Yes, the fact that Dan Brown prides himself on fact checking does, indeed, drive people crazy. I have absolutely no objection to that statement at all.
Well, that's understandable, and the entire purpose of 'Keep Moving' signs.
Although, like I said, a certain portion of the population doesn't understand what that means, they think it means traffic is going to yield to them. No. It means 'No oncoming traffic except you guys. Period. This is not a merge, it is not a turn, it is the forward direction of traffic for people in your lane, and only your lane. You should no more slow here than any other place in the road.'.
But without a keep moving sign, yeah, everyone's going to slow down and look, until they notice there not actually a lane for oncoming traffic to be in. You can't really blame them for that...even without a yield sign, if they're merging into another road, legally, they're supposed to look for traffic. They just don't realize they aren't merging before they look.
I complain about places like that too, but that, at least, is an oversight, whereas this stupid Yield sign is just wrong, and, like I said, legally impossible to actually obey. You are being directed to yield to traffic that does not exist. It's like putting 'left lane must turn left, right lane must turn right' on a one-lane road...you cannot obey that!
Of course, it's not the only 'legally impossible to obey' sign I know of. I know one two-lane road where, you turn the corner and nearly-instantly one of the lanes is right-turn only. Yes, there's a sign, at the start(?!) of the solid white line, but you're supposed to signal before changing lanes for 100 feet (at least) and there's not actually enough distance to signal that long before the line becomes white and you're not supposed to change lanes over it. (Not to mention you don't have to legally read signs 100s of feet down the road, they only apply when you reach them...and the second you reach this sign, you can no longer get out of that lane!)
Every single person (except the few who actually turn right.) who turns that corner and is in the right lane either a) changes lanes illegal without signaling enough, or b) changes lanes illegally across a solid white line. Every. Single. Person.
I know of another place where the problem isn't a curve, it's multiple traffic lights. You're not supposed to change lanes within a certain distance of those...but there are so many of them in a row so close together that you legally can't change lanes at all, and you can't actually see where you need to be at the start of it. Oh, and one of the intersections has a two-lane road coming into it, which of course means you have to turn into a specific lane, which then means you can plausible be in the wrong lane and have no legal way out!
Sometimes I think people putting up traffic lights and designing the damn roads needs driver's school more than normal bad drivers.
No, you're confused. The plotline itself isn't in the next novel.
His next novel, called 'The Play's The Thing', is about a lost Agatha Christie 'novel' (although actually a play) with that plot, secretly directed by Spike Lee at a theatre on 'Underground Broadway'.
It eventually turns out this Agatha Christie novel was used to send a message through time revealing who Shakespeare really was.
Spoiler: Shakespeare is really Arthur Miller, a fact the Actors' Equity Association has been covering up for 900 years.
Another fun thing are nonsensical Yield signs. There's an offramp on 400 where you get off and cars going right have a yield sign...a yield sign for their own lane. No car can be coming in that lane, for the simple matter that the lane does not actually exist before that point, and the line is solid white for a good 30 feet to keep people from changing into it. It needs a damn 'Keep Moving' sign(1), not a yield sign.
Yes, yes, car coming down the road could theoretically swerve into it, either by changing into that place before the lane actually exist, or changing into it over the solid white line as soon as it does.
But a) 'yield' does not actually means 'yield to people who might decide to change illegally lanes and hit your car', you don't have to do that even if there is a yield sign, and b) if that was actually a problem, well, that's what those silly white bars sticking up from the road are for, to physically block people from changing lanes when they aren't support to.
Put those bars up to stop the actual illegal behavior, not a stupid yield sign telling people to impossibly yield to traffic that doesn't exist, and which doesn't actually require them to yield to illegal lane changers.
It would be interesting to see the legal proceeding from a traffic accident there. I bet the guy who 'failed to yield' would get away scott-free, because he did, indeed, yield to any legitimate oncoming traffic. (Aka, none of it.)
1) And there's yet another of my pet peeves. People who don't grasp 'keep moving' signs. Guys, they only put those up when there can't be a car coming, but it looks sorta like there might be. Do not slow down and look for oncoming cars, they just told you it is physically impossible there is a car coming. (Unless it's careening wildly out of control, or whatever, but in that case it could just as easily be headed towards where you're stopped instead of where you're going.)
Asking people to imagine a Dan Brown where he got his fact straight is closer to asking people to imagine what an Agatha Christie novel would read like if set in a postapocalyptic future where giant mutant weasels fight off vampire dogs aided by elves from a parallel universe, in a metaphor for the fifth century Roman Empire and the collapse of the Catholic church.
Performed as a play written in iambic pentameter, and directed by Spike Lee.
I wasn't saying do it normally, although I can see how it could be read that way.
I was saying it should be done as a solution to an existing area of stop and go traffic, not to prevent it. (Although it certainly would do that also! But the price would be too high.) People should just...stop. Once. And let traffic get four to five car lengths in front of them, and then drive.
And only one person per-lane should be doing this. Aka, someone stopping in front of you and waiting till people got that far should not, itself, cause you do to then do the same thing to them. They already fixed the stop and go, you can just follow them normally.
Except, of course, this won't work, because fools will jump in. The best solution currently is to just inform people that every time they brake in stop and go traffic, they make the problem worse. So they should let cars get as far in front of them as they are comfortable with, and slowly idle forward instead of moving forward and braking.
Some examples are failing to accelerate to highway speed on the onramp
People who don't understand how to use on-ramp, off-ramps, and turn lanes, really annoy me.
Look, people, that lane exists for a reason. You are supposed to enter at the speed you're already going, the speed of the road you're already on. And you're supposed to finish at the speed you need to be on the new road. That is the function of those things.
You do not slow down before you get in, unless you need to because there are already people there. (And you don't speed up before you get in, although that doesn't really bother me. Speeding up can't make other cars go faster, where slowing down will make them go slower.)
You do not speed up when you leave it. You should already be at that speed for onramps and offramps. Turn lanes, not so much. Obviously, if it's an offramp and there's a stop sign or traffic light, the end speed is supposed to be 'zero'.
That is the point of those things. We spent billions to make roads between highways and surface streets so that people didn't have to slow down on the highway or speed up on the surface street. Please actually use those roads for their intended purpose. Start at one speed, finish at another. Hopefully in some sort of smooth transition instead of attempting to gain or lose all the speed near the end, but, honestly, that's a minor issue.
The thing that's really fun is the few times when it's a left side on-ramp. There's a place in Atlanta, when you're headed east on the Perimeter, and want to exit to 400, where you merge in from the left...and morons sit there and wait for an opening. Hey, it's a damn onramp, not a fucking stop sign. You can't sit and wait for a gap between cars going 70mph where you can pull out!
In fact, not only will backing up help avoid creating stop-and-go traffic, it help get rid of it once it exists. Get back four or five car lengths, and let the damn stop-and-go average out.
Stop and go traffic is contagious. It's like a cold. Someone starts it, usually from following too closely and having to break. People catch it from the cars in front of them, and pass it on to cars behind them, and then get cured naturally.
If you refuse to get 'infected', if you back off far enough that their stop and go doesn't make you stop, yeah, you don't get there any faster, you can't go through the cars in front of you. But you're not going to get there slower, and you'll get there with less gas usage and less wear-and-tear on your car. And the same for all the cars behind you, and very shortly, the entire mess will be over. (As soon as the people in front of you are cured of it.)
This is, in fact, often how outbreaks of stop and go disappear by themselves. Eventually, without consciously doing it, often just with poor reflexes, people average it into non-existence.
The problem, of course, is all the idiots who jump in front of you when you back off far enough to make it totally disappear. And their jumping in front of you makes you brake, starting a new case of stop-and-go.
You've pegged Atlanta. Here, people tend to be somewhat nice drivers. (As opposed to, for example, New York City, where they are horrible mean.) But very, very fast on the highways.
And, for some totally inexplicably reason, the Downtown Connector has a frickin speed limit of 55, so people are constantly going about 20 over, or about 10 over what it should be. (The greatest stunt ever.)
For those of you who don't know what the Connector is, that's where I-75 and I-85, the main north-south roads, merge into one giant superroad. 16 lanes of traffic in some places, 300,000+ cars a day.
All going 80 miles an hour. Down a road that doesn't have a medium, or a shoulder half the time. (The road essentially goes underneath the city streets, straight through both Downtown and Midtown, with walls down the side and buildings on top of them looming over the road.)
OTOH, people will, in fact, let you into traffic on the surface streets, and not attempt to wedge their car up your ass or cut you off.
I also didn't like how ActiveX morphed from a special browser-only technology into a synonym for COM and then into a replacement for OLE.
ActiveX was never a browser-only technology. It was just they referred to the embedding of COM controls in web pages as ActiveX, and eventually started renaming everything 'ActiveX'.
For people who don't know what we're talking about: COM started as a way to embed DLLs that provided specific functional in programs, essentially, 'plugins' that program builders could use that all operated much the same way. I.e., a lot of them you could mark out part of the application and have them responsible for drawing it, and receive signals when they part was active, etc.
Developers could go out and license, for example, a nice TIFF control to embed a picture in their application, or whatever. All the 'common controls' soon moved to this format. They contained all their 'header' information and whatnot inside them, so developers could take a COM file and see what was exported and whatnot in a consistent manner.
Like I said, it's like shared libraries, except all the functions are named and accessible via consistent means. They all use the same way to do things, so you can load them into your application without knowing what they are. (And hand over part of your document to them, or whatever.)
Creators could even do things like license these controls, where people could redistribute them, but not program using them.
ActiveX essentially is COM and OLE2. This were.ocx controls, the successor to.vbx controls, which is where the X in ActiveX comes from. (For those of you who remember your history, the very first version of this was called OLE, Object Linking and Embedding.)
All in all, this not a bad idea. In fact, most OSes have something like it...OSes start off with something like DDE or shared memory, and then end up with higher level functionality built on that to allow you to consistently embed parts of applications in others. Linux has something called, I believe, DCOP.
The problem came about when Microsoft started letting those DLLs be embedded in its web browser, instead of making people write DLLs with customer entry points and functionality, like Netscape had done. (And then it started renaming everything to ActiveX.)
I can see why it did it, in fact, using the COM format to embed controls makes sense, it's letting it use the existing controls that was the problem.
Strictly speaking, the GP is right. The reason that ActiveX is more vulnerable than Firefox is there are a lot more ActiveX controls than Firefox plugins. (Not to be confused with Firefox Addons, which seem to be fairly secure, and are pieces of javascript. Firefox plugins are things like the PDF viewer that Acrobat installs, etc.)
However, the reason there are a lot more ActiveX controls is a, tada, bad design. It's because ActiveX fundamentally lets you embed all sorts of stuff that came with the operating system and random applications and were not designed to be controlled by a web page. Stuff around from before web browsers!
So Microsoft has to kill each of these, one at a time. That's what the '175 killbits' is talking about....something like 125 of those were on things that it should not have been possible to load in a web browser anyway, but Microsoft decided it would be great fun if you could load all those fancy new signed-DLLs-under-another-name in a web browser. And companies that had been putting out ActiveX controls and had never had to worry about security before, because they were selling a PDF rendering control to software developers to embed in their app, suddenly found out how insecure they were.
Aka, is your car secure, right now? Yes? Alright, let's transport these dangerous criminals in it. What do you mean, it's not secure from that direction?
And this isn't helped by the fact that ActiveX controls are so easy to install. I'm not talking about malicious ones, those are easy also, but legitimate good ActiveX controls, which are signed by a legit company and everything.
And they work for two years, and web design moves on...and eventually a hole is discovered in them...and crackers download that version, put it up on their web site, and wait for people to click Yes to install this clearly legit control, signed by Macromedia or whatever, so they can buffer overflow it.
Oh, look. Have to issue a killbit for that also.
The large proliferation of ActiveX controls vs. the small proliferation of Netscapian plugins is why ActiveX is so vulnerable, but the first is entirely due to a rather stupid design decision at the start of IE that let web page designers use random ActiveX controls (Which everyone forgets were not invented for web browsers, but existed before as DLLs with well defined embedding mechanisms.) in a web browser
No, Netscape's Web Accelerator connects to a compressing proxy server for their dialup service. It recompresses images to lower quality and makes all pages gzipped. That's it. I'm not even sure it does any caching.
I'm fairly confused as to how this doesn't work on Linux, as it's a browser proxy, but don't care enough to actually look into it.
Which means all this talk about switching OSes is nonsense. He's someone using a $6.99 a month dialup internet connection, he can't afford a new computer!
Of course, apparently the idea of using Netscape's web browser, or Firefox, both which surely would work with Netscape Web Accelerator and would protect him from ActiveX, doesn't occur to him. (Granted, it doesn't seems to have occurred to anyone else here either.)
I appreciate that there's diseases that are misdiagnosed and others that we haven't properly diagnosed yet, but a lot of chemically or electromagnetically sensitive people have no problems being around the things that cause them endless torment as long as they don't know it's there, like when it's under a different name.
I, OTOH, get annoyed by flashing lights even when I don't consciously notice them. (Of course, annoyed and disabled are not the same thing.)
In fact, there are two specific places that I always forget can have flashing lights turned on. One is a office with a bad florescence, the other is a fan under a inset ceiling light.
Whenever those happen to be on, and I don't notice it right away, after about two minutes I'll start looking around trying to figure out what the hell is wrong. (And then remember where I am, and the answer is always 'there's a flashing light at this location'.)
And it's not just those places. I've been out with friends and notice something is wrong, and eventually think 'Maybe it's the lights', and pay attention, and, sure enough, I'll catch them flickering if I'm watching.
Somehow, my mind likes to alter me to flashing lights by making me feel uncomfortable. Even after I realize it's the light doing it, I still feel that way.
I suspect this is entirely 'psychosomatic', I'm not even sure there's any objective way for someone to become 'uncomfortable', and there's not really any way to test this.
To rephrase, 'abilities' are not paranormal. Explanations are paranormal, or not.
Someone who can see through walls 'magically' is paranormal. Someone who can see through walls because he can see infrared, either via technology or because his eyes are very strange and can actually see infrared (Which should be easily demonstrable with scientific testing.), is not.
Incidentally, it's nearly impossible to come up with a way people's eyes could see infrared, which is why I used ultraviolet in my other example, which people could plausibly see if they had added cones in their eye for it. Incoming infrared light would be very hard see vs. the amount your body, and hence parts of your eyes, are already putting out.
Which is probably the reason that no animal was ever evolved such an ability, despite it presumably being incredibly useful for night animals. Seeing UV, OTOH, wouldn't be that helpful, and wouldn't help at all at night, which is why no animal evolved that either.
Paranormal usually means 'Not able to to be done by science', so I, personally, would not include anything we can do with science.
I.e, I tend to require paranormal abilities to be something that impossible even with technological help. Otherwise, it's just someone demonstrating an ability we didn't know human bodies had, which is easy.
I mean, until 50 years ago, we didn't know human bodies had the ability to a mile in 4 minutes. If someone were to demonstrate that it's possible in three and a half minutes, that is not paranormal.
Likewise, if someone demonstrated the ability to see ultraviolet, and close examination of their eyes reveals that, in fact, they have a fourth cone that can see that UV, I think everyone would agree that is not 'paranormal' in any meaningful sense. They are some cool mutant or something, but not paranormal.
Same if someone demonstrated they can detect magnetic fields, or even radio waves, using some part of the human body we did not realize was usable for that purpose.
But I am, of course, not James Randi. (Well, I am, but I can't prove it.) I don't know what definitions that organization uses.
People hear 'radiation' and think 'Oh, it must be shielded very well'.
Well, it's not, because microwave radiation is not particularly dangerous to people.
Microwaves are used because they vibrate water, and we are, indeed, made of water, but that just means we'd get hotter, not cancer. (Cancer requires vibrating DNA, which is an entirely different size than water molecules.)
We could probably operate microwaves without doors and not be particularly harmed by them...
...until we stood there too long and collapsed from heat stroke. We don't have very good heat sensors inside our body, just on the outside, so it's conceivable we'd would not realize how hot our body had actually gotten. Our body would be thinking 'Our skin is 110 degrees, that's fairly hot. Let's sweat some and cool off.' when it should be thinking 'Holy crap, our brain is 110 degrees and we're dead.'
Oh, and of course, anyone with metal inside their body would be in rather a lot of trouble, as microwaves heat metal up a lot better than water.
Don't feel embarrassed. Anyone can have psychosomatic symptoms. I once ate the same place as someone, and he felt ill later and hypothesized it was food poisoning, and I felt a little queasy all day. It was not food poisoning, and I was not the slightest bit sick.
Once there's a 'reason' you should feel sick, and you actually start asking yourself if you do feel sick, it is very easy to believe you do.
Intelligent people, however, are the ones willing to say 'Well, okay, I guess that was in my head'. Just like intelligent people who think wifi hurts their head should, well, stop once it's demonstrated it does not.
It's the fools who remain convinced in the face of scientific evidence that are the problem.
No he wouldn't. The human body detecting radio waves is not paranormal. It's not possible based on the biology of the humans, but detection of radio waves is not a paranormal ability, or all radios would be paranormal.
The Randi foundation. however, probably would be willing to test him, like they tested that other guy with the 'impossible' ability to read record grooves with his fingertips. (Which, it turns out, he could.)
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Yes, the fact that Dan Brown prides himself on fact checking does, indeed, drive people crazy. I have absolutely no objection to that statement at all.
Well, that's understandable, and the entire purpose of 'Keep Moving' signs.
Although, like I said, a certain portion of the population doesn't understand what that means, they think it means traffic is going to yield to them. No. It means 'No oncoming traffic except you guys. Period. This is not a merge, it is not a turn, it is the forward direction of traffic for people in your lane, and only your lane. You should no more slow here than any other place in the road.'.
But without a keep moving sign, yeah, everyone's going to slow down and look, until they notice there not actually a lane for oncoming traffic to be in. You can't really blame them for that...even without a yield sign, if they're merging into another road, legally, they're supposed to look for traffic. They just don't realize they aren't merging before they look.
I complain about places like that too, but that, at least, is an oversight, whereas this stupid Yield sign is just wrong, and, like I said, legally impossible to actually obey. You are being directed to yield to traffic that does not exist. It's like putting 'left lane must turn left, right lane must turn right' on a one-lane road...you cannot obey that!
Of course, it's not the only 'legally impossible to obey' sign I know of. I know one two-lane road where, you turn the corner and nearly-instantly one of the lanes is right-turn only. Yes, there's a sign, at the start(?!) of the solid white line, but you're supposed to signal before changing lanes for 100 feet (at least) and there's not actually enough distance to signal that long before the line becomes white and you're not supposed to change lanes over it. (Not to mention you don't have to legally read signs 100s of feet down the road, they only apply when you reach them...and the second you reach this sign, you can no longer get out of that lane!)
Every single person (except the few who actually turn right.) who turns that corner and is in the right lane either a) changes lanes illegal without signaling enough, or b) changes lanes illegally across a solid white line. Every. Single. Person.
I know of another place where the problem isn't a curve, it's multiple traffic lights. You're not supposed to change lanes within a certain distance of those...but there are so many of them in a row so close together that you legally can't change lanes at all, and you can't actually see where you need to be at the start of it. Oh, and one of the intersections has a two-lane road coming into it, which of course means you have to turn into a specific lane, which then means you can plausible be in the wrong lane and have no legal way out!
Sometimes I think people putting up traffic lights and designing the damn roads needs driver's school more than normal bad drivers.
No, you're confused. The plotline itself isn't in the next novel.
His next novel, called 'The Play's The Thing', is about a lost Agatha Christie 'novel' (although actually a play) with that plot, secretly directed by Spike Lee at a theatre on 'Underground Broadway'.
It eventually turns out this Agatha Christie novel was used to send a message through time revealing who Shakespeare really was.
Spoiler: Shakespeare is really Arthur Miller, a fact the Actors' Equity Association has been covering up for 900 years.
She's a ghoul. She eats the dead.
As opposed to Poirot, who, of course, is a necrophiliac.
God knows what that's about.
Another fun thing are nonsensical Yield signs. There's an offramp on 400 where you get off and cars going right have a yield sign...a yield sign for their own lane. No car can be coming in that lane, for the simple matter that the lane does not actually exist before that point, and the line is solid white for a good 30 feet to keep people from changing into it. It needs a damn 'Keep Moving' sign(1), not a yield sign.
Yes, yes, car coming down the road could theoretically swerve into it, either by changing into that place before the lane actually exist, or changing into it over the solid white line as soon as it does.
But a) 'yield' does not actually means 'yield to people who might decide to change illegally lanes and hit your car', you don't have to do that even if there is a yield sign, and b) if that was actually a problem, well, that's what those silly white bars sticking up from the road are for, to physically block people from changing lanes when they aren't support to.
Put those bars up to stop the actual illegal behavior, not a stupid yield sign telling people to impossibly yield to traffic that doesn't exist, and which doesn't actually require them to yield to illegal lane changers.
It would be interesting to see the legal proceeding from a traffic accident there. I bet the guy who 'failed to yield' would get away scott-free, because he did, indeed, yield to any legitimate oncoming traffic. (Aka, none of it.)
1) And there's yet another of my pet peeves. People who don't grasp 'keep moving' signs. Guys, they only put those up when there can't be a car coming, but it looks sorta like there might be. Do not slow down and look for oncoming cars, they just told you it is physically impossible there is a car coming. (Unless it's careening wildly out of control, or whatever, but in that case it could just as easily be headed towards where you're stopped instead of where you're going.)
You're going to have to talk to Agatha Christie's estate. The play is called 'The Mousetrap', it's been running for over 50 years in West End.
Tolkien did get the fact rights.
Which wasn't too hard as he invented those facts in the first place, but whatever.
And 'culture' background.
And 'human being' background, while we're at it. (Dan Brown is actually an AI feed by Usenet conspiracy and pseudoscience groups.)
Asking people to imagine a Dan Brown where he got his fact straight is closer to asking people to imagine what an Agatha Christie novel would read like if set in a postapocalyptic future where giant mutant weasels fight off vampire dogs aided by elves from a parallel universe, in a metaphor for the fifth century Roman Empire and the collapse of the Catholic church.
Performed as a play written in iambic pentameter, and directed by Spike Lee.
I usually stop by dropping the engine out of the body of my car and having it drag along the road. Which am I doing?
I wasn't saying do it normally, although I can see how it could be read that way.
I was saying it should be done as a solution to an existing area of stop and go traffic, not to prevent it. (Although it certainly would do that also! But the price would be too high.) People should just...stop. Once. And let traffic get four to five car lengths in front of them, and then drive.
And only one person per-lane should be doing this. Aka, someone stopping in front of you and waiting till people got that far should not, itself, cause you do to then do the same thing to them. They already fixed the stop and go, you can just follow them normally.
Except, of course, this won't work, because fools will jump in. The best solution currently is to just inform people that every time they brake in stop and go traffic, they make the problem worse. So they should let cars get as far in front of them as they are comfortable with, and slowly idle forward instead of moving forward and braking.
Some examples are failing to accelerate to highway speed on the onramp
People who don't understand how to use on-ramp, off-ramps, and turn lanes, really annoy me.
Look, people, that lane exists for a reason. You are supposed to enter at the speed you're already going, the speed of the road you're already on. And you're supposed to finish at the speed you need to be on the new road. That is the function of those things.
You do not slow down before you get in, unless you need to because there are already people there. (And you don't speed up before you get in, although that doesn't really bother me. Speeding up can't make other cars go faster, where slowing down will make them go slower.)
You do not speed up when you leave it. You should already be at that speed for onramps and offramps. Turn lanes, not so much. Obviously, if it's an offramp and there's a stop sign or traffic light, the end speed is supposed to be 'zero'.
That is the point of those things. We spent billions to make roads between highways and surface streets so that people didn't have to slow down on the highway or speed up on the surface street. Please actually use those roads for their intended purpose. Start at one speed, finish at another. Hopefully in some sort of smooth transition instead of attempting to gain or lose all the speed near the end, but, honestly, that's a minor issue.
The thing that's really fun is the few times when it's a left side on-ramp. There's a place in Atlanta, when you're headed east on the Perimeter, and want to exit to 400, where you merge in from the left...and morons sit there and wait for an opening. Hey, it's a damn onramp, not a fucking stop sign. You can't sit and wait for a gap between cars going 70mph where you can pull out!
Correct.
In fact, not only will backing up help avoid creating stop-and-go traffic, it help get rid of it once it exists. Get back four or five car lengths, and let the damn stop-and-go average out.
Stop and go traffic is contagious. It's like a cold. Someone starts it, usually from following too closely and having to break. People catch it from the cars in front of them, and pass it on to cars behind them, and then get cured naturally.
If you refuse to get 'infected', if you back off far enough that their stop and go doesn't make you stop, yeah, you don't get there any faster, you can't go through the cars in front of you. But you're not going to get there slower, and you'll get there with less gas usage and less wear-and-tear on your car. And the same for all the cars behind you, and very shortly, the entire mess will be over. (As soon as the people in front of you are cured of it.)
This is, in fact, often how outbreaks of stop and go disappear by themselves. Eventually, without consciously doing it, often just with poor reflexes, people average it into non-existence.
The problem, of course, is all the idiots who jump in front of you when you back off far enough to make it totally disappear. And their jumping in front of you makes you brake, starting a new case of stop-and-go.
You've pegged Atlanta. Here, people tend to be somewhat nice drivers. (As opposed to, for example, New York City, where they are horrible mean.) But very, very fast on the highways.
And, for some totally inexplicably reason, the Downtown Connector has a frickin speed limit of 55, so people are constantly going about 20 over, or about 10 over what it should be. (The greatest stunt ever.)
For those of you who don't know what the Connector is, that's where I-75 and I-85, the main north-south roads, merge into one giant superroad. 16 lanes of traffic in some places, 300,000+ cars a day.
All going 80 miles an hour. Down a road that doesn't have a medium, or a shoulder half the time. (The road essentially goes underneath the city streets, straight through both Downtown and Midtown, with walls down the side and buildings on top of them looming over the road.)
OTOH, people will, in fact, let you into traffic on the surface streets, and not attempt to wedge their car up your ass or cut you off.
I also didn't like how ActiveX morphed from a special browser-only technology into a synonym for COM and then into a replacement for OLE.
ActiveX was never a browser-only technology. It was just they referred to the embedding of COM controls in web pages as ActiveX, and eventually started renaming everything 'ActiveX'.
For people who don't know what we're talking about: COM started as a way to embed DLLs that provided specific functional in programs, essentially, 'plugins' that program builders could use that all operated much the same way. I.e., a lot of them you could mark out part of the application and have them responsible for drawing it, and receive signals when they part was active, etc.
Developers could go out and license, for example, a nice TIFF control to embed a picture in their application, or whatever. All the 'common controls' soon moved to this format. They contained all their 'header' information and whatnot inside them, so developers could take a COM file and see what was exported and whatnot in a consistent manner.
Like I said, it's like shared libraries, except all the functions are named and accessible via consistent means. They all use the same way to do things, so you can load them into your application without knowing what they are. (And hand over part of your document to them, or whatever.)
Creators could even do things like license these controls, where people could redistribute them, but not program using them.
ActiveX essentially is COM and OLE2. This were .ocx controls, the successor to .vbx controls, which is where the X in ActiveX comes from. (For those of you who remember your history, the very first version of this was called OLE, Object Linking and Embedding.)
All in all, this not a bad idea. In fact, most OSes have something like it...OSes start off with something like DDE or shared memory, and then end up with higher level functionality built on that to allow you to consistently embed parts of applications in others. Linux has something called, I believe, DCOP.
The problem came about when Microsoft started letting those DLLs be embedded in its web browser, instead of making people write DLLs with customer entry points and functionality, like Netscape had done. (And then it started renaming everything to ActiveX.)
I can see why it did it, in fact, using the COM format to embed controls makes sense, it's letting it use the existing controls that was the problem.
Strictly speaking, the GP is right. The reason that ActiveX is more vulnerable than Firefox is there are a lot more ActiveX controls than Firefox plugins. (Not to be confused with Firefox Addons, which seem to be fairly secure, and are pieces of javascript. Firefox plugins are things like the PDF viewer that Acrobat installs, etc.)
However, the reason there are a lot more ActiveX controls is a, tada, bad design. It's because ActiveX fundamentally lets you embed all sorts of stuff that came with the operating system and random applications and were not designed to be controlled by a web page. Stuff around from before web browsers!
So Microsoft has to kill each of these, one at a time. That's what the '175 killbits' is talking about....something like 125 of those were on things that it should not have been possible to load in a web browser anyway, but Microsoft decided it would be great fun if you could load all those fancy new signed-DLLs-under-another-name in a web browser. And companies that had been putting out ActiveX controls and had never had to worry about security before, because they were selling a PDF rendering control to software developers to embed in their app, suddenly found out how insecure they were.
Aka, is your car secure, right now? Yes? Alright, let's transport these dangerous criminals in it. What do you mean, it's not secure from that direction?
And this isn't helped by the fact that ActiveX controls are so easy to install. I'm not talking about malicious ones, those are easy also, but legitimate good ActiveX controls, which are signed by a legit company and everything.
And they work for two years, and web design moves on...and eventually a hole is discovered in them...and crackers download that version, put it up on their web site, and wait for people to click Yes to install this clearly legit control, signed by Macromedia or whatever, so they can buffer overflow it.
Oh, look. Have to issue a killbit for that also.
The large proliferation of ActiveX controls vs. the small proliferation of Netscapian plugins is why ActiveX is so vulnerable, but the first is entirely due to a rather stupid design decision at the start of IE that let web page designers use random ActiveX controls (Which everyone forgets were not invented for web browsers, but existed before as DLLs with well defined embedding mechanisms.) in a web browser
No, Netscape's Web Accelerator connects to a compressing proxy server for their dialup service. It recompresses images to lower quality and makes all pages gzipped. That's it. I'm not even sure it does any caching.
I'm fairly confused as to how this doesn't work on Linux, as it's a browser proxy, but don't care enough to actually look into it.
Which means all this talk about switching OSes is nonsense. He's someone using a $6.99 a month dialup internet connection, he can't afford a new computer!
Of course, apparently the idea of using Netscape's web browser, or Firefox, both which surely would work with Netscape Web Accelerator and would protect him from ActiveX, doesn't occur to him. (Granted, it doesn't seems to have occurred to anyone else here either.)
I appreciate that there's diseases that are misdiagnosed and others that we haven't properly diagnosed yet, but a lot of chemically or electromagnetically sensitive people have no problems being around the things that cause them endless torment as long as they don't know it's there, like when it's under a different name.
I, OTOH, get annoyed by flashing lights even when I don't consciously notice them. (Of course, annoyed and disabled are not the same thing.)
In fact, there are two specific places that I always forget can have flashing lights turned on. One is a office with a bad florescence, the other is a fan under a inset ceiling light.
Whenever those happen to be on, and I don't notice it right away, after about two minutes I'll start looking around trying to figure out what the hell is wrong. (And then remember where I am, and the answer is always 'there's a flashing light at this location'.)
And it's not just those places. I've been out with friends and notice something is wrong, and eventually think 'Maybe it's the lights', and pay attention, and, sure enough, I'll catch them flickering if I'm watching.
Somehow, my mind likes to alter me to flashing lights by making me feel uncomfortable. Even after I realize it's the light doing it, I still feel that way.
I suspect this is entirely 'psychosomatic', I'm not even sure there's any objective way for someone to become 'uncomfortable', and there's not really any way to test this.
To rephrase, 'abilities' are not paranormal. Explanations are paranormal, or not.
Someone who can see through walls 'magically' is paranormal. Someone who can see through walls because he can see infrared, either via technology or because his eyes are very strange and can actually see infrared (Which should be easily demonstrable with scientific testing.), is not.
Incidentally, it's nearly impossible to come up with a way people's eyes could see infrared, which is why I used ultraviolet in my other example, which people could plausibly see if they had added cones in their eye for it. Incoming infrared light would be very hard see vs. the amount your body, and hence parts of your eyes, are already putting out.
Which is probably the reason that no animal was ever evolved such an ability, despite it presumably being incredibly useful for night animals. Seeing UV, OTOH, wouldn't be that helpful, and wouldn't help at all at night, which is why no animal evolved that either.
Paranormal usually means 'Not able to to be done by science', so I, personally, would not include anything we can do with science.
I.e, I tend to require paranormal abilities to be something that impossible even with technological help. Otherwise, it's just someone demonstrating an ability we didn't know human bodies had, which is easy.
I mean, until 50 years ago, we didn't know human bodies had the ability to a mile in 4 minutes. If someone were to demonstrate that it's possible in three and a half minutes, that is not paranormal.
Likewise, if someone demonstrated the ability to see ultraviolet, and close examination of their eyes reveals that, in fact, they have a fourth cone that can see that UV, I think everyone would agree that is not 'paranormal' in any meaningful sense. They are some cool mutant or something, but not paranormal.
Same if someone demonstrated they can detect magnetic fields, or even radio waves, using some part of the human body we did not realize was usable for that purpose.
But I am, of course, not James Randi. (Well, I am, but I can't prove it.) I don't know what definitions that organization uses.
Seconded. That doesn't just sound like tinnitus, it pretty clearly is tinnitus.
It can be caused by all sorts of things, including quite a few that can result in hearing loss.
Indeed.
People hear 'radiation' and think 'Oh, it must be shielded very well'.
Well, it's not, because microwave radiation is not particularly dangerous to people.
Microwaves are used because they vibrate water, and we are, indeed, made of water, but that just means we'd get hotter, not cancer. (Cancer requires vibrating DNA, which is an entirely different size than water molecules.)
We could probably operate microwaves without doors and not be particularly harmed by them...
Oh, and of course, anyone with metal inside their body would be in rather a lot of trouble, as microwaves heat metal up a lot better than water.
And there's the guy who's claim wasn't paranormal, but they (and him) agreed to have him tested anyway.
The guy's ability was that he could recognize the music on records by using his fingertips.
And he could.
However, everyone had agreed beforehand that this wasn't 'paranormal' and didn't count for the prize.
Don't feel embarrassed. Anyone can have psychosomatic symptoms. I once ate the same place as someone, and he felt ill later and hypothesized it was food poisoning, and I felt a little queasy all day. It was not food poisoning, and I was not the slightest bit sick.
Once there's a 'reason' you should feel sick, and you actually start asking yourself if you do feel sick, it is very easy to believe you do.
Intelligent people, however, are the ones willing to say 'Well, okay, I guess that was in my head'. Just like intelligent people who think wifi hurts their head should, well, stop once it's demonstrated it does not.
It's the fools who remain convinced in the face of scientific evidence that are the problem.
No he wouldn't. The human body detecting radio waves is not paranormal. It's not possible based on the biology of the humans, but detection of radio waves is not a paranormal ability, or all radios would be paranormal.
The Randi foundation. however, probably would be willing to test him, like they tested that other guy with the 'impossible' ability to read record grooves with his fingertips. (Which, it turns out, he could.)