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Comment Re:Most are ill-prepared (Score 1) 191

@Anonymous

I refuse to use Alcohol based products... they are horrible at heating food and Alcohol in the USA is completely unregulated, which means it may have a toxicity level that one would rather not want to worry about.

You're not supposed to drink the alcohol--even pure methanol is pretty toxic if you drink it. You're just supposed to burn the alcohol in a stove. A proper alcohol burner will mix the vapors with air and produce a hot blue flame that works quite well at heating food.

Comment Re:$230 (Score 1) 611

I thought I recalled it being built into firefox.

It is: Tools -> Add-ons, Plugins page, change the Shockwave Flash plugin to "Ask to activate". You can also configure per-host exceptions by clicking the globe/padlock icon in the address bar -> More Information -> Permissions tab.

Comment Re:Remember Microsoft Windows? (Score 2) 195

It used the FreeBSD networking code. This doesn't mean windows is fast and it's sort of specious. BSD has tricks in the Kernel to make I/O faster that pretty much anything else.

No it didn't. A few utilities that nobody used (e.g., the commandline ftp.exe, which doesn't even support PASV mode) were ported from BSD (not even FreeBSD), but the TCP/IP stack in Windows was not from BSD.

Comment Re:Hmm (Score 1) 299

If the amount of radiation didn't even kill the guy, it sounds like razing the building and securely storing all the towels that touched him is a bit overkill.

...And by "a bit" I mean the other thing.

Perhaps it didn't kill the guy because the substance that was emitting the radiation was transferred from his body into the towels that touched him?

Comment Re: Aperture-specific plugins... (Score 2) 214

the "cloud" version of Photoshop is out of the question, because I sometimes work in the field where there is no internet.

"Cloud" is just a marketing term that can mean a wide variety of things. In the case of Adobe Creative Cloud, it means you're licensed on a subscription basis, and need to connect to Adobe's servers periodically to verify that your subscription is still active. It doesn't mean you run Photoshop in a web browser--it's still installed on your hard drive like traditional programs. As the FAQ says, "No, the desktop applications in Creative Cloud, such as Photoshop and Illustrator, are installed directly on your computer, so you donâ(TM)t need an ongoing Internet connection to use them."

Comment Re:Not a problem (Score 2) 146

I don't know why you had such a problem. There are many GSM carriers that offer SIM/pre-pay, and have for as long as I can recall.

Agreed. He doesn't say exactly when his last trip to the US was, but AT&T and T-Mobile had prepaid SIMs "a few years ago". I don't know if there are any airport shops that sell them (seems like there would be), but as you say, they're readily available in various stores outside the airport.

However, AT&T's prepaid plans suck for tourists... if you have a smartphone (and seeing that this is /., I bet OP does), AT&T will make you get a "smartphone" plan, which starts at $25 for a month of service, and doesn't actually include any data--that's an extra $5 for a measly 50MB. T-Mobile has prepaid plans that I think would work better for a short-term visitor, e.g., perhaps their $3/day unlimited plan.

But I think the best prepaid plans in the US for visitors come from "MVNO"s--basically companies that resell access to either AT&T's or T-Mobile's network, such as Airvoice or Ultra. Unfortunately, their SIMs tend not to be available in actual physical stores, which makes buying their service impractical for a visitor.

Comment Re:Levi stadium situation (Score 1) 404

Despite sounding like a good idea, apparently in real life the margin on parking is so low that you can't really do it on a part time basis and make it worth your while. It's not that they are doing it wrong, their business model is to simply privatize the profit and socializing the liability and risks (e.g. city maintenance and self-insurance costs) not unlike a big-bad-bank...

FWIW, most of the office buildings around the Texas Rangers baseball stadium in Arlington turn their lots into pay parking on game days. (And for games at the Cowboys football stadium too, even though that's a bit of a longer walk from the office buildings).

Comment Re:Massive conspiracy (Score 2) 465

You should also, you know, READ the original TIGTA report, too. It is very enlightening, even with its admitted flaws. For example, the targeting was still a very small part of the total applications, and the "Tea Party" targeting was also less than a third of all targeted applications.

Read it already, and you're misstating what it says. You seem to be referring to Figure 4 on page 8--that's showing that of the applications that went for special review, about 1/3 looked like they were from "Tea Party" groups. That doesn't really say too much about whether Tea Party groups were targeted or not; of course there will be other applications that look borderline and need more review. What does show that they were targeted is that in a random sample of all applications, all Tea Party-looking groups were selected for special review. In other words, if you're not a Tea Party group, you only get special review if there's something worth reviewing. But if you are a Tea Party group, you're definitely getting reviewed. If you had read the report, you would have seen that it specifically mentions that the IRS made the same argument you made, and the report refutes that argument:

Figure 4 shows that approximately one-third of the applications identified for processing by the team of specialists included Tea Party, Patriots, or 9/12 in their names, while the remainder did not. According to the Director, Rulings and Agreements, the fact that the team of specialists worked applications that did not involve the Tea Party, Patriots, or 9/12 groups demonstrated that the IRS was not politically biased in its identification of applications for processing by the team of specialists. While the team of specialists reviewed applications from a variety of organizations, we determined during our reviews of statistical samples of I.R.C. 501(c)(4) tax-exempt applications that all cases with Tea Party, Patriots, or 9/12 in their names were forwarded to the team of specialists.

Comment Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting? (Score 1) 583

The tips are generally shared amongst some of the staff.... that portion of the staff makes shit wage, minimum wage law doesn't apply to them.

No, minimum wage law does apply to them: "If an employee's tips combined with the employer's direct wages of at least $2.13 an hour do not equal the federal minimum hourly wage, the employer must make up the difference."

It's actually most white-collar employees (e.g., software developers such as myself) who are exempt from the minimum wage laws (and overtime too)... see this page for the full list of exempt employees.

Comment Re:Don't trust the Wall Street Journal (Score 1) 129

Are there any of the major companies that aren't doing Fiber to the Press Release? Karl Bode has a hateboner for AT&T, but if you look at it objectively, Google's doing the same thing. Fiber in Austin! But where and when? Not here, and not right now--probably not for another year. Unlike AT&T's so-called FTTPR, which is currently available in the Austin suburb I live in.

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