If the Major League Baseball explanation is really just a "joke", as you claim, then it should be easy for you to disprove it. But you haven't. So far my theory is looking a bit more plausible than yours.
You know, they called me a loon when I exposed Major League Baseball, too.
Do you really think the Red Sox won that World Series all on their own? After 86 years? That's what I call a crazy conspiracy theory.
Ever notice how the official story tries to frame Muslims for the 9/11 attacks--Muslims, who don't eat pork? Look at the hot dog connection. Follow the money.
On the one hand, I think it'd be very strange indeed for them to admit the network is that fragile, especially if it really is. If it really is that fragile, then they'd better stop selling Treos, Blackberries, HPCs, etc. and recall all the units they've already sold... because those handsets run third party apps, which means they're just as likely to "bring down the entire west coast network" as an iPhone.
Unprecedented scientifically impossible events on large scale and you're asking how some of the most powerful people in the world could organize something you already assume some fucken hobo in a cave can organize? 1. They're only scientifically impossible if you ignore the testimony of scientific experts who have explained exactly how it happened.
2. I'm not asking how you think they organized the actual attack. I'm asking how they managed to cover up an operation that would involve far more people than the official story, with none of them coming forward in the years since and saying "yeah, I planned the attacks". I'm asking how they managed to bribe or coerce the media and all the experts who have examined the evidence. That's the part that's hard to believe - a successful conspiracy and cover-up from some of the most incompetent people in the country.
plus the population has had 50 years of brainwashing and chemical doping to dumb them down Chemical doping! Damn, dude. Save some of this for April 1st, otherwise you won't have any jokes left.
Um, no, I'm not. I'm arguing that the HPV vaccine should be treated the same as other vaccinations against contagious diseases that we don't want kids to spread to each other.
No thanks, I'm not going to waste my time cutting and pasting from other sites, especially answers to irrelevant questions like these. This is so typical of conspiracy theorists (and creationists) - obsessing over a bunch of details that are only vaguely related to the real issues, as if the tiniest little thing could simultaneously disprove The Government-Perpetuated Lies and prove The Truth They Don't Want You To Know, while overlooking the big, important questions such as:
* How could a conspiracy of this scale be pulled off perfectly, with no leaks from the people involved and leaving behind insufficient evidence to convince any mainstream experts, by the same government that has proved itself 100% incompetent in every other field of endeavor?
* If The Man is willing to sacrifice 3000 civilians and then cover it up in order to seize power, or whatever the supposed goal of this conspiracy is, then why haven't you been killed too, along with everyone else who's Exposing The Truth Behind The 9/11 Hoax?
I know you think my post a while back with a list of questions re 9/11 etc on it is a stupid way to "argue" a point (ala Cartman) but did you actually research any of them even briefly? or have you done any similar research in the past? Yes, I have encountered most of those "questions" in the past, researched them, and found them to be thoroughly debunked (Wikipedia is a good starting point). If they'd been less familiar, or if they'd all been on a single topic, I might have addressed them more seriously, but since it was just the same old conspiracy BS and it was all over the map, I thought I'd make a meta-point instead and get myself some +5 Funny while I was at it.
States/schools require certain vaccines to prevent outbreaks of contagious illness in schools and this vaccine does not qualify under that criteria. Er, why wouldn't it? HPV is a contagious disease. Yes, it's sexually transmitted, but the fact is that most teenagers will have had sex by the time they turn 18, probably with someone they met at school. With thost statistics in mind, why shouldn't we try to prevent them from catching HPV?
No, I'm suggesting that when a girl decides to have sex, she should be able to decide to get this vaccine. Thing is, this is the age where the vaccine is most effective. If you delay it, it's less effective. And don't forget, many girls don't get to decide when they first have sex - rape is still unfortunately part of reality.
I believe that Verizon and Sprint are the worst out there. Locking everyone in to their phones and only allowing data transfers (pictures, ringtones and such) through their proprietary services. I've had no trouble transferring data to and from my Verizon phones (LG). I use BitPim (free software) and the same $10 USB cable that also lets me use the phone as a modem.
GSM has always been about embracing more open standards. I can buy most any "unlocked" phone from eBay and use it by simply swapping SIMs. This alone makes a GSM provider miles better than a CDMA provider. It's been a while since I looked into this, but last I checked, you could buy any unlocked CDMA phone and activate it through Verizon's web site.
BTW, some of us care about data service. I'd say that the relatively wide rollout of EVDO vs. HSDPA alone makes a CDMA provider miles better than a GSM provider... but YMMV.
You're the one who needs to ask yourself some questions, pal.
- Which way do male models turn at the end of the runway? Which way do baseball players run around the diamond? Are major league baseball players male or female? Is that a coincidence?
- How many strikes to an out? How many planes hit their targets on 9/11? What does that tell you?
- Which MLB teams are partially owned by foreign investors? What are the main exports of those investors' countries? Notice a pattern yet?
- Why is it that the Boston Red Sox hadn't won a World Series for 86 years until after 9/11? Still think it's a coincidence?
The connections go on and on. Open your eyes, man.
See, if artists and labels want to give their stuff away for free, they can. If they don't want to, why is it up to MightyYar to decide that they have to? The artist doesn't have to do anything. If you're an artist and you want to sell copies, that's fine - just don't interfere when someone else uses his own resources to give them away. Live and let live.
Likewise, as an artist, you don't have to produce anything in the first place without being paid for it. If you're afraid that no one will buy copies of your song from you, because they can download copies elsewhere for free, then demand payment up front from your collective fan base before you record it. Just as the internet has made it possible to share information on a massive scale, it's also made it possible to fund significant projects with thousands of small contributions.
I bought an LCD HDTV in January and three of my friends have since bought HDTVs. Therefore EVERYONE now owns an HDTV. I posted an anecdote in response to another anecdote. But you're right, that's not good for anything. Let's rely on the objective evidence instead, which says that only 17% of American households have an HDTV.
And to your point about 32" TVs starting at $600-$700: Do you recall what 32" CRTs started at 5 years ago? LCDs have gotten MUCH cheaper in the past year or so. As much as you rail against it, the future is now!:) Um.. it doesn't matter whether they're cheaper now than they used to be. They're still too expensive for me and the other 83% of Americans. The HDTV "future" will be here when the prices are actually affordable, not just slightly less astronomical.
The problem is that the costs of polluting are external to the company, so it doesn't see the savings and it therefore appears to be cheaper to pollute. It is cheaper from the polluters' perspective; they aren't fooling themselves. The costs will be paid by someone else. Whether it's more or less economically efficient for everyone put together is beside the point.
Therefore, the government has to step in to impose the external costs on the company so that they become internal ones, included in the company's cost benefit analysis. That would be true if the fines for violating environmental regulations were exactly equal to the cost of cleaning up after the violations, and the money collected were used only for that. However, the fines are punitive, intended not just to make companies pay the true costs of their actions, but to artificially increase those costs so they don't pollute in the first place.
Yet you are rationalising and defending such a scheme? Instead of defending it, you should be up in arms and complaining to the opterators about it. Um.. right. Demanding that they stop charging for incoming calls, without increasing their outgoing rates to make up for it, is equivalent to demanding they cut their prices in half. While we'd all like to pay half as much for phone service, it isn't going to happen just because people want it. They aren't going to operate at a loss just to make us happy.
I don't know what's going on with the Cingular coverage map you linked, but it isn't accurate... try this one instead. And here's Verizon's coverage map.
And the problem here is exactly what? It sounds to me like Skype is saying, "Hey guys, if you let us use your networks we'll undercut all your prices and undermine your business models. Then all that money you spent to build out your cellular networks will benefit us instead of you! Deal?" I don't think so. It looks like they just want the carriers to stop restricting equipment and applications. The carriers would still charge for access to the network, kilobyte usage, etc. but without any limitations on which phones you can activate or what you can do with the kilobytes you're paying for.
If the cell provides saw business benefit in opening their network, they would do so. Obviously. The whole point of regulation, however, is that if the only thing guiding your actions is "business benefit", it'll often lead you to trash the commons or screw people over some other way. For example, if dirty factories could save money by polluting less, we wouldn't need environmental regulations - but in fact polluting less tends to cost more, so we impose regulations to give them an incentive to do it.
I wouldn't say hardly anyone. All the gamers I know either have one or are looking for one, and HDTVs were one of the hottest selling items this hoilday season. Prices are dropping a LOT, and 32" 720p LCD HDTVs can regularly be found for $500. Congratulations on finding a bargain - in the stores around here, 32" LCDs start around $600-$700. One of my gamer friends was thinking about buying an HDTV, but snapped back when he realized $500 would buy a screen not much bigger than his computer monitor.
Even $500 is too much, though: I paid about $250 for my TV, and in my mind that's how much TVs cost. Judging from the installed base, I'm not the only one with that opinion. I've seen HDTVs in lobbies, casinos, bars, and electronics stores, and I've been bombarded with advertising for them, but I've only ever seen one HDTV in an actual house, and it was a rear projection unit that looked awful.
The prices will only drop, and the install base will only rise in the future.
Why are so many people so shortsighted? HDTV is the future. I'm sure it will be... but it isn't the present. Until HDTV is affordable, not many people are going to care about HD quality graphics, Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, because they won't be able to use them anyway. By the time HDTV has been adopted widely, it'll be time for a new round of consoles anyway.
If you can construct complex programs from VB6, it was not obvious from the class or any of the books I read that you can do that. VB6 has a pretty weak object model, but you can indeed write complex programs in it. However, this story is about VB.NET, which is as robust a language as C# or Java.
I took a VB class once, and I noticed the same thing you did. The class was a complete waste of time. OTOH, I'd used VB on my own a few years earlier, coming from a background in C, and didn't really have any complaints. (When Visual C++ came out, I thought it was a total scam, because I expected it to be Visual Basic =~ s/Basic/C++/... but that's another story.)
It's just a different teaching style: you can tell a class full of newbies "Look! Click here, here, here, and then type this line - now press run, click your button, and it says hello world! We're programming already! That wasn't intimidating, was it?", and then work your way to explaining the constructs you can use inside event handlers, finally getting to making your own classes and maybe explaining what goes on behind the scenes. Or you can start from scratch, "This is a variable, this is a subroutine", eventually work your way through the Windows API and show them how VB does the heavy lifting for you, and finally get around to explaining the form designer.
The difference is that one style gets them writing programs with tangible results on the first day, and the other requires a bunch of learning up front for a payoff far in the future. If you start with dragging controls around, using the automatic database bindings, etc. then they might see the manually entered code as voodoo at first, but at least they're putting something together, and as they learn, they get immediate feedback in the form of what they think of as a "program" (as opposed to a console window full of text). And drag 'n drop might even be enough for a lot of lame in-house CRUD apps, which I think is the real audience for these classes: no one starts off their computer science degree by learning VB, at least like that. I hope.
No one chose.NET and then complained it wasn't cross-platform. It wasn't advertised as cross-platform. Depends what you mean by platform. It's impossible to read the specs without coming to the conclusion that.NET is meant to be implemented on multiple processors, due to things like the "native int" type whose size is unspecified. And as soon as the compact framework came out, we saw.NET running on WinCE, which is certainly not the same platform as desktop Windows. It's not hard to extend that to the possibility that the VM and compilers would be ported to other operating systems, which is exactly what happened with Mono.
When someone sends me a postcard, I do not have to pay to receive it. That's because people don't mind paying variable postage when they send a letter. They expect it to cost more to send a letter overseas than down the street, so it's feasible to charge the sender for postage for the entire trip.
In the US, we don't expect to pay more to call a cell phone than to call a landline, but if the caller paid for everything, that's what would have to happen. There'd be an outrage. If I used my Verizon phone to call a Cingular customer, I'd have to pay for the usage of bandwidth on both networks, or the person I'm calling would have to pay twice as much for his own outgoing calls to make up for it - Cingular still has to pay for the upkeep of their network, and that money doesn't just come out of nowhere.
(If I'm only calling other Verizon customers, I already get those calls for free.)
I don't pay for my friends net-connection when they email me. Exactly! You pay for your own internet usage - sending and receiving. You can't receive emails or IMs without paying for internet access, can you?
If you have a metered internet connection, you don't get to receive packets for free and only pay for the packets you send. It isn't "double charging" when you pay to receive a packet even though the sender already paid to send it to you; it's the reality of how networks operate. That packet is putting a load on the sender's network as well as on yours, so he pays for his end and you pay for your end, and if your network is more efficient than his, you get a better deal.
Similarly, when my phone is connected to my carrier's network, using my carrier's bandwidth, I'm charged for it. I'm still using the same amount of bandwidth whether I placed or received the call, so why is it unfair to charge me in both cases? Someone has to pay for it, and I'm the one who chose my carrier.
They are double-charging you, and you actually like it. If you were given the choice of paying X dollars when you call someone, or paying X dollars when calling or receiving a call, you would actually choose the latter. No, of course I wouldn't. I'd love to get incoming calls for free, just like I'd love to pay $20 a month instead of $60 a month for the same service - or even better, unlimited usage for free! But I don't expect those things to happen just because they'd be nice.
And you are still comparing apples to oranges. We are talking about cell-phone service here, and then you start bringing in totally unrelated things, like geographical sizes of countries. You do not pay double because USA is a big country. No, but I do save money on roaming. I travel about 700 miles from home on a pretty regular basis, and I pay exactly the same amount for calls over there as I do at home.
And besides, since coverage is so poor in USA, it might be that your hypothetical scenario of going from California to Florida would actually mean no cell-phone service at all. I actually checked coverage-maps of USA last month, and it seems that even the best networks only cover fraction of the country. It might seem that way, but try comparing those maps to a population density map - no one lives in the uncovered areas. You can get a signal in any city, any airport, and on any freeway. I can't think of the last time I had no service.
I bet that landlines are not 100% free. You do pay a monthly fee or something, right? Right. Like I said, though, there's no per-minute charge (for most of us): you pay the monthly fee and then talk as much or as little as you want. In the few areas where there is a per-minute charge, you pay for incoming and outgoing calls, just like with a cell phone - because you're paying for the use of the phone network, not for the privilege of taking an active role in the caller-callee relationship.
And, fact remains that you are paying twice. You pay if you call, and you pay if you are called. I just don't see what's so unreasonable about paying for the resources I actually use.
Sure, it'd be nice to get free incoming calls (Sprint tried it a few years ago), and maybe it'd be a standard part of the contract if we had a more competitive market, but it's not like these charges are baseless. My phone is, in fact, putting the same load on Verizon's network whether the call is incoming or outgoing, and if the person calling me is using a cell phone, he's also putting a load on his carrier's network.
Unless you're suggesting that the load simply doesn't need to be paid for, then it doesn't matter who pays for what. The total usage of Verizon's network is the same either way, which means the costs to run the network are the same, and since Verizon can only collect money from their own customers, those customers will be paying the same total amount either way. If the company didn't charge for incoming calls, they'd have to charge more for outgoing calls, because that money isn't just going to appear out of nowhere.
Most of our travel is done inside the country as well, so what's your point? I would wager that Europeans do a lot more international travel, and roaming, than Americans.
I don't think the point of vacation is to get physically as far as possible from home as possible. One of the points of vacationing is to visit a different setting or climate. If you wanted to take a trip to a desert or tropical beach, for example, you'd probably have to leave Finland.
It's not just about vacations; business is affected too. A company with branches in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York is not equivalent to a company with three branches in Finland - if you work for the European equivalent of that company, a trip from one branch to another will mean international travel.
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If the Major League Baseball explanation is really just a "joke", as you claim, then it should be easy for you to disprove it. But you haven't. So far my theory is looking a bit more plausible than yours.
You know, they called me a loon when I exposed Major League Baseball, too.
Do you really think the Red Sox won that World Series all on their own? After 86 years? That's what I call a crazy conspiracy theory.
Ever notice how the official story tries to frame Muslims for the 9/11 attacks--Muslims, who don't eat pork? Look at the hot dog connection. Follow the money.
2. I'm not asking how you think they organized the actual attack. I'm asking how they managed to cover up an operation that would involve far more people than the official story, with none of them coming forward in the years since and saying "yeah, I planned the attacks". I'm asking how they managed to bribe or coerce the media and all the experts who have examined the evidence. That's the part that's hard to believe - a successful conspiracy and cover-up from some of the most incompetent people in the country. plus the population has had 50 years of brainwashing and chemical doping to dumb them down Chemical doping! Damn, dude. Save some of this for April 1st, otherwise you won't have any jokes left.
Um, no, I'm not. I'm arguing that the HPV vaccine should be treated the same as other vaccinations against contagious diseases that we don't want kids to spread to each other.
No thanks, I'm not going to waste my time cutting and pasting from other sites, especially answers to irrelevant questions like these. This is so typical of conspiracy theorists (and creationists) - obsessing over a bunch of details that are only vaguely related to the real issues, as if the tiniest little thing could simultaneously disprove The Government-Perpetuated Lies and prove The Truth They Don't Want You To Know, while overlooking the big, important questions such as:
* How could a conspiracy of this scale be pulled off perfectly, with no leaks from the people involved and leaving behind insufficient evidence to convince any mainstream experts, by the same government that has proved itself 100% incompetent in every other field of endeavor?
* If The Man is willing to sacrifice 3000 civilians and then cover it up in order to seize power, or whatever the supposed goal of this conspiracy is, then why haven't you been killed too, along with everyone else who's Exposing The Truth Behind The 9/11 Hoax?
I hope you realize you're playing right into Bud Selig's hands.
BTW, some of us care about data service. I'd say that the relatively wide rollout of EVDO vs. HSDPA alone makes a CDMA provider miles better than a GSM provider... but YMMV.
You're the one who needs to ask yourself some questions, pal.
- Which way do male models turn at the end of the runway? Which way do baseball players run around the diamond? Are major league baseball players male or female? Is that a coincidence?
- How many strikes to an out? How many planes hit their targets on 9/11? What does that tell you?
- Which MLB teams are partially owned by foreign investors? What are the main exports of those investors' countries? Notice a pattern yet?
- Why is it that the Boston Red Sox hadn't won a World Series for 86 years until after 9/11? Still think it's a coincidence?
The connections go on and on. Open your eyes, man.
Likewise, as an artist, you don't have to produce anything in the first place without being paid for it. If you're afraid that no one will buy copies of your song from you, because they can download copies elsewhere for free, then demand payment up front from your collective fan base before you record it. Just as the internet has made it possible to share information on a massive scale, it's also made it possible to fund significant projects with thousands of small contributions.
I bought an LCD HDTV in January and three of my friends have since bought HDTVs. Therefore EVERYONE now owns an HDTV. I posted an anecdote in response to another anecdote. But you're right, that's not good for anything. Let's rely on the objective evidence instead, which says that only 17% of American households have an HDTV. And to your point about 32" TVs starting at $600-$700: Do you recall what 32" CRTs started at 5 years ago? LCDs have gotten MUCH cheaper in the past year or so. As much as you rail against it, the future is now!
I don't know what's going on with the Cingular coverage map you linked, but it isn't accurate... try this one instead. And here's Verizon's coverage map.
Even $500 is too much, though: I paid about $250 for my TV, and in my mind that's how much TVs cost. Judging from the installed base, I'm not the only one with that opinion. I've seen HDTVs in lobbies, casinos, bars, and electronics stores, and I've been bombarded with advertising for them, but I've only ever seen one HDTV in an actual house, and it was a rear projection unit that looked awful. The prices will only drop, and the install base will only rise in the future.
Why are so many people so shortsighted? HDTV is the future. I'm sure it will be... but it isn't the present. Until HDTV is affordable, not many people are going to care about HD quality graphics, Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, because they won't be able to use them anyway. By the time HDTV has been adopted widely, it'll be time for a new round of consoles anyway.
Trauma Center is great, as is WarioWare (especially if you have someone else to play with or just watch).
Hardly anyone owns an HDTV, even today. The companies will go where the customers are.
I took a VB class once, and I noticed the same thing you did. The class was a complete waste of time. OTOH, I'd used VB on my own a few years earlier, coming from a background in C, and didn't really have any complaints. (When Visual C++ came out, I thought it was a total scam, because I expected it to be Visual Basic =~ s/Basic/C++/... but that's another story.)
It's just a different teaching style: you can tell a class full of newbies "Look! Click here, here, here, and then type this line - now press run, click your button, and it says hello world! We're programming already! That wasn't intimidating, was it?", and then work your way to explaining the constructs you can use inside event handlers, finally getting to making your own classes and maybe explaining what goes on behind the scenes. Or you can start from scratch, "This is a variable, this is a subroutine", eventually work your way through the Windows API and show them how VB does the heavy lifting for you, and finally get around to explaining the form designer.
The difference is that one style gets them writing programs with tangible results on the first day, and the other requires a bunch of learning up front for a payoff far in the future. If you start with dragging controls around, using the automatic database bindings, etc. then they might see the manually entered code as voodoo at first, but at least they're putting something together, and as they learn, they get immediate feedback in the form of what they think of as a "program" (as opposed to a console window full of text). And drag 'n drop might even be enough for a lot of lame in-house CRUD apps, which I think is the real audience for these classes: no one starts off their computer science degree by learning VB, at least like that. I hope.
In the US, we don't expect to pay more to call a cell phone than to call a landline, but if the caller paid for everything, that's what would have to happen. There'd be an outrage. If I used my Verizon phone to call a Cingular customer, I'd have to pay for the usage of bandwidth on both networks, or the person I'm calling would have to pay twice as much for his own outgoing calls to make up for it - Cingular still has to pay for the upkeep of their network, and that money doesn't just come out of nowhere.
(If I'm only calling other Verizon customers, I already get those calls for free.) I don't pay for my friends net-connection when they email me. Exactly! You pay for your own internet usage - sending and receiving. You can't receive emails or IMs without paying for internet access, can you?
If you have a metered internet connection, you don't get to receive packets for free and only pay for the packets you send. It isn't "double charging" when you pay to receive a packet even though the sender already paid to send it to you; it's the reality of how networks operate. That packet is putting a load on the sender's network as well as on yours, so he pays for his end and you pay for your end, and if your network is more efficient than his, you get a better deal.
Similarly, when my phone is connected to my carrier's network, using my carrier's bandwidth, I'm charged for it. I'm still using the same amount of bandwidth whether I placed or received the call, so why is it unfair to charge me in both cases? Someone has to pay for it, and I'm the one who chose my carrier. They are double-charging you, and you actually like it. If you were given the choice of paying X dollars when you call someone, or paying X dollars when calling or receiving a call, you would actually choose the latter. No, of course I wouldn't. I'd love to get incoming calls for free, just like I'd love to pay $20 a month instead of $60 a month for the same service - or even better, unlimited usage for free! But I don't expect those things to happen just because they'd be nice. And you are still comparing apples to oranges. We are talking about cell-phone service here, and then you start bringing in totally unrelated things, like geographical sizes of countries. You do not pay double because USA is a big country. No, but I do save money on roaming. I travel about 700 miles from home on a pretty regular basis, and I pay exactly the same amount for calls over there as I do at home. And besides, since coverage is so poor in USA, it might be that your hypothetical scenario of going from California to Florida would actually mean no cell-phone service at all. I actually checked coverage-maps of USA last month, and it seems that even the best networks only cover fraction of the country. It might seem that way, but try comparing those maps to a population density map - no one lives in the uncovered areas. You can get a signal in any city, any airport, and on any freeway. I can't think of the last time I had no service.
Sure, it'd be nice to get free incoming calls (Sprint tried it a few years ago), and maybe it'd be a standard part of the contract if we had a more competitive market, but it's not like these charges are baseless. My phone is, in fact, putting the same load on Verizon's network whether the call is incoming or outgoing, and if the person calling me is using a cell phone, he's also putting a load on his carrier's network.
Unless you're suggesting that the load simply doesn't need to be paid for, then it doesn't matter who pays for what. The total usage of Verizon's network is the same either way, which means the costs to run the network are the same, and since Verizon can only collect money from their own customers, those customers will be paying the same total amount either way. If the company didn't charge for incoming calls, they'd have to charge more for outgoing calls, because that money isn't just going to appear out of nowhere. Most of our travel is done inside the country as well, so what's your point? I would wager that Europeans do a lot more international travel, and roaming, than Americans. I don't think the point of vacation is to get physically as far as possible from home as possible. One of the points of vacationing is to visit a different setting or climate. If you wanted to take a trip to a desert or tropical beach, for example, you'd probably have to leave Finland.
It's not just about vacations; business is affected too. A company with branches in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York is not equivalent to a company with three branches in Finland - if you work for the European equivalent of that company, a trip from one branch to another will mean international travel.