I've been roasting coffee stovetop for about a year. Takes me about 10 minutes to roast 12 ounces, the result is great, and it only ends up costing about $1/lb more than what I used to pay for roasted beans at Costco. If you like coffee at all, I highly recommend giving it a try!
If you completely ignore risk then what you say is true (especially with interest rates so ridiculously low). However, if we're talking about improving lives, I personally find value in eliminating debt (including the mortgage) as quickly as possible because such obligations represent risk. I could apply all these extra mortgage payments to other things (rental property, stock market, etc.), but then I stand a varying (but non-zero) chance of losing money on those things and still being stuck with a mortgage. I'd rather wait a few years and take those risks with my own money instead of money borrowed from the bank, and I think that economic woes of late suggest we'd be better off if a few more people thought this way.
Server also can be hit-and-miss if you've got any irregularities in your setup...I had a rough upgrade from 10.04 to 12.04 a few weeks ago (died halfway through, system left in half-upgraded broken-but-bootable state). In the end it turned out that it was due to a no-longer-maintained package (gitosis) which I'd replaced some time ago (with gitolite) but I hadn't actually removed the gitosis package and there was some hangup about deleting the gitosis user.
In fairness, after manually resolving the problem with removing gitosis and cleaning up a couple of other half-upgraded things, the upgrade process did recover and finish successfully, but it certainly wasn't painless.
The owners might also have to pay the piper with regards to their mortgage holder unless they own the property outright - I'm pretty sure my mortgage prohibits commercial activity like this without prior approval, similar to what a lease agreement would say. (Of course, a bank is far less likely to find out than a landlord.)
For the record, I switched to DDG in part because of the duck. (All right, so it was a very small part, but the point remains--the duck is awesome.) :)
Slight nitpick - the article said that the collision and missile test increased the amount of debris by 60%, not that they were responsible for 60% of debris in orbit. Still a lot, but not more than half.
The effort required to photoshop such an image (or paste your own picture on top of a stolen ID) is trivial compared to the effort required to forge or steal the ID in the first place. Thus, I don't understand how this would be anything other than an inconvenience to honest users.
I don't know much about replication, but I'd like to learn. Can you recommend any books/courses/tutorials that address the sorts of design decisions you're talking about?
First one was in 2002 and I was 20. Last one was about 21 months ago.
I've heard that a lot of rules have changed as well, but I don't know how much changed after I got the last one. Some changes definitely affected me at that time, but the hassle in my case was related to the fact that I was buying another house before selling the current one so I need to hold two mortgages simultaneously. Required more documentation of cash in the bank due to debt/income ratio.
Ironically, once around 2007 while trying to take advantage of a 10% off deal from a home improvement store on a big purchase, I got turned down for their line of credit due to lack of history. (Glad it happened that way in retrospect.) But mortgage companies have never given me trouble.
Maybe I'm lucky. (I'm not independently wealthy.) Mortgage companies are inscrutable. :)
Everybody says this, but I've obtained three different mortgages in my lifetime and never had a credit card. In lieu of credit history, the bank has just asked for other evidence that I pay my bills, like statements from the utility company.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but in my opinion, wanting a good credit score is a pretty bad reason to get a credit card.
I would have been very interested if this had gone to court to test the GPL purely in the context of themes/plugins, because to me that's the grey area. As it is, I wish (for the sake of both parties) that the matter could be settled without legal intervention. Now that it's been demonstrated that Thesis outright copies and incorporates portions of WP source code, it seems unlikely that a court decision would directly answer the question of plugins, because it wouldn't need to. (I don't think anybody argues that such copying isn't a GPL violation.)
True, which I originally pointed out. Although I don't have my mortgage contract in front of me (and am open to correction here), my recollection is that a foreclosure is the defined consequence of me breaking the contract I agreed to - that is, to repay my debt at a rate of $X per month. "Exercising a clause" is a euphemism for "breach of contract" in that case, isn't it? If so, I think the analogy to crime is applicable. If not, then admittedly the analogy is indeed broken.
It seems if one were to listen to those social experts, all of society would become a game of incentives and disincentives where the goal is finding the mismatched pairs (i.e. action where incentive outweighs disincentive, regardless of what the action is - whether it be walking away from a mortgage or robbing a store). In that scheme ethics (and morality - I don't think there's a difference) become purely relative, because value is an inherently relative concept.
Not being a moral relativist, I naturally disagree with the idea that such a society is desirable or that ethics in that case are even meaningful at all. :) Which is one of the things that disturbs me about the idea of an action being ethical just because it's defined in a contract.
I thought of this. However, I think in the abstract that's not a material difference, because (at least in theory), the "punishment should fit the crime"...society agrees that X punishment is sufficient tradeoff for Y crime. Granted, the store owner doesn't individually make an agreement with the thief, but over time that societal agreement was made nevertheless.
Ethically. I'm ok. This is because a mortgage has pre-arranged clauses in the contract that outline what the exit criteria are for the bank and the borrower. It's a contract with a pre-negotiated process around a divorce. A prenuptual if you will. In this case, we are just choosing to execute one of the clauses in the contract, as any business has the right to do. So, there is nothing unethical about adhering to the contract.
This is one of the arguments I've seen that doesn't sit well with me. How is this different from saying that it's ethical to steal money from a convenience store, because I'm willing to go to prison for it? After all, jail time is the pre-negotiated outcome for thieves, and I might decide I'd rather have the money and do the jail time rather than refraining from stealing in the first place.
Apart from one being in the criminal realm and the other in the civil, what's the difference? Or is that the difference that justifies the one and not the other? (Why?)
Note: despite the title, this is not actually about hosting sites on a box out of your basement; it's about VPS hosting. (I was looking forward to seeing what kind of bandwidth he had at his residence and how much it cost...)
In these situations the expiration date idea wouldn't work either because they would either find a workaround or refuse to install your software at all, knowing that it forces them to go through the upgrade process in the future (and on your timeframe instead of theirs to boot).
I think that while these extreme cases certainly exist, there are actually a lot of "normal" companies out there. I've worked for three (two small and one big), and while none were my "dream job", none of them treated me unfairly either. I don't understand why developers stay at companies that treat them like trash, particularly the talented ones at places like EA. However, I also don't get the impression that developer abuse is a widespread epidemic or common occurrence. (Or maybe I'm just very fortunate!)
I've been roasting coffee stovetop for about a year. Takes me about 10 minutes to roast 12 ounces, the result is great, and it only ends up costing about $1/lb more than what I used to pay for roasted beans at Costco. If you like coffee at all, I highly recommend giving it a try!