As I recall from my understanding at the time, BP has privately-owned and operated franchises. Like any franchise, the franchise license comes with certain contractual obligations.

One of the obligations for the first year or two of a BP franchise is buying BP gasoline.

After that, and again IIRC, it's open market: The BP (or AM/PM, or whatever) station can totally buy Marathon gas from the Marathon distribution point across town, instead of BP gas from the next state.

There is nothing wrong with this. Gasoline is generally a commodity, and about the only thing that keeps it brand-centric is the additive package which is (or may be) mixed differently for Shell or BP or Mobil or whatever.

So no, I didn't avoid BP stations after the BP gulf oil spill, because: Meh. I already knew better: Chances are, the owner was already buying whatever gas he wanted, according to market demands, whether sourced from BP, or Shell, or Marathon, or Exxon, some other such entity.

Punishing a BP franchisee for an oil spill is a cause which is based on a red herring, and is therefore nonsensical.

Ah, Canada. The only country I can think of where a certain percentage of broadcast, over-the-air programming must be of a specific national origin as a part of the licensing for the broadcast frequency.

Freedom?

I don't know of a single refrigerant in common use which remains liquid at STP. Almost all of them evaporate very, very quickly at atmospheric pressure.

Indeed, the most common one in new equipment (these days) is R-134a. Which is the same thing that goes into the "canned air" commonly sold and used for cleaning computer gear, and is also the same chemical used in the more common forms of freeze spray (the difference being whether it is dispensed as a liquid via an internal dip tube, or as a gas by simple lack of a dip tube).

What were you going on about, again?

Oh, right. Clues.

Obstructing traffic means just what it says: Obstructing traffic. The language of such a law is about relative speeds and of particular actions (such as, say, intentionally blocking a freeway).

Exceeding the speed limit is a whole different law.

The two are independent constructs. Indeed, I see no reason why one could not be cited for both "obstructing traffic" and "speeding" at the same time.

There is no conflict here.

Your understanding of history is so terribly flawed that I don't even know where to start.

I myself don't have a single USB 3 host device.

I purposefully bought one of the cheap USB 3 Kingston keys after reading the reviews. Been very happy with it: It often operates at close to the theoretical USB 2.0 transfer rates, and there have been instances where my USB 2.0 host is plainly the bottleneck. It was the right drive for the right price on that particular day, perfectly in the corner of the price/performance curve.

Meanwhile, none of this is news: If you buy an ATA/66 hard drive in 1997, you already know that you don't necessarily get 66 megabytes per second from it because the spinning rust can only transfer things so fast. The speed of the physical interface has typically nothing to do with the rate at which data is transferred, and it never has.

The only thing new here is your own flawed perception.

That's a bad security model in that it relies on the assumption that the local network is physically secure, which is never a good assumption to make.

NetBEUI over the Internet impossible? What are you going to tell me next, that I can't watch TV over the Internet either because the IP doesn't know how to deal with ATSC?

A small SBC running OpenVPN in tap mode will work just fine in a "it's not a router, it's an Ethernet bridge!" sort of way. And...done: NetBEUI, over the Internet, with every bit of untraceable clusterfuck that NetBEUI ever had.

And all you might notice is one or two new MAC addresses lurking around.....if the attacker is sloppy AND if you're paying attention. Which you aren't, or you'd realize that the model is unsound to begin with.

Are you saying I can't transmit Ethernet frames over the Internet?

Paragraphs.

Pretty please.

Prison is not meant to be torture, but it is meant to be punishment.

The trouble with an FPS or an MMO, or routine fun in general, is that people would be more likely to do dumb things just so that they can live in prison: Three squares a day, one's own bunk, laundry service, and regular gaming sessions?

We've already got enough people who LIKE prison and jail. :-/

I've never had a problem with Hot Pockets: Follow directions, learn how it works in a given microwave oven, and...done: Ridiculously-hot cheap, bubbly, unhealthy goodness.

Meanwhile, I don't need to read TFA to learn how the powdered aluminum wrapper turns RF energy into thermal energy. And I don't need TFA to know that any thing has a certain reluctance toward changing temperatures, as nothing is a perfect thermal conductor.

In fact: Dude, I've been cooking with a microwave since I was a little kid: It was the first kitchen appliance I was certified on other than -- maybe -- an electric can opener.

Up next on /.: How shoelaces work to keep our shoes on our feet, followed by a lesson in using a light switch to illuminate a dark room. Or "Toast: Why bread is caramelized only on the outside when using the every-day toaster."

*head in hands*

And when you download an installer, it's a ZIP with a single file: One compressed EXE.

So you extract the EXE (which is not meaningfully bigger than the ZIP), and execute it.

Then, the first thing it does is extract a compressed CAB (which is not meaningfully bigger than the EXE).

After that, it installs the CAB, which could have been accomplished by simply double-clicking on the (again, already-compressed) CAB....now that it's finally exposed after all of the needless wrappers.

This behavior would have never been considered acceptable in the day of the floppy disk, and it shouldn't be acceptable now: It's grossly inefficient in terms of CPU utilization, disk utilization, and (most importantly) human utilization. In many ways, we've forgotten much of what we used to know.

I can't fathom the number man-hours that are wasted daily by end-users just to save a few hours of optimizing such installers once, but if I had to take a guess, I'd think that [human lifetimes wasted] / [day] would be a cromulent unit to factor it in.

I email myself all the time.

I keep backups of most of my data, of course, but email is the most easily-searched, most easily-accessed, and most redundant system I have...and it takes zero additional thought on my part for it to behave in this way.

Additional redundancy is also simple: If something is Really Important to me, I can send it to myself at multiple independent email servers with ridiculous ease.

I've been doing it this way since I discovered IMAP something close to 20 years ago.

The fact that someone is using a tool in a way that you didn't intend should not be taken to indicate that such behavior is wrong, and if IMAP were totally unsuited it wouldn't handle multiple concurrent clients of different types, much less folders, much less generally-sane handling of attachments, much less [...].

(Granted, this is for stuff that is not secret to me -- just important to me. I don't have many secrets, and any that I do have certainly aren't anywhere near the Internet or any other network.)

But of course the object is keeping everyone interested in 5 different stories waiting on the one they care about.

No. The objective is to keep everyone interested so that they can observe the advertising.

Depending on locale, there may be easy answers to this problem: NPR, PBS, BBC, CBC, [et cetera].

Agreed.

But here I was thinking that, all this time, E-911 already uses ANI, as E-911 predates CLID.

So what's the real story, here?