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.
Wow, I never knew Vader was a Jew...
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.
oops, excuse me, I mean JEFF K IS A LTO FUNNYAR!!! ;)
Stick with it- the Matrix parody alone is worth the wait :)
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?
Well actually I was just kidding. No attempt at either irony or hypocrisy. Sorry.
Boy, is my face red. Years of bitching about assholes who couldn't spot humour that wasn't accompanied by myriad smilies, and I go ahead and do the self-same thing.
By way of explanation - if not mitigation - I humbly offer as evidence the googols of comments of the nature outlined and ask, if not for forgiveness, then at least for a modicum of understanding.
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!
Home version != arcade version. The play's going to be different, sometimes the scoring is different, the levels may be different, etc. Even if it's an emulation using the same arcade rom, there's no guarantee to Guinness that the gameplay was the same. Perhaps the emulator ran the game slightly slower so your reflexes didn't have to be as good. For all they know, you could have hacked the rom to make it significantly easier. Sure you could technically also do that with the arcade version, but as a general rule the overall chances of cheating are less on an actual arcade unit. Guinness wants its records to stand up to questioning. It may have started out as a bar book, but now a lot of people use it as a reference of sorts. With that comes increased responsibility for integrity.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
He hooked up the controller from his own Centipede arcade machine. Considering the tendency of Centipede trackballs to get rather gummy or just downright barely working (there's a machine I played once where you had to put some major spin on the bastard to get even the slightest movement), I can't blame him for bringing his own well-maintained trackball. The electronics that receive the input from it are still the same.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
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.
actually I found it quite insulting.
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
Maybe, but I'll never know because the colors on that page gave me an instant headache.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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?"
Call Darth Vader a gay sadomasochist on a web page and you get a story on slashdot.
That's funny, but it's also pretty sad. I can't be the only person here who found the page not only not unamusing but also really intolerant. I'm sure that the gay readership of Slashdot is offended by such poor humor at their expense. There's no way this link would have been posted if it were making fun of Vader as being black or Jewish.
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
Call Darth Vader a gay sadomasochist on a web page and you get a story on slashdot
This sort of 'ironicly pointing out slashdot's shocking hyprocisy' comment is becoming more and more popular. Normally I ignore them as the work of the foolish, but every once and a while something comes along that's truly inane and I feel the urge to respond. So here we go...
I've had some of my most insightful comments (IMO, natch) marked down as trolls. Some of my trolls were marked up. Such is life in an imperfect universe. Moderators will have differing opinions, as will slashdot readers. Deal with it.
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 - replete with (pretty crappy, but who cares) artwork - dedicated to brightening the lives of the few who find it? Make no mistake; the only reason people find pages like that is because they were sent the url. It's not the sort of thing you come across accidentally[1].
[1]Obviously, if you're going to ask jeeves where you can find gay, sadomasochistic lords of the sith then you might.
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.
I read that gay Vader thing.... it was just bad. I'm sorry, but it was. Don't bother.
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