Depends on your needs. In Canada I tend to go with Koodo mobile; pay $15 for the month as a base charge, then buy however much data or voice I'll need. I conserve my data usage so 1 gig of 4G data can cost me for 4-5 months. And both data and voice with them are "Canada wide", so no roaming or long distance charges, plus they never expire. I had my phone with them for a full year, and on average it's cost me about $25 / month, total.

In the US, on the other hand, I tend to shell out the $60 per month so I can have unlimited data and calling. Unfortunately you're right about Canada not really having any decent offerings for "unlimited use".

You can walk into any cellphone repair shop and have them punch your existing sim to a nano.

Kinda. But he could just as easily have written it as a VB Script. More easily, actually, since he was working on windows and ended up having to write Excel VBA for it later anyway.

Profit bad. Trolling good!

I received a CO's commendation for writing a website. Felt rather silly. But I had to write the damn thing in classic ASP so I guess you could say the award was hard-earned.

Yes. Did you have any more stupid questions?

No, it is not bigoted or racist to assume that someone of a different skin color may have had a different upbringing than you

It is certainly racist.

You are using race as the determining factor to make a presumption about an individual human.

What other useful definition of racism could there be?

Counter-anecdote.

My dad was active in Mensa when I was younger and he was newly divorced. My dad is an unapologetic anti-democrat; I think Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan may be above Jesus in his world view.

As near as I can tell, his interest in Mensa was for social networking with people that had a chance of understanding him. He's brilliant, loyal, fair, judgmental, and not at all sentimental. He has great difficulty expressing himself emotionally. Only certain people "get" him, and that's fine with him as long as there's at least one.... He's a hardcore INTJ.

He has no desire to run the world or to run other people's lives.

I haven't bothered to apply officially for Mensa, but I think I'd be borderline for admission. I'm also NOT a technocrat and ALSO not a liberal democrat.

There is nothing worthwhile in diversity in and of itself

This is the attitude that needs to stop. Diversity may not be a value in your pantheon, but it's not social engineering to want an inclusive society. It's wisdom.

Why does it need to stop?

A huge problem -- that few people seem to speak about -- is that using gender, nationality, or, most frustratingly -- race, as a measure of "diversity" is implicitly bigoted.

The diversity that people _claim_ to want is one of perspectives, life experiences, etc.

The things that are relatively easy to bucketize - gender identity, race, socio-economic status, etc.... these things in and of themselves are not a valuable source of "diversity"

The implicit bigotry in the "diversity" argument says that, if you hire more black people, you'll get much different ideas than what you already have. Why? Because all black people are different from the white people you already have.

I've never seen a more stark illustration of _racism_ then that.

The conjecture here is that if a population distribution doesn't' look the way certain people expect it to, then there is some upstream social problem that needs tinkering with.

That conjecture is only ever true or false on a case by case basis. The real problem that needs to stop is for people to believe this conjecture in the general case; the real problem is that people don't even agree or are not willing to state what their expectations are for the "ideal" population distribution, but, are still willing to cry foul and to assert that a problem exists.

Does that apply to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Some of the prices here look kinda steep: https://robertsspaceindustries... :)

Somehow that reminds me of this: https://xkcd.com/606/

BTW I'm still playing Guild Wars 1 - an old good but dying game...

FIRST POST

(however, the apparent local time when you see this post may differ based on the apparently non-constant nature of c )

It's more like hoarding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It's in the interests of the city to have parking spaces that are used for only as long as they are needed.

Allowing this "auctioning" thing causes parking spaces to be held longer than otherwise just so that someone can try to make money from it.

There is no significant increase in efficiency if parking spaces are in great demand - the moment you leave your spot, someone else is likely to take it. And even if there is some inefficiency there are other ways of solving it without this auctioning.

As long as voters can still vote and elections aren't terribly rigged/diebolded, I don't really consider protests that hold public spaces hostage a good thing. It's fine if they rented out a public space (stadium or field) for their "event".

If you want to protest publicly you could wear a particular hat, shirt, colored item, etc as a sign of protest and move about without preventing others from going about their normal daily lives. Causing massive disruption does not endear me to your cause. If you let random bunch of people start disrupting stuff, you cause problems for everyone else - and another bunch of people might start to do similar or _worse_ things if they disagree with the first bunch.

There are additional/alternative ways of communicating and spreading your message. Many people claim social media is useless -tweets, facebook shares, etc. But there are a number of governments that don't think so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And looking at various "campaigns" social media can actually be useful.

It's a different case if people don't have other options- they can't vote and communications are blocked/censored.

Well, not exactly a feature phone.

I use facebook, multiple account email, and Exchange calendar from my phone multiple times a day. Its just that, I'm usually at home or work, and both have WiFi.

Contract phone plans are absurdly expensive, and, I've been running a pre-paid SIM for over 7 years. I don't want to go back to a situation where I pay a high monthly fee for a limited selection of phones with phone company malware on them...

I am getting everything I need out of this smart phone WITHOUT a gmail account.