The retailer doesn't have the means to reinstate the user's account. Sure, they should and probably do have a fine for breaking the release date, but it is still the vendor's duty to go through their servers and reverse the 'bad behavior' bit that got instated. If that takes a ton of work, they should have a higher fine for breaking the release date. If they can't do that, the users should be screaming their heads off.
If it can't be patented and net drug companies billions of $$$; I doubt there will be a company to spend the millions for the research required to get "bitter-taste-based medication" through FDA approval.
The nice thing is, if these "standard bitter substances" have been FDA approved for one application they can be used for any application. You don't have to get FDA approval for each indication, so if these are already known substances it might be pretty easy to get a product made.
My understanding is that this is only true if they have been approved in the same form they will be used. A drug that is IV only does not get automatic approval when made in pill form, though it doesn't go through the same safety studies. Initial safety would need to be confirmed, that the medication doesn't metabolize differently in the gut than when injected. I suspect that something that was approved as a solid medicine would have to be approved as a vapor, as the safe vs effective doses would be much different once you change how they are absorbed.
Sounds like those cell-phone/wifi headache nutters are going to be our best friends when these trucks get more publicity.
In two years, or six months, after these have been deployed in visible locations for a while, someone will sue because they developed cancer. These devices may not have done anything to exacerbate that persons situation, but unlicensed technician operating radiation emitting devices will not play well for a jury.
Photographs go one two different hard drives, with backups to dvd. I would like to turn that hobby into a real job, so I am more meticulous there than about anything else. Still, no schedule about it. Pictures go on the pc when I get home from shooting, stay on the CF card until I get the raws backed up in a second location. Lots of cards and few excursions help that work. My books are catalogued by sitting on a set of bookshelves, roughly separated by style and then by author. If I know I am going shopping for old books, and know that I am missing the middle book of a trilogy I found two books of for a nickel, I will write stuff down on a note card or just memorize it for the time. Programing project XYZ may have several pages of paper notes about how it was written and what insights made each piece work. Those insights go into the documentation and comments, diagrams too if they are needed, then the paper notes go away. There isn't a backup scheme for those. If they are in use some place, then the code is where it needs to be. If it was a personal project that isn't in use, then it's not in use and was just for learning how some aspect of something worked.
As for the rest: throw it out. Seriously, those notes I took while learning a new language, no one will need those. The differential equations workbook, who cares. That note card that said "was looking for book 2 of space trilogy by Author McX", it really just needs to be thrown away. If, and it's a big if there, something needs to be saved for some reason, I have a 8 inch space of hanging folders for sorting and storing paper stuff. A couple of complete midterm and final exams are there, in case my younger friends had wanted them to study by. A few sparse pages of notes on a specific programing project that someone else had made while we collaborated, since their insights would be harder for me to just recreate. For other stuff I carry around a small notebook; unlined, decent paper, stuff that can be drawn on as well as written. Write down what comes to mind, a set-up for how a photo was taken, a crochet pattern, recipe, bad poems, photos i want to take, or short story ideas. Write it down, and look at it later. If it is worth saving, it can go in a folder. If it is worth sharing, I can put it on a blog or sell it. And the most important part of that, if it is utter crap I can throw it out. Note book gets full, I move on to a new notebook. Only the stuff worth saving or that might be improved on gets to stay, the rest of the old notebook gets recycled or used as charcoal starter.
There is a problem with information hording these days. The answer to the box of note from college that is taking up too much space is not to digitize all of them just in case someone needs them one day; the answer is to toss them out. Seriously, my world will not collapse if I lose my bookmark collection. I remember enough about the sites I visit often to find them again, and the ones that I bookmarked on a whim in case I needed something are of no use if I never returned to them. That same mantra applies to lines of code and everything else. Except email, academia has bitten me in the ass over emails from more than a year back, so those go in the same backup scheme as the photos.
And 15 seconds of audio does not take just 15 seconds of time. They couldn't just call up Price on the phone and ask "Hey, can you take a minute to say this line a few times, and let us record it?" Even for just a sample of his voice, you are talking about an hour in a studio, but that requires a day of traveling on both sides of the event, probably a day or two stay before the studio to recover from flying (my voice sounds like crap after a flight, dry air or something.). Figure in the take of the lawyer and his representation agency for contract negotiations, 25 grand doesn't seem that bad.
I would probably ask for 25K from a band that I wasn't a fan of, if asked today; and I am a nameless nobody. It's just a nice fraction of a large number that seems like a good amount.
With an ever shifting version of truth that Wiki represents, you are unlikely to get an accredited degree from such a university. Your courses would need consistent planning from year to year to get that, and each degree would require that you had passed certain courses.
Since that is not what the author is looking for, has he even looked at what small community colleges offer? Sure, some are tied up with the same bureaucratic nonsense that larger schools have; that will happen any place you have enough people vying for attention. Admission is usually just filling out a form for records, courses can be tied into certain degrees but you can take what ever you want to learn. I don't know how hard it would be to teach a non-accredited class through them. Another option is an open university, the local YMCA runs one. Teaching a class is as simple as filling out a form and getting enough people to sign up, attending just requires paying a small fee (around $50 to cover building use and such, more if the class requires supplies). You won't get a degree from something like this, but you can learn a lot.
The problem is, without an accredited degree, what reason is there to take a high end math or physics course? The highly motivated people will use the systems like MIT's open courseware, so the targets for this have to be those who need the structure of a classroom to learn. Can you possibly convince enough people to take these courses without the structure of a university to warrant the staff and time to do so? With a distance learning infrastructure, you might have enough people each year or so; but without the degree there is no motivation to take the course when it is not convenient. And if you offer the degrees with no accreditation and no prestige behind it, what separates Wiki-U from UoP?
A Wii can run a customized Linux kernel, if it is installed by the owner of the device. If you happen to have more information that Nintendo is using Linux on it stock, there are many people who would like to hear about that.
(And he's not even interested in reading them, he just sees them as a profit).
I think that may be what separates the people who find this behavior offensive in some way, and the people who don't. Some people think of books as containing knowledge while others, who may recognize the knowledge held in books, see them as just the tools to carry the knowledge that is also available elsewhere. Then there are the proud few who believe that as long as it turns a profit for the guy doing it, anything he does must be praised; his boot-strappy behavior is a model to be repeated by others.
disclaimer: I do this with cameras and yard/garage/tag sales. I know, by memory, brands and models that are higher priced, so I buy them cheap (what, 5$ for that CZ Jena, but I have to take the no-name body and leather case too?). Clean, fix, and run a couple rolls of film through them. Actually, haven't sold a one yet, still have film in the first. One day I might.
The refund customers are getting is between 2 and 6 USD. The charge, per month that this occurs in, is 1.9 USD per Mb (anyone with a verizon plan want to confirm whether it's megabit vs byte? I don't deal with their data system). Sure, looks like a great refund, if this only happens to you once or twice or even three times. Anyone who has had to deal with this problem more, and it's not a real refund any longer.
And the problem is not people who are using the internet on their phones, and then just lying about it. Verizon makes at least one of the default shortcut keys an internet or 'my vzw music store' by default. The shortcut keys do not have a label as shortcuts, and the booklet with the phone just mentions that they are programmable shortcut keys, not where they go by default. To further their scheme, the default option on most menus is 'get on the internet to do something'. An mp3 player with phone defaults to 'connect with vcast' instead of 'play the music on the sd card', and the ringtone menu defaults to 'buy new ringtones' ahead of showing you the ones already on the phone. They have even told employees that call centers need to upsell customers instead of disabling sms or internet access on a per number basis, firing them if they do offer to disable the options first. Google Verizon upsell or look back on/., it was covered here as well.
So the answer that everyone is happy with is two to six bucks off their next VZW bill? Six dollars amortized over the rest of your contract is nothing at all. It isn't even a refund, the money is not coming out of verizon's pocket at any point. It comes out of incoming revenue, so the only people who will notice will be shareholders. Not to mention that 90 million is the max they might be refunding. They say 'about 15 million people' and 'between 2 and 6 dollars' which they will probably try to keep as close to 2 as they can. But "Verizon issues more than $30 million in rebates" doesn't have the same ring to it.
this franchise will never willfully disrespect, intentionally or otherwise
How are they thinking they can unintentionally and willfully disrespect anyone? Words mean things, people, and if they have the man power to swap a few strings somewhere in game code, they can respect their audiences intelligence by proofreading their press release.
Yes, it was a grudge law. Same way as a cop with a grudge takes it out on a motorcyclist. Don't let the fact that you are surrounded by others who hate over-zealous cops blur that fact. Was someone speeding in the cops jurisdiction, or not, and why would you hamper the police in this area. Why not, and this is just a wild idea that would never work, change the way ticket fines are levied and distributed? If the system is unfair, why punish one area and not another; if not for the simple issue that this legislator wanted to screw with the people who pissed him off.
I do know of a town with about a mile of highway and a ton of revenue from tickets.
That sentence alone suggests that their motivation isn't public safety but revenue. If they view this stretch of highway as a revenue generator and enforce more strictly than surrounding communities, they are effectively taking money away from communities that really do have costs associated with speeding. Furthermore, unlike surrounding communities, they have no interest in a smooth traffic flow, so they'll enforce to the detriment of commuters all around.
How on earth do you connect those two? I can see one of the first points; obviously a town with more tickets issued is enforcing the law more stringently than surrounding areas. It's either that or the road conditions and surroundings make people think a higher speed is safer. I have no clue how you get that a community must have no interest in smooth traffic flow if it enforces the traffic laws. That just seems a non-sequitur to me. How on earth could a local cop know more about the safe driving speed of a stretch of road than the people who drive through it once a week or less? It isn't like the cop knows that the two-lane road has a blind corner around the next tree, or that it really is a school zone even if the drivers can't see the school.
It strikes me by the way everyone is acting here, is highway one of those words that mean something different based on where you are? Here, a highway is any of the state routes, from the ones that the interstate parallels to the small routes that just wind between the hills to neighboring cities; usually capped at 55mph and passing through farms and school districts at varying speeds. Interstates are the higher speed, accesses controlled, roads that just pass through some small towns. I can see telling a small town that they can't issue tickets to drivers on the interstate, but since there are rarely state cops out on the highways that seems an absurd step.
Removing the ability to stop speeders because one of the people speeding happens to be a state representative doesn't seem like a good reason to me.
It's not likely, but maybe the town got all it's revenue from tickets because many people were speeding there. It seems just as likely that this is the case, as it is that the representative passed this law out of careful consideration and not self serving greed and ego.
And this is different from the cop with a power trip, who issues you a speeding ticket just because you do something he doesn't like? Both of them are taking their personal grudges out of people, and doing so to the detriment of the people they are supposed to represent and protect. Garbage, all around.
I do know of a town with about a mile of highway and a ton of revenue from tickets. Seeing them unable to enforce the ones that are deserved would be just as distressing as seeing them creating ones that don't exist.
I don't know about your agreement, but mine has always been phrased as X number of days after you notice, or they inform you of, the inaccuracy. Granted, with a monthly statement, you are being informed at least every 30 days.
Geek type answer: parse the email. I don't know how your bank does their paperless system, but my dead tree statement is in a easily readable format, with key words and spacing for all the important information. If the paperless email statement is the same, just perl/python/sed the thing into something that the database likes. And if you still get a paper statement, OCR (banks like OCR fonts) and check it before filing it into the SQL format of your choice. Then the script doesn't have your login data, and only has to run on local information. You could even set it to a cron job, and have it check your mail box for new bank statements.
The patent looks interesting, but also looks like something that is just a computer controlled version of a technique that has been around for a long time. I have some old potato masher shaped, flash-bulb, strobes. A few of them have the reflector dish that is just slightly off center and a little bit movable. Some call that dents and age, but it looks a lot like Apple's patent. Move the reflector just slightly, and you can highlight a dark area and remove some light from the bright parts. Easy enough and, on the strobes that this was an intended feature, pretty old. Stick a few MEMS reflectors behind the bulb, and you can direct the hot spot of the light with a small in-camera lamp that same way.
The target crowd for this don't want perfect, aesthetically pleasing, artistic photos; they want snapshots. Like the original Diana and Brownie crowd. That still works as you are likely to find a Diana photographer carrying an Apple product now days, as well.
Depends on the routes, the population density, and the number of packages shipped one a given day. If the shipping companies developed a system where they would only service Remote Area A when there were either multiple packages, or a package had been waiting for a while, or there were other deliveries close to A, then the densely packed truck would probably have an advantage. In a more rural area, the trucks might have to drive 20 minutes to an hour just to deliver a few packages to a small town. If there is no coordination from the company shipping the product, or the shipping company, that route may have to be serviced every day or two, resulting in lots of half empty trucks making the same run. I didn't read the article (does anyone?) but I can think of some ways that the 'must arrive in 2 days' crowd could combine with a rural area to decrease the efficiency.
The problem is, if you shop in a physical store you are more likely to purchase multiple things at once. Even if you drive a few miles between each store, the major part of the drive back is done with a full car. If you purchase online, each package may get shipped separately. The more spaced out they are, the more a driver has to cover the same neighborhood, day after day, and the less 'green' it is. Now, if you are like my mother, and drive 20 miles to the store for one thing then get home and realize you need something else and drive back, and repeat a few times, then it's probably greener to buy online.
Okay, this is/. and you should be geeky or nerdy enough to know that he is The Doctor, not Doctor Who. Turn in your geek/nerd card at the next sci-fi con.
I guess that would depend on whether Christ's death was for their sins as well, or just us humans. Or whether they had their own Christ...maybe Christ traveled there, perhaps on a DC-8, or just reincarnated.
Mount and Blade did something like this. The earlier you bought the game in the development cycle, the less you paid. This works fine if you are a small team and have dedicated audience and coders, or the game is not the programmers main source of income.
The problem is publicity and numbers. How many people are willing to pay early in a games development cycle, and is it enough people to fund the developers? Even if it is enough people, and you are certain they are willing to buy your game, you still need some capital to borrow to pay the developers or wait to hire developers for a short term as each monetary goal is met. And if you find a company that is willing to do this, they might want distribution rights to the game.
These are the same consumers who gladly pay for extended warranties, who do not know the difference between a duel core cpu and a two socket motherboard, and who ask "My nephew told me I need more of those giga bites to make my computer better, so do I need this drive with 500 of them, or this stick with 4? Wouldn't 500 be better?"
Phrase it this way instead "Sale, 50 dollars off!!!"
The same thing that stops them from writing a BIOS virus that undervolts the CPU, clocks down the FSB, and turns on PIO for your old drives. The same thing that keeps them from writing a virus that edits the microcode on the CPU, allowing a rather complete rootkit. The fact that each batch is going to be different from the others, and that the BIOS/CMOS on the motherboard will have to support these features.
Board replacement is an interesting question. I have no clue how that would work. Since it is a Gateway, I really doubt the market is the type of person to perform a board replacement. I suspect that the 'licensed repair facilities' would have access to that, and could perform the update on any warrantied repairs.
So, now there are two chips in the economy bin, a 2x2.6Ghz and a 2x2.6GhzXT. One costs $50 and failed a test, the other has the same features, costs the same price, and can be upgraded later. The OEMs buy the latter and put them in beige boxes with certain serial numbers, and the rest go to everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
The retailer doesn't have the means to reinstate the user's account. Sure, they should and probably do have a fine for breaking the release date, but it is still the vendor's duty to go through their servers and reverse the 'bad behavior' bit that got instated. If that takes a ton of work, they should have a higher fine for breaking the release date. If they can't do that, the users should be screaming their heads off.
If it can't be patented and net drug companies billions of $$$; I doubt there will be a company to spend the millions for the research required to get "bitter-taste-based medication" through FDA approval.
The nice thing is, if these "standard bitter substances" have been FDA approved for one application they can be used for any application. You don't have to get FDA approval for each indication, so if these are already known substances it might be pretty easy to get a product made.
My understanding is that this is only true if they have been approved in the same form they will be used. A drug that is IV only does not get automatic approval when made in pill form, though it doesn't go through the same safety studies. Initial safety would need to be confirmed, that the medication doesn't metabolize differently in the gut than when injected. I suspect that something that was approved as a solid medicine would have to be approved as a vapor, as the safe vs effective doses would be much different once you change how they are absorbed.
Sounds like those cell-phone/wifi headache nutters are going to be our best friends when these trucks get more publicity.
In two years, or six months, after these have been deployed in visible locations for a while, someone will sue because they developed cancer. These devices may not have done anything to exacerbate that persons situation, but unlicensed technician operating radiation emitting devices will not play well for a jury.
Photographs go one two different hard drives, with backups to dvd. I would like to turn that hobby into a real job, so I am more meticulous there than about anything else. Still, no schedule about it. Pictures go on the pc when I get home from shooting, stay on the CF card until I get the raws backed up in a second location. Lots of cards and few excursions help that work. My books are catalogued by sitting on a set of bookshelves, roughly separated by style and then by author. If I know I am going shopping for old books, and know that I am missing the middle book of a trilogy I found two books of for a nickel, I will write stuff down on a note card or just memorize it for the time. Programing project XYZ may have several pages of paper notes about how it was written and what insights made each piece work. Those insights go into the documentation and comments, diagrams too if they are needed, then the paper notes go away. There isn't a backup scheme for those. If they are in use some place, then the code is where it needs to be. If it was a personal project that isn't in use, then it's not in use and was just for learning how some aspect of something worked.
As for the rest: throw it out. Seriously, those notes I took while learning a new language, no one will need those. The differential equations workbook, who cares. That note card that said "was looking for book 2 of space trilogy by Author McX", it really just needs to be thrown away. If, and it's a big if there, something needs to be saved for some reason, I have a 8 inch space of hanging folders for sorting and storing paper stuff. A couple of complete midterm and final exams are there, in case my younger friends had wanted them to study by. A few sparse pages of notes on a specific programing project that someone else had made while we collaborated, since their insights would be harder for me to just recreate. For other stuff I carry around a small notebook; unlined, decent paper, stuff that can be drawn on as well as written. Write down what comes to mind, a set-up for how a photo was taken, a crochet pattern, recipe, bad poems, photos i want to take, or short story ideas. Write it down, and look at it later. If it is worth saving, it can go in a folder. If it is worth sharing, I can put it on a blog or sell it. And the most important part of that, if it is utter crap I can throw it out. Note book gets full, I move on to a new notebook. Only the stuff worth saving or that might be improved on gets to stay, the rest of the old notebook gets recycled or used as charcoal starter.
There is a problem with information hording these days. The answer to the box of note from college that is taking up too much space is not to digitize all of them just in case someone needs them one day; the answer is to toss them out. Seriously, my world will not collapse if I lose my bookmark collection. I remember enough about the sites I visit often to find them again, and the ones that I bookmarked on a whim in case I needed something are of no use if I never returned to them. That same mantra applies to lines of code and everything else. Except email, academia has bitten me in the ass over emails from more than a year back, so those go in the same backup scheme as the photos.
And 15 seconds of audio does not take just 15 seconds of time. They couldn't just call up Price on the phone and ask "Hey, can you take a minute to say this line a few times, and let us record it?" Even for just a sample of his voice, you are talking about an hour in a studio, but that requires a day of traveling on both sides of the event, probably a day or two stay before the studio to recover from flying (my voice sounds like crap after a flight, dry air or something.). Figure in the take of the lawyer and his representation agency for contract negotiations, 25 grand doesn't seem that bad.
I would probably ask for 25K from a band that I wasn't a fan of, if asked today; and I am a nameless nobody. It's just a nice fraction of a large number that seems like a good amount.
With an ever shifting version of truth that Wiki represents, you are unlikely to get an accredited degree from such a university. Your courses would need consistent planning from year to year to get that, and each degree would require that you had passed certain courses.
Since that is not what the author is looking for, has he even looked at what small community colleges offer? Sure, some are tied up with the same bureaucratic nonsense that larger schools have; that will happen any place you have enough people vying for attention. Admission is usually just filling out a form for records, courses can be tied into certain degrees but you can take what ever you want to learn. I don't know how hard it would be to teach a non-accredited class through them. Another option is an open university, the local YMCA runs one. Teaching a class is as simple as filling out a form and getting enough people to sign up, attending just requires paying a small fee (around $50 to cover building use and such, more if the class requires supplies). You won't get a degree from something like this, but you can learn a lot.
The problem is, without an accredited degree, what reason is there to take a high end math or physics course? The highly motivated people will use the systems like MIT's open courseware, so the targets for this have to be those who need the structure of a classroom to learn. Can you possibly convince enough people to take these courses without the structure of a university to warrant the staff and time to do so? With a distance learning infrastructure, you might have enough people each year or so; but without the degree there is no motivation to take the course when it is not convenient. And if you offer the degrees with no accreditation and no prestige behind it, what separates Wiki-U from UoP?
A Wii can run a customized Linux kernel, if it is installed by the owner of the device. If you happen to have more information that Nintendo is using Linux on it stock, there are many people who would like to hear about that.
My feelings at his passing are both too real and too complex to explain in plane terms.
(And he's not even interested in reading them, he just sees them as a profit).
I think that may be what separates the people who find this behavior offensive in some way, and the people who don't. Some people think of books as containing knowledge while others, who may recognize the knowledge held in books, see them as just the tools to carry the knowledge that is also available elsewhere. Then there are the proud few who believe that as long as it turns a profit for the guy doing it, anything he does must be praised; his boot-strappy behavior is a model to be repeated by others.
disclaimer: I do this with cameras and yard/garage/tag sales. I know, by memory, brands and models that are higher priced, so I buy them cheap (what, 5$ for that CZ Jena, but I have to take the no-name body and leather case too?). Clean, fix, and run a couple rolls of film through them. Actually, haven't sold a one yet, still have film in the first. One day I might.
The refund customers are getting is between 2 and 6 USD. The charge, per month that this occurs in, is 1.9 USD per Mb (anyone with a verizon plan want to confirm whether it's megabit vs byte? I don't deal with their data system). Sure, looks like a great refund, if this only happens to you once or twice or even three times. Anyone who has had to deal with this problem more, and it's not a real refund any longer.
And the problem is not people who are using the internet on their phones, and then just lying about it. Verizon makes at least one of the default shortcut keys an internet or 'my vzw music store' by default. The shortcut keys do not have a label as shortcuts, and the booklet with the phone just mentions that they are programmable shortcut keys, not where they go by default. To further their scheme, the default option on most menus is 'get on the internet to do something'. An mp3 player with phone defaults to 'connect with vcast' instead of 'play the music on the sd card', and the ringtone menu defaults to 'buy new ringtones' ahead of showing you the ones already on the phone. They have even told employees that call centers need to upsell customers instead of disabling sms or internet access on a per number basis, firing them if they do offer to disable the options first. Google Verizon upsell or look back on /., it was covered here as well.
So the answer that everyone is happy with is two to six bucks off their next VZW bill? Six dollars amortized over the rest of your contract is nothing at all. It isn't even a refund, the money is not coming out of verizon's pocket at any point. It comes out of incoming revenue, so the only people who will notice will be shareholders. Not to mention that 90 million is the max they might be refunding. They say 'about 15 million people' and 'between 2 and 6 dollars' which they will probably try to keep as close to 2 as they can. But "Verizon issues more than $30 million in rebates" doesn't have the same ring to it.
this franchise will never willfully disrespect, intentionally or otherwise
How are they thinking they can unintentionally and willfully disrespect anyone? Words mean things, people, and if they have the man power to swap a few strings somewhere in game code, they can respect their audiences intelligence by proofreading their press release.
Yes, it was a grudge law. Same way as a cop with a grudge takes it out on a motorcyclist. Don't let the fact that you are surrounded by others who hate over-zealous cops blur that fact. Was someone speeding in the cops jurisdiction, or not, and why would you hamper the police in this area. Why not, and this is just a wild idea that would never work, change the way ticket fines are levied and distributed? If the system is unfair, why punish one area and not another; if not for the simple issue that this legislator wanted to screw with the people who pissed him off.
I do know of a town with about a mile of highway and a ton of revenue from tickets.
That sentence alone suggests that their motivation isn't public safety but revenue. If they view this stretch of highway as a revenue generator and enforce more strictly than surrounding communities, they are effectively taking money away from communities that really do have costs associated with speeding. Furthermore, unlike surrounding communities, they have no interest in a smooth traffic flow, so they'll enforce to the detriment of commuters all around.
How on earth do you connect those two? I can see one of the first points; obviously a town with more tickets issued is enforcing the law more stringently than surrounding areas. It's either that or the road conditions and surroundings make people think a higher speed is safer. I have no clue how you get that a community must have no interest in smooth traffic flow if it enforces the traffic laws. That just seems a non-sequitur to me. How on earth could a local cop know more about the safe driving speed of a stretch of road than the people who drive through it once a week or less? It isn't like the cop knows that the two-lane road has a blind corner around the next tree, or that it really is a school zone even if the drivers can't see the school.
It strikes me by the way everyone is acting here, is highway one of those words that mean something different based on where you are? Here, a highway is any of the state routes, from the ones that the interstate parallels to the small routes that just wind between the hills to neighboring cities; usually capped at 55mph and passing through farms and school districts at varying speeds. Interstates are the higher speed, accesses controlled, roads that just pass through some small towns. I can see telling a small town that they can't issue tickets to drivers on the interstate, but since there are rarely state cops out on the highways that seems an absurd step.
Removing the ability to stop speeders because one of the people speeding happens to be a state representative doesn't seem like a good reason to me.
It's not likely, but maybe the town got all it's revenue from tickets because many people were speeding there. It seems just as likely that this is the case, as it is that the representative passed this law out of careful consideration and not self serving greed and ego.
And this is different from the cop with a power trip, who issues you a speeding ticket just because you do something he doesn't like? Both of them are taking their personal grudges out of people, and doing so to the detriment of the people they are supposed to represent and protect. Garbage, all around.
I do know of a town with about a mile of highway and a ton of revenue from tickets. Seeing them unable to enforce the ones that are deserved would be just as distressing as seeing them creating ones that don't exist.
I don't know about your agreement, but mine has always been phrased as X number of days after you notice, or they inform you of, the inaccuracy. Granted, with a monthly statement, you are being informed at least every 30 days.
Geek type answer: parse the email. I don't know how your bank does their paperless system, but my dead tree statement is in a easily readable format, with key words and spacing for all the important information. If the paperless email statement is the same, just perl/python/sed the thing into something that the database likes. And if you still get a paper statement, OCR (banks like OCR fonts) and check it before filing it into the SQL format of your choice. Then the script doesn't have your login data, and only has to run on local information. You could even set it to a cron job, and have it check your mail box for new bank statements.
The patent looks interesting, but also looks like something that is just a computer controlled version of a technique that has been around for a long time. I have some old potato masher shaped, flash-bulb, strobes. A few of them have the reflector dish that is just slightly off center and a little bit movable. Some call that dents and age, but it looks a lot like Apple's patent. Move the reflector just slightly, and you can highlight a dark area and remove some light from the bright parts. Easy enough and, on the strobes that this was an intended feature, pretty old. Stick a few MEMS reflectors behind the bulb, and you can direct the hot spot of the light with a small in-camera lamp that same way.
The target crowd for this don't want perfect, aesthetically pleasing, artistic photos; they want snapshots. Like the original Diana and Brownie crowd. That still works as you are likely to find a Diana photographer carrying an Apple product now days, as well.
Depends on the routes, the population density, and the number of packages shipped one a given day. If the shipping companies developed a system where they would only service Remote Area A when there were either multiple packages, or a package had been waiting for a while, or there were other deliveries close to A, then the densely packed truck would probably have an advantage. In a more rural area, the trucks might have to drive 20 minutes to an hour just to deliver a few packages to a small town. If there is no coordination from the company shipping the product, or the shipping company, that route may have to be serviced every day or two, resulting in lots of half empty trucks making the same run. I didn't read the article (does anyone?) but I can think of some ways that the 'must arrive in 2 days' crowd could combine with a rural area to decrease the efficiency.
The problem is, if you shop in a physical store you are more likely to purchase multiple things at once. Even if you drive a few miles between each store, the major part of the drive back is done with a full car. If you purchase online, each package may get shipped separately. The more spaced out they are, the more a driver has to cover the same neighborhood, day after day, and the less 'green' it is. Now, if you are like my mother, and drive 20 miles to the store for one thing then get home and realize you need something else and drive back, and repeat a few times, then it's probably greener to buy online.
Okay, this is /. and you should be geeky or nerdy enough to know that he is The Doctor, not Doctor Who. Turn in your geek/nerd card at the next sci-fi con.
I guess that would depend on whether Christ's death was for their sins as well, or just us humans. Or whether they had their own Christ...maybe Christ traveled there, perhaps on a DC-8, or just reincarnated.
Mount and Blade did something like this. The earlier you bought the game in the development cycle, the less you paid. This works fine if you are a small team and have dedicated audience and coders, or the game is not the programmers main source of income.
The problem is publicity and numbers. How many people are willing to pay early in a games development cycle, and is it enough people to fund the developers? Even if it is enough people, and you are certain they are willing to buy your game, you still need some capital to borrow to pay the developers or wait to hire developers for a short term as each monetary goal is met. And if you find a company that is willing to do this, they might want distribution rights to the game.
These are the same consumers who gladly pay for extended warranties, who do not know the difference between a duel core cpu and a two socket motherboard, and who ask "My nephew told me I need more of those giga bites to make my computer better, so do I need this drive with 500 of them, or this stick with 4? Wouldn't 500 be better?"
Phrase it this way instead "Sale, 50 dollars off!!!"
The same thing that stops them from writing a BIOS virus that undervolts the CPU, clocks down the FSB, and turns on PIO for your old drives. The same thing that keeps them from writing a virus that edits the microcode on the CPU, allowing a rather complete rootkit. The fact that each batch is going to be different from the others, and that the BIOS/CMOS on the motherboard will have to support these features.
Board replacement is an interesting question. I have no clue how that would work. Since it is a Gateway, I really doubt the market is the type of person to perform a board replacement. I suspect that the 'licensed repair facilities' would have access to that, and could perform the update on any warrantied repairs.
So, now there are two chips in the economy bin, a 2x2.6Ghz and a 2x2.6GhzXT. One costs $50 and failed a test, the other has the same features, costs the same price, and can be upgraded later. The OEMs buy the latter and put them in beige boxes with certain serial numbers, and the rest go to everyone else.