Comment Re:Rounded... (Score 1) 362
The University of Melbourne has crunched the numbers, and you're right, the world probably isn't about to end:
http://www.scc.ms.unimelb.edu.au/whatisstatistics/coins.html
The University of Melbourne has crunched the numbers, and you're right, the world probably isn't about to end:
http://www.scc.ms.unimelb.edu.au/whatisstatistics/coins.html
No. With cash transactions the common practice in Australia is to round to the nearest 5 cent increment, whether up or down. It's not that difficult to do though because the rounding's done by the cash register anyway.
Will this armed paramilitary wear brown shirts and make sure that any "abnormal" citizens are detained and interrogated?
She had 2 handguns, completely reasonable for self defense. A standard
You do realise that to most people in most parts of the civilized/first world, this sounds completely insane, right?
Two handguns for self defence? Insane. Guess what I have for self-defence in the first world country where I live? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not even a bat or knife. Times I have been violently murdered or robbed so far: 0.
A "standard"
A shotgun, "pretty typical for hunting small game". Insane.
Even more insane, though, is this idea that your hobby/paranoia (which are the two reasons you implicitly think people should have guns) outweighs other people's safety.
Where I live, you actually don't see guns, other than small handguns, in holsters, carried by the police. That's it.
Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Guns just make people way more effective at killing each other. That's what they are for. Take up archery, buy a can of mace, and stop being so completely ridiculous about your weapon-infested society.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/index.html
1) The other one being Brisbane and Gold Coast at 100km apart, I would say we're just concentrated on the coast line, not at all huge.
I'm probably an ignorant southerner, but isn't "Gold Coast" just a fancy name for "the outer suburbs of Brisbane"?
People managed to navigate without all this garbage.
And if their maps wrongly placed their destination in completely the wrong place, they'd be equally screwed.
What's your point?
Before there is too much stupidity, if you've never been to Australia, please realise:
1. It's huge. Really huge. I live in one out of two of the closer-together cities in Australia, and they're about 800kms apart. In the other direction, the next major city is 2,500kms away.
2. It's mostly empty (in terms of civilization). Think of driving through rural Utah or Arizona, which are quite similar to the Australian bush.
3. It's mostly flat and full of similar looking landscape.
4. National parks and non-national park areas often look quite similar.
5. There's usually only one or two ways to get around in the country.
6. Mildura is a small town in the middle of bloody nowhere. If I was driving there from here I'd expect to pass through a handful of tiny settlements on the way.
So if you are relying on your GPS to get you somewhere outside a major city, it's actually quite plausible and reasonable that you might not have much idea that you're being led off in the wrong direction until you (don't) get there.
It's also quite plausible that you can die - it has happened before. People get lost, they run out of fuel, they don't have water, the temperature easily gets up into the 40-50C range and - dead.
Sooner or later Windows will be updated in a way that Steam won't run on it
Given that Windows 7 (what I use... haven't tried 8) still natively runs things designed for Windows 95 and 98, I'm not sure when or how you think Steam is going to "stop working" on Windows.
This.
In summary, "Don't be dick, and if you do, don't blame God for your dickishness."
So applicable for so many people I know.
No, beer is utterly delicious, you just don't like it.
Oh, unless you mean mainstream American beer, which I agree, does taste like crap and is justifiably the cheapest in the world.
It's not 1997 anymore...the kernel has 99% of the drivers you'll need, unless you need a proprietary one or something that's up for inclusion in the kernel that hasn't made it into the stable version yet.
Or unless you want to do something really bizarre like using wifi to connect to a network...
Flying -- with the notable exception of lighter-than-air such as gasbags -- is too energy intensive to be consumer-level practical at this point in time. Leaving out the technological, mass production, and licensing hurdles.
You forgot the most important issue - we are currently doing a good job of causing climate change with a few billion of us using motorised land vehicles. There is no way known that the environment can sustain any significant fraction of the population moving to air travel as a commuting method.
We should be focusing on getting rid of the idea that individuals need 1+ tonne lumps of metal to get around, not finding new ways to pump out greenhouse gases.
At that point, I thought we had arranged to nominate a certain group of citizens to cut through this kind of crap. Seriously, we must be at a point where government intervention is justified, rather than allowing billions of dollars of legal fees, court time and most importantly innovation to be wasted on this nonsense.
Well, the counter argument to this is that the, let's call them 'informational', goods don't depreciate with use like a tangible product does.
Of course they do.
Have you ever followed the price of a new release game? They start at, say, $70, then drop to $50, then $30ish, then end up in a "value" version for $15-20, then the value version drops to as low as $10 or so. You can see this in both physical releases and electronically distributed versions.
They don't depreciate in the sense that a particular copy doesn't rust or get "mileage" like a car, but their value is linked almost entirely to their novelty, so they actually depreciate more predictably than a car.
This, 1000x this.
Making up a humourus punishment is acknowledging that something potentially illegal happened, and trying to institutionally laugh it off. You absolutely cannot do that. Not once. Not ever.
This is such an American attitude. By making out like this is an all or nothing situation, you actually make it an all or nothing situation when it doesn't need to be.
IMHO a mature workplace would permit someone to cross a line once or twice, and would in a good natured way pull them back onto the right side of that line. Instead of automatically making everything a life and death big deal, why not act like an adult and defuse the situation if possible?
This whole discussion is ignoring the difference between behaviour which is (perhaps) inappropriate in context and behaviour which amounts to sexual harassment, too. Another peculiarly American perception seems to be that any reference to anything of a sexual nature in any context can "harass" someone who hears it.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. -- Jerome Klapka Jerome