That's still against the rules. If you do that and you have a return flight, you're very likely to find your return flight canceled. If you do it often enough, you're likely to have all your frequent flier miles revoked, too. It's not *illegal*, but it *is* generally against airlines' rules, and they're completely within their rights to punish you for doing this.

It is completely back-assward that there's even a reason to do this, but that's the way it is.

One: they frequently set it so that people who drive through the intersection on yellow because they "can't stop safely" sometimes get tickets, because they've set it for maximum profit rather than for maximum safety.

Two: they sometimes set it so that people who are "turning left and haven't been able to make it through beforehand" also sometimes get tickets, because again, maximum profit.

It is *exactly* the same people bitching about speed limits, for the same reason. Nobody is arguing that there should be no speed limits ever. What we argue is that, if you have a road where it's safe to drive 50, and everyone drives 50, the city shouldn't make the speed limit arbitrarily 25 so they can ticket people driving safely; they should make the speed limit 50, so they only ticket people who are *actually* driving like an "irresponsible jackass".

If they can only listen to phone calls and view text messages. That's like saying someone has "total access" to your machine because they installed a keylogger. Is it dangerous and invasive? Yes. But it's not "total access", if they can't actually *control* anything...

I enjoyed enough of Reamde that I didn't feel like it was a waste reading it. I did feel like it was essentially 3 different novels with 3 very different feels trying to coexist, and I liked two of them a lot more than the third, but overall, I thought it was a fun read. (That said, you chose a good time to stop reading, as the last third contained a higher ratio of the stuff I didn't think was as interesting.)

That is extremely incorrect.

This is going to be run by the people that run the Sprint MVNO Ting (which is owned by Tucows). Ting is *awesome*. They pretty much define what customer service and user experience should look like. I've been with them for over a year now, and they are one of a small handful of companies I go out of my way to proselytize to people.

I would switch to this in an *instant* if I could, and if their rates are reasonable, which I expect they will be, given that it will be run by Ting.

I do remember the Tucows of the mid-90s being as you described, but the Tucows of today is nothing like that.

Some of us *do* occasionally enjoy, as you say, stimulating the pleasure centers, without feeling the need to do it all the time and never do anything else. That is indeed why I stay away from things like heroin, or for that matter, cigarettes - because I don't *want* to put anything in my body that will cause my body to start rebelling if it doesn't continue to get it at regular intervals. That sounds terrible. (I'm already annoyingly physically addicted to food, water and sleep, I don't need any more...)

On the other hand, alcohol is fun occasionally, but has some unpleasant side effects. I'd *love* to have additional non-addicting psychoactive things to play with occasionally, if they were proven safe, and definitely non-addicting. I wouldn't do it all the time, or even often, because I have other things to do, but I don't understand our culture's general idea that "pure fun = evil", either.

Except not, because they're already dead, which is depressing. If mine ever dies, which it will, because hard drives do that, I'm *screwed*.

I will admit that I don't need a large local hard drive when:
  * I can get unlimited data
  * I can get it anywhere on the planet
  * It is *reliable* anywhere on the planet
  * I can get it for free or close to free

Obviously none of those things are even remotely close to true right now, and none of them are likely to become true anytime soon. Until then, I would like all my music with me while I'm driving in the car, without having to pay out the rear for it, without it losing signal, and whether I'm driving around town, or 300 miles out in the middle of nowhere.

But nobody sells them anymore, so I'm kinda screwed when this one dies. (I don't have an iPod - the largest they went up to is 160gb, if I recall correctly. That is *not big enough*.)

Reminds me of a great exchange I had with my crazy grandmother, that I still remember despite being like 7 years old at the time: I was whining because I was bored of sitting in her hotel room and wanted to go play in the pool. She said something like, "don't you know the world doesn't revolve around you? It revolves around *me*!" (She said it jokingly, but if you knew her, you would know that she didn't really mean it as a joke.)

On the same note, Microsoft clearly doesn't believe the world's servers are the US government's for the taking, because they know full well, they're *Microsoft's* for the taking. Remember that incident with no-ip a few months ago, where Microsoft declared no-ip was letting spammers use its domain, snatched like a million domains belonging to no-ip users, and proceeded to completely botch everything up? That was awesome.

Indeed, they *are* two different words, and thus, their connotations are in fact not the same. "Raises the question" just means "brings up", whereas the modern definition of "begs the question" asks that you imagine as though the question were literally (and in this case, I do mean literally, as the "metaphorically" sense is coming from the verb "to imagine") begging you, "PLEASE! *Please* ask this question! I *insist* that you ask this question!", that merely "raising the question" doesn't. As such, I firmly believe that the phrase as it is now commonly used *is* useful.

Furthermore, it is *not* overriding the previous usage - if you want to refer to the logical fallacy of begging the question, you would generally just state, "that is clearly begging the question". If I were to say, "that's clearly begging the question: where did she go?", and you assumed a definition of "assuming the conclusion of an argument" in that sentence, what would that even *mean*? A word or phrase can definitely have two or more meanings without any of them being diluted, as long as it's clear from context, either syntactically or semantically or both, which is meant.

Yes it does. It is literally (ok, fine, metaphorically) begging for you to ask that question. It begs the question. That's a perfectly legitimate shortening, even if it wasn't what the (significantly less clear) original meaning of the phrase was. Give it up.

You do realize that gender reassignment surgery only modifies the body, not the brain, right?

I assume you do, but it's also the best *proof* we have that yes, they are really actually different (on average) in ways other than physical: there are a good handful of studies of individuals which, either due to mutation or botched surgery as infants or both, were born as one gender but raised from infancy as the other. Despite being treated by everyone as the gender they appeared to be, they all invariably acted as you would expect of the gender they were born as, and all announced (sometimes as early as 5 years old) that they felt they were that gender.

Obviously, yes, gender roles are both partially socially constructed, and the parts that aren't, are only true on average, not across the board. Just because more guys are natively interested in programming for its own sake than girls, doesn't mean there aren't still plenty of girls who are also natively interested in programming.

So I do completely agree, we do need to stop feeling like we *have* to have full equality of everything. What we need is a world where a female can feel like yes, if she finds programming interesting, she can totally major in it and get a job in it. If she doesn't find programming interesting and would rather do something "traditional" like go into design or whatever, she should also totally be able to do that, too, without anyone eye-rolling or complaining about it. If that means the IT workforce is still going to be 70% male? Fine, that's not our fault. (As long as we aren't *discouraging* women from joining it who would have wanted to. (Or, obviously, actively preventing them from joining it, which I understand is still at least *occasionally* an issue, usually in the guise of "fitting in", which is BS.))

That would be nice, though it doesn't seem like how Google usually works... I can think of several instances where Google decided it knew best, rolled out changes to products that made them slower and crappier, and said, "you'll love this, so we made the changes mandatory!" I can only think of a single instance (the new Maps a few months ago) where they gave something an overhaul that left it cripplingly slow and which removed several key features, and provided us the option to go back to permanently still using the old one that worked better (actually permanently, I hope...)

Reminds me of a story from The Dilbert Principle, about an office that provided free drinks of various kinds, but then decided nominally as an experiment, but actually as a cost-cutting measure, to not buy new drinks until all the drinks had been drank. The "experiment" "proved" that everyone liked the unpopular flavors, as they got drank (once everything else was gone).

Or because they want to feel helpful. Or because they like watching numbers grow higher. Those are both perfectly legitimate reasons I was happy to hit 2000 rep on SO, so I could start helping with the Low Quality Posts review queue there (and the reason I currently have well over a thousand helpful flags).

Yes, yes it is already a thing. I was going to post that, but I can see I've already been beaten to that like three times already.

Read it again. He's not starving on the street. He's selling his medal because he wants to buy some expensive art with the money. I don't really feel sorry for him.