The companies may dodge the taxes on their income, but it's pretty hard to dodge taxes on their employees. Granted, WA doesn't have income tax, but there are also property and sales taxes. It would actually be interesting to see just how much the employees of all the companies listed (specifically, their WA offices) generate.

Yep, tweekers are pretty much a lost cause.

It's not just copper piping they can steal; they'll also steal electrical wiring. Nothing's too small or low-value for them.

Also, I don't think you can replace copper with PVC; you can use some other stuff, like PEX, but PVC isn't used for high-pressure supply piping as far as I know, at least not inside walls. I have seen it used for irrigation systems though. I think the problem is that you can't use PVC for hot water supply lines.

I'm not sure that a bodyless brain solves many problems that either long-term hibernation or virtual reality would solve better.

I value human space exploration for reasons orthagonal to the hard science, but I think advancements in virtual reality are going to make it an even harder sell. I know that communications lag is something of a stumbling block for serious interactivity.

But maybe with enough sensors and data streamed back some of the interactivity could be generated locally but with remotely gathered information. Maybe using some of this you could "act out' what you wanted the rover to do in VR with preliminary and interpolated data. The rover could then actually execute this autonomously and then if you went back and re-do what you acted out, enough specific data would have been generated that it would give you an extremely lifelike VR experience.

I think of it sort of like the way Google Street View works now. You can drive up and down the street looking at houses, and you can zoom in and out and turn your head but nothing else. What if you could walk up to an item of interest in a yard in VR. With just the street view data, it would look bad (warped perspective, excessive zoom, etc). But if the system knew exactly what you were interested in, sent in a camera setup after to mirror your examantion of the yard item but in complete detail you could go back to that same street view scene and actually walk up to the item.

No, it was most likely metal thieves. There's tons and tons of them in Phoenix, since that city is chock full of meth-heads and illegal aliens, both of whom steal any metal they can get their hands on so they can take them to the metal recyclers in South Phoenix and get a few bucks. They've had all kinds of problems with metal theft there for a long time; not only are new-home construction sites frequently burgled of their wire and copper pipe, they've even resorted to stealing catalytic converters from vehicles in parking lots (using a portable reciprocating saw).

There's been lots of cases of metal thieves trying to steal electric wire from high-voltage installations and being killed in the process.

If this is a simulation, I'd like them to simulate some better drugs. All the ones in my simulation have too many unwanted side effects. Some are better than others, but a lot of them can be fatal, most don't mix well and don't get me started on the cost and legal complications.

to show how much variation there is, I am also in the bay area and I have a year of 'intro deal' pricing where its less than $50 for 100meg down and 10meg up. no shit, either; I do get those speeds.

well, one caveat. I run openvpn almost 7x24 and this pisses comcast off, even though they won't ever say it. I get disconnected almost every hour on the hour. I work around it with my own form of creative network mgmt (...) and I'm annoyed by them, but its not stopping me.

note, when I don't run my vpn, I don't see the disconnects coming. strange, huh?

anyway, when the intro 12mo deal is over, I'll have to find some other service. there isn't much else to pick from! I once had clear.com (clearwire) - a semi-4g usb 'mifi' dongle that would give me acceptable connectivity without any house wiring. when I was short-term renting, that did the trick. neat little dongle, too. maybe I'll look into that again.

I just need to leave comcast (when my year is up) for 3mos, then I can reset the clock, get a new intro pkg and start again, but this time it probably will only be a 6mo special.

if you don't play these games, you get stuck for over $100/mo!

THIS is why comcast needs to be bitchslapped. and the others, too, but in my area, comcast is the only choice you get.

silicon valley - where we pretty much DID invent the internet - and we have a single vendor to pick from. sigh ;(

but they feel no pain, like people. no ability to show remorse or ethics or shame.

they can't be jailed and they are almost never punished in any meaningful way.

they have all the good things we, people have; but none of the bad things.

"gee, dad, when I grow up, I want to be a corporation!"

update: why didn't I try the simple thing, first? sigh. do a full uninstall, then install the new and this does not carry over previous 'settings'. it seems that even installing the new one over my older one was not so great. had to do a full remove and then add.

but after that, all is well! amazing. none of the problems I had are now there. loading an mkv file can take a long time over ac-rated wifi (sometimes 10 secs of the screen just sitting there, no status or anything) but then the video plays and from then on, its fine.

random positioning no longer shows the blockiness or buffering problem. playing dvd files is now fine and hd files continue to be fine.

wow. so, the 'trick' I'm glad to say, is simple. full uninstall and then fresh install. I should have known, sigh.

but really glad that it was not something other than 'bad settings'.

thanks for the idea.

but if win media player can play dvd data files perfectly, I'm thinking the video layer is fine as it is, and its vlc's buffering or queueing that seems broken.

if you FF to skip across compressed video, it will take some settle time to deblock, but on vlc it takes an absurd amount of timeto do that on mkv and mp4. and on dvd files, it never seems to play well, no matter what.

very odd that 'hard' files (such as hd) play with clocklike perfection and yet the lower res, lower bandwidth 'easy' files give such a hard time.

lately, I'm having a lot of trouble with vlc on win7. not sure why.

when I use wired ethernet, things seem fine (source of data is my nas box). I can play hd files that were downloaded (...) and those play great, even at 1920/120hz native refresh.

BUT - if I dare play a dvd with a video_ts style standard folder, even local playback shows lots of blockiness. I can copy the files to my local ssd and it still acts that way. playing dvd should be EASIER than high def mkv or mp4, right? so what's going on?

system is i7 haswell with onboard intel video. the system is fine, it can handle any hd file I throw at it. well, ok, one problem that might be related; if I skip around on the file, it takes forever to resync and unblock the blockiness. its like the deltas (non i-frames) are staying out of sync and there's no resync ability. 10 seconds or more, later, the file fixes itself (the player, that is) and the hd video looks great again.

that blockiness never seems to go away on pure dvd filesets.

I wonder what's going on? I'm pretty sure I was able to play 'simple dvd's about a year ago, but lately its unusable. if I feed that video_ts folder to win media player (included on win7) it plays as perfectly as a hardware based dvd player would, flawless. and yet, vlc chokes badly on dvd style data.

anyone see that on the last few builds? I don't know when things broke but I'm interested in finding a player that WILL work for all formats and is stable enough to use. win media player is great for the codecs it supports but there are too many it won't read and work with, hence my use of vlc.

I don't bother with vlc on linux on my htpc since the video system is still not as good as win7 is. still too much tearing compared to the perfect video I get from 7 (I hate saying that, too, but its true).

To clarify, I think it's pretty obvious to anyone who isn't dumb, and isn't being intentionally obtuse, that Gmail does not provide the level of security I'm suggesting.

So I guess the question is, which are you? An idiot, or an asshole?

Who said those were the things that I wanted?

The ginormous geniuses I've met don't seem to consider themselves intellectuals, geniuses, or whatnot. I've started pointing out that I'm a genius after recognizing that genius is a matter of technique, and so geniuses can be made: we can turn roughly 100% of the population into geniuses by proper training, with strikingly little effort. As such, one of my future political plans is to tweak the education system to normalize geniuses, bringing the baseline up to something most people believe is an inherent force of genetic superbrainism. Maybe then people will stop pestering me or, worse, trying to hire me with the justification that I'm smart and they want smart people on their team; they have smart people, if they would just act like an intelligent species.

Now, having understood that the only thing that ever stood in the way of my dreams was myself, I must go learn to draw. I realize now that I can't draw because I've never put in the exact same effort that career artists and famous painters put into the subject, and so never learned to draw; it's not that I can't, but that I simply decided not to. That changes now.

A... ah. No, not the one. Not the one, no talk, not the one. The one who will be, but not the one who is; so, not the one.