Every time I go to buy a new car and have to deal with dealerships, I just wish that I could order what I want from the factory (or Amazon) and just pay MSRP.
Seriously. Dealers have gotten so bad that paying sticker price for exactly what you want is a better deal and less hassle sometimes.
I think a lot of people think this way. That would be why there are places like Car Max have been started with the express point of no haggling over the price. You pay the sticker just like you do when going to buy a loaf of bread.
Yeah, the author has some interesting thoughts on the price discrimination part, but they forgot or left out a couple of important points.
For one, the studios don't "let" Netflix mail the DVDs. They just can't stop them legally. It has been said by others here that the right of first sale make it so Netflix can do what they want with the disks they buy.
For two, the author makes it seem like new releases are available to be sent to you on the first day that they come out on DVD. Perhaps things have changed since the last time I tried to get a new release in the mail from Netflix, but usually you have to wait your turn. Netflix only has so many copies of each movie and they get sent out on a first come first serve basis. So having to wait a week or two rather than going out to the store to buy your own copy is a bigger difference than they made it out to be. With their virtual DVD version, there would be no waiting as even a few copies of the movies would be much more available than physical disks that end up sitting at someone's house waiting until they get the time to watch it. Netflix needs many more copies of physical disks in that case as opposed to the virtual one that would only be rented when the person was actually ready to watch it and available to the next person as soon as they were done watching it.
I do remember reading a study where the replaced the morphine drip with saline solution and the pain relieving effects did not diminish at all. If I remember the study right they had to start with the morphine and reduce the amount until it was all saline to get the same effect. Starting with the saline did not do the same thing.
Plus, why does having a minute amount make it irrelevant. I remember reading about some vitamin or mineral that the body needs, but it only needs a very small amount. So getting a very small amount from somewhere would be good. But that does not mean that getting too much of it won't be harmful.
Some of the conventional medicines that cost lots of money have been found out to work no better than a placebo either. The drug makers stage their testing to look as positive as possible even if they end up hiding the truth. I think it was a heart medicine I read about last where it worked only as good as a placebo while the older, out of patent drugs, worked much better.
And if we have no expectation of privacy while in public, then there would be no problem with recording every phone call that took place on public phones. (Not that there are many of those left anyway.) It seems that wiretapping laws do recognize an expectation of privacy even when in public places.
It's bothered me for a long time that games.slashdot.org is blocked at my job.
I see that and the same with idle.slashdot.org. But the solution is to paste the article link into your browser and remove the games or idle part of the link. So instead of yro.slashdot.org/story/14/03/21/1453253/some-sites-that-blue-coat-blocks-under-pornography you can go to slashdot.org/story/14/03/21/1453253/some-sites-that-blue-coat-blocks-under-pornography and get the same article.
After all the revelations about the NSA putting back doors into MS Windows and other crypto or security software, you are seriously trying to say people trust this? All I can say to that is . . . Wow!
Rules about how they can't just decide that your money is now their money. Legal oversight.
I think the government can just decide that all your money is now their money. If it's in a bank account they can freeze it without you even getting a trial. Perhaps after a trial you may get it back, but how do you afford your attorney without your money is your problem. And if you have it as cash, the police have seized it without any evidence or trial that it must be drug money and so they can confiscate it. One poor couple I read about was going out to buy a car with cash and had the cops take all their savings.
Because if the bank fucks up there's rules in place for how they deal with it. There's deposit insurance..
FDIC insurance only covers you up to $250,000. That is a lot of money for sure, but for people who have millions it is a poor substitute for losing the rest.
All these things you like about our current banking industry are additions to regular cash, not a part of it. There is nothing stopping these regulations and insurance and rules being added to a digital currency. The cryptocurrency is just a version of cash that can be stored digitally as bits or sent over a wire. The rest of the banking industry would have to be built around it like it is with the US$. It is at the wild wist stage and mostly seems to be speculators at this point, but that doesn't mean there is no place for a digital currency. I think there are speculators that deal in the more traditional country currencies also, or at least in the differences in exchange rates from day to day. The only difference is with Bitcoin there is not enough regular transaction that the speculators end up effecting the price of the currency much more significantly.
I think it is pretty well know that solitary confinement will cause mental problems in people. If you are unaware of this that just shows how uneducated and ignorant of the world you are. Perhaps you should read a bit more or pay attention to the news some?
No, but long term solitary confinement is a type of torture. I can't see how someone could spend what appears to them as 1000 years because of a drug induced stupor being able to have any social interaction. So it turns into 1000 years of solitary confinement. That will drive anyone insane.
I would agree that the American culture in general does not place value on being intelligent. Just look at the popularity of Paris Hilton and the Kardashians. I do think the black culture has a bigger stigma over appearing to be intelligent. If a black person talks with good English rather than slang they are called names or said to be acting white. Even President Obama was disowned by a lot of the black community for being not black enough in the way he spoke and acted.
Weed was not supressed because it's a natural cure. Thus it's irrelevant in this case. Weed has been supressed for completely different reasons.
I'm not sure if you actually know what the real reasons for the suppression of weed is. The paper did not want the compitition from a much faster growing and better producing plant to take away their business. Hemp makes the best paper from what I have read, and can be used for clothing also so I bet the cotton growers were worried also. It was also very easy to vilify as it was smoked at the time by those "dirty Mexicans". The public service propaganda at the time was about how taking a single puff on a joint would cause teens to go insane and run around shooting people or jumping off bridges to their death. I don't think you can get much more ridiculous.
Or cynicism. Just because a lot of crackpots believe something, that is no guarantee that it is not true. There was a conspiracy theory, dismissed by most rational people, that the government was monitoring our email and phone calls. Then it turned out to be true.
I love how the term "conspiracy theory" means something that has been proven false but there are wackos out there who believe it anyway. The email and phone call monitoring is a good example, it would have been a conspiracy theory before we see that it is the truth.
Some of these medical conspiracy theories may be true as well. The one about the CIA causing HIV is unlikely to be true, because it would required the government to have an unreasonably high level of competence.
Just change the word HIV to Syphilis and it is completely true, and document that it was done. Why is it more reasonable to believe one horrible thing than it is to think other examples might also be true? (Not saying I believe the HIV thing, just saying.)
But all the other meter makes have been using the same design for decades also. So how does one company get to claim it when it's an industry standard. Just check around and see how many other meters have the same colors. I checked Home Depot's and Lowes sites and found many.
Any "hobbyist electronics retailer" attempting to sell a multimeter in the US knows -- or should know -- what a Fluke multimeter looks like, and any businessman or businesswoman knows -- or should know -- that there will be problems trying to sell a product that looks like the product with a dominant share of the market.
And how did that stop the multiple brands of meters being sold at Home Depot and Lowes that have an identical look to these. Perhaps safety yellow on an electrical testing device is an industry standard?
Also, you don't need "an army of consultants or attorneys to find this information." Trademarks are freely available from the USPTO web site, in searchable form. Anybody can look them up.
I have seen postings from people who did look it up. The Fluke trademark states that the color is not a part of the trademark.
Check out Home Depot and Lowes websites and see how many other digital multimeters out there are yellow boarders with grey face plates. It's enough of them that you might think it was an industry standard. Like how school buses are yellow or something.
There are only 6 colors on the color wheel, not infinite like positive integers. Remember, Fluke owns every shade of yellow, not any specific one. So you have Red (seen that at Home Depot), Blue, Green (Seen at Home Depot), Orange (The Klein ones at Home Depot look very much like the Fluke ones but might be a bit more orange), Purple, and Yellow (Fluke). I guess you also have Black (Seen meters in this color before) and White (watch out for Apple lawsuits).
Why are all the safety cones made the same orange color? Wouldn't that make things confusing? Why are all the construction signs the same yellow color as well as things like fork lifts? Half of the meters sold at Home Depot are the same color as these Sparkfun meters. Perhaps there is a general consensus that meters should be yellow for safety reasons and Sparkfun wanted to stick with the tradition. The Klien ones look more like the Fluke ones than the Sparkfun one does. I don't think a company should be able to own every shade of yellow out there. Perhaps an exact Pantone color, but not something like "Yellow".
Knowing that half of all the digital multimeters sold at Home Depot are grey face plate with yellow boarders seems to indicate that there is no problem with that color scheme. And none of them are Fluke either.
It's also the same color as a forklift, and road construction signs. Isn't yellow meant to be a color designating a warning or safety issue? I do see the similarity to Fluke meters with the grey face plate and yellow sides, but on their site they say the shade is more of a macaroni and cheese color. Can fluke own every shade of yellow? Other people on the Sparkfun site also mentioned how many non-Fluke meters are sold at Home Depot and Lowes that have the same yellow coloring on them. In fact I have just checked on Home Depot and see several brands of multimeters that have the grey face plate with yellow boarders. That would seem to make it a more generic coloration used for meters to make them easily recognized. Perhaps Fluke should lose their ownership of the color as it has become the normal color of most meters out there.
Actually I read a while ago that the micro-adjustments to the steering are a good way to tell the driver's alert level. As someone above mentioned, you can fall asleep, or at least loose concentration on your driving without your eyes closing. But in normal driving you are constantly making small adjustments to the steering wheel this way and that. Perhaps a combination of the two would be even more capable of detecting unsafe driving.
Slashdot Mirror
Every time I go to buy a new car and have to deal with dealerships, I just wish that I could order what I want from the factory (or Amazon) and just pay MSRP.
Seriously. Dealers have gotten so bad that paying sticker price for exactly what you want is a better deal and less hassle sometimes.
I think a lot of people think this way. That would be why there are places like Car Max have been started with the express point of no haggling over the price. You pay the sticker just like you do when going to buy a loaf of bread.
Yeah, the author has some interesting thoughts on the price discrimination part, but they forgot or left out a couple of important points.
For one, the studios don't "let" Netflix mail the DVDs. They just can't stop them legally. It has been said by others here that the right of first sale make it so Netflix can do what they want with the disks they buy.
For two, the author makes it seem like new releases are available to be sent to you on the first day that they come out on DVD. Perhaps things have changed since the last time I tried to get a new release in the mail from Netflix, but usually you have to wait your turn. Netflix only has so many copies of each movie and they get sent out on a first come first serve basis. So having to wait a week or two rather than going out to the store to buy your own copy is a bigger difference than they made it out to be. With their virtual DVD version, there would be no waiting as even a few copies of the movies would be much more available than physical disks that end up sitting at someone's house waiting until they get the time to watch it. Netflix needs many more copies of physical disks in that case as opposed to the virtual one that would only be rented when the person was actually ready to watch it and available to the next person as soon as they were done watching it.
You will also have much less snow on the side of the house than you will on the roof.
I do remember reading a study where the replaced the morphine drip with saline solution and the pain relieving effects did not diminish at all. If I remember the study right they had to start with the morphine and reduce the amount until it was all saline to get the same effect. Starting with the saline did not do the same thing.
Plus, why does having a minute amount make it irrelevant. I remember reading about some vitamin or mineral that the body needs, but it only needs a very small amount. So getting a very small amount from somewhere would be good. But that does not mean that getting too much of it won't be harmful.
Some of the conventional medicines that cost lots of money have been found out to work no better than a placebo either. The drug makers stage their testing to look as positive as possible even if they end up hiding the truth. I think it was a heart medicine I read about last where it worked only as good as a placebo while the older, out of patent drugs, worked much better.
If you always killed something, it wouldn't be called hunting, it would be called killing.
And if we have no expectation of privacy while in public, then there would be no problem with recording every phone call that took place on public phones. (Not that there are many of those left anyway.) It seems that wiretapping laws do recognize an expectation of privacy even when in public places.
It's bothered me for a long time that games.slashdot.org is blocked at my job.
I see that and the same with idle.slashdot.org. But the solution is to paste the article link into your browser and remove the games or idle part of the link. So instead of yro.slashdot.org/story/14/03/21/1453253/some-sites-that-blue-coat-blocks-under-pornography you can go to slashdot.org/story/14/03/21/1453253/some-sites-that-blue-coat-blocks-under-pornography and get the same article.
After all the revelations about the NSA putting back doors into MS Windows and other crypto or security software, you are seriously trying to say people trust this? All I can say to that is . . . Wow!
Rules about how they can't just decide that your money is now their money. Legal oversight.
I think the government can just decide that all your money is now their money. If it's in a bank account they can freeze it without you even getting a trial. Perhaps after a trial you may get it back, but how do you afford your attorney without your money is your problem. And if you have it as cash, the police have seized it without any evidence or trial that it must be drug money and so they can confiscate it. One poor couple I read about was going out to buy a car with cash and had the cops take all their savings.
Because if the bank fucks up there's rules in place for how they deal with it. There's deposit insurance..
FDIC insurance only covers you up to $250,000. That is a lot of money for sure, but for people who have millions it is a poor substitute for losing the rest.
All these things you like about our current banking industry are additions to regular cash, not a part of it. There is nothing stopping these regulations and insurance and rules being added to a digital currency. The cryptocurrency is just a version of cash that can be stored digitally as bits or sent over a wire. The rest of the banking industry would have to be built around it like it is with the US$. It is at the wild wist stage and mostly seems to be speculators at this point, but that doesn't mean there is no place for a digital currency. I think there are speculators that deal in the more traditional country currencies also, or at least in the differences in exchange rates from day to day. The only difference is with Bitcoin there is not enough regular transaction that the speculators end up effecting the price of the currency much more significantly.
I think it is pretty well know that solitary confinement will cause mental problems in people. If you are unaware of this that just shows how uneducated and ignorant of the world you are. Perhaps you should read a bit more or pay attention to the news some?
Confinement isn't torture.
No, but long term solitary confinement is a type of torture. I can't see how someone could spend what appears to them as 1000 years because of a drug induced stupor being able to have any social interaction. So it turns into 1000 years of solitary confinement. That will drive anyone insane.
I would agree that the American culture in general does not place value on being intelligent. Just look at the popularity of Paris Hilton and the Kardashians. I do think the black culture has a bigger stigma over appearing to be intelligent. If a black person talks with good English rather than slang they are called names or said to be acting white. Even President Obama was disowned by a lot of the black community for being not black enough in the way he spoke and acted.
Weed was not supressed because it's a natural cure. Thus it's irrelevant in this case. Weed has been supressed for completely different reasons.
I'm not sure if you actually know what the real reasons for the suppression of weed is. The paper did not want the compitition from a much faster growing and better producing plant to take away their business. Hemp makes the best paper from what I have read, and can be used for clothing also so I bet the cotton growers were worried also. It was also very easy to vilify as it was smoked at the time by those "dirty Mexicans". The public service propaganda at the time was about how taking a single puff on a joint would cause teens to go insane and run around shooting people or jumping off bridges to their death. I don't think you can get much more ridiculous.
Or cynicism. Just because a lot of crackpots believe something, that is no guarantee that it is not true. There was a conspiracy theory, dismissed by most rational people, that the government was monitoring our email and phone calls. Then it turned out to be true.
I love how the term "conspiracy theory" means something that has been proven false but there are wackos out there who believe it anyway. The email and phone call monitoring is a good example, it would have been a conspiracy theory before we see that it is the truth.
Some of these medical conspiracy theories may be true as well. The one about the CIA causing HIV is unlikely to be true, because it would required the government to have an unreasonably high level of competence.
Just change the word HIV to Syphilis and it is completely true, and document that it was done. Why is it more reasonable to believe one horrible thing than it is to think other examples might also be true? (Not saying I believe the HIV thing, just saying.)
But if any shade of yellow is just as bad, then that cuts it down pretty far doesn't it?
But all the other meter makes have been using the same design for decades also. So how does one company get to claim it when it's an industry standard. Just check around and see how many other meters have the same colors. I checked Home Depot's and Lowes sites and found many.
Any "hobbyist electronics retailer" attempting to sell a multimeter in the US knows -- or should know -- what a Fluke multimeter looks like, and any businessman or businesswoman knows -- or should know -- that there will be problems trying to sell a product that looks like the product with a dominant share of the market.
And how did that stop the multiple brands of meters being sold at Home Depot and Lowes that have an identical look to these. Perhaps safety yellow on an electrical testing device is an industry standard?
Also, you don't need "an army of consultants or attorneys to find this information." Trademarks are freely available from the USPTO web site, in searchable form. Anybody can look them up.
I have seen postings from people who did look it up. The Fluke trademark states that the color is not a part of the trademark.
Check out Home Depot and Lowes websites and see how many other digital multimeters out there are yellow boarders with grey face plates. It's enough of them that you might think it was an industry standard. Like how school buses are yellow or something.
There are only 6 colors on the color wheel, not infinite like positive integers. Remember, Fluke owns every shade of yellow, not any specific one. So you have Red (seen that at Home Depot), Blue, Green (Seen at Home Depot), Orange (The Klein ones at Home Depot look very much like the Fluke ones but might be a bit more orange), Purple, and Yellow (Fluke). I guess you also have Black (Seen meters in this color before) and White (watch out for Apple lawsuits).
Why are all the safety cones made the same orange color? Wouldn't that make things confusing? Why are all the construction signs the same yellow color as well as things like fork lifts? Half of the meters sold at Home Depot are the same color as these Sparkfun meters. Perhaps there is a general consensus that meters should be yellow for safety reasons and Sparkfun wanted to stick with the tradition. The Klien ones look more like the Fluke ones than the Sparkfun one does. I don't think a company should be able to own every shade of yellow out there. Perhaps an exact Pantone color, but not something like "Yellow".
Knowing that half of all the digital multimeters sold at Home Depot are grey face plate with yellow boarders seems to indicate that there is no problem with that color scheme. And none of them are Fluke either.
It's also the same color as a forklift, and road construction signs. Isn't yellow meant to be a color designating a warning or safety issue? I do see the similarity to Fluke meters with the grey face plate and yellow sides, but on their site they say the shade is more of a macaroni and cheese color. Can fluke own every shade of yellow? Other people on the Sparkfun site also mentioned how many non-Fluke meters are sold at Home Depot and Lowes that have the same yellow coloring on them. In fact I have just checked on Home Depot and see several brands of multimeters that have the grey face plate with yellow boarders. That would seem to make it a more generic coloration used for meters to make them easily recognized. Perhaps Fluke should lose their ownership of the color as it has become the normal color of most meters out there.
Actually I read a while ago that the micro-adjustments to the steering are a good way to tell the driver's alert level. As someone above mentioned, you can fall asleep, or at least loose concentration on your driving without your eyes closing. But in normal driving you are constantly making small adjustments to the steering wheel this way and that. Perhaps a combination of the two would be even more capable of detecting unsafe driving.