Maybe I exaggerated a little bit. :)

    They were cargo vans without side windows. The rear window was obscured by gear in the back. The mirrors were (hopefully) adjusted for the tech who drove them, but not for me moving it to where I was installing gear.

There are plenty of service jobs which require local talent. Add HVAC, and CDL licensed truck drivers to your list.

    Ummm.. I worked with a plumbing company for a while.. There was a whole lot of shit, literally. I was lucky, I just did their IT work. I could talk to the techs who had done messier jobs from a distance. If their blue uniform is now brown, don't get too close. :)

    It was entertaining, and absolutely disgusting, watching them clean out of of the tank trucks. It registered something like 10k pounds overweight, because of the sewage sludge that had built up in the bottom of the tank. At least the guy who went in to clean it got to wear a biohazard suit and respirator.

    I only had to deal with the trucks while I was wiring up their GPS tracking. It was the first chance I had to drive a 10 speed truck. (private property, CDL be damned). The drivers were gone for the day, and the other staff present were afraid to try to drive it up to the shop. The work/cargo vans were harder to drive. Their blind spot is anything but in front of them.

Making a zip gun from plastic tubing is, however. And that's what a 3-d printed gun barrel is.

I would so totally pay $20 to watch it live online.

Apparently charging people to watch suicide or homocide or otherwise physically severely injured or death is illegal in most countries. Well, unless it has to do with large crowds, multi-million dollar player contracts, and something called "sport"

Yes, you're right. You are getting that confused.

You are assuming Service-X is proprietary and that nobody else can/does provide the services people want. What would get me to quit scratching my head is an open standard.

As we know, Blackberry's products are doing poorly in the marketplace as it stands right now, and rightly so given their failure to meet the demands of today's mobile device users. Create an open standard and you force everyone to step it up rather than giving the impression that they can rest on their laurels (in whatever quantity they may exist) as RIM has.

If RIM can't hack it on those terms, they can and should exit the market.

Nice,. Yeah, that's more accurate.

    It's dataminers. I worked with a few. Lists of information are bought and sold frequently. Some of the lists are bits and pieces. Different companies aggregate the information differently.

Consider these totally fictional people. In this case, they are different.

John Smith, SSN 123-45-6789 DOB 01/01/1980
John Smith, DOB 01/01/##
John Smith SSN ###-##-6789

They would all be associated to be the same person. Some list providers only provide partial SSN. Some partial DOB. Sometimes neither, but a physical address.

Some providers consider people who lived at the same address in the same timeframe (+- 5 years) to be related. So if you live in an apartment for a year, in their eyes you're actually related to 8 set so of other tenants. For bill collectors, that's good enough to say you're a source of information..

Phone numbers are a life-long identifier. It doesn't matter that most people have changed phone numbers dozens of times. Again, having the same phone number can tie you in as family..

And sometimes their lists are just plain dirty. I've seen lists by places who take random bits and pieces and stick them together.

It's all fun and games, unless a search warrant is issued for your home, because some list provider tied your address to someone else.

I like the beginning of your idea..

If they make $5/yr on the delivered junk mail that you receive, $6.00 should make sure you *don't* receive it.

The USPS can already quantify bulk mailings to your zipcode. It's a simple matter to pay for your address to be excluded.

They'll have less resources to assign to the 90% of the time they have given to domestic disputes and even less to the chuckleheads who are cutting you off, talking on their phones, while drunk and snorting coke, while driving.

Every new law should be bound to carry funding to enforce it.

Here is tip, comrade, everyone is a terrorist, but me!

How about a pressure sprayer loaded up with thinned paint? :)

It isn't about sad, it about sense, and the IAU's definition doesn't make any, logically or scientifically