Slashdot Mirror
Surround Sound Quickies
Let's start this off with
SanLouBlues's submission
about a video made by splicing
old 8bit video
games (I don't think it'll work on Linux, but it's worth finding a
box to watch this).
And now, the senseless destruction portion of the show:
stevenma sent an ISP's
excuse letter,
including a photo of the bullet damage from the wire!
friedo knows how to
make a hard drive
squeal, but on purpose. If that's not enough destruction for you, knisa
sent in a story about a meteor destroying a
1980 Ford. Slightly less-destructive violence was submitted by Steve Stag,
who notes that Nerf has discovered that their weapons appeal to adults
too. (well duh!)
An anonymous reader noted that Liam Neeson's lightsaber from Phantom Menace
is being
auctioned off for charity.
WhyPanic sent us a site that talks about
Vintage Unix.
An anonymous reader noted that in Finland, you pay traffic violations based
on your income, and this dot-com millionaire was fined $70,000 for 20
miles/hour over the speed limit! Speaking of dot-coms, warland wonders if
todays dot-coms would get funding if they tried to pitch their
ideas today?
And now for the truly strange stuff:
conraduno sent in a palindromic C program.
NinjaPablo
sent in a link about a guy breaking a
centipede 14-year-old record by scoring 7,111,111 points (and I thought breaking 200,000
on joust made me cool ;)
head_the_mongoose sent us "Call Me Darth", a Darth Vader site that simply needs to be seen.
Akamai does geographic caching. It is called Akamaized and a few of the big portal sites use it.
Off, me pisses! Westley Brian to credited fucking -- be really should.
We do. As the body of the Financial Times article says, Rytsölä was fined for driving 70km/hour in a 40km/hour zone. (Now, if we really used the metric system, shouldn't it be in meters per second?)
Well yes... hence the usage in Denmark and Scandinavia. A large chunk of England was ruled by the Danes for several hundred years, so it's not surprising that English common law would share some the of the same concepts.
You misunderstand the progressive tax. All of your income is not taxed at the same rate. Given the following fictional tax scheme:
Income/Tax
up to 10,000/5%
up to 100,000/10%
up to 1,000,000/20%
over 1,000,000/30%
The first 10,000 you make is taxed at 5%, or $500.
The next 90,000 (100,000 - 10,000) is taxed at 10%, the next 900,000 (1M - 100K) is taxed at 20%. So if you make $101,000 you are taxed at
5% of 10,000 - $500
10% of 90,000 - $9000
and 20% of 1,000 - $200
for a total tax of $9700. By your calculation the tax would be $20,200, which is not the way it works.
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
Normally, the cable (TV) company credits you for the downtime if you ask. In this case, they are trying not to. Ah.. Bigger issue, ONE CABLE for all of thier clients in the whole state??!?
Recently at school I have been trying to out-do a mysterious "ALI" on the school's Galaga machine. Everytime I would get the high score, Mr. ALI (a guy because I think I saw him one time) would come along and score higher. We started at about 200,000. I thought I finally ended it at 476,000, but ALI came back. The next jump I made was to 796,000, which stood for a long time.
Today I came in to school to see that ALI set it at 993,000!
I was only able to break 700,000 today, but I think that one million is possible before Christmas break. Nothing worse than being 40 minutes into a game and realizing you need to leave for class...
Now I only need two things:
1) For the janitor staff to quit unplugging the machine once every couple of months
2) A stand-up version of Galaga for my house...
A well timed article concerning the Centipede high score. I had not seen TwinGalaxies before...
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
In Ohio (and, I suspect, in many other places), you can go to jail rather than pay a fine. If you're too poor to pay $500, you can "serve" 20 days in jail instead. Soak the poor indeed.
Basing jail terms on actuarial statistics is problematic, though. Judges are often lenient on the very old. However, there also reasons to be lenient on the very young (minors).
Our judicial system, for better or worse, values the freedom of a first time offender over a havitual criminal (read-- one who has committed two felonies.)
In California, a twice felon will face life in prison for petty larceny, but a naive kid won't. Under you fractional life system of sentencing, the kid would "serve" longer than the experienced criminal.
In addition, prison time is dangerous. That makes calculating actuarial parole messy.
If fines are meant to deter traffic offences, then a $100 fine is no deterrent to anyone with a lot of money. Heck, they may just think of it as "an expensive parking spot" or "a speed toll". And if fines are meant to be punitive, a $100 fine is no punishment at all to someone with enough money.
One possibility is for fines to actually be assessed through the tax system, but that might not work since the very rich often pay little or no tax.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Here's the output from GCC on the ``palindromic C program'':
blp:/raid/home/blp(0)$ gcc -ansi -pedantic c.otto.c
c.otto.c: In function `main':
c.otto.c:30: invalid lvalue in assignment
c.otto.c:33: invalid lvalue in increment
The problem is that the program contains two assignments of the form ``(int) x = y;''. Now, the problem with that is that the result of a cast is not an "lvalue" in C; that is, a cast cannot appear on the left side of an assignment operator.
Other than that, very cool!
go hang a salami, i'm a lasagna hog
Search first, ask questions later.
Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas
I once saw a palindrome that was a Latin phrase that, when read backwards, was its English translation. I'll be damned if I can remember it. I think I read it in Anguished English, by Richard Lederer.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
I've been looking for a converter. What do you use, and where do you get it?
The green running guy in the beginning is from Keystone Kapers, as are many of the sounds. (He's blue in the game.) That's also what the mall scene is from.
--Cycon
Your Brain + EEG + LEGO Robots = Brainstorms
BTW, I found your joke rather amusing and the site utterly stupid and a waste of bandwidth.
Nice work.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
What about the copyright restrictions?
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
I'm thinking a new sport, something about beeting up slashdot trolls.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Well, comparing both of your posts, I know which I thought was more grown-up, and it wasn't yours. The only one bitching is you.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Slashdot is a "high end"* web site -- multiple servers behind a load balancer with a dedicated, very high performance database server for DB queries, and all the bits inbetween are high end -- SCSI disk, full duplex fast or gigabit ethernet, and so on. It's designed to withstand DoS,
Many of the sites the Slashdot links to are "low end"* web sites without any redudnancy or performance enhancing systems or are shared between many sites. The traffic Slashdot brings brings them to their knees..
* Obviously low end and high end are relative terms. Get over it.
hey, beats the hell out of cutting funds to the busses and opening up the HOV lanes for more of those damnable SUVs
why are there so many SUVs in capitol hill anyway?
(I escaped last spring..I miss seattle though...even the damn yuppie ford expiditions trying to mow me down behind my apartment building)
You know, being an ex-capitol hill resident, I think I have to agree.
This is in reference to the Vintage Unix link..
:)
I currently own a Sparc IPX with the Weitek Powerup chip. I bought the machine from a guy at a computer show that thought it was a PC but couldnt find a way to hook a monitor up to it and get it to boot. $25 for the unit including the upgrade and a 200 meg hard drive with the previous owners install of Solaris.
I've owned or used quite a bit of Sun hardware in the past (the only sun hardware I own now is the IPX).
The 4/110 I owned was the server for my domain for about 6 months or so. Running NetBSD with a really fast SCSI drive it served its purpose and did amazingly well considering its age. The box virges on being "Cute" but is just a little too bulky.
The 4/260 was a fun beast. It took two people to lift it out of the trunk of my car at the time. They put casters on the unit for a very good reason. I believe this beast had a least 12 huge fans, 6 above and 6 below the card cage. When you turned this thing on, the lights dimmed and you would think a 747 had just landed in the room. The other cool thing was the power supply that came down on a tray making it easy to work on (although the power supply is the size of a mini-tower PC case.
All of these machines have been quite nice hardware wise. Everything feels much more solid and stong than current PC hardware I'm used to. I haven't had the chance to get my hands on newer Sun hardware (I would imagine that the system admin's at work would get scared if I started touching one of the newer boxes) and I hope that sun has continued the legacy of building good hardware. Sun hardware aside, I wish PC hardware had some of the features of my IPX. NVRAM is nice, you can tweak machine settings, run diagnostics and other cool things that just arent available on a PC BIOS.
If you've only used PC hardware and are willing to spend a hundred dollars are so, go pick up an old IPX-era sun box and play with it. I think you'll be impressed and even though some of them are over 15 years old, they can still make worthy machines. Check out the Sun Hardware Faq (first hit on google) for more information and some nostagia.
End of rant,
Geoffeg
Palindromic or not, it's certainly not news: it was winner of Best Layout in the 1987 Obfuscated C Contest. Why this unattributed copy deserves mention in Slashdot escapes me...
Oh, and the "mall game" is Keystone Kapers, by Activision. Google that if you're curious.
--
..!!in an intastella burst i am back to save the universe!!
So, what, we should extend this to prision sentences to? If you are 20 and rob a bank you should get 30 years, since you have more average lifetime left, but if you are 60 you should get a few months?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
So not everyone has an equal right to money? If it were possible to accurately estimate lifespan would you want prorated prison sentences for people that were going to live shorter lives? It seems to me that this could also be looked at as a case of poor people paying less, instead of rich people paying more. If someone wants to go out and break the law, shouldn't they attempt to earn more money, so that it hurts him less? Doesn't that make just as much sense?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
200,000 on Joust! Wimp! I once scored 5,000,000 and only stopped 'cause they closed the store.
Joust was cool. Williams' games were all cool.
I could infinite-play Robotron, too.
Here in Dallas a couple of weeks ago I saw 7 Bell lift trucks all backed up to the same wire between two poles. Thought it was strange to have so many. Later I asked a Bell guy working behind my house. He said that someone had put TWO bullet holes in the line about 10 feet apart. I said "That's amazing, why would someone shoot at the phone line?". He said "don't know, but it happens all the time". He went on to say that it looked like a 9mm.
The best one that I know of is: A man, a plan, a canal: Panama! (punctuation and whitespace don't count).
In Peter van der Linden's book Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets (the butt-ugly fish book), he discusses a program to create palindromes based on a large wordlist. If you get a computer to do the dirty work for you, it's possible to come up with some very long (if nonsensical) palindromes.
You're a suburbanite.
Amazing - you know it's from middle english, and yet don't know it's proper definition. Ere means before, and the palindrome is in reference to Napoleon, who was exiled to Elba for awhile. He came back, but only a few months later was the battle of Waterloo, and his days as Emporer were pretty much over.
Idiot.
Well, I think that hard drive squealing is terrific. I remember (ah, years ago) downloading a little application that made my Commodore 64's 1541 floppy drive play "A Bicycle Built For Two". I'm sure it was ever so healthy for the hardware, but it was absolutely worth it just for the jawdrop factor. If I'd had a girlfriend at the time I would have invited her over and tried lamely to impress her with it; as it was, I just played it over and over again for myself, heedless of the wear to the drive head, and tried to hack my own songs.
What to do with those near-useless old 20MB hard drives? Build a cheap surround-sound system!
Often the large files are mirrored, so a quick search on google for either the file name or the keywords will get you to an unslashdotted version.
Of course, that's a tedious solution, so how about this: an automatic mirror finder so when /. posts a link to a big file, the system automagically does a net search for files with approx. the same size and name, and links to them too on a "possilbe mirrors" page...
Or something.
I start downloading the 8-bit games movie (pretty damn cool) when there were only 3 comments posted. Starts out dloading at 45 K/sec, but steadily drops... and drops...
me too.
here you go
http://sage.che.pitt.edu/~harrold/Vcsclip.mov
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
Just carry high liability limits (i.e. towards $1 million). It doesn't cost as much as you would think, and, trust me, your insurance company will deploy the O.J. defense team to get out of paying a claim anywhere near that. (The guy in the Lexus SUV you hit will not be happy :).) If you carry state liability requirements on the order of $50k, though, they'll pay out the $50k and let you hang out to dry. (Not speaking from experience, IANAIS (I am not an insurance salesman), yadda yadda.)
The software at that link is System V Release 2, and as far as I know there is no way to get that legally for free. You can get current System V Release 4 for free (depending on how you plan to use it) from places like SCO and Sun.
SysVR2 is about 15 years too late to be "original Unix", though. You can get binary versions of much earlier systems -- Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Edition research Unix -- free for personal use, with Supnik's simulator at DEC's ftp site.
If you want to get early Unix source, and some versions other than those above, you can get a suitable Unix source license for free from SCO.
For information on early Unix, you could start with The UNIX Heritage Society, or perhaps Dennis Ritchie's home page.
Read the FAQ! It says:
don't speed. A law is a law is a law, if you're gunna speed you might as well kill someone. If you think you should be able to speed then you should gather together all your like minded fellow citizens and get the law changed.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Actually, a flat amount is regressive, but a flat percent is truly flat--neither progressive nor regressive. A progressive system increases the actual cost to people in middle and higher classes (in theory). In actuality, a progressive system becomes regressive as wealthy people have the resources to lobby for loopholes.
This sort of 'ironicly pointing out slashdot's shocking hyprocisy' comment is becoming more and more popular.
Well actually I was just kidding. No attempt at either irony or hypocrisy. Sorry. Wasn't trying to jump on the irony/hypocrisy bandwagon.
I've had some of my most insightful comments (IMO, natch) marked down as trolls.
Me too. Fun ain't it. That's what makes meta-mod so much fun, waiting for the day you can catch those folks.
You really don't see any difference between a one-line 'Darth Vader is a Gay Sadomasochist' posted on a discussion about bandwidth and a web page
Did I say I couldn't tell the difference? That's my bad. I'll just clear that up now. I can tell the difference.
I have to post something like this every once in a while, to get my karma down from max. Otherwise it's always maxed out, and that's boring.
They'll get this post too. "Offtopic" is my guess, or maybe "overrated". Not that it is offtopic, but if you don't care about finding good posts in a worthwhile discussion somewhere, and prefer to hunt for people to negatively moderate, i'm probably a fun target.
sigh, back to work.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
Call Darth Vader a gay sadomasochist in a comment and you get nailed as a Troll.
Call Darth Vader a gay sadomasochist on a web page and you get a story on slashdot.
Maybe I'll make a web page saying that Darth Vader is a Gay sadomasochist Troll, and see if I make the front page...
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
another mirror here.
-=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
You know, I intentionally posted that with the +1 bonus AND said "fucking" in the hopes that it would NOT get modded up. I mean, come on - some fucking wanker puts a 13-year-old IOCCC entry on his webpage, UNCREDITED, and it gets put in quickies, UNCREDITED? It's ridiculous. I can't believe you didn't beat me to it, mister fucking wanker.
Come back when you have some moderator points. I post once or twice a week, you should have no trouble finding me.
Idiot.
-=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
The clip is actually made by a Brazilian electronica group called "Golden Shower."
You can find out more about the video at
http://www.goldenshower.gs/e/clipe.html
Signed, Fucking Wanker.
*nod* *grin* *nod*
:)
Any one know of some software to do this kind of stuff? I want to burn up some hd's or fd's
Fire Jon Katz. Hire Neal Stephenson. (make this your sig too)
zo.
-1, Redundant (I know, I know; someone else probably thought of it first)
Bagledog has better quickies than slashdot!!
Where are my GPFs? I WANT MY GPFS!!
Unless, of course, you're in a Monty Python skit.
-Legion ["SPAMSPAMSPAM!"]
go read the faq...
Is he driving without a turn signal, or did the bulb burn out during the current car trip? You're getting fined without the benefit of a trial, and without the benefit of "innocent until proven guilty."
Here in California (YMMV), something like a turn signal out or similar doesn't warrant a fine at all. You'll get a "fix it" ticket, which means you fix whatever is wrong, then have a police officer sign the back of the ticket stating that the vehicle is no longer in violation. You bring this to the traffic window of the local courthouse and everything is forgotten.
--
Turn on, log in, burn out...
Given the way you've worded this distinction, I assume you've completely ruled out any possibility that the reasons for these disparities have more to do with the fact that crack usage was believed to be tearing apart inner-city neighborhoods (and the families living there) and leading pregnant women (and children) to bear permanently disabled children, so the legislators representing those communities focused their legislative ire on crack?
I don't know for sure, but before sounding off about this in a way that implies crack-vs-cocaine laws are designed to punish the poor, I'd make sure I knew just who passed those laws and why.
There are plenty of inequities in the law that are horrible to contemplate when viewed in toto (i.e. not in Kansas ;-), but the reality is that few laws are actually written from that perspective. Laws are most often written from a narrow perspective: we wish to discourage (or encourage) behavior FOO, what is the punishment (or enticement) we feel we must offer to accomplish our goal, etc.
So blaming the legislators for responding to the will of the people for that moment by writing a particular law, or even blaming the people, by assigning them (even by implication) some kind of large-scale malevolent desire to punish the poor, strikes me as somewhat off the mark.
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
You can find the website for MovieAction (the Unicef/Neeson project) here.
There's a nice palindrome in portuguese that goes:
"Socorram-me! Subi no ônibus em Marrocos!"
That translates to "Help me! I got up in the bus in Marrocos!".
The only one I know in english is "Madam, I'm Adam". Does anyone know other palindromes?
--
This space left intentionally blank.
Could you imagine the stake-out in front of every millionare's homes? Forget pulling over minorities, just pull over the rich guys. I am sure if a cop saw a Ferrari going 5 over and a Ford going 10 over, the Ferrari would then get pulled over.
Hey, I like this idea!
Man, my C64 drive would play "Mary Had a Little Lamb".. That was classic. The strange thing is that whenever I tell people about this they just grin and nod like they do not believe me...
I wonder if this exists for 3.5" floppy drives?
Hats off to the centipede record breaker. I had called up guiness world records to report that I had beaten (more like annihalated) the world record on the video game Joust. They replied by saying that since I had beaten it on a home game system that it was not valid even if I had witnesses and pictures/video, and that it had to have been done on a real arcade machine.
I had spent literally all day playing - had someone stuff a sandwich in my mouth for me and I drank by straw while I was playing. After going through all that crap spending all that time and probably damaging my nerves for life, I get rejected on a b.s. technicality! I think Guinesses rules suck. Not everyone has access to an arcade that has the particular game who's record they would like to beat and since I had more than ample proof of beating the record and not cheating I just felt ripped off. Hopefully thier rules have since changed. This happened many years ago but I am still pissed off about it and to this day I haven't bought another one of thier stupid little record books. Fuck you Guiness. And your beer sucks too.
Maybe what they meant was that a 1980 Ford was hit by another car, a Ford Meteor. See http://www.ford.ca/english/LearnAbout/Heritage/pre warfords/MeteorPhase1/Default.asp, for example. Hmmm.
I am not a lawyer.
I'm sorry guys and gals, but the Darth site was one of the stupidest things I've seen in a long time. Jesus, someone was hard-up for something to do.
C'mon, did *anyone* think it was the least bit humorous?
--SC
You read fiction? I write it! Lemme know what you th
What model, is it a GM or a (Rus|Mus)tang. Try Jegs or Jet perfomance, assuming you don't live in a emission tested area, hacking is a matter of finding the right race components manufacturer
Read my plan to save the Bengals
But you're already assumed to be guilty. That's my objection. The cop doesn't have to prove that you broke the law, you have to prove that you didn't.
As for "heavy penalties," if it's in the thousands of dollars, for all but the tiniest fraction of people, that's a heavy penalty. It's based on gross income, and you may not have that money available. You could be making millions, but if you just bought a house, you may actually need that money. And anyone who can afford to keep their car gassed up in today's market can afford a $25 fine. That's the price of 3 or 4 pounds of meat, depending on the cut, so even if you had your budget planned out to the last dime it's not going to reduce you to "bread and water for a month," unless your budget was originally "bread and water and four pounds of beef for a month."
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Of course, your other point is correct. Taxes on wealth are stupid. If you want to try to tax that, sales taxes are the way to go. What's the point in having wealth if you don't spend it? Sooner or later the government will get a chance to collect, and you'll do wonders for encouraging investment (which, as any econ student knows, is one of the most important factors in determining a country's rate of economic growth).
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Unfortunately there's about as much thought put into our legal system as our tax laws, so the punishment doesn't ever seem to fit the crime. Either the punishment is too harsh or not harsh enough, and there's always someone crying foul. Trial by jury is a joke because the jurists are so rarely anywhere near being a peer to the accused. When was the last time you saw a crack addict convicted by a group of crack addicts or a cat burglar convicted by other cat burglars. It's all done by numbers now, who will be sympathetic, who won't, who might help me get a mistrial, what cross section of Americana do I want to display to the cameras. Secondly they allow one juror to dominate the others, often through intimidation or threats to tie up people's time. Lost wages and productivity push people to make quick judgements on someone "who must have done it, just look at him". Fines follow the same rule. I've been in court and seen $500 an hour lawyers argue out $50 in parking fines. I've seen a 16 year old girl with a history of speeding and car wrecks get a 50 in a 25 thrown out, while a 29 year old first offender going 32 in a 25 gets a $65 fine. Too many discrepencies. Too widespread to ignore, but it still happens.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
The rich and big business argue that without the loopholes and tax breaks that it would be prohibitive to do business. That's bullshit. There are a lot of people out there starting up businesses and running businesses because it's their life long dream to do so, not because the gov gave them a tax break. I think somewhere around 80% of business in America is small business, these are the people who typically take the hit on taxes and yet year after year they continue to do business and grow and create more business and throw their hard earned money into the economy while big business complains about "possible" tax reforms that may 'hurt' them.
What people fail to understand is that taxes are supposed to be used for the betterment of the people who are paying them. Therefore if Steve pay's 20,000 in taxes because he makes 100,000, then Betty who makes 10,000 gets free job training, gets a better job at 50,000. The programs allow more people into the work place to fill higher skilled jobs which in turn increases tax revenue, leading to surplus, and eventually a lower tax percentage. Then when Steve becomes disabled and can only work for 20,000 a year, the taxes that Betty and others are paying can go into helping him. It's a circle people rarely understand.
A co-worker always gripes about the fact that his tax dollars go towards funding things for my children. He doesn't have children, why should his tax dollars be used towards that. Simply because when he's old and drawing off of those tax dollars for help, it will be my children who are the ones footing the funding. If his tax dollars hadn't gone towards better schools, my children would not get a proper education and would be getting a lower wage which in turn reduces the amount of tax dollars and effectively reduces the amount of money that he would be able to draw off of should he need it later in life.
This Christmas for me and mine is going to be somewhat limited. Why? Because I have a thousand dollar tax bill due at the end of December. So, what does this mean? Mr. Big Business gets less of my money (and for similar reasons a lot of other peoples money) which means he doesn't make as big of a profit. So big business get's to make a choice of how they want to lose money, do they lose it by giving it away in taxes, or do they lose it by the fact that the customer never gave it to them?
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
Too many crimes lately are going with higher punishments without a reasoning behind them. Oh the generic "it will make criminals think twice" is always used, but statistics show that criminals are in fact not thinking twice.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
Try not to crash into a bus load of nuns or anything tomorrow. I'd hate for you to hurt yourself.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
Dude, just right click on the web page and "view source". You can get a lot of info this way.
Compared to "call me darth" those dumb-ass Mr. T sites seem like Monty Python.
When punk rock is outlawed, only outlaws will have punk rock.
umm.. no. If I make $100 I pay tax on that $100. If I then invest it and it becomes $120 I pay additional tax on $20, not on $120.
I'm still only taxed once on each dollar I made.
Mercury Meteor not Ford Meteor, division of Ford. So a Mercury Meteor crashed through the guys windscreen and melted his dashboard? I remember my dad frying an egg on the trunk of his neighbour's Meteor though. I always liked that car.
:wq
Everybody uses the goddamn US dollar, whether we like it or not.
:wq
I was working at an internet cafe, when this refined old gent came in, wanting someone to show him how to check a mailbox that his grand-daughter had set up for him.
You could tell he was refined (cultured, even),
by the website that his email had been set up on.
Not one of those uncouth modern websites.
His email was hosted by Ya...whom....
Like the other dude said... its all a matter of finding the right race components. And the 'hack' is just a racing chip that replaces your current enginge control chip.
My truck doesn't have a chip... it's limited to 110mph by the physics of a super light truck hitting a bumb in the road. The Wright brothers got famous for a few of seconds in the air, why can't I?:-)
--Cam
All jocks think about is sports. All nerds think about is sex.
And the Republicans will make it so that people who make above $X won't have to pay tickets at all, they'll just take it out of some poor middle class schmoe.- ---------
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I bent my wookie
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I bent my wookie
Because the people who live on Capitol Hill are the trendiest, most fad-oriented people I have ever lived amongst.- ---------
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I bent my wookie
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I bent my wookie
I don't think that's the Republican's style. More likely they would construct a convoluted system in which you could pay with stock options and deduct the fine from your taxes as a business expense.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
Like in the River Raid segment where you fly into the mall. That's not in the game, but in the cartoon they needed to get you from the River Raid bit to the Miner 2049esque (it's not Miner 2049, but it is a hoppin' around on levels collecting things type game) part, so you fly to the mall.
As for the rock concert, that's just exposition, not homage. I'd say it's from the Journey game, but that implies that they were a rock band. I would bet the shuttle launch is made up too, but it could as easily be from the cutscene of some Atari 400 game.
I dig it. I forget the URL, but the group that did it is Brazilian and have a site.
Plus, the name of the clip is Golden Shower. And all the trolls are on about is vader and flat taxes. They could put Golden Shower all over the place and not be labeled off topic. It's like they're sleeping at the wheel.
come for the naked robots, stay for the zombies
Children have much less disposable income than adults. Excuuuuuuuuuuse me? Have you seen the kids these days? Ever heard of pokemon cards? Nintendo? Gap kids? Teenaged girls raiding the mall with mum's credit card? Been to the CD store lately? Its all aimed at the consumeristic middle-schoolers who've so little discretion that they've let the biz triple prices. If little jimmy wants an AK-47, he can afford it.
If I'm not mistaken, wasn't wergild actually a word taken from the Vikings?
--------------------------------------
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
--------------------------------------
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
An interesting account of this is present in the book, Njal's Saga , considered a must-read for those Libertarians among us. -mmmmmm
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
Try here.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
There are many that are for a "flat" tax and our current "flat" fine system. Unfortunatly, flat mean regressive. What a progressive tax and fine system does is make the actual cost incurred by the person equal across economic classes.
I guess any idea can seem reasonable and fair if you get to redefine the word "actual."
To me, it seems that $100 actually equals $100. So $100 paid by Bill Gates is equal to $100 paid by me. The fact that it hurts me more than him doesn't change that.
"Progressive," in the context of setting tax rates, sounds to me like punishing people for creating wealth. If that's what you want to do, at least be clear about it.
The situation is a bit different for fines, since one of the goals is to deter crime, but I am still concerned about the idea. If you accept that punishment should be designed to "hurt" everyone to the same degree, then why not apply this to prison sentences as well? Should someone who doesn't have much of a worthwhile life outside prison have to stay in jail longer than someone with a job and a family?
Oh, wait, that's right -- the US already does something like this, with higher mandatory minimum sentences for poor people's cocaine (crack) than for rich peoples' cocaine (powder).
--------------------
WWW.TETSUJIN.ORG
- - - -
The real Tetsujin 28 is a giant robot.
'Punishing people for creating wealth' is missing the point by a huge margin. People are being punished for _breaking the law_. If they don't like the law, they can fuck off to some other country that has laws they do like.
Your argument shows that you should read a little more carefully. I specifically limited my comment about "punishing people for creating wealth" to the context of setting tax rates -- not setting criminal fines.
--------------------
WWW.TETSUJIN.ORG
- - - -
The real Tetsujin 28 is a giant robot.
This stuff is worse than what can be found in the Newgrounds portal! Argh! Why was this posted?
Where's the submit button??
But then links to http://www.newslibrary.com/nldownload.asp?DBLIST=
Anyone use this system or know how to get around it? (like partners.nytimes.com instead of www.nytimes.com?)
I just found a new sig.
The 8bit videogame clip is from a Brazilian band called Golden Shower, check their site at: www.goldenshower.gs
The palindromic C program is the coolest thing I've ever seen! That's talent! Making a hard drive squeal on purpose isn't as cool as the C program!
--cr@ckwhore
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
In every thread, somebody always mentions the slashdot effect. I've always wondered how /. prevents from turning itself into a black hole... I pose the following question: If the slashdot effect really exists, then why does slashdot never get slashdotted? Hmmmm? I think it's a conspiracy
(Note: Check out the slick usage of 'slashdot' as a verb in the above paragraph -- yeah baby)
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
LIke most news papers, Lancaster News probably makes more money from selling back issues and reprints than the papers themselves. It doesn't surprise me that the article is already in the for pay section.
That palindromic c program is from like '95 it was a International Obfuscated C Coding Contest (or something) winner, some AWESOME stuff at: http://www.ioccc.org/ -d
I think it's fair (dunno about taxes thou).
--
I used Adobe Premiere 5.0 for this conversion.
I'm not very familiar with video editing software for Linux.
--Just because you can doesn't mean you should--
Got a copy of the 8bit games video mirrored and running here.
Feel free to swamp me - bandwidth is included in the tuition here.
Well, barring the use of Napster, of course.
--Just because you can doesn't mean you should--
And I think the original poster got it wrong. I have never heard anyone call the flat tax regresive. Comsumption taxes (sales tax) are frequently accused of being regressive, but really aren't. Sales taxes are only regressive if you assume that rich people spend a smaller percentage of their income than poor people. This would only be true if rich people had the same standard of living as poor people, or lived well below their means. The real effect of a national sales tax would probably not be regressive at all and would closely resemble the effect of a flat tax but it would be a lot easier to enforce.
BTW either a flat tax or a national consumption tax would lower the tax burden across the board (read _everyone_ would pay less) and yet the government would actually get more. How can you not be in favor of that?
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
Sounds great... Humm that'd mean since I'm a student and I make humm lets see 0 dollars per year 1/10th of my income is lets see... that'd be uhh... $0 per ticket... WOOHOO I CAN DRIVE AS FAST AS I WANT!!!!!!!
the palindrome of bolton would be notlob...it don't work.
Arm yourself with knowledge.
The currency is the Markka, but they have signed up to the Euro.
Grrr.... I finally get something posted on slashdot and they wait so long to post it that the link dies. =( I couldn't find it anywhere else on the site; they must've pulled it. The basic jist of it is this guy's car got hit by a meteorite. There was a fist sized hole in his window, with the glass melted around it. The rock then went through the dash, again melting the plastic around the hole. (I'm surprised it didn't catch fire). The intereor of the car was coated with fine granules of glass which was pulverized in the impact. The owner of the car said that he was going to try to get it fixed because "[the car] is the kind that will never die, short of getting hit by a meteor" (paraphrased from memory). Don't the posters check their links before they post? And why does my submission show as being rejected even though its being used?
This space for rent.
From the looks of it, it must've been Kraftwerk !!!
Nobody believes the official spokesman, but everybody trusts an unidentified source. -- Ron Nesen
Submitting the article for your perusal. Not real impressive, really..
// STUNNED E. HEMPFIELD RESIDENT, COP SAY CELESTIAL ROCK MELTED DASHBOARD
LANCASTER NEW ERA (LANCASTER, PA.) Saturday, November 18, 2000 Section: NEWS Page: A-1
DID A HOT HUNK OF METEORITE CREAM HIS CAR?
It fell, apparently, from outer space -- and vaporized part of Robert Nelson's car.
The East Hempfield Township man, startled by a loud "thump" at 3 a.m. today, awoke later this morning to find a fist-size hole in the windshield of his 1980 Ford Fairmont.
The still-intact part of the glass around the hole had been melted. Whatever slammed into Nelson's car was lodged deep inside the dashboard, leaving the surrounding plastic and foam charred and melted.
The interior smelled burnt.
A fine, grainy substance -- pulverized glass -- coated the seats and floor.
"The first impression I had when I walked up to the driver's door was that there was an animal in there, like a squirrel or something," Nelson laughed this morning.
But it wasn't a squirrel.
Nelson and police believe it may have been a meteorite from the Leonids meteor shower -- an event caused when the Earth passed through the dust particles of a comet overnight.
In this case, the debris was from Comet Temple-Tuttle. The annual shower is called the Leonids because the meteors appear to radiate out of the constellation Leo.
When the Earth passes through this debris, the dust particles, or meteors, heat up and glow.
Fragments that hit Earth are called meteorites.
Traveling 45 miles per second, they can cause quite an impact.
Take a look at Nelson's car, which was parked in front of his house at 814 Hillaire Road when all this happened.
Just as the Leonids were making their appearance in the sky over Lancaster, a massive thud shook the Nelsons' house after 3 a.m. His wife, Camelia, heard it, and so did a neighbor.
"I thought it was an electrical transformer," Nelson said.
The couple went back to bed.
Shortly after 8 this morning, on the way to church, he walked to his car and noticed the hole in the windshield. He called police.
"It definitely wasn't a rock. It was not a shotgun blast. I don't know what it was," said a perplexed East Hempfield Township police officer, Bret Hollis, who responded to Nelson's call early this morning.
"Whatever hit it was extremely hot and it was traveling extremely fast," Hollis said. "It melted the glass surrounding the hole."
"I've seen rocks thrown through windows, and this wasn't a rock," the officer said.
The first clue it wasn't a rock or shotgun: "The trajectory was from straight up. The guy would have to have been standing on top of the hood, shooting into the windshield," Nelson said.
And Hollis checked for footprints on the hood. There were none.
"It came from the sky," Hollis determined.
Say it's a meteorite. Now what?
Nelson is left with an old car that has 212,000 miles on it and a hunk of comet dust inside it. What to do?
Nelson will try to get it fixed.
"It's one of those cars that won't die," he said, "unless a meteorite hits it."
Illustration: COLOR PHOTO Marty Heisey / East Hempfield Township resident Bob Nelson believes a meteorite created this hole in his car windshield.
I posted the article here.
SatireWire forgets to point out that Yahoo! is derived from the name Jonathan Swift gave to the savage, sub-human slaves of the horse-people, which were called Yahoos. By the end of that chapter of Gulliver's Travels (I believe it's chapter 4), Gulliver was so brainwashed that when he returned to England he called all of the humans yahoos, including himself, and acted as a virtual slave to his own (regular, unintelligent) horses.
Let me be the first to say, what a stupid name for a PORTAL. Will we all become mindless slaves [to America Online]?
Plus, I hate their stupid logo and color schemes. Worthless.
Aciel
aciel@speakeasy.net
One of my favs: Live sex in a Toyota nixes evil.
I wrote a program for authenticating supposed palindromes to test one for a guy who thought he had the longest palindrome that wasn't nonsense syllables. I'll have to see if I can dig it out.
--
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
Can someone name all the video games presented in the clip ? I have recognized pitfall, UFO, that airplane game (?), Space Invaders, Tennis, PacMan, and, probably, Larry 1 and Double Dragon... But it would be nice to get an expert opinion :-)
Specifically, what was the very first game that they showed ? What was the game with the space shuttle taking off (Moon Patrol ?) What about the rock concert ? And the mall scene ?
Ahhh, nostalgia is making me feel all fuzzy inside...
>|<*:=
Sheesh.
./ more often. :)
I start downloading the 8-bit games movie (pretty damn cool) when there were only 3 comments posted. Starts out dloading at 45 K/sec, but steadily drops... and drops...and drops until it's hitting 6 K/sec (3/4 done) as the number of posts reached ~20. It's currently going asymptotic, constantly saying "3 minutes remaining"...
Should'a been reloading
-D
Able was I ere I saw elbA
This sig intentionally left blank.
I'm not sure if it is specifically the Vikings, but it is definitely a Germanic language. It contains the prefix wer, meaning "male" or currently, "man". Originaly, there were wermen and women, and the base word, "man" meant "human". The prefix is also used for various forms of lycanthropy, making a werewolf literally a "man-wolf".
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Hey, concept! If Seattle imposed traffic fines based on your income/wealth, we could pay for the Monorail by just one cop pulling over Gates, Allan, or Bezos for a traffic infraction.
Cool!
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
try
www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org
for all your obsolete computer needs
Thanks man
Anyone wanna give up a sec and teach me how to do that? (html link)
Just put a space in it or something so Slashdot will not see it as an actual link.
Thanks
I hope this works, my connection sucks, so it took me a half hour to uplaod this. I didn't feel like waiting for a test:t _effect/Vcsclip.mov
http://us.share.geocities.com/sanloublues/slashdo
What you need to do is market your gun collection to the parent as the thing that every kid wants for Christmas. Then wait for scarcity of the "Official Autographed Shoeboy Handgun(tm)" to drive the price up to outrageous levels.
You'll be set for life!
--
The most valuable commodity I know of is information. - Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko, Wall Street
"There are many that are for a "flat" tax... If I make $250K/year (net), and get a $250 speeding ticket, that just cost me 1% of my annual income.... If I make $250K/year (net) and that just cost me 1/10th of a percent of my income."
Uh, the flat tax is based on the very speeding ticket idea you describe. Everybody pays 17%, or 19%, or whatever the particular plan calls for (with possible deductions for dependents).
Yes. Verizon sucks. Oh, wait, I forgot that Verizon sucks so much that they had to go and buy up all the domain names that say so. My bad.
---- Just another spud server.
I was taught SOP for troubleshooting a device that is blowing fuses, is to replace the fuse with a piece of wire and look for the smoke. Been doing this for 15 years and only had a couple of explosions, though one was audible throughout the entire building.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Look, as soon as you write something that cool, then you can go bitching about the difference between symmetry and palindromicity. Until then, shut your fucking whiny mouth and let the grown-ups appreciate the cool shit.
Time to die, nerd-boy!
What IS the standard operating procedure when a fibre cable is severed by a bullet?
Lucent: Send out a press release saying that new Lucent "Copper Fibre" Technology is "nearly bulletproof".
Corvis: Send out a press release saying that Corvis equipment can function even if the cable is severed by a bullet.
State Highway Patrol: Fine the bullet for speeding.
PSInet: Ask the person who fired it if they want to buy some PSInet stock, cheap.
MCI/Worldcom: Ask the person who fired it if they would like cheap long distance service for their friends and family.
QualComm: scold the person at the end of the fibre for not using a cell phone instead.
I've been a user on NO since it started, and a SysOp there for quite some time.
Nerfonline is not Hasbro's official Nerf website. That's nerf.com, and it sucks. In general, Hasbro is a bunch of idiots that keep on discontinuing good guns and keeping the bad ones around. (I'm gonna miss the SuperMaxx 1500)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
That's why there is a point system in the US, 12 points, and you can't drive for a while. What about a poor person driving, should we not charge him at all?
Have you read my journal today?
Sure they should be fined. But you can fine them a lot less and still have the same impact. A $100 dollar fine might mean that they eat saltines and ketchup for a couple weeks.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Actually, that's not really relevant here since you're talking about civil cases. In those, I imagine most people think the damages depend more on the defendant's wealth than the plaintiff's, even though they shouldn't, officially. I guess we've all heard about people suffering whiplash when read-ended by a wealthy stockbroker or something and receiving much higher damages (or settlemements) than they would have if my grandma had hit them (plus, of course, they might not have sued granny at all).
That doesn't quite sit right with me.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
That's not a fair comparison. The purpose of a fine for minor violations is a sort of punishment, not restitution. (The effectiveness of that punishment is debatable.) If you level flat fines, wealthy individuals will view the fine as simply the price they pay for the privelege of speeding. From my experience, many people view it exactly that way. For the punishment to have any value, it needs to be more than a slap on a wrist. $500 is serious money to me (I could buy a new CPU!), but it's not worth picking up off the street to Bill Gates.
I find your statement particullarly funny given that the driver in question didn't challenge the fine and seemed to find it reasonable.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
If it's so FFForking dangerous why they can't they uh....fine him up to some arbitrary amount and take away the GUY's Licence?????? I mean what's the goal here? Make people drive safely or tax fast cars or what? This is like fining drunk drivers over and over and then revoking the fine because the drunk driver now can't afford to drive his car to get to work to earn the money to pay the fine.
I know that where I live if I get caught speeding in a school zone there is a better than even chance I will lose my driving privileges. If I also have to pay a few thousand dollars in fines that is the easy part.
I should go onto Google and do this research myself, but I'm dogeffingtired and really stressed out, so I'll just weenie out:
I've always though "flat tax" meant everyone pays a flat percentage. ie) a 10% flat tax would charge a $10K income $1000, and a $100K income $10000.
Seems fair enough to me, from a first-cut level.
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
It's much fairer. Fines are not damages - they are punitive, and meant to disincentivize speeding and other violations. If you have millions of dollars, a $200 fine will not disincentivize you from anything. I would like to see this approach adopted here in the US.
I find this stray bullet interesting... I have Verizon DSL which has a tendency to go down about 4-5 times per day on average usually for minutes at a time. However about once every other week it will be down for a good 6+ hours. I've never heard any nightmare stories about cable, and I see this letter as supporting the theory that cable is much more reliant than DSL. When my DSL goes down, I have to call their tech support and listen to a recording saying that they are having technical issues in my area. Cablevision, however, sent a freaking letter because their service was out for a couple hours. Verizon seems to be very used to technical difficulties, while Cablevision does not. Any thoughts?
Bogus.
You can download Linux v0.01 here.
You can still download Unix V5, V6, and V7, along with a PDP-11 simulator to run them on, here. Hope you know ed though...
And who would WANT to run anything else on that page anyway? Never mind the legality of it all.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
And if you are unemployed and have no income, you can speed all you want for free!
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
This assumes, though, that each extra dollar is worth the same to the individual surely?
If everyone is charged tax at (say) 20%, its impact one someone who's earning minimum wage is fairly substantial but its impact on someone earning $1 million / year is negligible. Mr Minimum Wage has a very low disposable income and is running on tight margins to get an acceptable standard of living. Mr. Millionaire, on the other hand, could afford several acceptable standards of living and has a pretty large disposable income.
Charge tax at a curve and you start getting closer to a genuinely level burden on the population.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
Is this American dollars?
If it was, then no matter who it was - unless he was endangering others lives (like if he had one other car around him at any time - or he had another person in his vehicle) - this seems excessive.
Not too long ago, I was caught speeding outside of El Centro, CA - I was doing 10 mph over the speed limit (75 in a 65 zone). To be honest, I didn't even realize I was speeding until I looked out the rearview mirror and seen the cop (I had gotten a severe sunburn the day before at Oceanside - and probably shouldn't have been driving - wasn't feeling very good). I pulled over, got the ticket, and went on my way. I later paid the fine, attended an online traffic school (to keep the points away) - in all, spent about $130 - plus my time.
Do I still speed - no - I realize now it isn't worth it - 65 vs 75 doesn't shave much time off in the end.
What gets me about the whole incident is the situation - I was speeding - yes - but I was outside of El Centro (about 25 miles outside), and anyone who has been out there knows it is flat, open land (desert?) - there wasn't a SINGLE car around me - my car is well tuned, the tires at proper pressure - the highway I was on was well maintained with a smooth surface, on a straight section. It was a VERY sunny and hot day (good grip on the road). I wasn't weaving, the road was empty around me (well, aside from the cop who probably pulled out from under an overpass to pull me over).
I guess what I am trying to say is that I realize that I broke the law - but that in the whole scheme of things I was really a danger to nobody, including myself. It wasn't like I was cruising at 120 in a 60 mph zone.
The final thing that irks me about all of this is what I know of an American citizen's constitutionally protected "Right to Travel" - if you really want your eyes opened, check out this link:
The Right to Travel
Essentially, the argument is (excerpted from the link above):
The forgotten legal maxim is that free people have a right to travel on the roads which are provided by their servants for that purpose, using ordinary transportation of the day. Licensing cannot be required of free people, because taking on the restrictions of a license requires the surrender of a right. The driver's license can be required of people who use the highways for trade, commerce, or hire; that is, if they earn their living on the road, and if they use extraordinary machines on the roads. In other words, if you are not using the highways for profit, you cannot be required to have a driver's license.
For further info, check out these links:
Vehicle Manufacturer's Certificate/Statement of Origin
Vehicle Registration in California
If you are an American driver/"owner" of a vehicle, you owe it to yourself (as a supposedly free individual) to be aware of this information...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
The UNIX version at that link is apparently System V Release 2, so the description, "The Unix system that started it all. BSD split shortly after this was released." is way off on both counts. System V Release 2 dates from 1984, which makes it about fifteen years too late to have "started it all". The first BSD stuff appeared in the late 70s, and diverged from Sixth & Seventh Edition research Unix, not System V. In fact it was with System V that the USG branch (AT&T's commercial UNIX, distinct from Bell Labs research UNIX) started incorporating BSD software -- things like csh and vi.
that is what "flat tax" means. I think the original poster ment "progresive" where the idea is that as a citizen of a country you want to give your government as much money as you can afford without effecting your standard of living. So the rich can give more than the poor. Which is, quite frankly, just stupid. When I'm poor I don't want to give anything to the government - they take my money. When I'm rich I hardly think I want to do anything different, but I guess I wont notice it as much when they do come to steal my money.
How we know is more important than what we know.
well here we go again. Once more Slashdot has posted a link to a "rather big file" and immediately crashed the site. Not to mention the fact that the poor slob who put this movie up on the net has had to pay through the nose for all the megabytes he has sent out (well, maybe not, but I'm sure someone somewhere is charging someone for the bandwidth). Think about it, Slashdot is an internationally visited site. There's probably a few tens of thousand of us Australians who have pulled down that clip and each and every time it has travelled under the atlantic or bounced off a satelight! Would it be so hard for Slashdot to set up servers and mirror the content before posting? Perhaps they could use some automatic caching technology to cut down on bandwidth load. How slow does the Internet run because of Slashdot?
How we know is more important than what we know.
pffft.. if MS had their way they could just unwrite history any time they liked. No, we will not bow to copyright restrictions when it comes to software this bad. Let every man download Windows 1.01 (or 2.03 for that matter) and truely wonder what was going through Microsoft's mind at the time. Remember, when Windows first came out Microsoft was staring at a Lisa wondering how this super expensive machine could do the amazing things it did, and their futile attempts to copy it are their for your eyes to see, now and forever.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Indeed, it is better to be rich than poor. If you are going to fine the rich more than the poor, shouldn't you also base jail sentences on life expectancy and give smokers and others with poor health a lower jail sentence?
That was high quality fiber optic cable close to my house, which runs at $100 a foot, and they probably had to replace the entire length of it, costing up to $100,000.
That may be my last $10 rebate I get from Optimum Online.
BTW, the squealing Hard drive was like nails on a chalkboard, I almost couldn't bear to hear the whole thing.
Almost all of the flat tax plans that I've heard of (most notably the one advocated by Steve Forbes in the 1996 election) mean "flat" as in a flat percentage of your income. Therefore the "actual cost" (as you have redefined it) of the tax for each person is the same under a flat tax scheme.
This to me seems more like what you are advocating for the punitive fines. It follows the equal percentage of your income logic that was in the last part of your comment. It is different from what is currently in place in the US where you pay a higher percentage of your income if your income is larger.
I think the analogous tax scheme of our current traffic fine scheme would be something like where everyone pays $20,000 per year. Perhaps not too bad for you or me, perhaps simple to Warren Buffet, but horribly difficult for the mailman or bus driver. I would agree with you that that would be a horrible plan.
I would argue that the flat tax plan actually makes the "actual cost" incurred by the person equal across economic classes.
I used to take apart all sorts of computer parts that weren't supposed to be taken apart in highschool.
I always used to wonder about those warranty stickers on hard drives, "Must only be dismantled in college".
I thought this was quite a sad article. Have we really got to the point where Slashdot geeks need instructions on how to dismember kit ? What happened to simply getting in there and finding out for yourself ?
My young son is just about at the point where he's dangerous with a screwdriver. He also understands perfectly well that I'll never tell him off for dismantling the VCR (but equally he'll never get to watch "Bob the Builder" again). Fortunately I also keep him well supplied with bits of obscure scrap so he's never short of something to pull apart and investigate.
You are absolutely right about how expedients cannot be used for heavy penalties, but that's the point
A 25$ ticket would mean nothing to Bill Gates (He'd lose far more money by having the cop keeping him busy for five minutes), but would mean living on bread and water for a month for someone else.
So wether or not a 25$ fine is too heavy for an expidient depends on who's getting it.
There are real problems though.
Consider how fines might go into the county budget, that pays the cops. They would probably focus more on "Let's bust those in expensive cars" than "Let's bust those who endanger road safety"
All opinions are my own - until criticized
So long as the fines are fairly low, this is no BIG deal. I mean, we've gotta keep the roads safe somehow, and I've never heard of any better scheme (though I'm open if anyone's got good ideas). But once the fines start reaching into the thousands, you can't let the cop act as judge jury and "executioner."
Any time you use an expedient, because of circumstances, rather than doing things the truly just way, you have to make sure that expedient is only used in unimportant cases. You see the same thing in government. What would truly be just is if everyone agreed on everything that was done. This is impractical. So it would be fairly just if we voted democratically on every proposed law (it would still be a "tyranny of the majority," but at least everyone would have direct input). This may be practical soon, if some of the problems with online voting are worked out, but it's not now, and it certainly wasn't when the Constitution was drafted. This leaves us with electing representatives. It's an expedient, but they still have to ammend the Consitution if they want to do anything REALLY big.
Any time there's a new proposal, always think of the potential for abuse FIRST, then consider what's good about it. We live in an imperfect world, and most things that sound good fail miserably in practice.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
Thanks; I was wondering. EiC wouldn't take it without int in front of main either, so the whole palindrome thing was shot right there.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
"Now, to kick off the meeting, let's have some palindromes."
"Rise to vote, sir!"
"Now, you know that voting isn't until later in the agenda..."
"No - 'Rise to vote, sir!' is a palindrome!"
"Ahh, Lisa, you'll fit right in here."
"Wow! Me? Fit in?"
Unless you bought a new car lately. My car is electronically limited to 130mph by the computer, although its capable of going about 15mph faster than that. Anyone know how to hack onboard computers?- -------------------
-------------------------------------
I bent my wookie
-------------------------------------------------
I bent my wookie
It sounds promising, but Democrats would adjust the rates so that anybody who makes less than $X / year will actually receive money as a fine.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
An anonymous reader noted that in Finland, you pay traffic violations based on your income, and this dot-com millionaire was fined $70,000 for 20 miles/hour over the speed limit!
Don't they use the metric system in Finland?
---
"Fdisk format reinstall, doo dah doo dah,
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Actually, I believe that kind of calculation can enter into the award in a wrongful death suit.
--------------------
WWW.TETSUJIN.ORG
- - - -
The real Tetsujin 28 is a giant robot.
I was extra-special bored tonight, so I went ahead and converted the video from Quicktime to DivX avi!
I know it's a bit late in the posting process to get many hits, but it's the thought that counts, right?
Get yer copy at allecto.org.
--Just because you can doesn't mean you should--
while it may look symmetrical, it's hardly palindromic. it would have to be able to be read identically backwards and forwards to be palindromic.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
I used to take apart all sorts of computer parts that weren't supposed to be taken apart in highschool. I would also try to find the most creative way to destroy computer components that didn't work that great anymore. A few of the ways I wasted time in class were:
Using a hard drive while it is open (only lasts about 15-20 minutes)
Crossing 120 volts to various leads on the motherboard and watch what parts in between start smoking
Using about 12 different scan disk programs on an older 386 and see how long the drive lasts
Hotswapping everything.....
I probably had way too much time on my hands, but I got an A in that class.
you can download the original Unix right before the BSD split right here8
.14 & .99
.99
http://www.abandonkeep.com/os/All.shtml?x=10&y=
sorry I don't know html, or I'd dress it up for ya as a nice happy link
at that site you can also download
linux
ICQ
Mosaic
Windows 1-3
Dos 3-6.22
NT 3.10
IBM DOS and CALDERA Dos
OS/2 1.00
And all other kinds of nifty stuff
aswell as a wealth of old games
What if I own a business that's losing money? Will they pay me to speed?
--
The most valuable commodity I know of is information. - Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko, Wall Street
(Disclaimer: IANAL)
Well, according to the old law codes in England, Denmark, etc, I believe this is exactly how the law worked. If you killed someone, even if it was ruled justifiable (ie he called you a wanker and you killed him in a fair duel), his family could still force you to pay his wergild (lit. "man-price"), which was supposed to compensate them for the income the deceased would have provided them.
I believe there's an analogous concept today in English common law.
Finland has it backwards. If you're rich, you should pay *less*, not more. I mean, the US has it down pat. If you're rich and famous, you can get away with robbing a bank (or murder). Meanwhile the less well-off have to struggle with ugly things like fairness and justice.
You crazy Finns! Damn you ALLLL!
-JB
http://xtux.sourceforge.net/
It has software logos battle it out, and you can play on a slashdot map too
After having no story about it he was convinced he'd get in on quickies.
So atleast my post here makes his wish half true in a rather sad kinda way.
Enjoy
It's turtles all the way down.
Sheesh, talk about punative damages. Imagine if your stock falls between the time they evaluate you at the time you pay. Maybe that's why Linux is so safe, Bill Gates wouldn't dare go to Finland.
Have you read my journal today?
No, it hasn't inspired me to make "nerf on or fuck off" my signature, nor has it inspired me to write one huge, rambling, incoherent, 5 page paragraph.
It has inspired me to get rich!
You see if adults like childrens guns, then it would seem logical that children would like adult guns.
I'm going to make a fortune.
Now I'm off to the local high school to sell my gun collection to disaffected video gamers.
Wish me luck!
--Shoeboy
Following standard operating procedure, Optimum field staff resolved the issue as quickly as possible..."
What IS the standard operating procedure when a fibre cable is severed by a bullet?
I can just see it now - a black van pulls up at the Optimum Online office, the side door slides open, and several black-clad men jump out, and do what? Take cover, and start returning fire?
Should it work the same way for liability? If your tottering grandmother runs over a millionaire, should she be fined 500,000 to make restitution for the victim's family, so they can maintain their standard of living?
http://www.ioccc.org/1987/westley.c
Should really be fucking credited to Brian Westley. Pisses me off.
-=Best Viewed Using [INLINE]=-
There are many that are for a "flat" tax and our current "flat" fine system. Unfortunatly, flat mean regressive. What a progressive tax and fine system does is make the actual cost incurred by the person equal across economic classes.
A fine is designed to cost someone a certain amount in an effort to deter them from a violation. If I make $25K/year (net), and get a $250 speeding ticket, that just cost me 1% of my annual income. Better yet, subtract a reasonable cost of living for my region and marital/child status, and you've just fined me a large chunk of my available cash. If I make $250K/year (net) and that just cost me 1/10th of a percent of my income. The individual making the lower amount actually pays a higher fine - as a person it bears more of a financial burden. Therefore the richer are pretty much unaffected and the fine is simply a "flesh wound" where the lower classes get thier arms chopped off (oh, wait, that's also simply a flesh wound).
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips