Simple fact is that you are safer in a four wheel drive vehicle in the snow, than in a two wheel drive vehicle (other things being equal).
I agree completely, and I think I said this in an earlier comment.
So yes, SUV drivers are safer than other drivers.
Wait, how'd you get to that point from the first sentence? Some SUVs are 4WD, and some non-SUVs are 4WD. The safety comes from having more wheels providing control and power, not from branding.
For what it's worth, most SUVs are terrible off road vehicles. They simply are not built for that use. They're built to look 'cool' while you pile your brood in the back on the way to the grocery store. You think a Lincoln Navigator is a good choice for snow driving? Or would you rather have the AWD Subaru?
I've always been more afraid of little, light two wheel drive cars (ok, some front wheel drives are ok) sliding around out of control vs a nice, heavier truck/SUB with bigger tires and 4-wheel drive. I know which one "I" would rather be in and it ain't the little car with no traction.
Big, heavy vehicles have a lot more moving mass and therefore inertia. When they break traction, they don't stop easily and it requires much more effort to bring them back under control. Bigger tires means that you have a higher chance of breaking traction. Look at vehicles specifically designed to work in low-traction environments like a sand rail or mud buggy. They're light and have narrow tires.
A sibling reply brought up a valid reason for having a truck, and it was only an argument based on ground clearance. I'll grant that whole heartedly, but not 'more mass and large tires are safer'. If you're in an environment when you must be out and about in stuff so deep your AWD passenger car won't make it, you need a specialized vehicle. You're fooling yourself it you think an SUV is designed for that kind of driving.
While I think it isn't a bad thing to be green in some respects, it is ok with me ONLY to the point to where it causes me inconvenience, or effort or costs me money. Life is too short not to be enjoyed and lived to the fullest.
This exactly illustrates my initial comment: "Saving money is a side effect and a decent motivator to get selfish people to go along with what is ultimately an altruistic decision." I'm cool with the fact that you get to make your own decisions and you don't care about the rest of the world or the future. Really, that's your choice. I'll do my part and you go ahead and not do yours. We'll both die and never see the results.
In the meantime, I'll do what I can to make greener decisions more appealing to people like you who can't think outside your own worldview. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy, and will probably end up being a positive thing for the wold in general. You go ahead and get your warm fuzzies from church or politics or whatever. We can all be happy.
In light of that, I might as well worrying about the sun going supernova as I am of so called man-made global warming.
You see the sun as going nova as the end. I see it as a challenge to get off this rock before it happens. Why resign so soon?
PS - thanks for actually having an opposing viewpoint on slashdot without flaming:)
All this "green" tech is fine and dandy, until some adverse weather shows up. Then you're wishing you still had that SUV, or proper stoplight bulbs, or whatever it was that you gave up to save 2 cents with "green" tech.
First, if you think that you're safer in an SUV in the snow, you're part of the problem. I am not scared of driving in the snow, but I'm terrified of people driving SUVs in the snow.
Second, the point of 'going green' isn't to save money. It's to save resources and have a lighter footprint on the environment. Saving money is a side effect and a decent motivator to get selfish people to go along with what is ultimately an altruistic decision. Most of the little decisions I make in my life to eat organic, recycle and be more energy efficient cost me money. In return I receive very little in terms of tangible reward, but I'm content with my grandchildren collecting on my behalf.
Someone will find a clever solution to this problem (perhaps some sort of law that requires you to treat an unknown light as red, perhaps one of these already exists in your jurisdiction) and we will move on. Completely abandoning progress in the face of adversity isn't really a tenable stance.
Only problem with your theory is that none of that worked on the original Macintosh. It was a single tasking OS, and the desktop was inaccessible while running an app. And "clippings" didn't appear until System 7.something.
The original intent was probably to enable window switching within an application.
Also I've noticed that a lot of Mac blowhards on this site love to frame these things in terms of the "original Mac" or "since 1984", when it is clear they probably have never used anything under MacOS 8.
MultiFinder was added in system 5 and allowed application level cooperative multi-tasking. While not quite 1984 (Wikipedia says 1987), it's still a damned long time ago.
My cable DVR is a pain in the ass. I can't watch shows I've recorded on my living room DVR in the bedroom unless I sign up for a second DRV (and record it twice). The shows I set up to record constantly chop 1-10 seconds off either end. I frequently end up with multiple copies of a given show because the DVR is too stupid to recognize that it has already recorded it.
The On Demand content is no better assuming you can even penetrate the byzantine and constantly changing menu system they foist upon you. You never know if or when a given show will be available on On Demand unless you drill down and look, which is only useful to know if it's on there right now. No indication as to whether or not it ever will show up - or when. Then there are the multiple listings with slightly different spellings. It's as if they hired myopic monkeys to hand enter all the metadata. If you want to see exactly how bad an interface can be, try watching a few music videos on Comcast's On Demand service.
I ran a MythTV box for several years and it was purely a joy to use (once configured). The cable company subsequently went pure digital and I upgraded to an HD setup in the living room, so that ended that. But I miss the days of a system that did exactly what I wanted it to. At the moment, the only thing that brings me anywhere near as much joy is Netflix Watch Instantly - and that's with an incredibly limited catalog of relatively stale content.
Frankly, I'm over it. I only want a tiny fraction of the content they're offering, but I'm paying for all of it - and it'll only come to me in a format that is a huge pain in my ass. I buy all my music now that I can purchase MP3s (or AACs) directly, conveniently and without DRM, but that model doesn't work for television shows. I don't need to OWN a copy of last week's The Office. I need to watch it exactly once.
Sell me a PirateBay torrent service. I already have a computer hooked to all of my TVs, so you don't even need to invest in any hardware. I figure I have roughly $60 per month that is going to the cable company right now, and whoever can deliver this to me can have that. If not, I think I'll just cancel my cable and start in on the piracy. Nobody seems interested in giving me the service that I want, so why not?
PS - I don't give a shit if ESPN will bitch that you can't bundle their channels to me with this model. Suck it up.
4K is roughly 4,000 pixels across, not 4X "HD", which is probably assuming HD to be defined as 1920X1080. 4x HD, if you multiply each dimension, would be 7680x4320, a lot higher.
Doubling the number of pixels in each dimension (eg, to 3840 x 2160) gives you four times the total pixels in the encompassed area.
You're ignoring the fact that lugging your laundry to the back yard, hanging it all up, waiting for it to dry then pulling it all down again is a lot more work than simply moving it from the washer to the dryer sitting right next to it.
I'm not saying that hanging your laundry out to dry naturally isn't a good idea, but lets not pretend there aren't valid reasons for using a dryer.
I expected to watch it and return here with some witty rejoinders to share. But something happened in that six minutes and fourteen seconds that not only neutered all creativity in my mind, but also seems to have caused me to be unable to think at all for the remainder of the day. Now the only thing I can say about it is:
Demon Internet Yesman 2: Uh, um.... SPLUNGE! Demon Internet CEO: What does splunge mean? Demon Internet Yesman 2: It means it's a great idea, but possibly not, and I'm not being indecisive! Demon Internet CEO: GOOD!
First time on slashdot that I've heard un-crippling technology described as despicable. Comes a day for everything, I suppose.
While I agree that the parent's word choice is 'interesting', I'd like to point out that freedom goes both directions.
People on this forum always seem to think that 'un-crippling' is the only right we need to talk about when discussion freedom with technology, but that's only half the discussion. Sure, we as users should have the freedom to tinker and tweak as much as we want given the tools we've at hand. That includes fiddling the source if it's available, writing extensions/plugins/whatever to a specified API, doing actual runtime object shuffling or even sticking a lying device on the end of some connection to fool the initiating end. So far, good deal - go freedom.
However, Apple also has the freedom to do whatever they want with their product. If they decide to shuffle the object model around and break your runtime object shuffling modification, they don't need to feel bad about it. If they want to break their public API, they can - though it's unlikely they'll want to. They can decide that they don't like devices on the end of their connections lying about what they are and block that too. These are all things that Apple is free to do. It's their toy.
Of course, you are then free to start your process again and re-shuffle those runtime objects or work around any 'don't lie to my cable' roadblocks. Game on.
The only thing that makes this particular case interesting is that the 'lie over the wire' technique is specifically against the USB standard. Palm is more than welcome to disavow their membership, stop stamping USB logos all over their products and continue on.
*I don't really mean to pick on you specifically, but your comment was the right size and tone.
It's the kind of thing that will help identify that baseball and kickball aren't good workouts while basketball, soccer, and field hockey are.
If you need a heart rate monitor to figure out that 9 people standing around and 1 person running is less of a workout then everyone running at once... we are talking the public education system here, so I'll rescind my statement before I finish.
Sorry, their search is appalling. If you want to go to "View all search results", it takes me to a page with no results, just a search window. I hit enter again, in case it needs it (bad UI, as I've already said I wanted all results), wait absolutely ages for it to load, and then still get no results. What's going on? I tried it a bit later, and it worked, but it only seems to work about 50% of the time. If something went wrong, there's no error message - again, fundamentally bad UI mistakes.
I didn't get that behavior, but it does load it via some AJAX nonsense instead of just showing the results - so unnecessarily complex for no good reason with a potential for unhandled failures. I agree with you here. They did just make some big announcements about new iPods, so they're probably swamped and it's not surprising that they're experiencing issues. Still no excuse for a company that large.
Doesn't work for me. Tested in IE and Opera.
I've only tested in Netscape (1.0 up until they passed to Mozilla), Mozilla (various versions until they quit), Firefox (initial split from Mozilla up to current), and Safari (1.0 to current). Worked for me in all those, but it looks like domain auto-fill doesn't work in IE or Opera. Sorry. I guess you'll have to put.com on the end of it.
Yes, it works if I do things like apple.com/developer, but big deal, I can do microsoft.com/windows, microsoft.com/office or microsoft.com/support. Microsoft have thought up obvious names for subfolders and redirects too.
Cool - so they both win on this front. I wasn't trying to say neener neener with that tip, but it appears you are. I have traditionally found it handy and thought I'd share. Those shortcuts have been stable for over 10 years for me, which is impressive in itself.
That's kind of the point of the article, actually. You don't get there directly from the home page, and that's the correct behavior for 90% or more of the people who land there. Just because you have a division or resource that is of interest to a small subset of your users doesn't mean it needs front page space.
In answer to your specific question, type 'developer' into their search box. You get an incredibly handy list of common results pre-filled in a drop down list, and actually submitting the search yields a bevy of results. Maybe it's the generally terrible in-site searching of sites around the net and the relative awesomeness of Google that has trained people to not even try, but Apple's site search is pretty good.
I've learned over the years, however, that pretty much anything you want from an Apple web site can be found by typing 'apple/foo' in your location bar. Your browser will autofill the 'apple' to 'www.apple.com' and Apple maps all of their resources to the first part of the path - even if it ends up redirecting you to 'foo.apple.com' in the end. So, try 'apple/quicktime' or 'apple/developer' (or 'safari', or 'macosx' or 'iphone', etc). Very handy.
You can leave it on, but be sure you don't leave a disk in the drive. It'll spin constantly and the drives simply are not rated for that much wear and tear. I left mine on (since they imply you should with the presence of all those spiffy channels on the main menu) but didn't think to pull out the disks. 1.5 years later, I'm dumping $70 on a new optical drive that you can really only get from Nintendo.
My parents used to watch TV at night, I prefer to play video games to unwind. I think it provides more mental stimulation than popping open a beer and sitting on the couch.
I've caught comments my whole life along the lines of "Why are you wasting time playing video games?" - from people who spend their entire free evenings plopped in front of the television. I've never understood this. I always ask how, exactly, a non-interactive video experience is less wasteful and I routinely get baffled looks back.
I've come to the conclusion that there was some social brainwashing component regarding video games that happened in the 80s that makes people believe this. Questioning this 'truth' is somehow an alien thought.
Of course, it didn't help that as a kid growing up that anything I did in front of the computer was considered 'video games' by my parents. For the record, I didn't play many video games growing up. That was my education.
I don't think you understand the appstore. I can not download the source, recompile it, package it and put it up on the app store as it exactly is. If the appstore wasn't governed then maybe what you are saying would be true.
Sure you can - you just have to have a Mac to do the compilation, pay the $99 developer fee for your certificate and submit it for whatever price you deem fit. The point of this whole discussion is that the code is still free and this team is following the letter as well as the spirit of the GPL. Anyone who wants can download the code and do with it whatever they want - including directly competing with these guys.
Of course, if you did all that and paid the developer fee, you may want to charge a nominal fee in order to recoup your outlay. Say, two or three bucks?
Nobody is suggesting that you eat the hay in that analogy. You're supposed to plant something else where the hay is and eat that - and also plant it where the cows live. You do get more usable energy out of the same land that way, period.
And none of that implies that you should eat no meat (though some would love that). Just don't eat quite so much of it. If you think that your Big Mac for lunch every day is a good way to go about a healthy life and that everyone else should STFU, that's fine - but don't pretend you're a nutritionist.
Apple has a lot of pull. They have a very, very desirable device that phone companies want badly. I have no doubt that, had Apple actually wanted to, they could have worked a very advantageous-to-them contract out.
They didn't have a 'very, very desirable device that phone companies want badly' when they negotiated the contract.
You need to get the collection agency's physical address and send them a debt validation letter (you can find standard boilerplate for a DV all over). Send it certified and keep notes. If they call you again after receiving that letter, you just won $1000 with an FDCPA lawsuit. Trust me, they won't call. They know exactly how far they can legally push, and lawsuits are not profitable to them.
In short, this is not a problem your phone carrier should have to deal with. They're just a carrier. They don't care WHO is calling you, they just deliver calls to your number. They're still monopolistic assholes for a myriad other reasons, but in this case I agree with them.
I don't know that I've ever seen the actual blots before. I find it interesting (at least on that page) that every single Possible Sexual Imagery entry basically says "Dicks or Vaginas" - no matter how improbable they may be in the actual blot. I could have been a famous psychiatrist for realizing that people see sex organs in everything?!
Slashdot Mirror
I agree completely, and I think I said this in an earlier comment.
Wait, how'd you get to that point from the first sentence? Some SUVs are 4WD, and some non-SUVs are 4WD. The safety comes from having more wheels providing control and power, not from branding.
For what it's worth, most SUVs are terrible off road vehicles. They simply are not built for that use. They're built to look 'cool' while you pile your brood in the back on the way to the grocery store. You think a Lincoln Navigator is a good choice for snow driving? Or would you rather have the AWD Subaru?
Big, heavy vehicles have a lot more moving mass and therefore inertia. When they break traction, they don't stop easily and it requires much more effort to bring them back under control. Bigger tires means that you have a higher chance of breaking traction. Look at vehicles specifically designed to work in low-traction environments like a sand rail or mud buggy. They're light and have narrow tires.
A sibling reply brought up a valid reason for having a truck, and it was only an argument based on ground clearance. I'll grant that whole heartedly, but not 'more mass and large tires are safer'. If you're in an environment when you must be out and about in stuff so deep your AWD passenger car won't make it, you need a specialized vehicle. You're fooling yourself it you think an SUV is designed for that kind of driving.
This exactly illustrates my initial comment: "Saving money is a side effect and a decent motivator to get selfish people to go along with what is ultimately an altruistic decision." I'm cool with the fact that you get to make your own decisions and you don't care about the rest of the world or the future. Really, that's your choice. I'll do my part and you go ahead and not do yours. We'll both die and never see the results.
In the meantime, I'll do what I can to make greener decisions more appealing to people like you who can't think outside your own worldview. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy, and will probably end up being a positive thing for the wold in general. You go ahead and get your warm fuzzies from church or politics or whatever. We can all be happy.
You see the sun as going nova as the end. I see it as a challenge to get off this rock before it happens. Why resign so soon?
PS - thanks for actually having an opposing viewpoint on slashdot without flaming :)
First, if you think that you're safer in an SUV in the snow, you're part of the problem. I am not scared of driving in the snow, but I'm terrified of people driving SUVs in the snow.
Second, the point of 'going green' isn't to save money. It's to save resources and have a lighter footprint on the environment. Saving money is a side effect and a decent motivator to get selfish people to go along with what is ultimately an altruistic decision. Most of the little decisions I make in my life to eat organic, recycle and be more energy efficient cost me money. In return I receive very little in terms of tangible reward, but I'm content with my grandchildren collecting on my behalf.
Someone will find a clever solution to this problem (perhaps some sort of law that requires you to treat an unknown light as red, perhaps one of these already exists in your jurisdiction) and we will move on. Completely abandoning progress in the face of adversity isn't really a tenable stance.
MultiFinder was added in system 5 and allowed application level cooperative multi-tasking. While not quite 1984 (Wikipedia says 1987), it's still a damned long time ago.
Please explain that to management. They will strongly disagree with you, so make a good case.
I know it's not an XKCD link, but it's surprisingly relevant to the topic: http://achewood.com/index.php?date=07052007
Seriously, I'll pay for this service.
My cable DVR is a pain in the ass. I can't watch shows I've recorded on my living room DVR in the bedroom unless I sign up for a second DRV (and record it twice). The shows I set up to record constantly chop 1-10 seconds off either end. I frequently end up with multiple copies of a given show because the DVR is too stupid to recognize that it has already recorded it.
The On Demand content is no better assuming you can even penetrate the byzantine and constantly changing menu system they foist upon you. You never know if or when a given show will be available on On Demand unless you drill down and look, which is only useful to know if it's on there right now. No indication as to whether or not it ever will show up - or when. Then there are the multiple listings with slightly different spellings. It's as if they hired myopic monkeys to hand enter all the metadata. If you want to see exactly how bad an interface can be, try watching a few music videos on Comcast's On Demand service.
I ran a MythTV box for several years and it was purely a joy to use (once configured). The cable company subsequently went pure digital and I upgraded to an HD setup in the living room, so that ended that. But I miss the days of a system that did exactly what I wanted it to. At the moment, the only thing that brings me anywhere near as much joy is Netflix Watch Instantly - and that's with an incredibly limited catalog of relatively stale content.
Frankly, I'm over it. I only want a tiny fraction of the content they're offering, but I'm paying for all of it - and it'll only come to me in a format that is a huge pain in my ass. I buy all my music now that I can purchase MP3s (or AACs) directly, conveniently and without DRM, but that model doesn't work for television shows. I don't need to OWN a copy of last week's The Office. I need to watch it exactly once.
Sell me a PirateBay torrent service. I already have a computer hooked to all of my TVs, so you don't even need to invest in any hardware. I figure I have roughly $60 per month that is going to the cable company right now, and whoever can deliver this to me can have that. If not, I think I'll just cancel my cable and start in on the piracy. Nobody seems interested in giving me the service that I want, so why not?
PS - I don't give a shit if ESPN will bitch that you can't bundle their channels to me with this model. Suck it up.
Doubling the number of pixels in each dimension (eg, to 3840 x 2160) gives you four times the total pixels in the encompassed area.
You're ignoring the fact that lugging your laundry to the back yard, hanging it all up, waiting for it to dry then pulling it all down again is a lot more work than simply moving it from the washer to the dryer sitting right next to it.
I'm not saying that hanging your laundry out to dry naturally isn't a good idea, but lets not pretend there aren't valid reasons for using a dryer.
I expected to watch it and return here with some witty rejoinders to share. But something happened in that six minutes and fourteen seconds that not only neutered all creativity in my mind, but also seems to have caused me to be unable to think at all for the remainder of the day. Now the only thing I can say about it is:
That was fucking terrible.
Demon Internet Yesman 2: Uh, um .... SPLUNGE!
Demon Internet CEO: What does splunge mean?
Demon Internet Yesman 2: It means it's a great idea, but possibly not, and I'm not being indecisive!
Demon Internet CEO: GOOD!
While I agree that the parent's word choice is 'interesting', I'd like to point out that freedom goes both directions.
People on this forum always seem to think that 'un-crippling' is the only right we need to talk about when discussion freedom with technology, but that's only half the discussion. Sure, we as users should have the freedom to tinker and tweak as much as we want given the tools we've at hand. That includes fiddling the source if it's available, writing extensions/plugins/whatever to a specified API, doing actual runtime object shuffling or even sticking a lying device on the end of some connection to fool the initiating end. So far, good deal - go freedom.
However, Apple also has the freedom to do whatever they want with their product. If they decide to shuffle the object model around and break your runtime object shuffling modification, they don't need to feel bad about it. If they want to break their public API, they can - though it's unlikely they'll want to. They can decide that they don't like devices on the end of their connections lying about what they are and block that too. These are all things that Apple is free to do. It's their toy.
Of course, you are then free to start your process again and re-shuffle those runtime objects or work around any 'don't lie to my cable' roadblocks. Game on.
The only thing that makes this particular case interesting is that the 'lie over the wire' technique is specifically against the USB standard. Palm is more than welcome to disavow their membership, stop stamping USB logos all over their products and continue on.
*I don't really mean to pick on you specifically, but your comment was the right size and tone.
If you need a heart rate monitor to figure out that 9 people standing around and 1 person running is less of a workout then everyone running at once ... we are talking the public education system here, so I'll rescind my statement before I finish.
I didn't get that behavior, but it does load it via some AJAX nonsense instead of just showing the results - so unnecessarily complex for no good reason with a potential for unhandled failures. I agree with you here. They did just make some big announcements about new iPods, so they're probably swamped and it's not surprising that they're experiencing issues. Still no excuse for a company that large.
I've only tested in Netscape (1.0 up until they passed to Mozilla), Mozilla (various versions until they quit), Firefox (initial split from Mozilla up to current), and Safari (1.0 to current). Worked for me in all those, but it looks like domain auto-fill doesn't work in IE or Opera. Sorry. I guess you'll have to put .com on the end of it.
Cool - so they both win on this front. I wasn't trying to say neener neener with that tip, but it appears you are. I have traditionally found it handy and thought I'd share. Those shortcuts have been stable for over 10 years for me, which is impressive in itself.
That's kind of the point of the article, actually. You don't get there directly from the home page, and that's the correct behavior for 90% or more of the people who land there. Just because you have a division or resource that is of interest to a small subset of your users doesn't mean it needs front page space.
In answer to your specific question, type 'developer' into their search box. You get an incredibly handy list of common results pre-filled in a drop down list, and actually submitting the search yields a bevy of results. Maybe it's the generally terrible in-site searching of sites around the net and the relative awesomeness of Google that has trained people to not even try, but Apple's site search is pretty good.
I've learned over the years, however, that pretty much anything you want from an Apple web site can be found by typing 'apple/foo' in your location bar. Your browser will autofill the 'apple' to 'www.apple.com' and Apple maps all of their resources to the first part of the path - even if it ends up redirecting you to 'foo.apple.com' in the end. So, try 'apple/quicktime' or 'apple/developer' (or 'safari', or 'macosx' or 'iphone', etc). Very handy.
You can leave it on, but be sure you don't leave a disk in the drive. It'll spin constantly and the drives simply are not rated for that much wear and tear. I left mine on (since they imply you should with the presence of all those spiffy channels on the main menu) but didn't think to pull out the disks. 1.5 years later, I'm dumping $70 on a new optical drive that you can really only get from Nintendo.
I've caught comments my whole life along the lines of "Why are you wasting time playing video games?" - from people who spend their entire free evenings plopped in front of the television. I've never understood this. I always ask how, exactly, a non-interactive video experience is less wasteful and I routinely get baffled looks back.
I've come to the conclusion that there was some social brainwashing component regarding video games that happened in the 80s that makes people believe this. Questioning this 'truth' is somehow an alien thought.
Of course, it didn't help that as a kid growing up that anything I did in front of the computer was considered 'video games' by my parents. For the record, I didn't play many video games growing up. That was my education.
PS: I play lots of video games now ;)
I laughed with empathy until I realized that this is actually sad.
Sure you can - you just have to have a Mac to do the compilation, pay the $99 developer fee for your certificate and submit it for whatever price you deem fit. The point of this whole discussion is that the code is still free and this team is following the letter as well as the spirit of the GPL. Anyone who wants can download the code and do with it whatever they want - including directly competing with these guys.
Of course, if you did all that and paid the developer fee, you may want to charge a nominal fee in order to recoup your outlay. Say, two or three bucks?
Nobody is suggesting that you eat the hay in that analogy. You're supposed to plant something else where the hay is and eat that - and also plant it where the cows live. You do get more usable energy out of the same land that way, period.
And none of that implies that you should eat no meat (though some would love that). Just don't eat quite so much of it. If you think that your Big Mac for lunch every day is a good way to go about a healthy life and that everyone else should STFU, that's fine - but don't pretend you're a nutritionist.
They didn't have a 'very, very desirable device that phone companies want badly' when they negotiated the contract.
You need to get the collection agency's physical address and send them a debt validation letter (you can find standard boilerplate for a DV all over). Send it certified and keep notes. If they call you again after receiving that letter, you just won $1000 with an FDCPA lawsuit. Trust me, they won't call. They know exactly how far they can legally push, and lawsuits are not profitable to them.
In short, this is not a problem your phone carrier should have to deal with. They're just a carrier. They don't care WHO is calling you, they just deliver calls to your number. They're still monopolistic assholes for a myriad other reasons, but in this case I agree with them.
What on earth makes you think a user would follow such a link to, what appears to be to them, a random third party web page?
I don't know that I've ever seen the actual blots before. I find it interesting (at least on that page) that every single Possible Sexual Imagery entry basically says "Dicks or Vaginas" - no matter how improbable they may be in the actual blot. I could have been a famous psychiatrist for realizing that people see sex organs in everything?!
You're assuming they'll drop the gasoline tax. I'm betting it's more like a leap from $106.73 to $406.73.