The jaywalking law isn't for your own protection. It's not even to reduce medical costs. It's a traffic control law, which not only protects you, but others also.
Specifically, people swerving to avoid your ass. (I originally typed 'serving' as 'swearing'. Freudian typo.) People swerving all over the place cause accidents, especially in intersections, which is incidentally why you are not supposed to change lanes in them.
Until you can figure out some way to make people willing to casually run over you, jaywalking will harm other people as they try to miss you.
In fact, people casually running over you cause rather serious damage to others, also, with you flying around the intersection, denting up cars and even breaking windshields.
Jaywalking is not a victimless crime. It's rather akin to letting people commit suicide by jumping off buildings. Yes, that mostly harms the person doing it, but the people whose car they land on won't be too happy about it either, or even the people who heard someone was going to jump and had to move their cars.
If people wish to seriously injury themselves via automobile, they should be required to get someone to drive them down a deserted stretch of road at high speeds and then leap out of the car via the passenger door.
Oh, I get it. You're one of those America-haters. You think Americans are so damn stupid and sheeplike that they don't realize they are no long in control of their own country, despite all the obvious signs.
Well, we're not. You'd have to be some sort of total moron not to realize we lost control of the government decades ago, and, Mr. America-Hater, if there is one thing Americans are not, it's stupid layabouts who believe anything our leaders tell us and that we actually matter at all to them.
Hell, no. Americans have a proud tradition of fighting 'the man'. We're intelligent free citizens, not sheeplike subjects.
This country was invented because our rulers were distant and uncaring. In the Civil War, the South broke off because it felt like it didn't have enough political control, which even if you don't agree with what they would use the power for, you have to admire. And we idolize people who've stood up for their rights. There are people alive today who got beaten in the streets by police in the 60s because they were standing up for the rights of complete strangers!
This country has always stood against tyranny, both internal and external, and has always had people willing to take up arms and fight the fight themselves. If you think Americans are so stupid they don't know they've lost control of the government, or so cowed that they wouldn't fight back, well, I dunno what to think of you. You don't live in the same America I read about in the history books.
Thus, logically, the only reason we haven't fought back is that we have no guns. Q.E.D.
I've did that once, back in 2000. Filled in the little ovals with a pencil.
But the last time, in 2004, they gave me a memory stick and stuck me in front of a computer that said some stuff on the screen.
So I pushed some buttons, but then couldn't figure out how to see what was on the card because I didn't have anything to read it with. I asked if I could go get my laptop with a cardreader to view the card to make sure it stored my vote correctly (I didn't actually have a cardreader, nor knew the format of the card, but it was a test.) but they seem horrified at this idea.
They instead ran it though a machine and said it was fine, but as they rather obviously couldn't tell me who'd I'd voted for, I don't really see what the point of that was.
So, no, I didn't vote in 2004. I put a card in a machine and pushed some buttons on the machine and gave the card back.
I didn't it was 'illegal', you lunatic, I said it was 'restricted'. The words 'legal' or 'illegal' didn't appear anywhere in my post.
It is quite correct to refer to a civil infraction as 'restricted behavior'. For example, 'Copyright law restricts copying of some material' or 'I am restricted in using images or real people in advertising without their permission.'. If you can be punished, in the court system, for a specific behavior, that behavior is restricted.
It doesn't matter if it's the government punishing you, or a third party operating through the government court system. It's a restriction. In this case, it's a restriction because it's a tort, it actually harms someone else.
And considering my point was the SEC should fine people, I was actually suggesting it be made illegal in certain, political circumstances. If it's constitutional for third parties to sue for a certain tort, it's constitutional for the US government to make it illegal and prosecute for it.
The KKK has the right to bear arms, just like they have the right to free speech. Random people, or even the government, don't get to pick and choose what rights other people have, people simply have rights, period.
Of course, that obviously doesn't give them the right to use those guns in an illegal manner.
The heart may be in the right place, but the issue isn't who can communicate how.
What we need to do is to fine political candidates who lie, and the media that reports these lies without verification.
The ideal solution would be to have the media jump on them, but as the media is a bunch of lazy fuckers who would reprint slander about the Pope having sex with a goat if someone anonymously faxed it in, that seems unlikely to happen, and we need to start punishing them too.
Remember, slander is an already allowed restriction on free speech.
The question was, for a decade: Cheap commodity hardware running a cheap and somewhat crappy OS you'd have to constantly maintain, or expensive proprietary hardware running a good OS that you could stick in the corner and forget.
Linux blew that completely out of the water by having the best of both. As a bonus, it runs on even cheaper hardware than Windows would, and if you have any expensive proprietary hardware, you can run Linux on that too.
Combine that with the best SMB file server, the best web server, and some damn good mail servers, and it's really inevitable. Oh yeah, and it's free.
People act like the competition is in the desktop market, which confuses the hell out of me. People, in general, do not choose what OS is on their desktop. They either live with what the store put on it, or must use what the IT guys did, so loses and gains there do not really reflect anything except what those external people thought.
I use Azureus (Of course, I have a Pentium 2600 and 384 megs of memory) and, yes, it's slow and bloated. The only reason I use it is because of its magic uPNP stuff that makes it work when I take my laptop to different networks, and the fact it will create empty files for the torrents before it downloads, reducing fragmentation. (I could probably find another client that does that, however.)
I think MS is having a lot of problems with their rendering engine. It seems to basically be a little better than the Netscape 4 engine, and there's a reason that entire thing was scrapped. Hack on top of hack on top of hack. (The sad thing being that half of it was apparently rewritten from IE5, just apparently not very well.) I actually used to read a blog about this at MS, I forget where. (The blog was at MS, not I.)
However, the Mozilla took a hell of a long time to write an engine correctly, and IE7 is already in beta, so they obviously haven't fixed theirs.
I can't really complain about WMP's UI, because almost all media players were apparently designed by a 13-year olds, starting with Winamp. Which is why I use foobar2000 and Media Player Classic, but that's just me.
I could get into a whole rant on this, but I won't. Maybe people actually enjoy craptacular interfaces with random shaped windows and funky fonts and odd controls. It's not for me to judge, because I don't have to code for them like I do for IE.;) I just find it funny my non-native-widget Web browser looks more native than WMP, something made by MS.
The actual 'how to do things' in WMP seems okay, though, the few times I've used it. Assuming it can do what you want it to. It seemed to limit itself to only the features that 80% of the users would need, often stopping short in inexplicable places.
That last sentence could actually be applied to Windows in general. For example..you can burn files...but not ISOs. Huh? Burning an ISO is less work for the OS.
I sometimes wonder if they don't cripple their products not so that users don't get confused, but so they have some apparent competition, while they have in fact made off with 80% of that market.
A stylesheet should put those things in, not take them out.
The new normal-mode slashdot doesn't appear to be more complex than the original light version. In fact, it doesn't look to be more complex than the current light version.
Maybe you should look at the HTML instead of just assuming what's there. Almost everything is done in CSS.
Damn, this is weird looking. And you're kinda right, while I'm not a OSS zealot, I am an FF zealot, simply because I'm a damn web designer and IE annoys the hell out of me with its broken standards. I'd actually rather IE get fixed than FF win, though. Competition is good. FF, at this point, has basically won by default when IE didn't show up at the race, and the only reason it actually hasn't won is that the competition is so entrenched.
Anyway, FF is designed in a way I would not design a product, with large sections of it and its extensions written in Javascript. However, it seems to be working, and there have been some very innovative (Assuming Microsoft hasn't forever made a mockery of that word.) extensions that, thanks to them basically working identical to the original code, can be added by the devs without any work. Nice scam.;)
I'm thinking of the All-in-One sidebar, NoScript, WebDeveloper, Adblock, Link Toolbar, etc, all of which MS would do well to look at.
The real plus side there is that once the Javascript engine itself is mature, as it appears to be, quite a lot of the rest is trivial and window dressing. FF is, in many ways, a platform instead of a program. (Witness FireFTP, an FTP client that runs inside FF.)
As for IE, it's mostly well-designed product that was probably the best web browser available when it first came out. The problems it has is three-fold:
1) It's incredibly old. Seriously. What's the rule of thumb? An internet year is an RL month? IE6 is like 60 years old!
2) MS, while they design nice, usable software (Except, inexplicably, Windows Media Player, whose UI was designed by a 13-year old.),they can't seem to design secure software. I'm sure they have all sort of processes and whatnot, and none of them even vaguely seem to include 'always input-check for buffer overruns' and 'trust no one'. Why the hell do they have so much problems here? (This is supposed to be fixed in IE7, but it was 'supposed' to be fixed several times before.)
3) They don't seem to be willing to support standards. This is the major thing that annoys me. And, no it's not always due to age.
There are several pre-IE6 standards it doesn't support correctly, like the blatant issue with transparent PNG, which IE6 can do with some weird Javascript hack, so we know the damn code is there. There's Howard Dean's infamous 'IE7' hack that manages to fix a lot of CSS issues with Javascipt. Look, Microsoft, if other people can do it, in Javascript no less, there's no excuse for you not doing it. (Yet this is apparently not planned for IE7. Bastards.)
Erm, I don't know where you got the idea I was a zealot.
The point I was making is that 'mature' comes about because of releases, not 'age'. Microsoft Office is very mature. (And has managed to avoid all the pitfalls so far.) Windows XP is getting mature for the NT line. (And, sadly, has fallen victim to the 'Legacy compatibility' one.)
Internet Explorer is not mature. IE6 was a near-total rewrite of IE5 (Which somewhat 'resets' the maturity of the product.), and then bugfixes for half a decade. Things do not become mature by patching security holes every month. (They, apparently, don't even become secure.)
On the plus side, that means it hasn't fallen victim to any of the downsides, either. It's not bloated (Well, not more than what it started with.) it's not really legacy compatible, and its lack of flexibility is not due to its maturity.
And the security work has made it fairly stable if nothing else.
Firefox, OTOH, is almost as immature, and had a 'reset' at roughly the same point in the past when Netscape was open-sourced and completely rewritten, but it's immature because it's changing too fast at the moment, and when it settles down it should be fairly mature.
Mature code is what you get when you constantly have a competant development team making regular updates and occasionally pruning code, with a whole lot of testing in there. This, in theory, allows you to remove bugs without adding new ones, and work towards some sort of 'ideal' release. Neither Mozilla or IE are anywhere near this concept.
I use to not like the bar either, but I realized the only solution is to disable installing software entirely. Otherwise, malware sites will just walk the user through installing their crap.
You could bury the option three deep in the menu and requiring four checks in different dialogs, and idiots would do it so they can install a 'file viewer' to see their porn.
And if no software was installable through the web browser, we'd just go back to 'manual download and install' of malware.
Thirdly, it is highly unlikely that MS wants to leave bugs unconfirmed because it may make the person who discovered it feel ignored and release the exact details to the public without MS having a patch ready.
What the fuck is wrong with people? Do you just not read the comments? There are tons of currently unconfirmed by MS security issues in IE.
If the actual door locks are networked, then there's even less reason to put any person on the card. If the door really wants to know the name of the person, it can just look it up.
What they need to do if they want to stop piracy, right now, is fix conditions in movie theaters. Bring back ushers, put at least one in each showing, and give them the authority to remove anyone who is acting stupid or brought infants.
Nowdays it's like they are operating with exactly four people...one at the ticket windows, one at the counter, one to take your ticket, and one hiding somewhere that pushes the button to start the movie. Heaven forbid if you need focus or the sound screws up.
Look, teenagers will work at movie places for extremely low wages if you let them see free movies and give them a free fountain drink. Well...stick them in uniform, give them some rules, and let them watch the movie. If anything stupid is going on, they have to deal with it, otherwise they can watch the movie.
Of course, this is completely impossible. Why?
The reason theaters don't have ushers is that they make a buck fifty on each person watching a movie, and movie studios get a percentage, so they can't just raise their prices...if they want to make an extra one dollar per person to pay for an usher, they have to raise prices like four dollars.
The obvious solution is a flat-rate. Give all theaters in an area the same movie for the same price per person, and let them charge more but have cheaper food, or charge more and have more service, or be dirt-cheap with crappy service and expensive food, like all theaters are currently.
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By that logic, I'm protecting your car when I assert I will not steal it.
Specifically, people swerving to avoid your ass. (I originally typed 'serving' as 'swearing'. Freudian typo.) People swerving all over the place cause accidents, especially in intersections, which is incidentally why you are not supposed to change lanes in them.
Until you can figure out some way to make people willing to casually run over you, jaywalking will harm other people as they try to miss you.
In fact, people casually running over you cause rather serious damage to others, also, with you flying around the intersection, denting up cars and even breaking windshields.
Jaywalking is not a victimless crime. It's rather akin to letting people commit suicide by jumping off buildings. Yes, that mostly harms the person doing it, but the people whose car they land on won't be too happy about it either, or even the people who heard someone was going to jump and had to move their cars.
If people wish to seriously injury themselves via automobile, they should be required to get someone to drive them down a deserted stretch of road at high speeds and then leap out of the car via the passenger door.
If we had guns we would have used them by now.
Oh, I get it. You're one of those America-haters. You think Americans are so damn stupid and sheeplike that they don't realize they are no long in control of their own country, despite all the obvious signs.
Well, we're not. You'd have to be some sort of total moron not to realize we lost control of the government decades ago, and, Mr. America-Hater, if there is one thing Americans are not, it's stupid layabouts who believe anything our leaders tell us and that we actually matter at all to them.
Hell, no. Americans have a proud tradition of fighting 'the man'. We're intelligent free citizens, not sheeplike subjects.
This country was invented because our rulers were distant and uncaring. In the Civil War, the South broke off because it felt like it didn't have enough political control, which even if you don't agree with what they would use the power for, you have to admire. And we idolize people who've stood up for their rights. There are people alive today who got beaten in the streets by police in the 60s because they were standing up for the rights of complete strangers!
This country has always stood against tyranny, both internal and external, and has always had people willing to take up arms and fight the fight themselves. If you think Americans are so stupid they don't know they've lost control of the government, or so cowed that they wouldn't fight back, well, I dunno what to think of you. You don't live in the same America I read about in the history books.
Thus, logically, the only reason we haven't fought back is that we have no guns. Q.E.D.
Wait. We do have guns.
Oh, SHIT.
But the last time, in 2004, they gave me a memory stick and stuck me in front of a computer that said some stuff on the screen.
So I pushed some buttons, but then couldn't figure out how to see what was on the card because I didn't have anything to read it with. I asked if I could go get my laptop with a cardreader to view the card to make sure it stored my vote correctly (I didn't actually have a cardreader, nor knew the format of the card, but it was a test.) but they seem horrified at this idea.
They instead ran it though a machine and said it was fine, but as they rather obviously couldn't tell me who'd I'd voted for, I don't really see what the point of that was.
So, no, I didn't vote in 2004. I put a card in a machine and pushed some buttons on the machine and gave the card back.
It is quite correct to refer to a civil infraction as 'restricted behavior'. For example, 'Copyright law restricts copying of some material' or 'I am restricted in using images or real people in advertising without their permission.'. If you can be punished, in the court system, for a specific behavior, that behavior is restricted.
It doesn't matter if it's the government punishing you, or a third party operating through the government court system. It's a restriction. In this case, it's a restriction because it's a tort, it actually harms someone else.
And considering my point was the SEC should fine people, I was actually suggesting it be made illegal in certain, political circumstances. If it's constitutional for third parties to sue for a certain tort, it's constitutional for the US government to make it illegal and prosecute for it.
Of course, that obviously doesn't give them the right to use those guns in an illegal manner.
What we need to do is to fine political candidates who lie, and the media that reports these lies without verification.
The ideal solution would be to have the media jump on them, but as the media is a bunch of lazy fuckers who would reprint slander about the Pope having sex with a goat if someone anonymously faxed it in, that seems unlikely to happen, and we need to start punishing them too.
Remember, slander is an already allowed restriction on free speech.
I don't understand. How's that supposed to happen? Do we have some magical way of getting the government to do what we want?
You are aware they have guns, right?
The question was, for a decade: Cheap commodity hardware running a cheap and somewhat crappy OS you'd have to constantly maintain, or expensive proprietary hardware running a good OS that you could stick in the corner and forget.
Linux blew that completely out of the water by having the best of both. As a bonus, it runs on even cheaper hardware than Windows would, and if you have any expensive proprietary hardware, you can run Linux on that too.
Combine that with the best SMB file server, the best web server, and some damn good mail servers, and it's really inevitable. Oh yeah, and it's free.
People act like the competition is in the desktop market, which confuses the hell out of me. People, in general, do not choose what OS is on their desktop. They either live with what the store put on it, or must use what the IT guys did, so loses and gains there do not really reflect anything except what those external people thought.
And there's the nice NoScript extension that not only disabled Javascript for you, but lets you enable it on certain sites.
His BASIC interpeter is an actual Turing machine. ;)
However, I have to point out that doesn't really 'add 1 to the number you input', it keeps the original number, displaying it as it adds 1.
Also, it doesn't appear to work with imaginary numbers or transfinites.
It can be set to always view a certain site in IE.
No only are my whites whiter, my blues are now pale green!
I use Azureus (Of course, I have a Pentium 2600 and 384 megs of memory) and, yes, it's slow and bloated. The only reason I use it is because of its magic uPNP stuff that makes it work when I take my laptop to different networks, and the fact it will create empty files for the torrents before it downloads, reducing fragmentation. (I could probably find another client that does that, however.)
However, the Mozilla took a hell of a long time to write an engine correctly, and IE7 is already in beta, so they obviously haven't fixed theirs.
I can't really complain about WMP's UI, because almost all media players were apparently designed by a 13-year olds, starting with Winamp. Which is why I use foobar2000 and Media Player Classic, but that's just me.
I could get into a whole rant on this, but I won't. Maybe people actually enjoy craptacular interfaces with random shaped windows and funky fonts and odd controls. It's not for me to judge, because I don't have to code for them like I do for IE. ;) I just find it funny my non-native-widget Web browser looks more native than WMP, something made by MS.
The actual 'how to do things' in WMP seems okay, though, the few times I've used it. Assuming it can do what you want it to. It seemed to limit itself to only the features that 80% of the users would need, often stopping short in inexplicable places.
That last sentence could actually be applied to Windows in general. For example..you can burn files...but not ISOs. Huh? Burning an ISO is less work for the OS.
I sometimes wonder if they don't cripple their products not so that users don't get confused, but so they have some apparent competition, while they have in fact made off with 80% of that market.
A stylesheet should put those things in, not take them out.
The new normal-mode slashdot doesn't appear to be more complex than the original light version. In fact, it doesn't look to be more complex than the current light version.
Maybe you should look at the HTML instead of just assuming what's there. Almost everything is done in CSS.
Anyway, FF is designed in a way I would not design a product, with large sections of it and its extensions written in Javascript. However, it seems to be working, and there have been some very innovative (Assuming Microsoft hasn't forever made a mockery of that word.) extensions that, thanks to them basically working identical to the original code, can be added by the devs without any work. Nice scam. ;)
I'm thinking of the All-in-One sidebar, NoScript, WebDeveloper, Adblock, Link Toolbar, etc, all of which MS would do well to look at.
The real plus side there is that once the Javascript engine itself is mature, as it appears to be, quite a lot of the rest is trivial and window dressing. FF is, in many ways, a platform instead of a program. (Witness FireFTP, an FTP client that runs inside FF.)
As for IE, it's mostly well-designed product that was probably the best web browser available when it first came out. The problems it has is three-fold:
1) It's incredibly old. Seriously. What's the rule of thumb? An internet year is an RL month? IE6 is like 60 years old!
2) MS, while they design nice, usable software (Except, inexplicably, Windows Media Player, whose UI was designed by a 13-year old.),they can't seem to design secure software. I'm sure they have all sort of processes and whatnot, and none of them even vaguely seem to include 'always input-check for buffer overruns' and 'trust no one'. Why the hell do they have so much problems here? (This is supposed to be fixed in IE7, but it was 'supposed' to be fixed several times before.)
3) They don't seem to be willing to support standards. This is the major thing that annoys me. And, no it's not always due to age.
There are several pre-IE6 standards it doesn't support correctly, like the blatant issue with transparent PNG, which IE6 can do with some weird Javascript hack, so we know the damn code is there. There's Howard Dean's infamous 'IE7' hack that manages to fix a lot of CSS issues with Javascipt. Look, Microsoft, if other people can do it, in Javascript no less, there's no excuse for you not doing it. (Yet this is apparently not planned for IE7. Bastards.)
The point I was making is that 'mature' comes about because of releases, not 'age'. Microsoft Office is very mature. (And has managed to avoid all the pitfalls so far.) Windows XP is getting mature for the NT line. (And, sadly, has fallen victim to the 'Legacy compatibility' one.)
Internet Explorer is not mature. IE6 was a near-total rewrite of IE5 (Which somewhat 'resets' the maturity of the product.), and then bugfixes for half a decade. Things do not become mature by patching security holes every month. (They, apparently, don't even become secure.)
On the plus side, that means it hasn't fallen victim to any of the downsides, either. It's not bloated (Well, not more than what it started with.) it's not really legacy compatible, and its lack of flexibility is not due to its maturity.
And the security work has made it fairly stable if nothing else.
Firefox, OTOH, is almost as immature, and had a 'reset' at roughly the same point in the past when Netscape was open-sourced and completely rewritten, but it's immature because it's changing too fast at the moment, and when it settles down it should be fairly mature.
Mature code is what you get when you constantly have a competant development team making regular updates and occasionally pruning code, with a whole lot of testing in there. This, in theory, allows you to remove bugs without adding new ones, and work towards some sort of 'ideal' release. Neither Mozilla or IE are anywhere near this concept.
You could bury the option three deep in the menu and requiring four checks in different dialogs, and idiots would do it so they can install a 'file viewer' to see their porn.
And if no software was installable through the web browser, we'd just go back to 'manual download and install' of malware.
If so, taht's pretty much automatically flawed, comparing the numbers of one product to the numbers of two.
What the fuck is wrong with people? Do you just not read the comments? There are tons of currently unconfirmed by MS security issues in IE.
This is because it's not 'mature' in the traditional sense of the word, because it has sat still and let the world pass it by.
If it had been constantly updated the last five years, it would be 'mature'. It's not, it's just 'old'.
If the actual door locks are networked, then there's even less reason to put any person on the card. If the door really wants to know the name of the person, it can just look it up.
And don't blame the studios for Firefly being made into a movie. Blame the Fox channel from canceling the show. No one wanted it to be a movie.
Nowdays it's like they are operating with exactly four people...one at the ticket windows, one at the counter, one to take your ticket, and one hiding somewhere that pushes the button to start the movie. Heaven forbid if you need focus or the sound screws up.
Look, teenagers will work at movie places for extremely low wages if you let them see free movies and give them a free fountain drink. Well...stick them in uniform, give them some rules, and let them watch the movie. If anything stupid is going on, they have to deal with it, otherwise they can watch the movie.
Of course, this is completely impossible. Why?
The reason theaters don't have ushers is that they make a buck fifty on each person watching a movie, and movie studios get a percentage, so they can't just raise their prices...if they want to make an extra one dollar per person to pay for an usher, they have to raise prices like four dollars.
The obvious solution is a flat-rate. Give all theaters in an area the same movie for the same price per person, and let them charge more but have cheaper food, or charge more and have more service, or be dirt-cheap with crappy service and expensive food, like all theaters are currently.