Posts by skeptical i 1195 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Aug 2007
when they're fresh made on-site, will they really be that much more fabulous than what a local Las Vegas-based baker can crank out? Will the average Vegas customer even notice? Yay for Berlidon's, but the local bakeries in Vegas can't be too pleased about this squandered opportunity.
Hi, asdf: re "I apologize in advance for not buying the narrative that the older southern white christian American male is ruthlessly persecuted.", you forgot 'het': Queer Nation is apparently hunting down heterosexuals and taking their marriages away thanks to the Supreme Court legislating from the bench. [* rolls eyes *]
Some c-stores and coffeeshops here in Amurka will knock a nickel or dime off your beverage price if you bring your own refillable cup (reduce landfill, save trees, yadda yadda yadda), and these C[r]apita folks couldn't even pretend to have a better motive than parsimony? Yeesh. Hope the employees are able to find new jobs at better companies.
Once upon a time Merkin area codes had either a 1 or 0 as the middle digit, then that schema was chucked out when we ran out of phone number prefixes (or exchanges) and more area codes were required ... maybe about the time fax machines went from expensive Fortune 500 business office furniture to cheaper and more widely available. Miss those old Pac Bell rotary phones, they doubled as hand weapons.
reducing wrinkles, or leading to exercise-free weight loss and they'll be snarfed up in no time. Even faster if one of the teevee "doctors" endorses broiled goldfish fillets. Might have to create a new name for 'em, though, since eating goldfish will make kids cry and the apparently more appropriate "sewerfish" is not likely to land on any menus any time soon.
If some government contractors require various clearances, would this same form be used as a starting point to determine which contractors (and contractors' employees) get them? If so, would they (or copies of them) also have been stored with the employees' forms that got hacked? Sorry if this was addressed elsewhere (hence Paris). I'm concerned about a former co-worker who had moved on/up to a job for a company that did government work.
tasked with building, securing, and maintaining the personnel records database(s), the obvious solution is a bill that would require MORE people's comms records to be shifted hither and yon because, well, we gotta do Something and computers is confusing. I get that elected officials have an unwritten mandate to grab limelight whenever possible for later monetizing during campaign season; one wonders whose dollars the good Senator will be chasing next election.
and if I have any interest in the merch on offer (mmmmmm, donuts!), wouldn't I just stick my nose in and have a look-see without being prompted by fecebook? I can not imagine that getting a notice saying "three out of five visitors to the donut shop 100 feet ahead on the right gave it a favourable rating, most notably the honey glazed" would make a difference; if I were sitting so precariously on the fence that this WOULD have any impact, why wouldn't I just see for myself if I am close enough to it for the beacon to blip my phone? Sure, I can see value for fecebook (we know you like donuts, we saw you enter that shop, don't try to deny it, and guess what adverts you will see until the day you die?) and for the businesses involved ("free" advertising, unless the reviews are bad enough to scare potential customers away), but I am seeing little value for the end user/products.
re: "It might be better to just push on the autonomous cars"
Hmmm, the possibilities are entertaining.
If driver is drunk beyond the legal limit but generally under control, RoboCar drives home.
Elsif driver is drunk beyond legal limit, hammered beyond comprehensibility, and acting like a total asshat, RoboCar drives to the drunk's ex's house, parks in the driveway, and plays "Jingle Bells" with the car horn.
This could be fun.
Melamine in the milk was part of the iterative design and testing process, cleverly disguised as a one-off rogue incident.
KFC need to heed some advice from Oscar Wilde: "What's worse than people talking about you? People not talking about you."
browsers with a black-list function that can deny content by subdomain (content from ads.somesite.com is denied whilst allowing other somesite.com stuff) are the browsers of choice. Adblock, Ghostery, and Noscript are fine, but they can not catch everything and "search and destroy" against the source code should always be an option. Sad to see the interwebs are becoming an arms race between throughput speed and ad-/track-/spy-/other mal- ware bloat, and that the self-defense moves learned during dial-up days are still required. (Honestly, does anyone BUY the stupid crap that gets advertised?)
The year I was in the high school theater lighting crew was the year they got a new light control board (fit on a folding table) that was pretty high-tech for the time (easy cross-fades and all that). Yeah, it was spiffy and ours was the first crew to use it, but I felt vaguely ripped off not being up in "the loft" with the banks of levers and switches the previous years' light crews got to use.
Tom Bihn -- hear, hear! I bought a TB backpack (sorry, don't remember the model name) in, ahhh, 2001 and I still use it almost daily. More for schlepping groceries (it'll hold eight shelf-stable quart containers plus some extra, depending on how the goods are arranged) on my bike now than computer gear, but it's darn handy for flying since it fits under airplane seats yet holds enough clothes/stuff for any trips I take anymore. Zippers are starting to go, but I guess after more than a dozen years of not-delicate almost-daily use it's entitled.
Hi, JimmyP: Agree, that is the dream. The reality for many, though, is that the annual cost of vehicle feeding + maintaining + registration + insurance (this last being quite substantial, even for those with clean driving records) is not justified for the relatively small number of trips that REQUIRE use of a car. The arithmetic will vary by person and situation, of course, but in areas where most trips can be done by transit, bicycle, on foot, or by cadging a ride with a friend, on-demand driverless for those outlier cases (schlepping the load of DIY materials, as was pointed out above) could tip more people to selling the car and walking away. This would then free up many of those dollars held hostage to owning/insuring/feeding a car to be spent elsewhere in the local economy. Again, not for everyone (especially in rural areas) but possibly for a good number of people.
With Bourne and Bond having sewn up the spies-n-'splosions franchise, it's too bad the _Spooks_ crew didn't aim higher and focus more on the intelligence and intrigue. It's not like there's too much already going on in that genre. Squandered opportunity.
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