Point of order:
Most cities/townships actually try to notify the businesses at least 3 months beforehand, and go out of their way (in most cases) to accommodate the businesses affected.
There's also the demonstrable need to do road maintenance, else the entrance to your business eventually winds up a potholed obstacle course.
Man, if you got your wish, the art would well and truly suck.
Besides, it'd never work in the practical realm. Communism tried that... failed miserably. Seems it opens things up for too many political operators to slide in and own the joint.
As a bonus, you might even collect enough money to pay them back!
This, right here.
I had exactly two instances of this.
The first one was looking for some woman. I simply asked to speak to the supervisor, explained that I had just got the phone number, and that was that.
The second had some asshat of a debt collection company. After trying to convince them I wasn't that guy, and the chick on the other end not transferring me to a supervisor, I finally told them the following: "Put up or shut up - take me to court - I fucking dare you to sue me." I never heard from them again.
I like the recording thing you mentioned, though
...well, until some perp gets a competent lawyer (either during the trial or any of the appeals), who demands access to the thing for his own analysis on it. Fail to do that, and suddenly there's a reason for mistrial.
Not loo long ago, it used to be quite the opposite... Crysis, Unreal Tournament (towards the end of the series), and many more had hardware specs that, while they would technically run on ordinary machines, would almost demand that you go out and buy a fire-breather just to run the stuff. The reason why had less to do with developer ego than with the fact that graphics programming was still mostly in infancy back then, coupled with the fact that GPUs were fairly new tech. Hardware was also evolving pretty damned fast back then - nowadays most improvements are incremental at best.
(Though to be fair, id Software was historically pretty good about making games that ran fairly well on fairly crap specs.)
And then it'll stop being an overpriced joke where the only cool part is that you just paid 500 dollars to get a fancy LED on your case.
Oh wait, what the fuck is cool about that shit?
Admittedly, it was cool back in 1998 at the LAN parties - but only if you soldered the little bastard on yourself.
Same with the lucite case window, the jerry-rigged liquid cooling system, the LED lights inside, the massive power supply, and the ginormous fan bolted on the side - just to make it look as if your bargain-basement system actually needed the same CFM rating as a Peterbilt radiator fan**.
'course, those days are long-the-hell gone, but I'm man enough to admit that I got into it once. I'll even admit to a twinge of nostalgia when I think about it.
** true story - I bolted an old 12" Amstrad cooling fan onto the side of a case once, just to see my old LAN buddies' eyes pop out. At 110VAC (1/2 the rated voltage), it ran whisper quiet, but having to find an extra plug was a bitch sometimes.
Got no need to bash it - hell, I think he's allowed to do it all he wants. His servers, his rules.
Not sure anyone here ever agreed to charge $100/email during the previous conversations you refer to, though...
$390? You got 6 iPhones and an OC-12 on your bill or something?
Genuinely curious, because my crappy little Crackberry is paid for by the employer, and my 30mbps Internet is a mere $30/mo.
FYI: CenturyLink already does #2, and their DSL service is crap.
Unless they start making only electric-firing cartridges (e.g. Remington's failed Etronic type), then make it so that the primer only kicks off after a super-funky software key exchange? Well, it is pretty trivial to take one of a zillion existing firing-pin trigger mechanism designs out there, and customize one to suit the gun.
Considering the existence of reloading gear and the stupendous mass of existing guns + ammunition? At low-end guessing, "long-term" would be at least a century before the stuff sitting around today got too expensive to use, even if you banned all existing "dumb" guns and ammunition today.
This is a clever trick designed by Slashdot to make people RTFA.
You're not making me fall into that trap, by gum...
TFA points out that people are demanding action.
Couple o' bits:
1) I'd like to see valid statistics on what actions are being demanded. Any poll that boils down to "do something, I don't care what" can mean nearly anything.
2) You do know that media loves to hype things, right?
That's cute - you assume that all hacks are digital.
You completely forgot that someone with a bit of machinist experience and a few decent tools could simply replace the whole damned trigger/firing-pin/whatever-else assembly.
McVeigh's action were damned sure not defensive by any means, hence the fact that no sane person looks up to him.
That alone destroys what little argument you thought you had.
An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.
