Your car insurance works the same way. Get into too many accidents, whether they're your fault or not, and you get put into the shitmagnet...er, high-risk category.
If your insurance on your car is $100/mo ($600 bianually), you got to figure that a $2000 claim for repairing your headlight and bumper for rear-ending someone, or replacing the door you screwed up when backing up into the garage, etc., is worth doubling that rate for the next 3 years...
And some insurance companies are quicker at this than others. I'm more wary of low-priced insurers, because one claim with them will probably boot you into the higher-risk (and more profitable) categories.
GEICO has been accused of doing this in the past (take a lifetime 0-claim safe driver, driving a Buick, who gets a silly speeding or no-stop ticket, who gets dropped by the company, and can only be insured by fly-by-night high premium companies now. So much for loyalty).
I can't wait until companies start categorizing employees for pinkslips/downsizing based on their credit reports. And you thought HP's mandatory minimum substandard performer ratings were bad...
Yep, like the area that had a few Wal-Mart super centers, and the meatcutters there successfully managed to get union representation. Wal-Mart downsized them, and replaced on-site meat cutters with pre-packaged cut meat that IBP or Tyson was more than willing to supply them with.
You mean, kind of like the Alternative Minimum Tax in the US? The net of deductions and income amounts for the AMT was greatly increased in the tax bill pushed by the Bushites a couple of years ago.
The AMT was set up to catch the top 0.x% of people in the US who can work the system to have no income tax on millions of dollars of income. Now, if you declare enough deductions (say, child care, or the big new deduction for your children that was a part of it), and you make more than $50,000, you could get sucked into it as well. AMT is taxed at the top tax rate regardless of your actual income.
"Hey, I'm super-rich, and I hate the fucking AMT, so, George, for this $100,000 election check, will you either get rid of it or make more of the untermenschen qualify for it as well?"
Mmmmethinks that BillG and SteveB made enough political capital infusions to the presidential campaign that any such interference from the government has been taken care of.
How exactly do you nuke a corporation, without revoking its charters of doing business and seizing its assets?
...except, I don't think that MS has a patent on TCP/IP. Maybe particular Microsoft-specific functionality added onto it, but not the core of the protocol.
But I wouldn't be suprised if the USPTO at some point grants Microsoft various patents on TCP/IP that have been prior art for, oh, at least 30 years. George has to pay off his political loans (they were loans, george, not "capital". You know you need to pay them back with interest, and unfortunately, so to the rest of us).
What would have been far more interesting would be to skim the surface of the actual design and layout process of the chip, the software used that actually builds the layout and chip design, and the uber-geeks that actually simulate the design, identify bottlenecks or problems in the design, and hand-optimize the chip design before committing it to the mask process ("tape"), and the tools and techniques they use to do this.
It's a lot more than a SPICE simulation, I think...
Because you don't have to story peoples' names or any other information! You just have a bunch of dna entries, but you don't know who they belong too, where they live, etc. You can't even figure out who is a voter from the database. If you have the dna from someone you can check them against the database, but you can't do it the other way around. So as far as the government or anyone else who might abuse voter information is considered, the database is just about useless.
What about removing, say, a convicted felon from the database? Just get a sample of his dna and pull the matching strand from the database.
So, this becomes then a national database, where you know what your DNA "hash" is, right?
Well, in most districts, there is a requirement that you are qualified to vote in that district, whether it is the local city council seat or federal Representative district. So they will need to correlate DNA hashes to meat-world addresses. So you haven't really solved anything.
Besides, it would then be entirely feasible that Experian, et al., would get access to this database, one way or the other (cross-check addresses with credit reports, and then figure out likely DNA hash matches). I would be suprised if it isn't farmed out to them in the first place.
So then we will need point-of DNA verification, where a machine samples some swab (hair follicle? cheek swab? anal probe?) of your DNA to verify your presented DNA hash before you can proceed.
So instead of presenting documentary evidence to get a voter card, you replace it with a very expensive and complicated system, that does nothing to improve accuracy?
...at least the federal elections (House of Representatives, Senate, President) will require amending the constitution. The federal-level voting day is actually written into the Constitution.
New forms of voter fraud are... being a GOP registration card collector, and losing those not marked GOP (or vice-versa), misrepresenting the form so that an "affirmative" selection is really the opposite of what the user intended, etc.
Avenues that haven't really been pursued in the US include losing absentee ballots as they are moving through the mail system, miscalibrating optical-based readers, challenging voter credentials at the polling place, holding "rallies" near the likely access paths to polling places, etc.
Limit the official political season to maybe 3 months. 1 month before primary, then 2 months before final runoff election. In the case of US president, keep the process.
I love how desperate the parties are at keeping the status quo. In Washington, they are pushing for open primaries. In Oregon, they just made them closed (i.e., if you are an independent/not registered with a party, you essentially can't vote). The two parties are VERY against open primaries, and for reasons I can't fathom, so is the Libertarian party.
If the two or 3 best candidates from the primary happen to be of the same party, then so be it. The other party(ies) should not automatically get a seat at the table, as it were.
Although I don't live in Portland, OR., my Oregon ballot was just one page long, even with 7 local initiatives on it. Oregon essentially has an all-absentee ballot election, the so-called "Mail-in vote".
What is interesting about the initiative process in most states is that initiatives can be initiated and funded by out-of-state entities. Liberty Mutual Insurance Company is trying to alter Oregon's workers' compensation system, to its benefit, of course, by way of a state initiative. Other non-Oregon entities have gotten other initiatives on the ballot as well.
Just like in California a few years ago, Pete Wilson made pathetic attempts arguing that initiatives to try and curb the Indian tribal casinos in California were not funded by Las Vegas casinos.
What is probably the most nefarious and slimy part about the initiative process in most states is the "professional" signature gatherers that are used. They are rarely unbiased. They often are practically clueless about what they're trying to pimp. And they are essentially unaccountable. THIS is what scares me.
It is about as crooked as a union "invitation" card for more information about the union actually counting actually as a vote for union representation.
...maybe it's just me, but when I was a kid growing up in the 70's, the "terrorism" most common was being on an airliner that was hijacked. The most common destination for US planes was Cuba, but it affected Europe as well.
then, the pro-Communist/Marxist terror groups, like the Red Brigade, started kidnapping people. There was an American Army general that was kidnapped in the 80's who was killed, but he got a bullet in the back of the head, if memory serves me right.
Then it kind of died out. Sure, the regional terror (Israel/Palestinians, ETA/Basques vs Spain and France, IRA/England) groups kept things going, but it mostly died out in the 80's and 90's.
Then, things got interesting again at the turn.
But is it worse now than it was 20 years ago? Hmm... I don't feel so bad in the US, but I left the Chicago area. Chicago would be #4 in my book of targets to do something big in (NYC, WADC, LA).
Now what would happen if a community in the US decided to play the "kidnap-behead" trick in the US? Let's say some wahoos decide they don't like Islamic people. Portland might be a good area for this, because one is pretty close to somke pretty isolated wilderness only an hour or two from Portland. But it could also be some Islamic "lone wolf" who does it too. Besides, will we ever decide that serial killers (like Ted Bundy, "Green River Killer", etc., are not also terrorists? Or does one have to have some sort of political motive to provide some semblance of motive for one's actions to be a "terrorist"? Would Critical Mass participants be rightly classified terrorists?)
Think about the trouble the US had tracking down that wack job in North Carolina/South Carolina/Georgia, the guy who had been shooting womens clinic doctors, and who "lived off the land" (and Taco Bell dumpsters) for a couple of years.
So the US is kind of lucky, really. the "terror" picture is mostly abstract right now, with one very physical reminder of it (I think that OKC has mostly slipped from the collective consciousness, but it's probably THE most probable threat, not external asshats like Al Kwaydah). But that's it.
It's all 7000 miles away right now. It's mostly happening right now to people from other countries. Because a few American soldiers die every day, more or less, we're kind of numb to this small scale death rate. You probably hear about almost as many people dying driving to/from work on the daily news.
And it's being used to justify all sorts of neat and dandy things by the Government. Did we need the Patriot Act to finally catch Malvo and the other guy? Did we need the Patriot Act to finally catch that slippery eel Ted Bundy? We didn't need it to catch Tim McVeigh or his cowardly buddy Terry McNichols (at least Tim had the guts to face the death penalty).
The cops already know how to work habeus corpus to their advantage. They already know how to detain people for "questioning" for more than 72 hours without charging them with anything (because they're not under arrest, they're not exactly subject to HC). They didn't need secret wiretaps to catch any of those guys. They didn't need all the stuff in the Patriot Act to catch McNichols/McVeigh, either.
It's been a big power grab.
Oh well, I guess I've run out of steam. I guess I sound like I'm crying about spilt milk. Maybe I am.
...all it would take would be a mail truck here or there catching on fire this time of year. How many absentee ballots were lost? Don't know.
Or, just a malicious truck driver or postal employee "forgetting" to transfer a mail bag or, deciding he was too tired, simply throwing it into the dumpster.
Such things have happened in the past (and the employees eventually punished, but...), now we would just need to add a couple of politically motivated postal employees willing to Take One for the Dubya! o(or Kerry).
Does anyone else out there feel like this year's election is being run by nutheads, like it's some big self-fulfilling prophecy?
The US is looking VERY bush-league, almost African or Central American in its quality. International election observers in the US? Does anyone see something wrong with this picture? Why don't the crackpots just go crab fishing (i.e., throw themselves into the crab pots as bait)?
...It depends. If you had a well-designed database, and reasonably partitioned datasets, a given query could be parcelled out to each server, and get you results far quicker than on a monolithic computer.
If it wasn't so, then it wouldn't be a feature of Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, etc...
Re:Fredericksburg Rural Area
on
Broadband Bits
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· Score: 1
rural places CAN get broadband
Well, I wouldn't call Fredericksburg, VA, very rural. It's a bedroom community for Washington DC now. It *feels* rural, but it ain't.
Now, I live in the Willamette Valley, in OR. I'm about 15 miles from Salem, 10 miles from McMinnville (and only 3 miles from the Verizon CO in Amity). No DSL. definitely no cable TV. Don't worry, I'm definitely rural. Nearest neighbors are about 3/4 mi. from my house.
Good thing there are places like OnlineMac, which offer wireless broadband. 768kbps symmetrical DSL, static IP, very brief TOS agreement. $50/mo. Can't beat that! It uses a Waverider modem (it's a 900MHz-ish link to the tower).
I'll stay with it, even if Verizon does manage to deploy Fibre-to-the-curb (or whatever it is) down Hwy 99 in the next 20 years, because I bet it'll be WiMax first, but it will have annoying TOS agreement and limitations.
Re:does broadband change a town to a city?
on
Broadband Bits
·
· Score: 1
Yes, it was the same issue brought up when the Rural Electrification project was initiated...
It brought all those hick ranchers and farmers out in the hinterlands into the 20th century.
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Ooo, is that what your parents charge you for the room above the garage?
I pay a $1800/month mortgage on 4 acres. BFD.
Would you wear shorts and a tanktop to a typical job interview or sales presentation? Probably not.
But I don't get off on impressing people. It's more fun just to walk into a store, knowing what I want or close enough, and leaving with it after paying for it. Unless the guy seems fairly knowledgeable, it's not fun talking to them, and I'm not fun to talk to.
I've gotten the spiel with the cell phones I've purchased, too. "You know, Li- batteries do wear out". Yep. So?
The coolest thing, though, was with a relative's phone, one of those Motorola units that was built around the battery, when he got a new phone, they pulled this little chip out of it, put it in the new phone, and voila, all contacts, etc. were in the chip.
they would publish sales in the paper or on-line, but of course have about one item in-stock, offer rain checks, which might or might not get honored down the road, etc.
They want the "bait", and as much of the "switch" as they can get away with.
If there is no money in being a big-box retailer, then hurry up and go out of business. Don't stoop to stilly pricing games, pissing off your customers, etc.
Besides, if you get those "20% bad customers" to not shop at your store, who becomes the riff-raff then?
It was in the Oregonian today.
The idea is to cut the standard B&O tax a couple of tenths of a percentage, and add a tax on telecommunications, including pagers, cell phones and landlines. They want to get it to include VoIP as well.
Of course, what this will do is make the companies a little mad, because they have to keep track of it and collect the $$$ on behalf of the government taxing body, but the telcos will of course pass those costs onto the consumer...
Oh well. It's not like there are already various state and county taxes on the phone lines, cell phone towers, etc.
Credit card return... generally, challenging a credit card charge, the amount has to be over $50, and you only get credited back the amount over $50 you initially spent...
Not gonna work so well with a $18 CD+.
The woman in the article may not realize it, but even with the $2,000 a year she spends, she may be far less profitable than a person who spends $200 on a single splurge purchase once.
Oh, I don't know. Cash flow is cash flow. Companies of most retailers' size probably have "sweep accounts" for their daily cash register deposits. The till income is swept into an interest-bearing money market account daily. Actually, it doesn't officially earn interest, but some sort of funky credit system with the bank, that offsets costs on other accounts and transactions, etc.
The longer it takes you to return the item, the more short-term interest they've made off of it, or they've been able to use your return to leverage against more long-term (and more profitable) instruments.
But the system is set up to rook the consumer more and more. Think Check-21. Will the average consumer ever be able to set up a Net-30 or Net-60 account with a store? Nope. Consumers don't get float anymore, but companies will always have it...
Yes, especially with homeowner's insurance, you have to figure out if the long-term costs of making a non-catstrophic claim like that are worth paying for or financing the problem out of your own pocket.
I personally think it's a form of fraud for an insurance company to do what Allstate (and it's not just Allstate that does this) does.
At least the premiums shouldn't stay tripled for the lifetime of the mortgage, and will come down eventually.
Your car insurance works the same way. Get into too many accidents, whether they're your fault or not, and you get put into the shitmagnet...er, high-risk category.
If your insurance on your car is $100/mo ($600 bianually), you got to figure that a $2000 claim for repairing your headlight and bumper for rear-ending someone, or replacing the door you screwed up when backing up into the garage, etc., is worth doubling that rate for the next 3 years...
And some insurance companies are quicker at this than others. I'm more wary of low-priced insurers, because one claim with them will probably boot you into the higher-risk (and more profitable) categories.
GEICO has been accused of doing this in the past (take a lifetime 0-claim safe driver, driving a Buick, who gets a silly speeding or no-stop ticket, who gets dropped by the company, and can only be insured by fly-by-night high premium companies now. So much for loyalty).
I can't wait until companies start categorizing employees for pinkslips/downsizing based on their credit reports. And you thought HP's mandatory minimum substandard performer ratings were bad...
Yep, like the area that had a few Wal-Mart super centers, and the meatcutters there successfully managed to get union representation. Wal-Mart downsized them, and replaced on-site meat cutters with pre-packaged cut meat that IBP or Tyson was more than willing to supply them with.
You mean, kind of like the Alternative Minimum Tax in the US? The net of deductions and income amounts for the AMT was greatly increased in the tax bill pushed by the Bushites a couple of years ago.
The AMT was set up to catch the top 0.x% of people in the US who can work the system to have no income tax on millions of dollars of income. Now, if you declare enough deductions (say, child care, or the big new deduction for your children that was a part of it), and you make more than $50,000, you could get sucked into it as well. AMT is taxed at the top tax rate regardless of your actual income.
"Hey, I'm super-rich, and I hate the fucking AMT, so, George, for this $100,000 election check, will you either get rid of it or make more of the untermenschen qualify for it as well?"
Mmmmethinks that BillG and SteveB made enough political capital infusions to the presidential campaign that any such interference from the government has been taken care of.
How exactly do you nuke a corporation, without revoking its charters of doing business and seizing its assets?
I want to know is, where is the assignment of rights to Microsoft from Al Gore, the Inventor of the Internet?
...except, I don't think that MS has a patent on TCP/IP. Maybe particular Microsoft-specific functionality added onto it, but not the core of the protocol.
But I wouldn't be suprised if the USPTO at some point grants Microsoft various patents on TCP/IP that have been prior art for, oh, at least 30 years. George has to pay off his political loans (they were loans, george, not "capital". You know you need to pay them back with interest, and unfortunately, so to the rest of us).
What would have been far more interesting would be to skim the surface of the actual design and layout process of the chip, the software used that actually builds the layout and chip design, and the uber-geeks that actually simulate the design, identify bottlenecks or problems in the design, and hand-optimize the chip design before committing it to the mask process ("tape"), and the tools and techniques they use to do this.
It's a lot more than a SPICE simulation, I think...
Before you leave your job, leave 3 envelopes in your desk.
The first one says, "blame the system."
The second one says, "blame the users."
The third one says, "make 3 envelopes and put them in your desk drawer."
Because you don't have to story peoples' names or any other information! You just have a bunch of dna entries, but you don't know who they belong too, where they live, etc. You can't even figure out who is a voter from the database. If you have the dna from someone you can check them against the database, but you can't do it the other way around. So as far as the government or anyone else who might abuse voter information is considered, the database is just about useless.
What about removing, say, a convicted felon from the database? Just get a sample of his dna and pull the matching strand from the database.
So, this becomes then a national database, where you know what your DNA "hash" is, right?
Well, in most districts, there is a requirement that you are qualified to vote in that district, whether it is the local city council seat or federal Representative district. So they will need to correlate DNA hashes to meat-world addresses. So you haven't really solved anything.
Besides, it would then be entirely feasible that Experian, et al., would get access to this database, one way or the other (cross-check addresses with credit reports, and then figure out likely DNA hash matches). I would be suprised if it isn't farmed out to them in the first place.
So then we will need point-of DNA verification, where a machine samples some swab (hair follicle? cheek swab? anal probe?) of your DNA to verify your presented DNA hash before you can proceed.
So instead of presenting documentary evidence to get a voter card, you replace it with a very expensive and complicated system, that does nothing to improve accuracy?
...at least the federal elections (House of Representatives, Senate, President) will require amending the constitution. The federal-level voting day is actually written into the Constitution.
New forms of voter fraud are... being a GOP registration card collector, and losing those not marked GOP (or vice-versa), misrepresenting the form so that an "affirmative" selection is really the opposite of what the user intended, etc.
Avenues that haven't really been pursued in the US include losing absentee ballots as they are moving through the mail system, miscalibrating optical-based readers, challenging voter credentials at the polling place, holding "rallies" near the likely access paths to polling places, etc.
It has gotten WAYY out of control.
Electronic voting won't work, either.
Limit the official political season to maybe 3 months. 1 month before primary, then 2 months before final runoff election. In the case of US president, keep the process.
I love how desperate the parties are at keeping the status quo. In Washington, they are pushing for open primaries. In Oregon, they just made them closed (i.e., if you are an independent/not registered with a party, you essentially can't vote). The two parties are VERY against open primaries, and for reasons I can't fathom, so is the Libertarian party.
If the two or 3 best candidates from the primary happen to be of the same party, then so be it. The other party(ies) should not automatically get a seat at the table, as it were.
Although I don't live in Portland, OR., my Oregon ballot was just one page long, even with 7 local initiatives on it. Oregon essentially has an all-absentee ballot election, the so-called "Mail-in vote".
What is interesting about the initiative process in most states is that initiatives can be initiated and funded by out-of-state entities. Liberty Mutual Insurance Company is trying to alter Oregon's workers' compensation system, to its benefit, of course, by way of a state initiative. Other non-Oregon entities have gotten other initiatives on the ballot as well.
Just like in California a few years ago, Pete Wilson made pathetic attempts arguing that initiatives to try and curb the Indian tribal casinos in California were not funded by Las Vegas casinos.
What is probably the most nefarious and slimy part about the initiative process in most states is the "professional" signature gatherers that are used. They are rarely unbiased. They often are practically clueless about what they're trying to pimp. And they are essentially unaccountable. THIS is what scares me.
It is about as crooked as a union "invitation" card for more information about the union actually counting actually as a vote for union representation.
...maybe it's just me, but when I was a kid growing up in the 70's, the "terrorism" most common was being on an airliner that was hijacked. The most common destination for US planes was Cuba, but it affected Europe as well.
then, the pro-Communist/Marxist terror groups, like the Red Brigade, started kidnapping people. There was an American Army general that was kidnapped in the 80's who was killed, but he got a bullet in the back of the head, if memory serves me right.
Then it kind of died out. Sure, the regional terror (Israel/Palestinians, ETA/Basques vs Spain and France, IRA/England) groups kept things going, but it mostly died out in the 80's and 90's.
Then, things got interesting again at the turn.
But is it worse now than it was 20 years ago? Hmm... I don't feel so bad in the US, but I left the Chicago area. Chicago would be #4 in my book of targets to do something big in (NYC, WADC, LA).
Now what would happen if a community in the US decided to play the "kidnap-behead" trick in the US? Let's say some wahoos decide they don't like Islamic people. Portland might be a good area for this, because one is pretty close to somke pretty isolated wilderness only an hour or two from Portland. But it could also be some Islamic "lone wolf" who does it too. Besides, will we ever decide that serial killers (like Ted Bundy, "Green River Killer", etc., are not also terrorists? Or does one have to have some sort of political motive to provide some semblance of motive for one's actions to be a "terrorist"? Would Critical Mass participants be rightly classified terrorists?)
Think about the trouble the US had tracking down that wack job in North Carolina/South Carolina/Georgia, the guy who had been shooting womens clinic doctors, and who "lived off the land" (and Taco Bell dumpsters) for a couple of years.
So the US is kind of lucky, really. the "terror" picture is mostly abstract right now, with one very physical reminder of it (I think that OKC has mostly slipped from the collective consciousness, but it's probably THE most probable threat, not external asshats like Al Kwaydah). But that's it.
It's all 7000 miles away right now. It's mostly happening right now to people from other countries. Because a few American soldiers die every day, more or less, we're kind of numb to this small scale death rate. You probably hear about almost as many people dying driving to/from work on the daily news.
And it's being used to justify all sorts of neat and dandy things by the Government. Did we need the Patriot Act to finally catch Malvo and the other guy? Did we need the Patriot Act to finally catch that slippery eel Ted Bundy? We didn't need it to catch Tim McVeigh or his cowardly buddy Terry McNichols (at least Tim had the guts to face the death penalty).
The cops already know how to work habeus corpus to their advantage. They already know how to detain people for "questioning" for more than 72 hours without charging them with anything (because they're not under arrest, they're not exactly subject to HC). They didn't need secret wiretaps to catch any of those guys. They didn't need all the stuff in the Patriot Act to catch McNichols/McVeigh, either.
It's been a big power grab.
Oh well, I guess I've run out of steam. I guess I sound like I'm crying about spilt milk. Maybe I am.
...all it would take would be a mail truck here or there catching on fire this time of year. How many absentee ballots were lost? Don't know.
Or, just a malicious truck driver or postal employee "forgetting" to transfer a mail bag or, deciding he was too tired, simply throwing it into the dumpster.
Such things have happened in the past (and the employees eventually punished, but...), now we would just need to add a couple of politically motivated postal employees willing to Take One for the Dubya! o(or Kerry).
Does anyone else out there feel like this year's election is being run by nutheads, like it's some big self-fulfilling prophecy?
The US is looking VERY bush-league, almost African or Central American in its quality. International election observers in the US? Does anyone see something wrong with this picture? Why don't the crackpots just go crab fishing (i.e., throw themselves into the crab pots as bait)?
Oracle 10g seems to have made an effort to figure out the "grid" cluster database.
I've got a left-handed crescent wrench to help fasten that ID-10T wire...
...It depends. If you had a well-designed database, and reasonably partitioned datasets, a given query could be parcelled out to each server, and get you results far quicker than on a monolithic computer.
If it wasn't so, then it wouldn't be a feature of Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, etc...
rural places CAN get broadband
Well, I wouldn't call Fredericksburg, VA, very rural. It's a bedroom community for Washington DC now. It *feels* rural, but it ain't.
Now, I live in the Willamette Valley, in OR. I'm about 15 miles from Salem, 10 miles from McMinnville (and only 3 miles from the Verizon CO in Amity). No DSL. definitely no cable TV. Don't worry, I'm definitely rural. Nearest neighbors are about 3/4 mi. from my house.
Good thing there are places like OnlineMac, which offer wireless broadband. 768kbps symmetrical DSL, static IP, very brief TOS agreement. $50/mo. Can't beat that! It uses a Waverider modem (it's a 900MHz-ish link to the tower).
I'll stay with it, even if Verizon does manage to deploy Fibre-to-the-curb (or whatever it is) down Hwy 99 in the next 20 years, because I bet it'll be WiMax first, but it will have annoying TOS agreement and limitations.
Yes, it was the same issue brought up when the Rural Electrification project was initiated...
It brought all those hick ranchers and farmers out in the hinterlands into the 20th century.