Citation please? I'm not doubting you, just please provide the evidence for all of us.

I don't care what the offset is from GMT, just leaveitthehellalone. If businesses need winter hours, they can have those.

t seems to me that if you're going to give a company a de facto monopoly of both television distribution and Internet, it would be a fair trade-off to require that they provide a very basic level of service to poor people for free. We can quibble over the details, but for example, providing the over-the-air channels and a 1mbps symmetrical connection seems fair.

These companies don't like to admit it, but they're providing exclusive access to public infrastructure. I think they should be counting their lucky stars that they're not as regulated as other utilities.

Unintended, huh? The eternal optimist. I don't believe in major unintended consequences any more. Oh sure, when we're dicking around with nature, they're still possible. But when it comes to government regulation leading to consequences that many, many people saw coming? Nah.

1, isn't this a dupe?
2, how about free internet access for all? it would be a genuinely useful thing for a local government to provide, and it would help them stay in touch with the citizenry. My net access still sucks, they're going to have a better connection than I am most likely

The idea of Hypercard begat Filemaker. A little more like a real database, a little less in the way of training wheels. Still really simple to bang out an app in. Still extensible. The way we did it was to make use of its serial or telnet capabilities (way back when) in order to talk to devices or machines.

I realize there's snazzier stuff today but Hypercard didn't just vanish in a puff of logic without anything in between, before this Livecode thing I know nothing about, there was Filemaker. Love it, hate it (more likely) or feel indifferent, but it did more or less the same job as Hypercard. Sure, it was harder to do simple things, but it was easier to do the slightly more complicated things that people commonly needed to do.

Sure, and it's simple enough to read the disc in the meter optically, so logging is not that difficult, either. The power factor is shown right on the meter's face...

Sure, if a precision of 1 nautical mile (1852 meters) is good enough for you, with fixes only possible at certain times of the day. Celestial navigation is not going to keep your 200 foot beam supertanker in the middle of a 500 foot shipping channel in the middle of the day. That's like treading a needle, only you thread ways a half million tons and is traveling at 19 miles/hour.

Every auto parts/tools outfit has restocking fees for at least some stuff. Sometimes this reflects their typical usage pattern (like auto code scanners) and other times just the cost of dealing with fraud and the actual cost of dealing with restocking, as in electrical components. A percentage of what you get back will be the pulled parts, cleaned up.

they had meters that could handle time-of-use metering before they had meters that could handle realtime reporting. they had to come to your house with a fancy PDA once a month and get a dump from the meter.

This isn't about conformity, this is about self-justification. It can't possibly be bad, because I'm doing it, and I am a good person!

I don't know how it works where you are, in part because I don't know where you are, but here in California you get guaranteed matriculation into a state college if you graduate from a community one. With some care you can knock out a bunch of prereqs for a real degree in the process, and get it done much more cheaply than doing it at the U. However, a two year degree is good for nothing else but preparation for a four year degree. No one gives one tenth of one fuck about a two year degree any more. Even a four year degree is a yawn.

I still heartily recommend it. Tell him to spend three years getting a two year degree so that he can enjoy himself by taking classes which are just for fun while it's cheap.

it didn't, though. We have it as mandatory in California, or at least we did when I was in school, and I only learned the bare boring facts, and rapidly forgot most of those. They don't teach you what you really need to know, which is how corporations control the law in detail. I didn't get that until college, by which time I already pretty much got it.

It's not that private spaceflight is the only good work, it's that spaceflight is good work. It benefits the human race, or at least, it has done so in the past, continues to do so in the present, and has the potential to do even more. Anyone who advances spaceflight without my tax money is doing a good deed in my book.

What makes someone a hero is other people's dependence on them. We install businesses into high-rises for convenience, not out of necessity. There would be lesser environmental impact using another method; indeed, we have usable commercial buildings sitting idle all over this country, and sprinkled across much of the planet. Ask China or even Spain about that.

Exactly. And, one might add, at potential cost to oneself.