I don't see what's wrong with it. Yes, they may have called, they may also have emailed. Perhaps they wrote a letter, or sent someone down there to talk to them in person. Maybe they did all of those. Does it matter which one they did? No? Then why not have a verb that specifies that they got in touch, but doesn't care how?
It *is* nonviolent. I'd obviously rather not have my cards stolen at all, but if given the choice, I'd rather my cards be stolen by pickpocketing than by mugging, and I'd definitely rather they be stolen by pickpocketing than by someone blowing up an ATM while I might be standing nearby.
"I'm sure society would be better if everyone drove just as fast as they want."
Nope.
"those speed limit rules were made up just to create revenue."
Generally: yes.
Speed limits *in the abstract* are a good idea. However, the vast majority of specific speed limit *numbers* are way lower than they should be, if the purpose was entirely for safety, rather than for revenue. Hence why everyone drives generally between 5-20 mph (depending on location) higher than the posted speed limit if they can get away with it: because they're driving the speed it's actually safe to drive. I'm 100% not for removing all speed limits - that's a great straw-man argument. I'm just for raising them to a more reasonable speed, at which point I would be entirely in favor of actually policing them strongly, which I'm not at all in favor of under their current implementation. That guy going 110mph in a 65 zone absolutely deserves a huge fine at *least*. The guy going 75, though, totally doesn't (under most circumstances).
I've definitely been in plenty of situations where I wanted to charge 2-4 devices at once (my phone, some other device of mine, my wife's phone, some other device of her's). I've never been in a situation where I needed to charge *8*, though... that said, if we were a family with kids, instead of just the two of us, I could totally see it.
There's technically FiOS in my city already, but that doesn't mean I've actually been able to get it either in my current building or the building I lived in before that, nor do I know anyone who has it, so it was already clear they didn't give one crap about doing anything with FiOS other than advertising the crap out of it. Which I seriously don't get - where's the profit in spending a jillion dollars on something that everyone would be happy to pay you for, but you aren't letting them?
I mean, yes, Verizon is an awful company that would do the world a favor by dying in a fire (or at least it would if the result were competition over the ashes, rather than, as is probably more likely, just giving Comcast even *more* of a stranglehold...), but regardless, FiOS would (probably?) be better than the crap internet we have from them now.
Clearly it needs to be user-customizeable - I would totally take a silent car that could be programmed to go "vroom! vroom!" excitedly when I went fast in it.
Second-to-none, as in it's the literally the second option in terms of integrity, with "none" as the better option?
Wait, what? You want me to put something in the cloud? What possible relevance does that have to this article?
Right, it doesn't *come* in buckets... that's just where it goes , duh.
It's not like they would have any reason to try to help us save money, since that money would be directly lost by them if they did. We already see that elsewhere - Verizon, for instance, is technically "happy" to let you not pay for phone service if you don't need it: you can pay like 70 bucks for internet by itself, or alternatively, you can pay *50* bucks for the same internet and also a phone line. But it's *technically* an option...
I'm imagining that the same thing would happen here - yes, you can totally only buy one channel. It'll cost you 500 dollars, but it's *technically* an option... according to our website, not according to any actual logic...
Obviously that's not what anyone wants, and wouldn't reasonably be considered "unbundling" by anyone except a cable company, but still.
Or even CS majors, if they went to schools with a core that required absolutely any engineering course as part of their overall core, as mine did. Everyone hated that class, even the engineers, but I 100% agree with your basic point, that matlab is not even remotely a "little-known programming language". Little-used-professionally-by-non-engineers language, yes. But everyone's at least *heard* of it...
So that's sort of silly. If they came out with an mp3 player that actually had a decent storage capacity... ok, I still wouldn't pay $1200 for it, that'd be crazy. I'd be happy to pay like 500, though. I paid that much for my current mp3 player for exactly that reason (500gb hard drive) - which is running, incidentally, no joke, Android 1 point freaking 6. That mp3 player is no longer available for purchase, and nobody's come out with any replacement.
One of my favorite quotes from the Jargon Files, on this exact subject, as relevant now as when it was written:
"At first glance, to anyone who understands how these programs actually work, this seems like an absurdity. As hackers are among the people who know best how these phenomena work, it seems odd that they would use language that seems to ascribe conciousness to them. The mind-set behind this tendency thus demands examination.
The key to understanding this kind of usage is that it isn't done in a naive way; hackers don't personalize their stuff in the sense of feeling empathy with it, nor do they mystically believe that the things they work on every day are `alive'. To the contrary: hackers who anthropomorphize are expressing not a vitalistic view of program behavior but a mechanistic view of human behavior."
Full text here: http://www.well.com/~lonewolf/...
That's still against the rules. If you do that and you have a return flight, you're very likely to find your return flight canceled. If you do it often enough, you're likely to have all your frequent flier miles revoked, too. It's not *illegal*, but it *is* generally against airlines' rules, and they're completely within their rights to punish you for doing this.
It is completely back-assward that there's even a reason to do this, but that's the way it is.
A committee is a group that keeps the minutes and loses hours. -- Milton Berle
