This law refers to race discrimination and isn't relevant to your argument.
Key part with lots of sub clauses removed for readability: "Whoever, under color of any law, willfully subjects any person in any State to the deprivation of any rights, on account of such person being an alien, or by reason of his color, or race, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both;"
No, you're rewriting it by omitting the relevant clause. The race discrimination is one of the clauses that can invoke it, not the only one.
Let me quote it with line breaks for readability:
"Whoever, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, willfully subjects any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States, "
So, anyone who dies this.
"or to different punishments, pains, or penalties, on account of such person being an alien, or by reason of his color, or race, than are prescribed for the punishment of citizens, "
Or who does this based on race, residency....
"shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both"
Shall be punished.
You can invoke the law by doing the first set of things, or by doing the second set of things.
It is an OR clause, meaning if A OR B are true, then the penalties apply. IF there were an AND on race, it would be the way you read it.
This is a significant disadvantage for some categories. For example one category from Friday was "WARE"-ING with each question containing "ware" in the response.
After typing out this comment it occurs to me that if you carefully consider each answer there is only only logical question for all the answers in this category. Although I don't have any specific examples, there are times when a question is ruled incorrect because of the category name (e.g The category called for a specific number of letters in the response).
Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett is a great fictionalized spy novel centered around Operation Fortitude and spy catching in the UK during the second world war.
I don't think this is a big deal at all. It is unclassified and also not marked with one of the Sensitive But Unclassified markings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_but_unclassified) meant to control distribution. You could request this document through a freedom of information act request.
The article implies he simply used the cards to buy stuff he would buy normally which put him over the threshold dollar amount to earn the bonus miles. If this is true it's equivalent to getting the miles for free since he didn't buy anything out of the ordinary. I'm assuming he paid the cards off in full each month
You're ignoring the opportunity cost of having a card that gives airline rewards instead of, say, an Amazon Visa which wouldn't get him any "free" plane tickets but would instead get him Amazon gift certificates.
Credit card companies will give you free money (a portion of what they charge merchants), and that really has nothing much to do with how to travel cheaply.
If someone said "here's how to get $500 of stuff on amazon for $50" and the trick was to use $450 in amazon rewards earned from normal credit card use, that'd be a dumb article, right?
You're ignoring the opportunity cost of having a card that gives airline rewards instead of, say, an Amazon Visa which wouldn't get him any "free" plane tickets but would instead get him Amazon gift certificates.
Yes but you're ignoring that $4000 spend on Amazon Visa might net you a $40 certificate (@1%, I dunno the exact reward) where as $4000 spend on British Airways Chase might net you 75,000 miles (incorporating their bonus) which might represent $1000 worth of airline ticket.
In my experience, assuming you fly, the airline reward cards are the best in terms of the $ value of the reward.
Hmm. How can the airlines possibly give away 25% of what you spend? They are only making 2% of what you spend from merchants for providing the card or something thereabouts.
edit: Maybe some airlines do it by only letting you use reward miles on seats that they wouldn't have been able to sell anyway or something along those lines. But some don't. I know Southwest reward tickets aren't heavily handicapped or anything lame.
1) Signing on bonus. That 75,000 miles extra reward miles is a "one-off" for spending a certain amount at the start of the card. There is a cost of customer acquisition (CCA) for a credit card member and presumably some of the CCA is factored into the bonus. The 'hack' is to constantly apply, use, bin and then reapply for cards to maximize the bonus.
2) $1000 in airline fare isn't actually a $1000 liability to the airline, because that is the market price where as to them the cost price is going to be less... and as you suggest if they restrict it to a few seats per plane the cost price is even less.
Because so few people actually redeem their FFMs. They hoard them up. And then quite often, completely in the terms of the program, they don't earn enough and their balance gets wiped.
And yes, reward flights usually require you to pay tax, and for popular routes there may be only one FFM redeemable ticket per class per flight. Meaning you have to book ages in advance, choose less popular routes/times or be damn damn lucky.
The value is increased even further if you redeem the miles for first class tickets (which can easily be worth several thousand dollars, and which I suspect most people would never be willing to pay out of pocket for).
When I first saw the spike it was for XKCD and Penny Arcade, I was expecting it to be internet culture related. I mean at the time XKCD was still growing in readership and to get a colossal jump was a bit weird so I was wondering about a Digg or Reddit boost, then when I noticed it was wider and into more obscure terms I wondered if it was an oddball 4chan event. However I saw it in literally every term I searched, the only ones I couldn't see it in were terms that already had huge random spikes.
So I thought I'd post it here, see if anyone else could figure it out and it looks like a few people have good suggestions - gotta love HN.
Not only do they follow a small number of patterns, most that involve subject matter rather than simply logic are part of a small number of categories. Almost all involve body parts, colors, names and days of the week.
