Anyone who starts a comment with those exact words should be immediately punched in the face. Just one punch, but with 100% certainty, as a general deterrent to all.
All you need is a Casio calculator watch. ytcracker, the nerd rap king, said something like:
"When I was younger I flossed a Casio, calculator watch, yeah it was nasty yo. I used that, shot to head of the class, and then I went the speed of light and shot to infinite mass."
Personally, a simple Movado is enough watch for me. For everything else we have smartphones, tablets, netbooks, laptops, desktops, lending libraries, wise talking dogs, wikipedia, and oracles. Ahhh... the simple life...
I thought the phrase was "weighs in," perhaps deriving from boxing and showing that you are willing and able to partake in a fight, rather than "wades in," which I have never heard and sounds like it has something to do with water.
Irregardless, I think the title sounds funny, but this sounds like a question of supply and command. I'd wade in a little more, but I need to go de-thaw something for dinner.
With AT&T in my area, the "up to" 3mbps service was attractive a few years ago but the actual speed always fluctuated a great deal. I made several calls, they assured me that there was nothing wrong and there was nothing they could do, even though it seemed to get worse over time. The wiring on my end was not a problem, and I ran a new line from outside straight to the modem, just to be sure, which did not help. I had already had issues with the only alternative in town (Time Warner Cable), so before switching companies I decided to try the newly-available Uverse service. Mind you this is also DSL, delivered over the same exact line into my house, and I now get a steady, reliable 12mbps. I have no idea why the old service was so inconsistent and the newer version is so much better, but I have been happy since - and not really paying any more!
After the switch, AT&T erroneously charged me $150 for a technician install that was never requested or performed, which took 4 phone calls (two apparently to South Asia, one of which was to an impatient operator with an accent I could barely understand) but they did finally credit me for the scammy charge, and that has been my only issue since upgrading.
Philips' 100W-equivalent bulb will be available some time in the fourth quarter. Pricing has yet to be announced, but it will likely be well over $30.
Seriously? Well over $30? Okay, thanks, but no thanks. I'll stick to CFLs for most of my home lighting needs (with a few old hot bulbs where appropriate), for now at least. And to think, lots of folks still laugh at "expensive" CFL prices. I would love to transition to LEDs, but it has to make financial sense first. CFLs are just as energy efficient, and much cheaper.
Within the last 24 hours, if you didn't hear, the FBI announced that they had prevented 5 men from blowing up a bridge in Northeast Ohio. They had previously sold the men a phony bomb and a fake remote detonator, and then monitored the self-proclaimed anarchists as they placed their "bomb" at the base of a bridge and attempted to detonate it. Chalk up one in favor of the FBI, as the alleged, would-be bombers had surveyed several potential targets and planned to conduct further bombings. I doubt these "anarchists" really understand the concept of anarchy, and they are clearly not that bright, but they do appear to have been a legitimate threat, and I can't help but applaud the FBI on a great success.
This is the "homegrown" terror threat that scares me much more than radical Islamist infiltrators, and I can't help but praise the FBI. Maybe this hits home hard, as I know the bridge that was threatened, but it isn't everyday you hear about a bunch of young, mid-western white boys trying to blow up something important. Usually they just blow up stupid shit in their back yards, not bridges! I'm not a big fan of law enforcement, especially the FBI, but this was a job well done.
If secret patents are in the works how are others with similar product ideas protected?
How? They aren't. They waste their time and resources working on technologies for which someone else will be granted a patent, without being able to know that they are driving at full speed down a dead-end street. This feeds the patent trolls, and discourages innovators by raising the stakes. Great idea, just what the US needs!
So what is to be gained if the US text is kept secret, but the essentially identical application is in the open in three dozen other countries?
The gain for the patent holder is magnified if competitors waste their time developing technologies that they will later be unable to use once the secret patents pop up. Prior art is no longer a cut and dried topic, and patents become even more significant. And this while patent trolls and the biggest corporations are already speculatively amassing ridiculous numbers of patents that they really have no intention of putting into production. In time this will only further stifle innovation in the USA, where it is clearly already hard enough.
Debian is a great distro, I must agree. However, I find it to be a little rough around the edges, and prefer Mint's Debian-based edition. LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) offers the fast, clean, stable Debian base with all the bells, whistles, and eye candy that that the Mint team are known for. It is 100% Debian-compatible, and ready out of the box to serve as a great general purpose desktop OS. First Mint took Ubuntu and made it better, and now they have done the same with Debian, and I couldn't be much happier with the result.
If God is omnipotent, why does he need the glory? And why does he seems to need everyone to love him? If this dude is real, he has one serious inferiority complex.
Well, if he has access to Everything, what else do you give him? Glory is a natural gift for he who needs nothing. In most historical cases of anyone asking for praise to be given to God, it was men asking for the glory to bestowed upon The Lord as a means of showing thanks, not He himself asking. We can praise him, though we can not really give him money, hugs, sausages, a beer, a sweater, or a fancily-wrapped trinket, so props seem like a no-brainer.
"Uh, we know what we want to do isn't legal and isn't morally acceptable in a civilized society, or else we wouldn't be asking for specific permission now via scientific investigation because we would already be doing it, but we think torture is definitely an effective interrogation technique, so..."
But their sister product, Miller Lite, has "more taste." What they don't tell you is that more crappy taste is not necessarily better than less crappy taste. The "more taste" marketing campaign never once said it had a BETTER taste than Bud Light, just that it had more. I've smelled some dog turds that probably have a ton of taste, but I'm not going to mess with those, either. I'll stick to Yuengling or Gennesee when I'm feeling poor, and keep sampling quality craft brews the rest of the time.
What this really is, is beer for people who don't like beer. I am a beer enthusiast (not quite a beer snob... yet), and I can tell you that the last thing real beer lovers want is ultra-cold, crapified beer. Don't we have enough beer for people who don't actually like beer? Like all American-style macrobrewed lagers (Bud, Bud Lite, Miller Lite, Coors, and most everything made by Anheuser or Miller-Coors), most Canadian beers (including most all of them exported to the US), Corona, most malt liquors, etc.
Most cheap, common beers are pretty crappy examples of their respective styles. They are generally watery, taste more of adjuncts than hops or barley malt, 4.2%-5.9% alcohol, piss yellow, over carbonated, and meant to be served so cold as to mask what little flavor there is. I'll pass on this frozen beer BS, though I bet plenty of idiots who swear by Bud Light will be all over it.
The maze in their website which led to this opportunity is now a story of legend. Will the key to this unlocking the iPhone be as byzantine for former customers?
Is it just me being a burnout, or do these two sentences, when viewed without context, sound like they could have been written by a computer rather than a person?
Nvidia's CEO is also predicting this summer will see the rise of $200 Android tablets.
So Android tablet prices are going up? You can already buy sub-$200 tablets all day long from Amazon, or Big Lots as one example if you prefer a brick and mortar option. Both have some pretty useful ones for $99 right now. They are not iPads, but they are pretty useful for only a c-note. I just saw one with a capacitive screen, Android 3.1, 1GB RAM, 8 GB internal (I think), and an SD card slot, for $99. Not blazingly fast, surely, but fiarly capable and dirt cheap. If you really want a tablet, and you are in the Western world, chances are you can already afford one.
Guns aren't any use if they're a) not handy, and b) not understood. Could also backfire if the bad guy takes it away from you. Or steals it from you while you're gone during the day.
c) if you are not there to use them
Guns can't protect your property while you are away, so a visible security system of some sort may be a deterrent, and a dog is as good or better. If you rely on firearms to protect your family when you are home, you must be ready to use them, which is something a lot of gun owners do not fully appreciate. If somebody breaks in, you have to shoot them, or you risk them taking your gun and shooting you. Then you'll have to at least justify your actions to a court, unless you live in Florida, apparently. If you are in fact in Florida, you can not only defend your home, but run around the neighborhood and shoot people for wearing hoodies, it appears, so none of this applies to you.
If you break into my house, you are either going to die or bleed a lot, and likely the former, as my neighbors might not be too quick to call the police (and I certainly won't). But not everyone is willing or able to pull the trigger, which is something you must consider if you are thinking of arming yourself to confront any burglars.
Ways to protect your home, in order of easiest and most effective to least reliable and most troublesome:
1. Get a dog. Burglars HATE them.
2. Get a conspicuous security system, with signs and cameras, to act as a deterrent.
3. Get a gun, get professional training so you know how and when to use it, and live with the fact that you might kill someone.
4. Put lovely wrought iron security bars on all your windows and get extra-heavy steel security doors with expensive locks, hinges, and frames.
5. Move out to the middle of Wyoming, where your nearest neighbor and the nearest road are a couple of miles away.
6. Never leave home, and never sleep.
7. Do nothing and hope for the best.
One thing that immediately jumped out at me from this post: the safe. Do not rely on a home safe to protect your valuables or important documents. A fire-resistant box is not a bad idea, but the affordable ones are not able to stand up to a fire that burns your house to the ground. And if it doesn't weigh at least 300 pounds, count on it being stolen if thieves loot your home. I'm sure they absolutely love to find Walmart safes, since they know there is likely to be something good in them, and they can simply carry them away to destroy them at their leisure later on. Safe deposit boxes at banks are much, much safer for valuables you don't need to have readily accessible, and are highly under-utilized, IMHO. (No, I don't run a bank or own stock in one.)
To deter break-ins, the cheapest effective thing to do would be to steal a Brinks security sign from the guy around the corner, and perhaps place a couple of faux security cameras in conspicuous places. Nothing, whether video surveilance or a monitored security system, is a guarantee, unfortunately. I saw some professional burglars interviewed in some documentary, and they said they didn't care what you had, since they didn't drive right up with their license plates in full view. Plus they were always in and out in a matter of three to five minutes, or well before the local constabulary could even be dispatched. The one deterrent that works? Dogs. Some dogs are tolerant of strangers, some are too tiny to be a threat, but the thieves I saw all said they will move on to another target if they see any sign of a dog. To them, the presence of a dog means uncertainty, and that a house is not worth bothering with, since there are plenty without dogs.
This is not quite a fair comparison. I know for a fact that I am perfectly capable of taking my allegedly smart phone with my in the car and keeping it in my pocket where it creates no distraction. On the other hand, if my BAC were.15 or somewhere near that range, I doubt that simply ignoring my drunkenness would allow me to maintain my ability to drive.
"Bad work habits," "reading between the lines" to say the guy got fired, and "try working for a change?" Dude just doesn't want to lug 2 freaking laptops on the road if he doesn't have to, jeez. Who wants to tote a second machine around just to check their email, watch a movie ON THEIR OWN TIME (especially when travelling for work, or would hanging out at the hotel bar be better?), or pay a bill or something once in a while? Yes, the best solution is to use something other than a work laptop, but come on, be realistic.
I can't believe that comment got +5 for insightful. more like -1 for insults and made up BS. Not everyone downloads pirate torrents, looks at porn, or surfs mindlessly all day at work, but damn near everyone near a computer checks their email, which doesn't necessarily detract from productivity. It is 2012 not 1996, so we don't all play solitaire every time we're left alone. I can't believe employers are willing to fork over big salaries and give laptops out to employees they can't trust any more than a 4 year-old.
When I was younger and went to bars I would regularly nap between getting home from work and heading for the bar at about 10pm.
And you were probably a bit tipsy to drive after hitting the bar, despite having a nap. More than once (to understate things) I hit up happy hour, got in my car to go home at 7 or 8 PM, and said "Whoa... I better not get pulled over." And I am far, far from alone. Most people can probably drive successfully above.08 most of the time, but we have to have a somewhat conservative limit when other circumstances are factored in and lives are on the line. Drink all ya want and have a good time, just don't put my family and friends in danger when you do it and I won't care. This is a topic I feel very strongly about. Hell, I ENCOURAGE drinking because I enjoy doing it myself and I make money from you doing it, but be realistic and be careful. Drinking isn't a moral issue for a lot of us, but operating a 3000-5000 pound metal projectile capable of 100+ mph on public highways while impaired certainly is.
So in going from a BAC of 0.12 to 0.8 a whopping drop of... 8,000. When you factor in that cras today are much safer and the larger number of miles driven it becomes clear that DRUNK DRIVING LAWS ARE ALL HYPE.
So.08 may be a bit low, I'll grant you that. But have you seen people at.12 try to pass "field sobriety" coordination tests? They generally don't fall on their faces but they don't do so well, either. At.12 most people appear to be somewhat impaired. You've got to have a hard, across the board cutoff somewhere, don't you? Or enhanced physical tests? You've got to have a limit somewhere, since nobody at.25 or.3+ should ever be drive a car on a public road. So what's the answer? Performance begins to deteriorate well below even.08, and becomes evident for even good, careful drivers by about.12. I *think* I can drive fine a bit above.08, but maybe that is not always the case if ti is 2 AM and I am tired, and may not be true for everyone, so I'd rather the limit be on the low side and act as a deterrent rather than having a high limit that encourages over indulgence, as people will always push their limits.
When you factor in that cras today are much safer and the larger number of miles driven it becomes clear that DRUNK DRIVING LAWS ARE ALL HYPE. Most people drive worse while rushing to work, eating food in the car or any other number of things.
You can't underestimate the deterrent effect of jail. I know and have known tons of people who have liked alcohol an awful lot. I've also known a bunch who have had DUIs/DWIs/OVIs. I would definitely say the smarter and better educated people I know are both more averse to arrest and jail time and less likely to drive wasted. I don't care to look up statistics, but I'd bet a month's wages that DUI convictions skew towards lower income/less educated people, and I'm proud to say that I've spent significant amounts of time with people from all walks of life and had friends of every imaginable background. It isn't that the the people I know with MDs and PhDs don't like alcohol, but that they are more likely to get a ride after drinking and not put themselves in such bad situations as the lower-income and less educated folks.
Drunk driving laws are not hype: they WILL get you if you regularly drink and drive (or if you do it infrequently and really screw up or have bad luck), and they are a huge deterrent for a lot of people. I've put myself (and others) at risk many times, but as I've matured a bit I've realized how lucky I was and, as such, I nolonger take such stupid chances with my freedom and the lives of bystanders. Eating, smoking, playing with the stereo, tending to kids, getting road head, barking dogs, being tired, whatever, are dangerous too, but good luck stopping all those things. Strict alcohol enforcement can and does make a difference. Again, I love love LOVE beer, but I shudder to think about what our roads would be like if we had no DUI laws. I may technically "ride dirty" again, but the threat of arrest, incarceration, and loss of the privelege of driving will always be in the back of my mind to keep my habit in check to some degree.
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Subject says it all!
Anyone who starts a comment with those exact words should be immediately punched in the face. Just one punch, but with 100% certainty, as a general deterrent to all.
All you need is a Casio calculator watch. ytcracker, the nerd rap king, said something like:
"When I was younger I flossed a Casio, calculator watch, yeah it was nasty yo. I used that, shot to head of the class, and then I went the speed of light and shot to infinite mass."
Personally, a simple Movado is enough watch for me. For everything else we have smartphones, tablets, netbooks, laptops, desktops, lending libraries, wise talking dogs, wikipedia, and oracles. Ahhh... the simple life...
I thought the phrase was "weighs in," perhaps deriving from boxing and showing that you are willing and able to partake in a fight, rather than "wades in," which I have never heard and sounds like it has something to do with water.
Irregardless, I think the title sounds funny, but this sounds like a question of supply and command. I'd wade in a little more, but I need to go de-thaw something for dinner.
With AT&T in my area, the "up to" 3mbps service was attractive a few years ago but the actual speed always fluctuated a great deal. I made several calls, they assured me that there was nothing wrong and there was nothing they could do, even though it seemed to get worse over time. The wiring on my end was not a problem, and I ran a new line from outside straight to the modem, just to be sure, which did not help. I had already had issues with the only alternative in town (Time Warner Cable), so before switching companies I decided to try the newly-available Uverse service. Mind you this is also DSL, delivered over the same exact line into my house, and I now get a steady, reliable 12mbps. I have no idea why the old service was so inconsistent and the newer version is so much better, but I have been happy since - and not really paying any more!
After the switch, AT&T erroneously charged me $150 for a technician install that was never requested or performed, which took 4 phone calls (two apparently to South Asia, one of which was to an impatient operator with an accent I could barely understand) but they did finally credit me for the scammy charge, and that has been my only issue since upgrading.
...which was actually their THIRD reactor that nobody was aware of.
Philips' 100W-equivalent bulb will be available some time in the fourth quarter. Pricing has yet to be announced, but it will likely be well over $30.
Seriously? Well over $30? Okay, thanks, but no thanks. I'll stick to CFLs for most of my home lighting needs (with a few old hot bulbs where appropriate), for now at least. And to think, lots of folks still laugh at "expensive" CFL prices. I would love to transition to LEDs, but it has to make financial sense first. CFLs are just as energy efficient, and much cheaper.
Within the last 24 hours, if you didn't hear, the FBI announced that they had prevented 5 men from blowing up a bridge in Northeast Ohio. They had previously sold the men a phony bomb and a fake remote detonator, and then monitored the self-proclaimed anarchists as they placed their "bomb" at the base of a bridge and attempted to detonate it. Chalk up one in favor of the FBI, as the alleged, would-be bombers had surveyed several potential targets and planned to conduct further bombings. I doubt these "anarchists" really understand the concept of anarchy, and they are clearly not that bright, but they do appear to have been a legitimate threat, and I can't help but applaud the FBI on a great success. This is the "homegrown" terror threat that scares me much more than radical Islamist infiltrators, and I can't help but praise the FBI. Maybe this hits home hard, as I know the bridge that was threatened, but it isn't everyday you hear about a bunch of young, mid-western white boys trying to blow up something important. Usually they just blow up stupid shit in their back yards, not bridges! I'm not a big fan of law enforcement, especially the FBI, but this was a job well done.
If secret patents are in the works how are others with similar product ideas protected?
How? They aren't. They waste their time and resources working on technologies for which someone else will be granted a patent, without being able to know that they are driving at full speed down a dead-end street. This feeds the patent trolls, and discourages innovators by raising the stakes. Great idea, just what the US needs!
So what is to be gained if the US text is kept secret, but the essentially identical application is in the open in three dozen other countries?
The gain for the patent holder is magnified if competitors waste their time developing technologies that they will later be unable to use once the secret patents pop up. Prior art is no longer a cut and dried topic, and patents become even more significant. And this while patent trolls and the biggest corporations are already speculatively amassing ridiculous numbers of patents that they really have no intention of putting into production. In time this will only further stifle innovation in the USA, where it is clearly already hard enough.
They make a shampoo for that. Just wash the developers once in a while and you'll have no trouble with fleas, just as with cats and dogs.
Debian is a great distro, I must agree. However, I find it to be a little rough around the edges, and prefer Mint's Debian-based edition. LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) offers the fast, clean, stable Debian base with all the bells, whistles, and eye candy that that the Mint team are known for. It is 100% Debian-compatible, and ready out of the box to serve as a great general purpose desktop OS. First Mint took Ubuntu and made it better, and now they have done the same with Debian, and I couldn't be much happier with the result.
If God is omnipotent, why does he need the glory? And why does he seems to need everyone to love him? If this dude is real, he has one serious inferiority complex.
Well, if he has access to Everything, what else do you give him? Glory is a natural gift for he who needs nothing. In most historical cases of anyone asking for praise to be given to God, it was men asking for the glory to bestowed upon The Lord as a means of showing thanks, not He himself asking. We can praise him, though we can not really give him money, hugs, sausages, a beer, a sweater, or a fancily-wrapped trinket, so props seem like a no-brainer.
"Uh, we know what we want to do isn't legal and isn't morally acceptable in a civilized society, or else we wouldn't be asking for specific permission now via scientific investigation because we would already be doing it, but we think torture is definitely an effective interrogation technique, so..."
... "cold" is not a flavor.
But their sister product, Miller Lite, has "more taste." What they don't tell you is that more crappy taste is not necessarily better than less crappy taste. The "more taste" marketing campaign never once said it had a BETTER taste than Bud Light, just that it had more. I've smelled some dog turds that probably have a ton of taste, but I'm not going to mess with those, either. I'll stick to Yuengling or Gennesee when I'm feeling poor, and keep sampling quality craft brews the rest of the time.
What this really is, is beer for people who don't like beer. I am a beer enthusiast (not quite a beer snob... yet), and I can tell you that the last thing real beer lovers want is ultra-cold, crapified beer. Don't we have enough beer for people who don't actually like beer? Like all American-style macrobrewed lagers (Bud, Bud Lite, Miller Lite, Coors, and most everything made by Anheuser or Miller-Coors), most Canadian beers (including most all of them exported to the US), Corona, most malt liquors, etc.
Most cheap, common beers are pretty crappy examples of their respective styles. They are generally watery, taste more of adjuncts than hops or barley malt, 4.2%-5.9% alcohol, piss yellow, over carbonated, and meant to be served so cold as to mask what little flavor there is. I'll pass on this frozen beer BS, though I bet plenty of idiots who swear by Bud Light will be all over it.
The maze in their website which led to this opportunity is now a story of legend. Will the key to this unlocking the iPhone be as byzantine for former customers?
Is it just me being a burnout, or do these two sentences, when viewed without context, sound like they could have been written by a computer rather than a person?
Nvidia's CEO is also predicting this summer will see the rise of $200 Android tablets.
So Android tablet prices are going up? You can already buy sub-$200 tablets all day long from Amazon, or Big Lots as one example if you prefer a brick and mortar option. Both have some pretty useful ones for $99 right now. They are not iPads, but they are pretty useful for only a c-note. I just saw one with a capacitive screen, Android 3.1, 1GB RAM, 8 GB internal (I think), and an SD card slot, for $99. Not blazingly fast, surely, but fiarly capable and dirt cheap. If you really want a tablet, and you are in the Western world, chances are you can already afford one.
Guns aren't any use if they're a) not handy, and b) not understood. Could also backfire if the bad guy takes it away from you. Or steals it from you while you're gone during the day.
c) if you are not there to use them
Guns can't protect your property while you are away, so a visible security system of some sort may be a deterrent, and a dog is as good or better. If you rely on firearms to protect your family when you are home, you must be ready to use them, which is something a lot of gun owners do not fully appreciate. If somebody breaks in, you have to shoot them, or you risk them taking your gun and shooting you. Then you'll have to at least justify your actions to a court, unless you live in Florida, apparently. If you are in fact in Florida, you can not only defend your home, but run around the neighborhood and shoot people for wearing hoodies, it appears, so none of this applies to you.
If you break into my house, you are either going to die or bleed a lot, and likely the former, as my neighbors might not be too quick to call the police (and I certainly won't). But not everyone is willing or able to pull the trigger, which is something you must consider if you are thinking of arming yourself to confront any burglars.
Ways to protect your home, in order of easiest and most effective to least reliable and most troublesome:
1. Get a dog. Burglars HATE them.
2. Get a conspicuous security system, with signs and cameras, to act as a deterrent.
3. Get a gun, get professional training so you know how and when to use it, and live with the fact that you might kill someone.
4. Put lovely wrought iron security bars on all your windows and get extra-heavy steel security doors with expensive locks, hinges, and frames.
5. Move out to the middle of Wyoming, where your nearest neighbor and the nearest road are a couple of miles away.
6. Never leave home, and never sleep.
7. Do nothing and hope for the best.
One thing that immediately jumped out at me from this post: the safe. Do not rely on a home safe to protect your valuables or important documents. A fire-resistant box is not a bad idea, but the affordable ones are not able to stand up to a fire that burns your house to the ground. And if it doesn't weigh at least 300 pounds, count on it being stolen if thieves loot your home. I'm sure they absolutely love to find Walmart safes, since they know there is likely to be something good in them, and they can simply carry them away to destroy them at their leisure later on. Safe deposit boxes at banks are much, much safer for valuables you don't need to have readily accessible, and are highly under-utilized, IMHO. (No, I don't run a bank or own stock in one.)
To deter break-ins, the cheapest effective thing to do would be to steal a Brinks security sign from the guy around the corner, and perhaps place a couple of faux security cameras in conspicuous places. Nothing, whether video surveilance or a monitored security system, is a guarantee, unfortunately. I saw some professional burglars interviewed in some documentary, and they said they didn't care what you had, since they didn't drive right up with their license plates in full view. Plus they were always in and out in a matter of three to five minutes, or well before the local constabulary could even be dispatched. The one deterrent that works? Dogs. Some dogs are tolerant of strangers, some are too tiny to be a threat, but the thieves I saw all said they will move on to another target if they see any sign of a dog. To them, the presence of a dog means uncertainty, and that a house is not worth bothering with, since there are plenty without dogs.
It may not run WIndows, but don't forget that the Xbox is a Microsoft product, so of course it is a liability.
This is not quite a fair comparison. I know for a fact that I am perfectly capable of taking my allegedly smart phone with my in the car and keeping it in my pocket where it creates no distraction. On the other hand, if my BAC were .15 or somewhere near that range, I doubt that simply ignoring my drunkenness would allow me to maintain my ability to drive.
"Bad work habits," "reading between the lines" to say the guy got fired, and "try working for a change?" Dude just doesn't want to lug 2 freaking laptops on the road if he doesn't have to, jeez. Who wants to tote a second machine around just to check their email, watch a movie ON THEIR OWN TIME (especially when travelling for work, or would hanging out at the hotel bar be better?), or pay a bill or something once in a while? Yes, the best solution is to use something other than a work laptop, but come on, be realistic.
I can't believe that comment got +5 for insightful. more like -1 for insults and made up BS. Not everyone downloads pirate torrents, looks at porn, or surfs mindlessly all day at work, but damn near everyone near a computer checks their email, which doesn't necessarily detract from productivity. It is 2012 not 1996, so we don't all play solitaire every time we're left alone. I can't believe employers are willing to fork over big salaries and give laptops out to employees they can't trust any more than a 4 year-old.
When I was younger and went to bars I would regularly nap between getting home from work and heading for the bar at about 10pm.
And you were probably a bit tipsy to drive after hitting the bar, despite having a nap. More than once (to understate things) I hit up happy hour, got in my car to go home at 7 or 8 PM, and said "Whoa... I better not get pulled over." And I am far, far from alone. Most people can probably drive successfully above .08 most of the time, but we have to have a somewhat conservative limit when other circumstances are factored in and lives are on the line. Drink all ya want and have a good time, just don't put my family and friends in danger when you do it and I won't care. This is a topic I feel very strongly about. Hell, I ENCOURAGE drinking because I enjoy doing it myself and I make money from you doing it, but be realistic and be careful. Drinking isn't a moral issue for a lot of us, but operating a 3000-5000 pound metal projectile capable of 100+ mph on public highways while impaired certainly is.
So in going from a BAC of 0.12 to 0.8 a whopping drop of... 8,000. When you factor in that cras today are much safer and the larger number of miles driven it becomes clear that DRUNK DRIVING LAWS ARE ALL HYPE.
So .08 may be a bit low, I'll grant you that. But have you seen people at .12 try to pass "field sobriety" coordination tests? They generally don't fall on their faces but they don't do so well, either. At .12 most people appear to be somewhat impaired. You've got to have a hard, across the board cutoff somewhere, don't you? Or enhanced physical tests? You've got to have a limit somewhere, since nobody at .25 or .3+ should ever be drive a car on a public road. So what's the answer? Performance begins to deteriorate well below even .08, and becomes evident for even good, careful drivers by about .12. I *think* I can drive fine a bit above .08, but maybe that is not always the case if ti is 2 AM and I am tired, and may not be true for everyone, so I'd rather the limit be on the low side and act as a deterrent rather than having a high limit that encourages over indulgence, as people will always push their limits.
When you factor in that cras today are much safer and the larger number of miles driven it becomes clear that DRUNK DRIVING LAWS ARE ALL HYPE. Most people drive worse while rushing to work, eating food in the car or any other number of things.
You can't underestimate the deterrent effect of jail. I know and have known tons of people who have liked alcohol an awful lot. I've also known a bunch who have had DUIs/DWIs/OVIs. I would definitely say the smarter and better educated people I know are both more averse to arrest and jail time and less likely to drive wasted. I don't care to look up statistics, but I'd bet a month's wages that DUI convictions skew towards lower income/less educated people, and I'm proud to say that I've spent significant amounts of time with people from all walks of life and had friends of every imaginable background. It isn't that the the people I know with MDs and PhDs don't like alcohol, but that they are more likely to get a ride after drinking and not put themselves in such bad situations as the lower-income and less educated folks.
Drunk driving laws are not hype: they WILL get you if you regularly drink and drive (or if you do it infrequently and really screw up or have bad luck), and they are a huge deterrent for a lot of people. I've put myself (and others) at risk many times, but as I've matured a bit I've realized how lucky I was and, as such, I nolonger take such stupid chances with my freedom and the lives of bystanders. Eating, smoking, playing with the stereo, tending to kids, getting road head, barking dogs, being tired, whatever, are dangerous too, but good luck stopping all those things. Strict alcohol enforcement can and does make a difference. Again, I love love LOVE beer, but I shudder to think about what our roads would be like if we had no DUI laws. I may technically "ride dirty" again, but the threat of arrest, incarceration, and loss of the privelege of driving will always be in the back of my mind to keep my habit in check to some degree.