Meh, my phone integrates to the sound system of the car and is entirely hands free. I can even answer the call with a button on the steering wheel. If you're allowed to talk to passengers....
The dems only wanted to raise taxes on the rich
The problem is raise is the wrong word here. The correct word to use is RESTORE taxes on the rich.
I'm a small business owner. By the time I pay my federal taxes (income and payroll, which is really all income) I'm paying 43.6% of every additional dollar I own to the federal government.
How can I lower my tax burden?
Well, I just need to become FILTHY rich. The problem is that I actually work for my income. If I already had enough money that I just needed to "invest" for my income, I could knock my federal tax rate down to 15%. Even less with some nice accounting tricks.
I think it is perfectly fair that people who "invest" to get their income pay the same tax rate as those of us who actually WORK for our income.
Republicans, however, are not interested in this concept. They are a party whose #1 priority is helping the rich get richer. The Republican position isn't "low taxes", the Republican position is "High taxes for the middle class, low taxes for the rich." And they have been successful at advancing that position - the Bush tax cuts heavily favored the wealthy. Now that the Republicans already managed to get the rich to pay lower taxes than the rest of us, they are working very hard to make sure the rich keep that advantage, at the expense of everything else.
That's not to say Democrats don't have their own problems, but until Republicans agree that the rich should pay the same taxes as people who work, it is silly for me to support Republicans.
And if a bunch of generally wealthy people have to spend a lot more time sitting around airports to get rich people to pay their fair share, I'm good with that.
T-Mobile has the most affordable service in the US.
It also has the worst coverage. If you're in urban areas all the time, this won't effect you much, but if you travel outside urban areas, dropped calls and areas of no coverage at all are common.
I drive along interstate 94 through western Wisconsin fairly frequently and while I can place calls along the way, I can't keep a call going more than a couple minutes until I get into the MSP metro area. 94 down to Madison is even worse.
"Can't talk on phone while driving on interstate" is a pretty big negative for me.
Google Docs, like LibreOffice, can insert equations written using LaTeX notation.
http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=160749
I don't think you can write while never having your hands leave the keyboard (you must at least tap/click the "New Equation" button) but I don't know how easy it is to operate that way in any desktop program that renders input.
BTW, MS Word's Equation Editor lets you enter LaTeX also, it's not some superpower only open source software has.
I'm not promoting any one of these choices, just pointing that by writing math & notation as TeX is useful feature in a number of document creation programs, online and offline.
So, if I actually only need to be there 30 minutes in advance, why am I told that I need to be there two hours in advance?
The 2 hours is published as a recommendation, not a requirement.
And you're told that because if you don't know when you actually need to arrive at the airport, you're probably an infrequent traveler, and then you may need to be there 2 hours in advance.
That 2 hours includes finding a place to park, getting into the terminal, waiting through the check-in line (which may be short or long, depending), getting through security (which may be short or long, depending), and getting to the gate.
If you know what you're doing and are fit and able, you can clip that down to 45 minutes. I do it all the time. In fact I've checked a bag 31 minutes before departure more times than one might think possible. But if the airline is publishing a number for Jane and Joe Public, 2 hours is a good recommendation.
Since when can you buy lighters in airports?
And I wouldn't count making a bow and arrow as being successful at getting a (useful) weapon on a plane. A bow and arrow is a virtually useless device in the close-quarters of an aircraft.
Antiquated rules on the requirements for how long people need to be there before the flight are maintained to ensure there is a large number of trapped people sitting about who want to buy food/drink and who get bored or are addicted anyway to buying things they don't really need in shops.
There are three sets of rules about when you need to be at the airport:
- Check-in time: Usually 30 minutes. This cutoff is to both give you time to get through security and the airline time to put other people in your seat if you don't show. But, since you can check in online anytime within 24 hours of your flight, this doesn't really put any requirement on you as to when you have to be at the airport.
- Back Check Time: Usually the same as the check-in time, and usually 30 minutes, although at some airports it's more. This is to make sure that the airline has time to get your bag to the plane and loaded on it. 30 minutes is pretty reasonable here (and the airports where it's longer, like Las Vegas, there's a reason.)
- At The Gate time: 15 or 30 minutes prior to departure, depending on whether you're doing domestic or international departure. As a practical matter though, this is really "before they are done boarding the plane". If it's 10 minutes to departure and they've still got a line of people getting on the plane, they won't know you're not there. But if it's 25 minutes before departure on an international flight and you're not on the plane and they are done boarding, they're going to pull your bags from the plane.
Why 30 for international but only 15 for domestic? Because the airlines are not required to fly your bags on the same plane as you domestically, but they are required to do so internationally, so they need the extra 15 minutes to get bags off the plane.
So, yes, there are rules about when you have to be at the airport and at the gate. But they have nothing to do with getting people to shop.
As a matter of fact, if a gun is "meant" for killing people, considering that there are approximately 200 million guns in the US and 11,000 gun deaths per year in the US, then even if you consider every single one of those deaths to have been caused by a different firearm (which isn't true, but that's a "worse case scenario"), then every year 99.9945% of those guns are used for something other than what they're "meant" for since they didn't kill anyone.
Frequency of use for designed purpose does not change the designed purpose.
Guns are made for killing things. The fact that many/most guns are not used for killing things does not change that guns are made for killing things, any more than the fact that most air bags just sit in a steering wheel changes the fact that airbags are designed to prevent injury or death in car accidents.
It's not illegal to manufacture or sell something that is eventually used in a crime.
It *IS* illegal to provide material support for a criminal act. That makes you one of the criminals.
So, if I make guns that are sold at retail and a criminal comes and buys them at a store and then uses them in a crime, not my fault. But if I sell a few crates of guns to a visitting African warlord for cash, well....
If I have a business installing hidden compartments in cars, no problem. If I find out one of my customers is using the compartments to smuggle materials and I continue to serve that customer, I'm no longer just installing hidden compartments, I'm PARTICIPATING IN THE SMUGGLING.
The guy wasn't jailed for making the compartments. He was jailed for being part of the smuggling scheme.
Practicing to kill an animal for food... what's wrong with using paintballs?
Practicing hunting with paintballs is like practicing basketball with baseballs.
Paintballs are an OK approximation of close-quarters firearms use, but are a horrible approximation at any sort of distance.
If you want to practice hunting, using real bullets on targets would be more effective.
So, the programming problem posed in the article is:
"Given a data file describing a maze with diagonal walls, count the number of enclosed areas, and measure the size of the largest one."
Who wants to take a stab at an algorithm for that?
I got a kick out of the rule that you can have one golf club, or two clubs, but the golf clubs is right out.
Cause, you know, more than one club per hand is just too dangerous.
Just FYI, as you get older, it gets harder and harder to see things that are close to your eyes, leading you to hold things you want to read further and further away from your face, not closer.
An iPad is a poor PC replacement for most old folks. They don't need to be doing tasks like email on a small screen with a touch "keyboard".
8 Catfish = 1 Octo-puss
