I bought a used pickup at the end of last year, but you wouldn't catch me buying a new one anytime soon. If you live in an area where it doesn't snow you might have a different view, but I've had enough experience with 2wd pickups in the snow to never want to do it again. So 4wd is a must for me and that adds between $4-6k which takes the price up into the $25k area. I'd sooner buy a small car that gets much better mileage for less money and just rent a truck when I actually need one. And yet if you look around the dealerships around here trucks are pretty much all you see. I guess we didn't get the memo about gas prices here.

What bugs me is that while pretty much every little hatchback lets you fold down the rear seats, very few let you also fold down the front seat to fit the long stuff you'd want the pickup for (okay you aren't going to get a full sheet of plywood in there, but that's what the truck rentals are for). The Honda Fit was pretty much the only one that I saw that would do it, and the Fit really ought to get better mileage for what it is. It could also stand to not be so freaking ugly.

It would give them an excuse to start prying into the lives of anyone they associated with through gaming. Actually finding anyone who is a real threat is a secondary concern to having more people to have to look into and more ways to look into them so they can get more money and influence.

I'm playing through it right now on win7x64. First you install the game with the option to put as much on the hdd as possible. Then you install patch 1.02. The game will work at this point, but the movies won't because you don't have the right codecs for it. Then you install a mod that converts the game to opengl and allows it to run at higher resolution and compensate for widescreen monitors. There is a whole modding community for the game that among other things replaces the in game models for the characters with better versions, so Cloud doesn't look like a lego man outside of battles.

I've had some crashes, once in a great while when entering battles, and often it hangs up when exiting the program.

It will also work pretty much out of the box with an xbox 360 controller, except the dpad and L2 and R2 don't work. It's playable as is though, it thinks the left analog is a joystick and you don't really need L2 and R2.

It took about 4 years to get our new development on the map. I never had any joy getting the other companies to add it. Then I think Google added a different tool for reporting errors and when I reported it to them again I actually got a response back essentially saying you're right and we're going to fix it. Within a month or so it was on the map.

In the same way as if you were diverting the water for irrigation or drinking water, the water doesn't disappear it re-enters the system somewhere else. The people (and ecosystem, but no one really gives a damn) downstream have less of it.

Now if you had a plant that was fed by a river that came down from mountains just to the west of the plant, and the prevailing winds were east to west, then some of the condensate would tend to end up right back into the river.

Why would you ever not want to be at war for a whole month? What's needed is a genetically engineered horse or mule that is patented and requires genetically engineered food that is also patented (You wouldn't want the enemy to be able to just steal your $100k horse and be able to feed it with grass, would you?). Then the military will buy millions of them.

Overstating your threat to the US is a really good way of getting blown the hell up. See: Iraq. This is only useful if the rest of the plan is to first get the hell out of the country and then wait for the US economy to implode.

Pirates use the copper in the lines to steal trillions of dollars worth of copyrighted materials. By stealing the copper, you are stealing the copyrighted materials that were transferring across them. Since we can't determine exactly how much copyrighted material was in the copper at the time, we need to assume it's at least 10 million dollars worth per foot. Since we'll never be able to recover this money from thieves desperate enough to steal copper, we simply need to authorize the RIAA and MPAA to shoot anyone suspected of stealing copper on sight.

A zip code isn't enough to calculate a tax rate. There are county level taxes and country boundaries are not necessarily zip code boundaries. So you have to know what county the address is located in.

Furthermore, certain items are tax exempt or taxed at different rates, and not every jurisdiction has the same exemptions and rates. So you may not only need a database of rates at every level of government, but also a database of what is taxable for every level of government of every jurisdiction in the country.

Furthermore, certain jurisdictions have tax holidays so you somehow need to find these out for every jurisdiction in the country every day, while you check to see if anyone has changed their tax rate(s).

So what makes more sense, having every individual find their own solution to this problem, or have the entity responsible for the problem and receiving the money come up with a single solution and indemnify the businesses that use it against any inaccuracies present in the database?

It's funny when you pull back the veil to see these guys being petty snobs. Oh, Robert Frost is an old fart, no award for him.

Recently I've seen George RR Martin ("The American Tolkien") completely dismiss all the critical reader reviews on Amazon of his last 2 books as being from trolls, saying he only cares about the opinion of his peers. There's nothing like the internet for giving you the non-sugarcoated truth of what people think, because they'll say things they would never say to your face.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8E5dUnLmh4/

The problem is when one car is bigger than the other, this is much worse for the smaller car than the smaller car hitting a wall. This is the problem with SUVs, even the people who don't necessarily want to drive a larger vehicle may buy a larger vehicle to protect their family in the event of an SUV hitting them. A sub-compact with a 5 star front impact rating can still get munched in a head on collision with an SUV.

So, you read the data and tried to interpret it, but didn't RTFA or look at the picture of the mangled car? Here's a hint, a 2g crash does not result in the right front tire being separated from what used to be a car. It was severe enough to bend the A pillars, but that probably happened while the car was flipping over twice. Yeah, it was probably just the stereo though.

The basics of photography are a simple equation made to appear complicated by using obscure notation.

Exposure = Shutter Speed x Aperture x Sensitivity

Exposure is the total amount of light captured, and the camera attempts to guess at what the correct exposure is. When it's guess is not what you had in mind you use Exposure Compensation to tell it what you want, or go to full manual mode and take control, though the camera will still show you how far you are away from what it thinks.

The reason why you can change different parameters is that in addition to affecting exposure they also have additional effects on the image.

Sensitivity is the simplest since it is just the gain applied. The tradeoff for increasing the gain is more noise and therefore less image quality, but otherwise doesn't change the image.

Shutter Speed affects how motion is captured, including your own motion while holding the camera.

Aperture is the most complicated. First it's expressed in an obscure form such as f/2.8 that you can't plug into our equation, but just know that one click of the dial when you change the aperture has the same effect as one click on the dial when you control the shutter as far as the exposure is concerned. What it affects in the image is called the Depth of Field, which is how far in front and behind the plane of focus will be sharp. But Depth of Field is also affected by the distance to the focal plane and the focal length of the lens. This is where there is no substitute for experience. The smaller the aperture (bigger f number) the more depth of field.

One of the main reasons for using a dslr is that the image sensor is larger, which means you use longer actual focal length lenses than a compact camera. This in turn gives you less depth of field for the equivalent field of view. A compact camera with a small sensor gives you very little control over the depth of field except at very close focus distances.

That's it. The various modes of the camera are just about which of the variables you are going to control and which you are going to let the camera control. But only in Manual mode will the camera not balance the exposure out for you, so don't be afraid to turn the dial away from Auto or Program. I use Aperture Priority 90% of the time, since that's the one that has the most effect on the image.

"Before you actually start coding" Yeah, except you missed the part where the submitter said he was explicitly told he wouldn't be paid for it but has already done it anyway. I have no idea what the problem is here. If they cared about being paid then they shouldn't have done the work without an agreement to be paid. Having done the work, they can either withhold it out of spite of their own stupidity or use it.

The nice thing about my netbook is that it doesn't cost $100/month or more to do anything with it.