There were some really good ones I've read, but they were on government run sites and have been taken down. Here are some articles that indirectly support what I'm saying.
A conspicuously biased study from a lobby group. No responsible safety professional would define safety solely in terms of probability of accidents; it has to be scaled according to the severity of the accident. Sure, there may be more likelihood of an accident at low speed than at high speed, but if one results in a dented fender and the other results in me and my family smeared all over the highway then they're hardly equivalent.
Another biased report from the same lobby group. If you read the report that it links to you will see that "when the casualty accidents at signalised intersections was plotted [...] it can be seen that while there is a small decrease in right-thru accidents in 1989 it is nowhere near the same magnitude of change as at the 41 RLC sites. The drop at the 41 sites was more than 30%" (my emphasis). Again, your lobby group is selectively reporting, only looking at accidents, not the severity (although in this case it doesn't matter much, because the report they cite goes on to say in the conclusions that the quality data available to the study pretty poor, so the conclusions aren't up to much anyway. Something else the lobby group didn't mention).
Add to that: the smiles are all just the mouth smiling. If you watch someone smile, it's a complete facial expression, not just the lips changing orientation to the horizontal axis. The eyes narrow and cant upward at the outside, cheeks change shape slightly due to muscle tensions, hell the hairline and ears even move slightly.
Real smiles, yes. The sort of fake smiles we're all used to seeing on corporate promos, no. So they got away with that as far as I'm concerned.
Correct. The British rule is essentially that unless the quote is a whole sentence the punctuation goes outside the quote marks. But the GP was correct to call foul on the GGP for an attempted pedantic correction that wasn't necessarily true.
I find this hard to believe. I live in the UK and we use textbooks just fine, though perhaps we use less. The professor has to actually have a better knowledge than the author for this to be beneficial.
I live in the UK too. Most of my professors *were* the authors of their set texts. One lecturer just read verbatim from the compulsory set text each lecture. If anybody asked him a question, he would just read the relevant paragraph again. The coursework element was attendance -- to pass the course we had to turn up to most of these futile lectures. Others were better, but by far the best lecturers were the ones who didn't set a text but used the lectures to get us so fired up about the subject that we'd go and research it ourselves.
I'd really hate that, because I like to read the book myself
The mistake there is with the phrase "the book". What book? There are *many* on *any* undergraduate subject. On the courses I've done that didn't have textbooks I went down to the college library and checked out books (plural) on the subject. I not only found the ones that explained the subject in a way that was clear *to* *me*, I also found alternative views and approaches that I wouldn't have found had I limited myself to one set text. It made such a difference to my understanding of those subjects that I now do it even on classes that do have set texts, and leave the other students wondering why I get such good grades. Set texts are not the only way to go, but they may be the most lucrative way to go for the publishers and for the professors who set their own books for their classes.
You can spend 2 weeks learning all that stuff and get fired for not getting your work done, or spend an hour playing around in excel/access and get the same stuff done without getting fired. Take your pick of what most people will do...
Yeah, I once lost a Christmas and New Year holiday because somebody had coded an application like that, that just happened to be a critical app for the company. When it gave wrong answers, and the person who had coded it couldn't sort it out because it was such a mess [1] they called me in to redesign it from scratch and import the data. I gained kudos, and probably saved the head of the person who did the original database, but trying to get to the office when there was no public transport running was a pain in the butt.
Thing is, if the job needs doing, it's almost certainly worth doing right. If your employer loses a lot of money because you neither normalised your database nor put in referential integrity checks on the non-normalised data (basic stuff!) then that's far more likely to get you fired than saying "sorry, our systems aren't designed to give us that information at the moment".
[1] They'd made a non-unique element a primary key. Whenever the database wouldn't let them add an entry because it would create a duplicate key, they just cloned the structure of the affected table structure and carried on adding the entries in the new table.
Green on black? We submitted Hollerith cards, and got back output from a golfball printer that was so misaligned that you couldn't easily read along a line even with the green lines preprinted on the paper to help you!
Sounds like a stupid browser problem to me. Which one uses smartquotes?
How do you propose that slashdot support both iso-8859-1 AND unicode simultaneously according to the what stupid commenter wants? What if they want to use UTF-16 next?
The trouble is that there are different definitions of "life", and all of them are problematic. The one you learned at school ("Mrs Gren" -- "Movement, reproduction, sensitivity", etc) was ok for getting through your school exams but isn't good enough once you start dealing with marginal cases (heck, as you point out it's not even good enough to deal with mules), and there's no consensus over how to deal with the marginal cases. That's before we deal with sciences other than biology -- a physicists definition of life is more to do with self-organising structures. "Life" is too vague a term to be used in a precise technical context; you have to say precisely what properties you're talking about.
The issue is with ISPs refusing to publish the connection settings. Tiscali did that to me a few years ago, they told me that the connection settings were about to change and that I had to run their (MS Windows only) installation disc to configure my computer. I'd heard rumours of the disk messing with rival products, so I told them I couldn't run the disk because I was running Linux. They responded that they didn't support Apples (!). Yes, if I had been able to find the SMTP server address, the new dial-up number (this was quite a few years ago!) and so on I would no doubt have been able get a connection, but I reckon that they'd made it clear enough that they didn't want customers with Clue so I left.
Purely a guess: getting nailed to a log just for suggesting that people should try to be a little bit nicer to each other.
Oh yeah, and claiming to be the bastard child of a peasant woman and the supreme deity of a large chunk of the population.
Quite possibly -- he never claimed that, as far as we can tell (others did, later). He does seem to have taken a line of playing the government's game but subverting it (rather than directly opposing it). There's a history of subverting such rules, such as the way PGP got around encryption export regulations by giving the option of the US-produced encryption engine or the compatible scandinavian-produced encryption engine, so that one never had to take the technology across the US border. I can easily see an increase in use of encryption as people become more aware of the issue of the possibility of data interception by governments en-route. Or maybe not -- industial espionage is hardly new (http://www.iht.com/articles/1991/09/14/spy_.php) but I suspect many organisations are still lax.
Who decides what is "reasonable"? The equipment is returned when the investigation is "complete", but I saw nothing in the article saying how long they could take over that investigation. And if you try to sue for return of your property, what could you offer as evidence that the time they are taking is unreasonable, if they claim that more time is still needed (particularly as there's no requirement even of suspicion)?
"You cannot fight global terrorism by turning the USA into a police-state." No actually you hand the terrorists a "WIN" on a silver platter...terrorist goal accomplished.
Er, what terrorist goal would that be? All of the relevant terrorist goals I have heard about involve change of foreign policy, particular with regard to Israel, or of religious policy. Which terrorist group is actually interested in limiting your freedoms in general? Have you been watching Fox News again?
However, nothing at all happened! At customs, they did not even have me open my bags. The only search was the routine scanner upon re-entering the secure area to catch my connecting flight home. It didn't look like anyone else was having any trouble either. The customs folks all looked incredibly bored.
Possibly because you don't look like the officials' preconception of the sort of person they want to make life hard for?
and are thus acting without any authority whatsoever, other than being armed with big guns and no sense of humour.
"Other than"? Pretty effective de facto authority, even if not de jure. Whoever said "a Smith and Wesson or a Colt always beat four aces" was onto something.
Sir, you are welcome to inspect my laptop, but I am afraid there is no information in it. At all.
"In fact, sir, your laptop plainly shows the maker's name, the model number, a serial number, and the letters A through Z on this bit just below the screen. That is plainly information, and it correlates with intelligence I received from "What PC" magazine that this is a highly desirable model, so I will be confiscating it indefinitely."
Slashdot Mirror
There were some really good ones I've read, but they were on government run sites and have been taken down. Here are some articles that indirectly support what I'm saying.
http://www.motorists.org/speedlimits/
A conspicuously biased study from a lobby group. No responsible safety professional would define safety solely in terms of probability of accidents; it has to be scaled according to the severity of the accident. Sure, there may be more likelihood of an accident at low speed than at high speed, but if one results in a dented fender and the other results in me and my family smeared all over the highway then they're hardly equivalent.
http://www.motorists.org/blog/red-light-cameras/red-light-cameras-increase-accidents-5-studies-that-prove-it/
Another biased report from the same lobby group. If you read the report that it links to you will see that "when the casualty accidents at signalised intersections was plotted [...] it can be seen that while there is a small decrease in right-thru accidents in 1989 it is nowhere near the same magnitude of change as at the 41 RLC sites. The drop at the 41 sites was more than 30%" (my emphasis). Again, your lobby group is selectively reporting, only looking at accidents, not the severity (although in this case it doesn't matter much, because the report they cite goes on to say in the conclusions that the quality data available to the study pretty poor, so the conclusions aren't up to much anyway. Something else the lobby group didn't mention).
http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/sl-irrel.html
Enjoy.
Now that was an interesting study -- but it said nothing about safety, only the standard of enforcement in the USA.
Aside from which, studies have shown that cultures without traffic laws have more efficient mobility and reduced accidents
[citation required]
Add to that: the smiles are all just the mouth smiling. If you watch someone smile, it's a complete facial expression, not just the lips changing orientation to the horizontal axis. The eyes narrow and cant upward at the outside, cheeks change shape slightly due to muscle tensions, hell the hairline and ears even move slightly.
Real smiles, yes. The sort of fake smiles we're all used to seeing on corporate promos, no. So they got away with that as far as I'm concerned.
Correct. The British rule is essentially that unless the quote is a whole sentence the punctuation goes outside the quote marks. But the GP was correct to call foul on the GGP for an attempted pedantic correction that wasn't necessarily true.
I find this hard to believe. I live in the UK and we use textbooks just fine, though perhaps we use less. The professor has to actually have a better knowledge than the author for this to be beneficial.
I live in the UK too. Most of my professors *were* the authors of their set texts. One lecturer just read verbatim from the compulsory set text each lecture. If anybody asked him a question, he would just read the relevant paragraph again. The coursework element was attendance -- to pass the course we had to turn up to most of these futile lectures. Others were better, but by far the best lecturers were the ones who didn't set a text but used the lectures to get us so fired up about the subject that we'd go and research it ourselves.
I'd really hate that, because I like to read the book myself
The mistake there is with the phrase "the book". What book? There are *many* on *any* undergraduate subject. On the courses I've done that didn't have textbooks I went down to the college library and checked out books (plural) on the subject. I not only found the ones that explained the subject in a way that was clear *to* *me*, I also found alternative views and approaches that I wouldn't have found had I limited myself to one set text. It made such a difference to my understanding of those subjects that I now do it even on classes that do have set texts, and leave the other students wondering why I get such good grades. Set texts are not the only way to go, but they may be the most lucrative way to go for the publishers and for the professors who set their own books for their classes.
You can spend 2 weeks learning all that stuff and get fired for not getting your work done, or spend an hour playing around in excel/access and get the same stuff done without getting fired. Take your pick of what most people will do...
Yeah, I once lost a Christmas and New Year holiday because somebody had coded an application like that, that just happened to be a critical app for the company. When it gave wrong answers, and the person who had coded it couldn't sort it out because it was such a mess [1] they called me in to redesign it from scratch and import the data. I gained kudos, and probably saved the head of the person who did the original database, but trying to get to the office when there was no public transport running was a pain in the butt.
Thing is, if the job needs doing, it's almost certainly worth doing right. If your employer loses a lot of money because you neither normalised your database nor put in referential integrity checks on the non-normalised data (basic stuff!) then that's far more likely to get you fired than saying "sorry, our systems aren't designed to give us that information at the moment".
[1] They'd made a non-unique element a primary key. Whenever the database wouldn't let them add an entry because it would create a duplicate key, they just cloned the structure of the affected table structure and carried on adding the entries in the new table.
ICL 1904s actually. I'm not that old!
Green on black? We submitted Hollerith cards, and got back output from a golfball printer that was so misaligned that you couldn't easily read along a line even with the green lines preprinted on the paper to help you!
Variant records.
Sounds like a stupid browser problem to me. Which one uses smartquotes?
How do you propose that slashdot support both iso-8859-1 AND unicode simultaneously according to the what stupid commenter wants? What if they want to use UTF-16 next?
EBCDIC!
No, /. sucks. Try to point out the price of something in Euros. It won't work.
"10 Euro".
Hmm, seems to work here...
The trouble is that there are different definitions of "life", and all of them are problematic. The one you learned at school ("Mrs Gren" -- "Movement, reproduction, sensitivity", etc) was ok for getting through your school exams but isn't good enough once you start dealing with marginal cases (heck, as you point out it's not even good enough to deal with mules), and there's no consensus over how to deal with the marginal cases. That's before we deal with sciences other than biology -- a physicists definition of life is more to do with self-organising structures. "Life" is too vague a term to be used in a precise technical context; you have to say precisely what properties you're talking about.
The issue is with ISPs refusing to publish the connection settings. Tiscali did that to me a few years ago, they told me that the connection settings were about to change and that I had to run their (MS Windows only) installation disc to configure my computer. I'd heard rumours of the disk messing with rival products, so I told them I couldn't run the disk because I was running Linux. They responded that they didn't support Apples (!). Yes, if I had been able to find the SMTP server address, the new dial-up number (this was quite a few years ago!) and so on I would no doubt have been able get a connection, but I reckon that they'd made it clear enough that they didn't want customers with Clue so I left.
Purely a guess: getting nailed to a log just for suggesting that people should try to be a little bit nicer to each other.
Oh yeah, and claiming to be the bastard child of a peasant woman and the supreme deity of a large chunk of the population.
Quite possibly -- he never claimed that, as far as we can tell (others did, later). He does seem to have taken a line of playing the government's game but subverting it (rather than directly opposing it). There's a history of subverting such rules, such as the way PGP got around encryption export regulations by giving the option of the US-produced encryption engine or the compatible scandinavian-produced encryption engine, so that one never had to take the technology across the US border. I can easily see an increase in use of encryption as people become more aware of the issue of the possibility of data interception by governments en-route. Or maybe not -- industial espionage is hardly new (http://www.iht.com/articles/1991/09/14/spy_.php) but I suspect many organisations are still lax.
Forth Amendment
I thought the code was Python...
Who decides what is "reasonable"? The equipment is returned when the investigation is "complete", but I saw nothing in the article saying how long they could take over that investigation. And if you try to sue for return of your property, what could you offer as evidence that the time they are taking is unreasonable, if they claim that more time is still needed (particularly as there's no requirement even of suspicion)?
"You cannot fight global terrorism by turning the USA into a police-state."
No actually you hand the terrorists a "WIN" on a silver platter...terrorist goal accomplished.
Er, what terrorist goal would that be? All of the relevant terrorist goals I have heard about involve change of foreign policy, particular with regard to Israel, or of religious policy. Which terrorist group is actually interested in limiting your freedoms in general? Have you been watching Fox News again?
and you remember the last time Americans became angry with their government?...
Yesterday? And the day before? And the day before that? ...
However, nothing at all happened! At customs, they did not even have me open my bags. The only search was the routine scanner upon re-entering the secure area to catch my connecting flight home. It didn't look like anyone else was having any trouble either. The customs folks all looked incredibly bored.
Possibly because you don't look like the officials' preconception of the sort of person they want to make life hard for?
and are thus acting without any authority whatsoever, other than being armed with big guns and no sense of humour.
"Other than"? Pretty effective de facto authority, even if not de jure. Whoever said "a Smith and Wesson or a Colt always beat four aces" was onto something.
This is crazy, people. Make sure you're not wearing any clothing with text on it, you might have to enter the USA naked.
Have you seen me naked? It would be the USA's loss...
Sir, you are welcome to inspect my laptop, but I am afraid there is no information in it.
At all.
"In fact, sir, your laptop plainly shows the maker's name, the model number, a serial number, and the letters A through Z on this bit just below the screen. That is plainly information, and it correlates with intelligence I received from "What PC" magazine that this is a highly desirable model, so I will be confiscating it indefinitely."
You still don't get your laptop, PDA, eBook reader or mobile phone back.
And the Invisible Pink Unicorn is too cute to be taken seriously when it comes to damning, so that one's out of the question too.
Although I find that "Go spin on the IPU's horn" has a certain allegorical and surreal appeal to it...