Cash is legal tender. Plastic is not. If I offer you cash (in reasonable denominations) to pay a debt and you refuse it, then the debt is cancelled. That's the law in Canada. Canada inherits that from British common law -- just like the US but with a later fork. This is an ancient principle, so it's likely to be the same in the US unless there was an explicit change. In this case (hair done), the debt is incurred so you don't even have the excuse of forward negotiation. For completeness: The debt can be incurred before the product is taken. If you run the items through the cash register and say "Total: $19.56", I now have a functional debt. If I hand you a $20 and walk away, the debt is paid. Of course: IANAL .. YMMV.

One specific incident. i had a programing problem that I couldn't solve. I was about to post to Usenet (80s) asking for advice. Just before I posted my problem I stopped and asked: "If someone else posted this problem, what would I tell them?"

I then followed my own advice, and it solved the problem that I couldn't solve on my own.

Yeah, not much use for it right now, but the Wright brothers' initial technology wasn't that useful, either. A century later, some people consider propeller driven aircraft reasonably functional..

or $60K for each New York job. Not sure if it's worth it.

The US government using Russian-made software to secure their machines is like the time that they let Russian workers build the Moscow embassy. It ended up being so bug-ridden that they had to rebuild parts of the new building in order to have a secure zone.

Yeah!.. Same thing with Columbine, The Oklahoma bombing and Sandy Hook.

Hold on.. Those were all right wing white Christians. Nobody would have been afraid of being called racist for ratting out right wing white Christians! ... So how did those people not get stopped? Because police were afraid to be seen taking down white kids? Should police be more nasty to white folk too?

Uhm, no. It's not about porn. It's about control over, and access to, what people say to each other in private.

The death toll in this attack is roughly equal to the number of people who have died in the UK because of DUI. The only difference is that DUI deaths are so common and so continuous that they're rarely front page news, much less international news.

In the US, you have on average, 650 gun deaths per week. 500 can be attributed to 'Christians'. Less than one per week can be attributed to 'Muslim Extremists'..

For me, the difference between an archive and a backup is that a backup is usually offline (i.e. unavailable and not intended to be available) while an archive is usually 'live' in some way. It makes sense to me to make backups of your archives (although possibly at a lower frequency than your 'live' data). It also makes perfect sense to use your backups to make an archive.

By this rule 'live backups' that are (semi) online and available for users without other human interaction are actually archives. They don't technically become backups until you put them in vault or take them off-site. (and put them in storage).

The reason why I make this distinction is that archives (like RAID) are still vulnerable to online corruption.

That's $300/month. Still cheaper to buy a burner phone and forward my calls. The big three cell companies in Canada have similar plans.. they suck. I'm with Wind Mobile (now Freedom Mobile since they got bought out). They have a plan for roaming in the US for about $10/month.

That's the kind of pricing that you should be paying. The cost of dealing with roamers for the companies are probably in the pennies per day. Those plans are almost 100% profit. The only reason why they get away with it is that "everybody does it" .. and regulators allow them to get away with it because lawmakers are paid off by the companies making these massive profits (earned off of our backs).

Manning's freedom was lost because (s)he thought that the public knowing what was really going on in Iraq was important enough to make the risk worthwhile. In return, i'd say it's the least we can do to refer to her by her preferred gender. It's a lot easier than losing your freedom, don't you think?

You realise, of course, that options 1 and 3 are essentially the same thing.....

Pardons are also for innocent people wrongly accused or convicted..

A great idea -- until the first senator you go to turns out to be not so supportive and turns you in. So much for getting the data out at all.