NIMBY's suck farts off dead chickens in August. And if you've ever smelt a rotting chicken in the August heat, you know how revolting that is.

The job of a NIMBY is to do whatever they can to obstruct progress. Whether they do it to "protect property values", "save the children", or "stand up for our (religious) rights", they all do the same thing in the end: Say "No" without providing any options.

Every nation in this world is full of conquered peoples. There are more "sacred places" than you can shake a stick at, and I challenge you to pick a direction and walk twenty miles without running into someone's "sacred" place. Yet when is the last time you ever saw them worshipping there?

Yeah. Right.

Never.

Machines in every form benefit the owners of the means of production, not the worker that works for someone else. This has been a fact since cottage industry gave way to centralized production at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Machines allow less humans to do more work. That is true of the use of the water-powered forging hammer that replaces a half-dozen men swinging sledge hammers, or of the automated alignment and welding assembly that puts car bodies together without using humans for the bulk of the job.

I'm really surprised that fast food and other low-skill, low-wage work hasn't been replaced by robots already. Companies that sell these products have already figured out exactly how hot the grille and deep-fry oil needs to be, how long the meat needs to be in each and when to flip or remove, and given the crap job that the no-skill worker does of stacking the condiments, a machine probably could apply a slice of lettuce, two slices of tomato, meat, and cheese between two slices of bread to make a hamburger before wrapping it in paper.

Fast food isn't a skill. It doesn't even come close to coffee shop barista, where the customer is already paying a luxury price for a human's touch when making a product that could come out of a machine just about as well. If it costs $200,000 per year to pay employees to work a fast food restaurant, and that cost can be reduced to $60,000 per year by the introduction of a half a million dollars of machinery that will last for a decade, these companies would be nuts to not replace workers with robots.

Your right, thats all blunt objects, and its the FBIs statistics I was looking at:

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cj...

So "blunt objects" and "personal weapons" (including fists, etc), EACH are more than double that of rifles at 380.

But this is homicides, doesn't count intentional self wounding, since, that isn't really a useful statistic, being...intentional and consensual.

The pose is a face, a little bit of bare shoulder, hair, and a hat. That kind of exposure (ie, the shoulder) is common throughout the United States anywhere that's warm enough to dress that way. There are entire fashions dedicated to off-shoulder blouses and dresses for women. Women of all ages, including minors, are free to dress that way, and men and women of all ages, including minors, need to learn how to control themselves when something as sexual as a shoulder is displayed.

You want to not be tantalized or enticed? Move to a country that requires women to cover themselves. Otherwise learn to control your base instincts, you animal. If she's not displaying her sexual characteristics then your being excited is definitely your problem, not anyone else's.

Argentina already went through this headache when the US Dollar became the defacto standard for awhile while the Argentine Peso was pegged by law to the US Dollar and contracts were drafted using the Dollar, not the Peso, as the unit of currency. This became a problem when Argentina wanted to decouple from the Dollar; it meant that Argentines, earning money in Pesos, would be entirely dependent on the exchange rate at the moment to pay back their debts. I expect that's why the currency exchange laws were passed, to make the transition back to their own currency and thus their own monetary policy possible.

Bitcoin, if it gets too big, destabilizes this again, as now people do not look to their own national currency, and their already weak national currency grows even weaker. If you want an example of the effects of a nation not being able to control monetary policy, look at Greece as a constituent of the EU; they can't control monetary policy through the usual means (ie, controlling access to new money) so they can't devalue the currency when necessary to keep the economy flowing.

I expect that the laws will be interpreted to mean that Bitcoin users are in violation, or else new laws will be written to force Bitcoin exchange to follow the same rules as any other currency exchange. Argentina has struggled with their money for too long to let something destabilize the government like this.

Well, since the current logo is an E, if the new logo is an E, then the end-user won't have any trouble knowing which icon to avoid clicking on.

On a day with freak weather conditions a buddy of mine in Las Vegas managed to talk on 2m to someone in Hawaii on an HT. He had a hell of a time getting people in California to quiet down and let him have airtime.

I've only managed to go about 50 miles at 5 Watts on 2m, but I haven't really made a point of trying for range either.

On September 11, 2001 the cell networks nationwide failed because of the panic after the attacks, even in cities thousands of miles from the sites of the attacks. My wife was able to call her parents on the landline. That's why we still have one.

When the summer storms hit I pull out the 2m HT and tune to a simplex frequency just in case. Haven't heard anyone asking for help but it's no burden to listen.

People like to forget that while traditional analog radio isn't secure, when these kinds of disasters happen being able to broadcast such that multiple people can receive and possibly respond is a feature, not a flaw. Consumer cell phones are designed to let the phone communicate with the carrier only, not to communicate with other phones directly. That means that contacting multiple parties is so much more complex that when the system is stressed it breaks.

I've actually broken down on the Interstate where I had no cell service, and the passengers from the other incapacitated vehicles (from debris on the road) also couldn't get cell service, so it wasn't just one provider. It wasn't a terrible emergency, but if we'd needed an emergency response we couldn't have called for it.

Drew,

Fark used to have some of the best Photoshop contests, both in terms of what people came up with (thinking of the Lukket fake Rand Corporation computer as an example), and in the way that the in-line display and voting for the entries worked. What would you like to do with these going forward to get more involvement for these contests?

OTOH aside from existing regulations aimed at the business side, I don't see what is wrong from that persons perspective. In principle I have no issue with a service that allows people to, on a part time basis, give other people rides for a few bucks to make some spare income.

Why does everything need to be professional? I think the problem with amateurs providing services are mostly overblown.

Believe it or not, and I know not everyone complies with this, but I believe external markers are required (here in MA) on ANY vehicle with commercial plates. Note, of course, that no Uber driver is going to have commercial plates, and really shouldn't, generally people don't need commercial plates when they supply their own personal vehicle for the job. (imagine what that would do to pizza delivery)

Here is a nickle, kid, go tell someone who never had to go find another system to run a web browser on because the latest updated broke his XF86Config. (a version of which happened again recently when I wasn't paying attention and I allowed an update to uninstall the ati graphics driver packages....oops, always read those "to be removed" lists)

Every distro out there has managed some type of update breakage at some point, and if you run a full desktop you pretty much can't avoid it.

Though I did switch back to Debian myself because I didn't like the direction they were going with the Desktop and noticed Debian release cycles had shortened significantly since I switched.

*LOL*