Interesting thing about this year's KEXP pledge drive: it was short.
Last year at this time, you couldn't wait for them to STFU with the begging, already. This year, there seemed to be about a week's worth of serious grovelling, and then I guess they made their goal.
Personally, I signed up as a member before the drive even started. My guess is that a lot of other people did, too, judging from the proliferation of yellow-and-black bumper stickers around Seattle these days. Popular disenchantment with the Clear-Channelization of radio has got to be the best news possible for stations like KEXP.
C'mon...just because the reporter isn't up to snuff on computers, doesn't mean they can't write. I hear this all the time from our users at work. It's almost accepted among the non-tech folk.
So what you're saying is that I'm supposed to decide what companies to invest in, whether or not to support various wars, which of several political candidates to vote for, and whether to take an umbrella to work tomorrow based on journalism of this quality?
Here's a question for the NYT apologists: if their reporters don't give a shit about accuracy in matters you can call them on, what makes you think their reporting is worth anything on other, more important topics?
Don't most modern processors have a hard-wired operation that returns the first byte past an index that matches a value?
Yep (REPNE SCASB in x86-land), but it's not free, and because it's a microcoded instruction, it's not necessarily faster than coding a search loop by hand. Somebody -- either your code or the CPU's microcode -- still has to read each memory location to find the zero termination, wasting time and dumping potentially-valuable data out of the caches.
Even if not, this strikes me as such a simple optimization (an inline function with a constant argument!) that any optimizing compiler that couldn't spot it would have to be considered crap.
MSVC actually isn't "crap" in most respects, but I just tried the following code, and its strlen() intrinsic does use REPNE SCASB when compiled with/Ox/G6:
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
if (strlen(argv[1]) == 0)
{
return 0;
}
return 1; }
I was kind of surprised, actually... I'm pretty sure there are more efficient ways to code strlen() than that. The x86 string instructions haven't been competitive with hand-optimized loops since the 486, but I suppose it's possible that Intel tweaked them in the P6 core.
Either way, you don't want to use strlen() when !x[0] will do.
What's wrong with calling strlen() to see if a string's empty?
Look at the case where the string isn't empty. Unless strlen() is implemented as an intrinsic by a compiler that's smart enough to realize that the expression result is only compared to 0, it will step through every character in the string to see how long it is. Some compilers are smart enough to do that, but a lot aren't (or they may be configured to optimize for code size rather than speed), and in any event, it's sloppy coding.
If all you want to know is whether a C string is empty or not, you only need to look at its first character. If you ever catch yourself writing
Some signs of a good programmer: good programmers have a habit of writing their { and then skipping down to the bottom of the page and writing their }s right away, then filling in the blank later.
Sounds great, Joel! <smile, nod amiably, back slowly toward door>
They also tend to have some kind of a variable naming convention, primitive though it may be... Good programmers tend to use really short variable names for loop indices. If they name their loop index CurrentPagePositionLoopCounter it is (a) sure sign that they have not written a lot of code in their life.
Or that they just like long variable names. The most annoying programmers to work with (and the ones I'd be least likely to hire) are the ones who use names like "i1", "i11", "ii1", "iii1", "a2", "b" for everything.
For example, if you ask them to reverse a linked list, good candidates will always make a little drawing on the side and draw all the pointers and where they go. They have to. It is humanly impossible to write code to reverse a linked list without drawing little boxes with arrows between them. Bad programmers will start writing code right away.
Okey-dokey, then.
Occasionally, you will see a C programmer write something like if (0==strlen(x)), putting the constant on the left hand side of the == . This is a really good sign. It means that they were stung once too many times by confusing = and == and have forced themselves to learn a new habit to avoid that trap.
There are good interviews, bad interviews, and then there are a few things you can do to get me to call security to escort you out of the building:
1) Start a fire for no obvious reason. 2) Make fun of all the old-school Duran Duran songs in my phat MP3 collection. 3) Call strlen() to see if a string is empty.
From what I can tell, what Joel considers the "99.9th percentile" is actually a level of competence I'd expect from a bright high-school kid who skipped some, but not all, of his introductory computer-science class. It's not exactly hard to hire people at this level; most of them are, or should be, brushing up on their Hindu grammar to help them train their replacements.
No, that's not a basic democratic principle. That's a current principle used to encourage everyone to vote without fear of reprisal, but it's hardly a fundamental aspect of the system.
There are at least two reasons why you want secret balloting, one of them rather subtle. The obvious one is to prevent voter intimidation; the other is to keep people from being able to bring evidence that they voted for a particular candidate outside the confines of the voting booth.
Otherwise, I can park across the street with a sign reading, "$1 Paid For Each Vote for Candidate X" and buy votes from people coming out of the polling place with proof of their vote. Some of the machines being discussed would enable corrupt voters to do exactly that.
You really don't want to have any way to associate individual voters with their votes during or after an election. I'm sure there are tons of potential exploits beyond the few that I've heard of or thought of myself. Dropping the voter-secrecy requirement would be a major step in the ongoing banana-republicization of America.
Interestingly, this link is actually worse at searching msdn.microsoft.com than normal Google. Try searching for "WaitForSingleObject" at www.google.com/microsoft versus plain old www.google.com. The result you (probably) want is the very first entry on google.com, while it's not even on the first page at www.google.com/microsoft.
We work, day to day, to just keep up with the pace of change; we don't have time or energy to spare to try to push that change beyond the immediate necessity. It is not that the sense has disappeared, so much as it is already in use.
That's a really good point. In Asimov and Heinlein's heyday, we didn't have appliances that were smarter than their users. No VCRs blinking an endless noon; no DVD players that insult their owners. Our cars didn't have an average of a dozen CPU chips each, and we didn't have hundred-million transistor personal computers that only a few dozen people on the planet can honestly say they understand through and through. The ubiquitous Joe Six-Pack could still assimilate the technological content of his life as late as the mid-Seventies, and he had time left over on the weekends to think about what it all meant and where it was going.
But then the Japanese figured out how to fit 10 pounds of shit in a 5-ounce box. The sales graphs at Heathkit flatlined, Radio Shack started selling toys, and some hippie named Wozniak dragged a weird-looking piece of hardware to a club meeting in a forgotten basement in Sunnyvale. We quit making stuff in the Western world, both personally and industrially speaking, around the time of the last Apollo mission. When subscriptions to Popular Electronics started to decline, how long could Asimov's Magazine of Science Fiction hold out?
Maybe this is why the few examples of really-successful modern SF have been escapist fantasies rather than celebrations of futuristic hardware and intellectual conquest. I really liked this guy's essay, and I suspect he's a lot closer to the truth than Spider Robinson is. Fantasy hasn't replaced SF; it's just less optional today.
You're right; there's only so much blame we can lay at the feet of the Original Implementers of things like SMTP. And (as I mentioned in another post) I'm not blaming SMTP in particular for the lameness of SoBig.F bounces.
But at some point, the Garden-of-Eden argument loses its steam. Someone had to stand idly by and let that stream of passenger cars onto that dirt path without thinking ahead far enough to warn them about the bridge up ahead with its 500-pound load limit and resident troll encampment. Or to stretch the analogy even further past its breaking point: like the doped-up monkeys in "28 Days Later," SMTP and Sendmail should never have been released from their cages in the IT equivalent of a Level 3-biohazard research lab.
We're going to have to deal with this stuff sooner or later. I'm sure Jon Postel was a great guy and all, but so is Woz, and we've managed to get past the Apple I.
If x is the size/impact of a single letter, then including the impact of a bounce is (2x) not (x+1).
That's true only if the bounce goes back to the original recipient. In the case of SoBig.F, the recipient of the bounce is forged, so it is indeed a case of geometric spreading.
Returning the attachment was a sensible concept at the time, but nowadays it's just wasteful
I still wouldn't buy that. Think in terms of the value of the resources used to send (and bounce) a particular amount of Internet traffic versus the value of the same amount of storage space on the originating machine. If anything, back in the days when v.32bis modems hadn't even been invented, it made less sense to rely on the 'Net to return your bounced attachment safely to you than it does today.
Did you ever stop to think that many of the Internet's protocols were designed when there were no fuckwits running operating systems that are a virtual "petri dish" for viruses and worms?
Oh, and by the way, while we're waiting for Jon Postel to come to the phone, let's track down a kid named Robert Morris and get his thoughts on that particular point. I don't believe Morris was a big Windows user, but I understand he knew his way around sendmail.
Did you ever stop to think that many of the Internet's protocols were designed when there were no fuckwits running operating systems that are a virtual "petri dish" for viruses and worms?
(Shrug) Bad engineering is bad engineering. Postel's accomplishments were legion, but in the email department, he and his colleagues dropped the ball big-time. There's just no room to defend the decisions that were made.
The minute the Internet showed signs of growing out of the obscure DARPA-funded labs where it was born, the engineers should have started paying attention to security and authentication issues. It would not exactly have been hard to fix SMTP by disallowing open relays and including a trivial sender-authentication mechanism to prevent forged headers, but now it's probably too late. A couple dozen lines of C code written between coffee breaks at USC would have made all the difference.
That being said, the bouncing-attachment idiocy most likely has more to do with the default configurations of popular server-side virus filter packages than with anything Postel was involved with. The common denominator is that people with a great deal of responsibility in the Internet engineering field seemed to have taken leave of their senses at a few critical junctures with no one around to say "Hey, wait, maybe that's not a smart thing to do."
And on top of that, some of them return the virus with the message. Therefore, it you don't have virus protection (which is stupid) and your address is forged on one, you might get a copy and also get infected.
<rant>
That's what utterly astonished me during the recent SoBig.F infestation. When an undelivered mail message with an attachment bounces, the mail servers return not just the subject line, or the message text, but the attachment to the putative sender.
Were the architects of the common Internet mail utilities just plain stupid? What other conclusion can possibly be drawn? Who taught these epsilon-minus lackwits to use a computer, and why? What else am I supposed to think when a mail gateway or server is designed to bounce hundreds of kilobytes worth of attached junk to someone who, by definition, already has the data (since, after all, it's not as if he or she is the one who fucking sent it the first place)? And when it's designed to do so via an untrustworthy return address courtesy of the nullwits who designed the SMTP protocol, no less?
It is WAY past time to scrap the Internet's existing email infrastructure in favor of something designed by actual engineers. What we have now is a giant, virtual Petri dish better suited for the cultivation of worms, viruses and spam than for communication between legitimate users.
Um, it probably doesn't have ANYTHING to do with the increase of safety in cars since 1973, right?
Sure. That's one of several confounding factors that make it difficult to prove that low speed limits (or high ones, for that matter) "save lives" by themselves. However, traffic engineers have done their homework (even if you haven't), and as it turns out, most drivers are neither incompetent enough nor suicidal enough to outdrive their capabilities most of the time.
?But I'm sure that you're right, because logically, going faster is safer. Are you actually trying to illustrate the bullsh*t nature of statistics? Maybe you're trying to give an example to the flawed logic flying around here like crazy?
If drivers could be modelled as gas molecules undergoing random collisions that increase in likelihood with velocity, then you'd have a point. But the truth is, drivers don't conform to simple statistical models like those embodied by slogans such as "Speed Kills." If you impose an artificially-low speed limit on a deserted interstate in East Bumblefuck, it's not that difficult to envision an increase in highway carnage due to slow, law-abiding drivers mingling with faster ones who would otherwise not be at significantly greater risk in the absence of an artificially-imposed speed differential. (Especially when drivers aren't taught lane discipline, as is the case in the good ol' USA where one can apparently claim squatters' rights on any right of way paid for in part by one's taxes.)
If we'd just teach people to drive, most of the arguments in this thread would become entirely moot.
Back during the Oil Embargo to conserve fuel? Not for reasons of public safety?
Yes, that was how the NMSL was sold to the American public in 1973. It was made permanent in 1975 by Congress on the basis of the drop in traffic fatalities that occurred at the same time. Of course, the Arab oil embargo might have had a minor role to play in reducing traffic-related deaths too, but hey, all that extra revenue was too much for the states to let go of when the embargo ended.
Twenty years later, it became (literally) painfully obvious that unreasonably-low highway speed limits were costing more lives than they saved, and the NMSL was repealed. If you look at a graph of fatalities per hundred-million vehicle miles travelled (which is the only meaningful statistic in the traffic safety business, not the death rate per capita used to justify the NMSL in the first place), you'll see a slow and almost monotonic decline beginning in the early Seventies and continuing to the present day. The correlation between posted highway speed limits and the death rate is much more often negative than positive. The reasons are probably twofold: (1) nobody pays that much attention to highway speed limits anyway; and (2) higher limits on the Interstates encourage the diversion of traffic from slower but far-more-dangerous secondary roads.
but I'm not crying unfair law when I get pulled over.
You should be. Traffic engineers will tell you that the speed at or below which 85 percent of the public is travelling is actually the safest for a given road. Politicians and crooked police departments will tell you something very different, though, because while "majority rules" may be the safest way to set speed limits, it certainly isn't the most profitable.
Apart from that off-topic rant, the original poster does have a very good point: when the laws do not reflect the values of the populace, respect for the law in general is endangered. The DMCA is teaching today's kids the same lesson that the old Federally-mandated 55 MPH national speed limit taught me when I was a teenager: that lawmakers in this country have their heads up their asses.
I don't have any objections to having CW dropped as a requirment, but I do think that if it does happen, people will eventually want the CW portions of the HF band turned over to other modes, which I object to.
Well, it's worth noting that CW is the one mode you're allowed to transmit anywhere in the RF spectrum. You don't have to use SSB on 3.819 MHz -- you can use CW if you want. Any objections will come from the guys trying to carry on an SSB conversation, not the FCC. Even if the FCC opened up CW subbands for SSB and other modes, it still wouldn't be the end of the world for CW.
Slashdot Mirror
Plus: The worst case scenario would be Eolas being bought by Microsoft because the patent would live on in the hands of Microsoft
How is this a worst-case scenario?
When's the last time Microsoft proactively enforced a broad-ranging patent to the detriment of an entire industry?
Interesting thing about this year's KEXP pledge drive: it was short.
Last year at this time, you couldn't wait for them to STFU with the begging, already. This year, there seemed to be about a week's worth of serious grovelling, and then I guess they made their goal.
Personally, I signed up as a member before the drive even started. My guess is that a lot of other people did, too, judging from the proliferation of yellow-and-black bumper stickers around Seattle these days. Popular disenchantment with the Clear-Channelization of radio has got to be the best news possible for stations like KEXP.
C'mon...just because the reporter isn't up to snuff on computers, doesn't mean they can't write. I hear this all the time from our users at work. It's almost accepted among the non-tech folk.
So what you're saying is that I'm supposed to decide what companies to invest in, whether or not to support various wars, which of several political candidates to vote for, and whether to take an umbrella to work tomorrow based on journalism of this quality?
Here's a question for the NYT apologists: if their reporters don't give a shit about accuracy in matters you can call them on, what makes you think their reporting is worth anything on other, more important topics?
Actually, many scientists believe that the earth is at the center of the universe
Actually, not.
Yep (REPNE SCASB in x86-land), but it's not free, and because it's a microcoded instruction, it's not necessarily faster than coding a search loop by hand. Somebody -- either your code or the CPU's microcode -- still has to read each memory location to find the zero termination, wasting time and dumping potentially-valuable data out of the caches.
Even if not, this strikes me as such a simple optimization (an inline function with a constant argument!) that any optimizing compiler that couldn't spot it would have to be considered crap.
MSVC actually isn't "crap" in most respects, but I just tried the following code, and its strlen() intrinsic does use REPNE SCASB when compiled with
Either way, you don't want to use strlen() when !x[0] will do.
Look at the case where the string isn't empty. Unless strlen() is implemented as an intrinsic by a compiler that's smart enough to realize that the expression result is only compared to 0, it will step through every character in the string to see how long it is. Some compilers are smart enough to do that, but a lot aren't (or they may be configured to optimize for code size rather than speed), and in any event, it's sloppy coding.
If all you want to know is whether a C string is empty or not, you only need to look at its first character. If you ever catch yourself writing you probably want instead.
From Joel's Guerilla Guide to Interviewing:
Some signs of a good programmer: good programmers have a habit of writing their { and then skipping down to the bottom of the page and writing their }s right away, then filling in the blank later.
Sounds great, Joel! <smile, nod amiably, back slowly toward door>
They also tend to have some kind of a variable naming convention, primitive though it may be... Good programmers tend to use really short variable names for loop indices. If they name their loop index CurrentPagePositionLoopCounter it is (a) sure sign that they have not written a lot of code in their life.
Or that they just like long variable names. The most annoying programmers to work with (and the ones I'd be least likely to hire) are the ones who use names like "i1", "i11", "ii1", "iii1", "a2", "b" for everything.
For example, if you ask them to reverse a linked list, good candidates will always make a little drawing on the side and draw all the pointers and where they go. They have to. It is humanly impossible to write code to reverse a linked list without drawing little boxes with arrows between them. Bad programmers will start writing code right away.
Okey-dokey, then.
Occasionally, you will see a C programmer write something like if (0==strlen(x)), putting the constant on the left hand side of the == . This is a really good sign. It means that they were stung once too many times by confusing = and == and have forced themselves to learn a new habit to avoid that trap.
There are good interviews, bad interviews, and then there are a few things you can do to get me to call security to escort you out of the building:
1) Start a fire for no obvious reason.
2) Make fun of all the old-school Duran Duran songs in my phat MP3 collection.
3) Call strlen() to see if a string is empty.
From what I can tell, what Joel considers the "99.9th percentile" is actually a level of competence I'd expect from a bright high-school kid who skipped some, but not all, of his introductory computer-science class. It's not exactly hard to hire people at this level; most of them are, or should be, brushing up on their Hindu grammar to help them train their replacements.
No, that's not a basic democratic principle. That's a current principle used to encourage everyone to vote without fear of reprisal, but it's hardly a fundamental aspect of the system.
There are at least two reasons why you want secret balloting, one of them rather subtle. The obvious one is to prevent voter intimidation; the other is to keep people from being able to bring evidence that they voted for a particular candidate outside the confines of the voting booth.
Otherwise, I can park across the street with a sign reading, "$1 Paid For Each Vote for Candidate X" and buy votes from people coming out of the polling place with proof of their vote. Some of the machines being discussed would enable corrupt voters to do exactly that.
You really don't want to have any way to associate individual voters with their votes during or after an election. I'm sure there are tons of potential exploits beyond the few that I've heard of or thought of myself. Dropping the voter-secrecy requirement would be a major step in the ongoing banana-republicization of America.
Interestingly, this link is actually worse at searching msdn.microsoft.com than normal Google. Try searching for "WaitForSingleObject" at www.google.com/microsoft versus plain old www.google.com. The result you (probably) want is the very first entry on google.com, while it's not even on the first page at www.google.com/microsoft.
Yeah, mine too, but 'endless noon' sounded so much more euphonic...
We work, day to day, to just keep up with the pace of change; we don't have time or energy to spare to try to push that change beyond the immediate necessity. It is not that the sense has disappeared, so much as it is already in use.
That's a really good point. In Asimov and Heinlein's heyday, we didn't have appliances that were smarter than their users. No VCRs blinking an endless noon; no DVD players that insult their owners. Our cars didn't have an average of a dozen CPU chips each, and we didn't have hundred-million transistor personal computers that only a few dozen people on the planet can honestly say they understand through and through. The ubiquitous Joe Six-Pack could still assimilate the technological content of his life as late as the mid-Seventies, and he had time left over on the weekends to think about what it all meant and where it was going.
But then the Japanese figured out how to fit 10 pounds of shit in a 5-ounce box. The sales graphs at Heathkit flatlined, Radio Shack started selling toys, and some hippie named Wozniak dragged a weird-looking piece of hardware to a club meeting in a forgotten basement in Sunnyvale. We quit making stuff in the Western world, both personally and industrially speaking, around the time of the last Apollo mission. When subscriptions to Popular Electronics started to decline, how long could Asimov's Magazine of Science Fiction hold out?
Maybe this is why the few examples of really-successful modern SF have been escapist fantasies rather than celebrations of futuristic hardware and intellectual conquest. I really liked this guy's essay, and I suspect he's a lot closer to the truth than Spider Robinson is. Fantasy hasn't replaced SF; it's just less optional today.
You're right; there's only so much blame we can lay at the feet of the Original Implementers of things like SMTP. And (as I mentioned in another post) I'm not blaming SMTP in particular for the lameness of SoBig.F bounces.
But at some point, the Garden-of-Eden argument loses its steam. Someone had to stand idly by and let that stream of passenger cars onto that dirt path without thinking ahead far enough to warn them about the bridge up ahead with its 500-pound load limit and resident troll encampment. Or to stretch the analogy even further past its breaking point: like the doped-up monkeys in "28 Days Later," SMTP and Sendmail should never have been released from their cages in the IT equivalent of a Level 3-biohazard research lab.
We're going to have to deal with this stuff sooner or later. I'm sure Jon Postel was a great guy and all, but so is Woz, and we've managed to get past the Apple I.
To clarify: those forged bounces are a major propagation vector for the virus, resulting in the aforementioned geometric nastiness.
Bouncing mail with attachments intact is unimaginably dumb.
If x is the size/impact of a single letter, then including the impact of a bounce is (2x) not (x+1).
That's true only if the bounce goes back to the original recipient. In the case of SoBig.F, the recipient of the bounce is forged, so it is indeed a case of geometric spreading.
Returning the attachment was a sensible concept at the time, but nowadays it's just wasteful
I still wouldn't buy that. Think in terms of the value of the resources used to send (and bounce) a particular amount of Internet traffic versus the value of the same amount of storage space on the originating machine. If anything, back in the days when v.32bis modems hadn't even been invented, it made less sense to rely on the 'Net to return your bounced attachment safely to you than it does today.
Did you ever stop to think that many of the Internet's protocols were designed when there were no fuckwits running operating systems that are a virtual "petri dish" for viruses and worms?
Oh, and by the way, while we're waiting for Jon Postel to come to the phone, let's track down a kid named Robert Morris and get his thoughts on that particular point. I don't believe Morris was a big Windows user, but I understand he knew his way around sendmail.
Did you ever stop to think that many of the Internet's protocols were designed when there were no fuckwits running operating systems that are a virtual "petri dish" for viruses and worms?
(Shrug) Bad engineering is bad engineering. Postel's accomplishments were legion, but in the email department, he and his colleagues dropped the ball big-time. There's just no room to defend the decisions that were made.
The minute the Internet showed signs of growing out of the obscure DARPA-funded labs where it was born, the engineers should have started paying attention to security and authentication issues. It would not exactly have been hard to fix SMTP by disallowing open relays and including a trivial sender-authentication mechanism to prevent forged headers, but now it's probably too late. A couple dozen lines of C code written between coffee breaks at USC would have made all the difference.
That being said, the bouncing-attachment idiocy most likely has more to do with the default configurations of popular server-side virus filter packages than with anything Postel was involved with. The common denominator is that people with a great deal of responsibility in the Internet engineering field seemed to have taken leave of their senses at a few critical junctures with no one around to say "Hey, wait, maybe that's not a smart thing to do."
And on top of that, some of them return the virus with the message. Therefore, it you don't have virus protection (which is stupid) and your address is forged on one, you might get a copy and also get infected.
<rant>
That's what utterly astonished me during the recent SoBig.F infestation. When an undelivered mail message with an attachment bounces, the mail servers return not just the subject line, or the message text, but the attachment to the putative sender.
Were the architects of the common Internet mail utilities just plain stupid? What other conclusion can possibly be drawn? Who taught these epsilon-minus lackwits to use a computer, and why? What else am I supposed to think when a mail gateway or server is designed to bounce hundreds of kilobytes worth of attached junk to someone who, by definition, already has the data (since, after all, it's not as if he or she is the one who fucking sent it the first place)? And when it's designed to do so via an untrustworthy return address courtesy of the nullwits who designed the SMTP protocol, no less?
It is WAY past time to scrap the Internet's existing email infrastructure in favor of something designed by actual engineers. What we have now is a giant, virtual Petri dish better suited for the cultivation of worms, viruses and spam than for communication between legitimate users.
</rant>
Um, it probably doesn't have ANYTHING to do with the increase of safety in cars since 1973, right?
Sure. That's one of several confounding factors that make it difficult to prove that low speed limits (or high ones, for that matter) "save lives" by themselves. However, traffic engineers have done their homework (even if you haven't), and as it turns out, most drivers are neither incompetent enough nor suicidal enough to outdrive their capabilities most of the time.
?But I'm sure that you're right, because logically, going faster is safer. Are you actually trying to illustrate the bullsh*t nature of statistics? Maybe you're trying to give an example to the flawed logic flying around here like crazy?
If drivers could be modelled as gas molecules undergoing random collisions that increase in likelihood with velocity, then you'd have a point. But the truth is, drivers don't conform to simple statistical models like those embodied by slogans such as "Speed Kills." If you impose an artificially-low speed limit on a deserted interstate in East Bumblefuck, it's not that difficult to envision an increase in highway carnage due to slow, law-abiding drivers mingling with faster ones who would otherwise not be at significantly greater risk in the absence of an artificially-imposed speed differential. (Especially when drivers aren't taught lane discipline, as is the case in the good ol' USA where one can apparently claim squatters' rights on any right of way paid for in part by one's taxes.)
If we'd just teach people to drive, most of the arguments in this thread would become entirely moot.
Back during the Oil Embargo to conserve fuel?
Not for reasons of public safety?
Yes, that was how the NMSL was sold to the American public in 1973. It was made permanent in 1975 by Congress on the basis of the drop in traffic fatalities that occurred at the same time. Of course, the Arab oil embargo might have had a minor role to play in reducing traffic-related deaths too, but hey, all that extra revenue was too much for the states to let go of when the embargo ended.
Twenty years later, it became (literally) painfully obvious that unreasonably-low highway speed limits were costing more lives than they saved, and the NMSL was repealed. If you look at a graph of fatalities per hundred-million vehicle miles travelled (which is the only meaningful statistic in the traffic safety business, not the death rate per capita used to justify the NMSL in the first place), you'll see a slow and almost monotonic decline beginning in the early Seventies and continuing to the present day. The correlation between posted highway speed limits and the death rate is much more often negative than positive. The reasons are probably twofold: (1) nobody pays that much attention to highway speed limits anyway; and (2) higher limits on the Interstates encourage the diversion of traffic from slower but far-more-dangerous secondary roads.
but I'm not crying unfair law when I get pulled over.
You should be. Traffic engineers will tell you that the speed at or below which 85 percent of the public is travelling is actually the safest for a given road. Politicians and crooked police departments will tell you something very different, though, because while "majority rules" may be the safest way to set speed limits, it certainly isn't the most profitable.
Apart from that off-topic rant, the original poster does have a very good point: when the laws do not reflect the values of the populace, respect for the law in general is endangered. The DMCA is teaching today's kids the same lesson that the old Federally-mandated 55 MPH national speed limit taught me when I was a teenager: that lawmakers in this country have their heads up their asses.
I'm _really_ wanting someone to make a miniITX version with TV-out.
Already there -- do a search on EPIA 8000.
You are allowed to transmit in any mode in any section of the spectrum you are licensed to use.
I'm afraid not. Try running SSB on 3.520 in the USA and see how it goes over with the FCC.
Well, the Pentium M also has SSE2, FYI.
Which is going to make for one damned nice DSP platform.
I don't have any objections to having CW dropped as a requirment, but I do think that if it does happen, people will eventually want the CW portions of the HF band turned over to other modes, which I object to.
Well, it's worth noting that CW is the one mode you're allowed to transmit anywhere in the RF spectrum. You don't have to use SSB on 3.819 MHz -- you can use CW if you want. Any objections will come from the guys trying to carry on an SSB conversation, not the FCC. Even if the FCC opened up CW subbands for SSB and other modes, it still wouldn't be the end of the world for CW.