Plus I should point out that you are trying to foist your politics off on Stripe. Why should they be forced to share your political beliefs? Why should they be forced to pick a side?
Because he is (was) paying them. Would you pay for the services of some company that does things you abhor, when there are competitors you could go with that don't do those things?
There's a picture I've seen somewhere that shows the malpractice insurance paid by various doctoral specialties in their various provinces. It goes from something like the $4,000/year you are talking about, up to something crazy like $100,000/year for gynecologists in Quebec. Shit's crazy.
I received an email just a few minutes ago from TiVo saying the same thing as the Kroger one, so does TiVo outsource their customer data to this company too?
Tell me, when you're doing your hobby, say, gardening, what would you do if some random schmuck came up to you and said "I really like peas, and you aren't planting any, so you suck. You should plant peas."?
NO kidding bro. They have FIOS up in Dallas, 25 megabits/second for about $60/month, but the fastest you can get in Houston is Comcrap's 16 meg service (over $100/month). Also, just received a letter in the mail a few days ago from AT&T talking about "Get Uverse internet and get 12mbps!" Great, sign me up! "Ok, $150 installation fee." Thought about it for awhile, still wanted faster speed, so went ahead. "Ok, now we need a credit card. No, we aren't charging anything to it now, but we need it just in case. Debit cards won't work, only credit cards." Fuck that. Stupid fucking ISPs just don't know how to do business anymore.
I don't think the line in jack is going to go extinct anytime soon. My current car, and a previous one, both had line-ins, and it was a major factor in the purchase of those vehicles. For the longest time, it was the only way to hook up an iPod or CD player (if the car didn't have one) or other things; I believe the satellite radios did it for awhile too, right?
Nowadays you can get a new car with an option to be "iPod compatible", but even if it works, it only works with iPods. Also, its an expensive option. A male-to-male line-in cable costs as much as $15 if you can't find a cheap one, but thats the upper limit. The options on new vehicles can add hundreds or thousands. Plus, the line-in "just works".
Corn syrup tastes like shit, sugar tastes great. Isn't that reason enough to use sugar? If I shat in your coffee every morning instead of putting in two sugars, it would be cheaper, but it would taste like shit, and you would want sugar instead. Why can't we just do that?
In Texas at least, and I think California, if you go into smaller general shops or gas station mini marts you can find 330mL glass bottles of Coca Cola made with cane sugar. The cheapest I've seen it is $.95/bottle. It tastes awesome. If you have a choice, get the stuff that is bottled in Monterrey; it says where it is bottled on the side of the cap. The stuff bottled in Tijuana is horrible and watered-down shit.
So when was that F150 that some guy bought to drive to work going to "pay for itself"? Seriously. Its about change, and an initial step; people buying hybrids now give the automakers incentive to come out with cars that are so good, they "pay off". Cars are about transportation; they aren't meant to directly generate profit (unless you buy a commercial vehicle like a van or truck for example).
Theres a cool MMOFPS out there (albeit 5 years old now) called Planetside, developed I believe originally by Verant who were then bought by Sony Online Entertainment. You have three empires (teams) and the main objective is to attack, and capture, bases. Each base's "state" can be seen by every player logged onto the server as the same (however, to see if there is a fight there or not, you need to look for "hotspots" which only show up if you are on the continent that said base is on). The world itself is persistent, as are the bases, and towers. Every player created object is not however; if you leave deployables alone for an hour they will deconstruct; if you get a vehicle, and leave it, say to get into another vehicle or leave the continent, it deconstructs after 15 minutes. It does this to save on lag; each team can have 133 players, and, if desired, all three teams can fight over one base (happens fairly frequently). You get massive-ass battles, and even though the graphics are a bit outdated, the sheer number of objects that can be present in one of these massive battles brings even the most modern gaming systems to its knees, even with a five year old game. That said, plenty of people play it just fine; you just need primarily to ensure that you have lots of RAM and a fast processor (graphics cards hardly make a dent in the framerate). If players leave a base alone, it will remain in its state until the end of time. One of the servers, "Werner", is so barren that some bases on there have been as they are for weeks. The main server though, no continent can go more than a few days before being untouched (sounds bad, but once you play it you understand why; under the fastest conditions, a continent can take an hour or so to take; if there is any resistance, it could take all day, or several days). I recommened anyone with an interest in fps games or MMOs to at least give it a try; I believe there is a 10 day trial going if you download the launchpad for it. No, I don't work for them, I'm just an avid fan who would like to see the game have much more population. http://www.planetside.com/
219,000 cars/day supposedly. The road even has its own website, since the project is so big. http://www.katyfreeway.org./ Thats not even half of a parallel road nearby, Westheimer Road, which takes I believe 500,000 cars/day. However, the traffic on Katy Freeway is almost all work-commuters, people who work in the big buildings downtown, and they *must* get to work on time, so that particular section of highway gets a lot of attention. Katy is a "bedroom community" for all the downtown workers. At some stretches of the freeway, you can see over the bollards to the parts that are under construction; and you can see 10 lanes already built - it really isn't as big as it sounds - it would take maybe 15 seconds to walk across all ten lanes.
By comparison with roads; they are expanding the Katy Freeway (I-10) here in Houston to ten lanes either way - at a cost of $1 billion/mile. (22 miles, $22 billion) It will still probably end up being congested, whereas a train likely will not suffer the same kind of gridlock/congestion.
I am 23, and I have been waiting for this since 1996. Shit I made maps for it when I was 12.
Same. At this point, even if DNF is just the same as the old Duke Nukem, its still a great game because the Duke Nukem theme is cool; and the old Duke game doesn't work on Vista, and barely on XP. So even if its the same, as long as it works, I can play a Duke Nukem multiplayer game with my friends again (hopefully it has multiplayer).
Personally, I think it would be safer in a flying car; the congestion that exists now is simply because all the drivers in a particular area are at one altitude; the ground. Given advanced gps and "auto pilot" systems, cars could fly in zones 10 or 20 feet different in height, instead of the thousand or so foot zones given to aircraft today. Pick your destination, and a non-conflicting course, most likely straight a-to-b travel, and get to your destination without having to worry about a collision with another vehicle. Also, there are no speed limits in the air really; just the sound barrier, some 600mph, out of consideration for the windows of homeowners. If you had the choice, would you take a 50 mile commute at 75mph max on a crowded road with bad drivers talking on their cellphones, or simply bypass all that and go MUCH faster?
The problem with the English language was perfectly described, imho, in the movie "Idiocracy".
Narrator: "Unaware of what year it was, Joe wandered the streets, desperate for help. But the English language had deteriorated into a hybrid of hillbilly, valley girl, inner-city slang and various grunts. Joe was able to understand them but when he spoke in an ordinary voice he sounded pompous and faggy to them."
So, remind me again why getting high is bad? Its not like you can get drunk at work, so why would getting high be an issue - and IMHO stoned people are way easier to spot than drunk people...
I'm no pilot, but I would assume the reason he can see less of the stars now is because these major 50's planes have been updated intensively; perhaps theres a lot of LCD screens in the cockpit now, which would emit more light in the immediate area, limiting his night vision.
So I just recently moved to Texas....if you ever go on an interstate here, hell, even a city road, damn near every single fucking driver tailgates you...after talking about it with a few locals, they agree that its dangerous, but that, since everyone else is doing it, they they, and I, should do it as well, in order to stay alive.
They say, "drive aggressively". I say, hell no, I'm going to drive defensively.
I was on the way back from Austin the other day and, while driving at the speed limit of 65mph, some asshole redneck in a pickup pulled right up to my bumper and flashed his lights at me. I give him a hand signal to pass me if he really insists on getting in front of me - to which he does a sort of "no, fuck that" hand signal and keeps blinking his lights. Realize that there was an SUV in the lane to my right so not even I could switch lanes.
After a few minutes of this the retard cells in his brain finally switch off momentarily and he switches lanes and passes me. As he does so, he give me the finger, with the typical redneck "thumb pointing out as well" (I assume this is because they haven't got enough self control to figure out that for maximum effectiveness of this particular gesture, the thumb probably should not be extruded).
Over the course of the three hour drive, probably some 200 cars pass me. I was driving at the speed limit the whole entire way - so quite obviously, everyone that passed me was speeding. If that was not obvious enough, the fact that they sped off into the distance for me to never see them again most certainly was.
At one point someone was so desperate to gain an extra 10 feet in distance over me that they passed me and when they pulled into my lane there was little more than a couple inches of clearance between my front bumper and their rear bumper.
Then later on when the rainstorm of hell kicked in as I approached Houston, and the more sensible drivers slowed down to around 40mph or so, there were still some belligerent assholes who insisted on doing the "flashing blinkers, honking horns, and wild hand gestures" dance that indicated they were unsatisfied with the quality of my driving.
This was, mind you, in conditions where the rain was so hard, that even though my windshield wipers were on maximum speed, I could hardly see out of the windshield.
Granted, I had just barely passed the driving test myself - that is, I failed entirely the parallel parking segment (which, curiously, I had spent probably 90% of my driver training on mastering); I still drive extremely safely; this is not to say I drive slowly; I drive the speed limit or perhaps slightly less. However I realize when certain conditions force you to have to slow down; whether it be wet roads, night time, pouring rain, or a strong wind that pushes the vehicle about.
I feel the problem is that, in virtually every country I have lived in, no one has ever had to retest. Thats it; only ever drunk drivers, in certain countries, have had to retest; if you think about it, probably a good 60% of the drivers currently on the road would no longer be so if they had to take a mandatory re-test within a week (that is, not enough time to prepare to learn "the answers" so they can pass it by a point and keep driving for a year).
Yearly mandatory retesting would go a HUGE way to guaranteeing safety on the roads. It would take a lot more people to get something like that off the ground, but I certainly would not mind paying something on the order of 15% of my taxes towards employing more people to get that much testing running.
In relation to the topic; there have been a few times that I have driven home after drinking. Let me qualify that though - I only ever had a single beer. However, even then, I felt like a complete cunt for even daring to risk other peoples lives on the roads by my actions. I really don't care about my life or my property, as in the end I will get what I deserve; but I know that a good majority of my friends or associates have abs
From what I understand that is NOT how a Predator is used. They stand off a ways and take pictures from a high altitude (25,000ft). From TV shows I've seen about it, it doesn't even fly near its target, really. It flys to the side, and pivots its camera to watch, and target, enemies. Then presumably it would just need to turn in the direction of the target for a minute to launch a missile. So, even if there are SAM-armed infantry defending a certain area, the Predator wouldn't need to be near that area to see them and engage them, therefore its probably very unlikely a Predator would ever get shot down.
I know what you mean about that farm kid...damn near every time I saw that ad, I answered his question to myself with "because it would rape the soil of nutrients and prevent us from growing anything ever again". I think they just were looking for an emotional response there...
But as far as I see it, BP and Shell, they are both investing in the possible next-gen fuel. They see that, they only have to invest, what, a half percent of their annual profits, and they might, just MIGHT come up with the next oil, which would put them in a position to reap trillions in profits for the rest of their lives, and their successors lives....
And so I applaud them.
The American oil companies just do not give a shit though. They are all about quarterly profits. When oil runs out or becomes too expensive, they are fucked. But hey, who cares when Ken Lay (or whoever, yes I know Ken Lay is dead) makes assloads of money this year by following the old business model?
Ill probably get the European model. Unlocked from any carrier, and supports better protocols. Right on. Just make sure the phone is compliant with your local cell networks' bands. I'm sure they will be, hell, I just bought a new Motorola SLVR here in the states and it says its tri band. Just be sure though.
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Plus I should point out that you are trying to foist your politics off on Stripe. Why should they be forced to share your political beliefs? Why should they be forced to pick a side?
Because he is (was) paying them. Would you pay for the services of some company that does things you abhor, when there are competitors you could go with that don't do those things?
There's a picture I've seen somewhere that shows the malpractice insurance paid by various doctoral specialties in their various provinces. It goes from something like the $4,000/year you are talking about, up to something crazy like $100,000/year for gynecologists in Quebec. Shit's crazy.
I received an email just a few minutes ago from TiVo saying the same thing as the Kroger one, so does TiVo outsource their customer data to this company too?
Tell me, when you're doing your hobby, say, gardening, what would you do if some random schmuck came up to you and said "I really like peas, and you aren't planting any, so you suck. You should plant peas."?
All the time!
NO kidding bro. They have FIOS up in Dallas, 25 megabits/second for about $60/month, but the fastest you can get in Houston is Comcrap's 16 meg service (over $100/month). Also, just received a letter in the mail a few days ago from AT&T talking about "Get Uverse internet and get 12mbps!" Great, sign me up! "Ok, $150 installation fee." Thought about it for awhile, still wanted faster speed, so went ahead. "Ok, now we need a credit card. No, we aren't charging anything to it now, but we need it just in case. Debit cards won't work, only credit cards." Fuck that. Stupid fucking ISPs just don't know how to do business anymore.
In my experience, Japanese cars from say 2005 onwards tend to have line-ins.
I don't think the line in jack is going to go extinct anytime soon. My current car, and a previous one, both had line-ins, and it was a major factor in the purchase of those vehicles. For the longest time, it was the only way to hook up an iPod or CD player (if the car didn't have one) or other things; I believe the satellite radios did it for awhile too, right?
Nowadays you can get a new car with an option to be "iPod compatible", but even if it works, it only works with iPods. Also, its an expensive option. A male-to-male line-in cable costs as much as $15 if you can't find a cheap one, but thats the upper limit. The options on new vehicles can add hundreds or thousands. Plus, the line-in "just works".
tl;dr
Corn syrup tastes like shit, sugar tastes great. Isn't that reason enough to use sugar? If I shat in your coffee every morning instead of putting in two sugars, it would be cheaper, but it would taste like shit, and you would want sugar instead. Why can't we just do that?
In Texas at least, and I think California, if you go into smaller general shops or gas station mini marts you can find 330mL glass bottles of Coca Cola made with cane sugar. The cheapest I've seen it is $.95/bottle. It tastes awesome. If you have a choice, get the stuff that is bottled in Monterrey; it says where it is bottled on the side of the cap. The stuff bottled in Tijuana is horrible and watered-down shit.
Among airplane pilots or chopper pilots? Because chopper pilots have a joke about airplanes:
Why do airports have runways?
So the disabled can fly.
:)
So when was that F150 that some guy bought to drive to work going to "pay for itself"? Seriously. Its about change, and an initial step; people buying hybrids now give the automakers incentive to come out with cars that are so good, they "pay off". Cars are about transportation; they aren't meant to directly generate profit (unless you buy a commercial vehicle like a van or truck for example).
Theres a cool MMOFPS out there (albeit 5 years old now) called Planetside, developed I believe originally by Verant who were then bought by Sony Online Entertainment. You have three empires (teams) and the main objective is to attack, and capture, bases. Each base's "state" can be seen by every player logged onto the server as the same (however, to see if there is a fight there or not, you need to look for "hotspots" which only show up if you are on the continent that said base is on). The world itself is persistent, as are the bases, and towers. Every player created object is not however; if you leave deployables alone for an hour they will deconstruct; if you get a vehicle, and leave it, say to get into another vehicle or leave the continent, it deconstructs after 15 minutes. It does this to save on lag; each team can have 133 players, and, if desired, all three teams can fight over one base (happens fairly frequently). You get massive-ass battles, and even though the graphics are a bit outdated, the sheer number of objects that can be present in one of these massive battles brings even the most modern gaming systems to its knees, even with a five year old game. That said, plenty of people play it just fine; you just need primarily to ensure that you have lots of RAM and a fast processor (graphics cards hardly make a dent in the framerate). If players leave a base alone, it will remain in its state until the end of time. One of the servers, "Werner", is so barren that some bases on there have been as they are for weeks. The main server though, no continent can go more than a few days before being untouched (sounds bad, but once you play it you understand why; under the fastest conditions, a continent can take an hour or so to take; if there is any resistance, it could take all day, or several days). I recommened anyone with an interest in fps games or MMOs to at least give it a try; I believe there is a 10 day trial going if you download the launchpad for it. No, I don't work for them, I'm just an avid fan who would like to see the game have much more population. http://www.planetside.com/
219,000 cars/day supposedly. The road even has its own website, since the project is so big. http://www.katyfreeway.org./ Thats not even half of a parallel road nearby, Westheimer Road, which takes I believe 500,000 cars/day. However, the traffic on Katy Freeway is almost all work-commuters, people who work in the big buildings downtown, and they *must* get to work on time, so that particular section of highway gets a lot of attention. Katy is a "bedroom community" for all the downtown workers. At some stretches of the freeway, you can see over the bollards to the parts that are under construction; and you can see 10 lanes already built - it really isn't as big as it sounds - it would take maybe 15 seconds to walk across all ten lanes.
By comparison with roads; they are expanding the Katy Freeway (I-10) here in Houston to ten lanes either way - at a cost of $1 billion/mile. (22 miles, $22 billion) It will still probably end up being congested, whereas a train likely will not suffer the same kind of gridlock/congestion.
Same. At this point, even if DNF is just the same as the old Duke Nukem, its still a great game because the Duke Nukem theme is cool; and the old Duke game doesn't work on Vista, and barely on XP. So even if its the same, as long as it works, I can play a Duke Nukem multiplayer game with my friends again (hopefully it has multiplayer).
When the Air Force has the ability to control any computer on demand, I think the courts are going to be a non-existant problem for them.
Personally, I think it would be safer in a flying car; the congestion that exists now is simply because all the drivers in a particular area are at one altitude; the ground. Given advanced gps and "auto pilot" systems, cars could fly in zones 10 or 20 feet different in height, instead of the thousand or so foot zones given to aircraft today. Pick your destination, and a non-conflicting course, most likely straight a-to-b travel, and get to your destination without having to worry about a collision with another vehicle. Also, there are no speed limits in the air really; just the sound barrier, some 600mph, out of consideration for the windows of homeowners. If you had the choice, would you take a 50 mile commute at 75mph max on a crowded road with bad drivers talking on their cellphones, or simply bypass all that and go MUCH faster?
The problem with the English language was perfectly described, imho, in the movie "Idiocracy".
Narrator: "Unaware of what year it was, Joe wandered the streets, desperate for help. But the English language had deteriorated into a hybrid of hillbilly, valley girl, inner-city slang and various grunts. Joe was able to understand them but when he spoke in an ordinary voice he sounded pompous and faggy to them."
http://www.gotwavs.com/php/sounds/?id=bst&media=MP3S&type=Movies&movie=Idiocracy"e=englishlanguage.txt&file=englishlanguage.mp3/So, remind me again why getting high is bad? Its not like you can get drunk at work, so why would getting high be an issue - and IMHO stoned people are way easier to spot than drunk people...
I'm no pilot, but I would assume the reason he can see less of the stars now is because these major 50's planes have been updated intensively; perhaps theres a lot of LCD screens in the cockpit now, which would emit more light in the immediate area, limiting his night vision.
So I just recently moved to Texas....if you ever go on an interstate here, hell, even a city road, damn near every single fucking driver tailgates you...after talking about it with a few locals, they agree that its dangerous, but that, since everyone else is doing it, they they, and I, should do it as well, in order to stay alive.
They say, "drive aggressively". I say, hell no, I'm going to drive defensively.
I was on the way back from Austin the other day and, while driving at the speed limit of 65mph, some asshole redneck in a pickup pulled right up to my bumper and flashed his lights at me. I give him a hand signal to pass me if he really insists on getting in front of me - to which he does a sort of "no, fuck that" hand signal and keeps blinking his lights. Realize that there was an SUV in the lane to my right so not even I could switch lanes.
After a few minutes of this the retard cells in his brain finally switch off momentarily and he switches lanes and passes me. As he does so, he give me the finger, with the typical redneck "thumb pointing out as well" (I assume this is because they haven't got enough self control to figure out that for maximum effectiveness of this particular gesture, the thumb probably should not be extruded).
Over the course of the three hour drive, probably some 200 cars pass me. I was driving at the speed limit the whole entire way - so quite obviously, everyone that passed me was speeding. If that was not obvious enough, the fact that they sped off into the distance for me to never see them again most certainly was.
At one point someone was so desperate to gain an extra 10 feet in distance over me that they passed me and when they pulled into my lane there was little more than a couple inches of clearance between my front bumper and their rear bumper.
Then later on when the rainstorm of hell kicked in as I approached Houston, and the more sensible drivers slowed down to around 40mph or so, there were still some belligerent assholes who insisted on doing the "flashing blinkers, honking horns, and wild hand gestures" dance that indicated they were unsatisfied with the quality of my driving.
This was, mind you, in conditions where the rain was so hard, that even though my windshield wipers were on maximum speed, I could hardly see out of the windshield.
Granted, I had just barely passed the driving test myself - that is, I failed entirely the parallel parking segment (which, curiously, I had spent probably 90% of my driver training on mastering); I still drive extremely safely; this is not to say I drive slowly; I drive the speed limit or perhaps slightly less. However I realize when certain conditions force you to have to slow down; whether it be wet roads, night time, pouring rain, or a strong wind that pushes the vehicle about.
I feel the problem is that, in virtually every country I have lived in, no one has ever had to retest. Thats it; only ever drunk drivers, in certain countries, have had to retest; if you think about it, probably a good 60% of the drivers currently on the road would no longer be so if they had to take a mandatory re-test within a week (that is, not enough time to prepare to learn "the answers" so they can pass it by a point and keep driving for a year).
Yearly mandatory retesting would go a HUGE way to guaranteeing safety on the roads. It would take a lot more people to get something like that off the ground, but I certainly would not mind paying something on the order of 15% of my taxes towards employing more people to get that much testing running.
In relation to the topic; there have been a few times that I have driven home after drinking. Let me qualify that though - I only ever had a single beer. However, even then, I felt like a complete cunt for even daring to risk other peoples lives on the roads by my actions. I really don't care about my life or my property, as in the end I will get what I deserve; but I know that a good majority of my friends or associates have abs
I know what you mean about that farm kid...damn near every time I saw that ad, I answered his question to myself with "because it would rape the soil of nutrients and prevent us from growing anything ever again". I think they just were looking for an emotional response there...
But as far as I see it, BP and Shell, they are both investing in the possible next-gen fuel. They see that, they only have to invest, what, a half percent of their annual profits, and they might, just MIGHT come up with the next oil, which would put them in a position to reap trillions in profits for the rest of their lives, and their successors lives....
And so I applaud them.
The American oil companies just do not give a shit though. They are all about quarterly profits. When oil runs out or becomes too expensive, they are fucked. But hey, who cares when Ken Lay (or whoever, yes I know Ken Lay is dead) makes assloads of money this year by following the old business model?
Hear hear to BP and Shell.