No, it doesn't. It says that talking to passengers is less distracting than talking on the phone. In other words, the nominal case for the cell phone is worse than the nominal case for an adult passenger. However, when you examine the worst case, their relative levels of distraction reverse fairly dramatically.
Try comparing the driving errors made by someone talking on the phone to an adult versus someone with seven kids jumping around the back seat, hitting each other with those long foam sticks, throwing food, and one kid complaining that he/she is feeling nauseated while another kid keeps reaching around the seat and covering your eyes.
Trust me, passengers can be much more distracting than a telephone. In the worst case, you can throw the phone out the window. And although in theory, I suppose you could do the same thing with your kids, I'm pretty sure there are laws about that.
Ideally though maybe it's best that devices are required to blank the map when the car is traveling above a certain speed, relying only on audio prompts.
No, it's not best. It's a fucking car wreck waiting to happen. Sure, if all of our roads had sanely designed exits ramps that were all consistently laid out, it would work. The reality of the matter, though, is that quite often, my Garmin or my TomTom will tell me either to get ready to exit or to take an exit, and I look at the exit structure and see two or three different possible ways to interpret that sentence because of two or three different exits.
Now when this happens, I have maybe half a second to interpret the instructions correctly. One second, tops. If I have some bullshit design like what NHTSA wants, there's no possibility of being able to successfully interpret it in the time available, and thus there are only two possible outcomes: either I miss the exit and waste ten or fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to get back to where I was going (in which case the navigators become no better than printed directions off of Google maps) or I make the right decision, but too late, and dramatically increase the risk of an accident.
Now if you had said that it should disable the ability to type in locations while driving, I might agree, but disabling the display while driving? What the **** is the point of a navigation system that doesn't tell you where you are at a glance? The whole point of a navigation system is to free you from having to count exit numbers and other such things that distract you from the road and to make it possible to instantly see where you are and where you're going to be a couple of seconds ahead. If a navigation system can't do that, then it is a useless waste of money.
NHTSA is just plain wrong, pure and simple. There's no grey area here. They simply have no concept of the harm that their proposal will cause on many roads.
Look at people walking down the road, looking at their mobile phones. Does anyone not regularly have to get out of the way of these people? this shit is too distracting.
That's why you shouldn't be reading while driving (on a cell phone or otherwise). This has no real bearing on GPS devices. If anything, on the whole, GPS devices significantly reduce distractions while driving, precisely because they do the exact opposite of what NHTSA wants. The information GPS units provide isn't distracting because A. drivers rarely look over at them, and B. when they do look over at them, it's because they need to know where they are now—not two or three seconds ago or two or three seconds from now. If drivers weren't looking at the device for such information, they would be slamming on their brakes and looking all around for a road sign, all the while not noticing that they've veered into the next lane over, etc.
My backup drive is a fireproof 2 TB enclosure attached to an Airport Extreme, using Time Machine. That holds backups for my laptop and my home server. Most of the stuff I care about is on one of those two machines. The server is backed up continuously. I kick off a backup on the laptop every week or two. And when I'm working on important projects that aren't under external version control on a server somewhere, I back them up by hand onto a flash drive whenever I'm done working on them.
Beyond that, everything else is media, which I back up periodically to large external drives that I bring them to work.
So if I decide to allow people to create accounts and talk about my books on patriotsbooks.com (when the site goes live), I'm probably in violation of their rules. And even if they don't decide to go after me for doing so, the fact that they could do so makes it an unacceptably risky proposition to remain a member of Facebook.
Hint: every author in the world is looking at these rules and deciding whether to leave Facebook forever at this moment.
Wearing a bomb, no. Carrying a gun, yes. Then again, a terrorist caught wearing a bomb is just going to set it off right there in the security line anyway, so it really doesn't matter what the security people do....
Citation needed. To the best of my ability to determine, nobody has yet succeeded in removing Cinavia from any movie except by either:
removing the higher-quality audio track or
creating an AACS-protected managed copy (which most media center software doesn't support and which limits you to a single copy per disc serial number).
Thus, both solutions are effectively useless for feeding a ripped copy of a movie from a home media center to a hypothetical Cinavia-equipped TV, nor would either solution be usable for mass piracy.
Didn't we say in the pre-9/11 days that you couldn't hijack a plane?
To my knowledge, nobody said that you couldn't hijack a plane before 9/11. It was always possible, and still is. The assumption was that if a hijacker came on board with a knife, the people would pummel him/her, whereas a gun was considerably more lethal. Thus, they protected against the latter and not the former. What they didn't count on was thirty years of complacency brought about by a lack of incidents.
Or do we go back to pre-9/11 security screenings until $DISASTER takes place?
No, we go back to pre-9/11 security screenings, period, even after disasters take place. When you can prove that a newer screening technology significantly improves security without fundamentally invading the privacy of the people being screened, we'll consider it. Short of such proof, we must assume that the new systems aren't actually making us safer, which means that A. we should not be spending millions of dollars every year on them, and B. we should not be subjected to the invasion of privacy that they cause.
Also, security theater may be useful to a limited degree, but security theater that makes people feel violated is unacceptable. If you're going to cross those sorts of lines as the TSA does every day, there had damn well be a damn good reason, and the public has a right to know in detail what that reason is. That means we expect:
a regularly updated list of terror plots successfully foiled or scared off by this invasion of our privacy,
a detailed accounting of who benefits financially from the purchase of new security equipment, along with a complete breakdown of any financial or interpersonal relationships between them or their lobbyists and the people who made the purchasing decisions (including any and all stock held by anyone involved in the decisions), and
a regularly scheduled and televised review board meeting in which the public can present their grievances and obtain vengeance^Wjustice^Wredress.
Anything less than all of the above is a gross abrogation of the government's responsibility to protect the public good.
Yes, there's non-zero value to having some visible security. I would argue that the security checkpoints aren't useful at providing visible security, though; the screeners are not even armed. They're about as relevant to security as the bag checkers on your way out of Fry's. If someone gets caught, they can simply run away, and there's probably a pretty good chance they'd make it to a car waiting for them curbside.
Want to make people honestly feel safer? Station armed national guard or actual police at every checkpoint like they did right after 9/11. Then ditch the body scanners in lieu of either metal detectors or nothing at all, and perform a cursory X-ray of people's bags. Train the national guard troops to make eye contact with every passenger. That would be about a thousand times more effective at making people feel safer and a billion times more effective at scaring the bejeezus out of would-be attackers than what they're doing now, all while being a lot less invasive for legitimate travelers.
More to the point, if you ask those questions, the burden of proof lies on you, the employer, to prove that it did not affect your hiring decision. After all, why would you have asked if you didn't care about the answer? Therefore, although it is not illegal per se, it is de facto illegal.
I think it would be just as effective to spam Sarkozy with porn site links, and upon detecting visits, accuse him of being a porn star. After all, only someone planning to make pornography could possibly want to go to a site containing pornography.
Cinavia on a player doesn't bother me because I don't buy pirated copies of movies. From my perspective as a legitimate, non-pirating movie viewer, so long as Cinavia is only on the players, it's actually a pretty good DRM concept. It makes the more problematic variety of piracy—people selling pirated copies of movies—much harder or even impossible while still not affecting the public's ability to rip their media to carry with them on vacation, stream it from a home media server, or any of our other basic fair use rights.
However, if I bought a TV and discovered that it had Cinavia on it, the TV would go back to the vendor as defective. It would be a very expensive mistake for a TV manufacturer to pull such a stunt.
10% of your annual income shouldn't break you financially unless you are only making $20,000 per year. Then that's three months' rent.
It should probably be more like:
For individuals making over $100,000 annually (automatically adjusted for inflation), no maximum.
For individuals making between $50,000 (adjusted) and $100,000 (adjusted), a maximum of 10%.
For individuals making between the poverty line and $50,000 (adjusted), a maximum of 5%.
For individuals making below the poverty line, a maximum of $100 (or possibly zero).
Or you might merge the two middle categories into a single category at 5% or 10%. Either way, such a scheme would prevent unscrupulous businesspeople from taking advantage of people who cannot afford to be taken advantage of. And that should be a cap on total spending for any given year, not a maximum per investment.
Also, there should be no cap if your net worth is above some figure, regardless of income. Let's call it a million dollars, though this is somewhat arbitrary. The idea, of course, is that someone with a few million bucks in the bank who decides to not work for five years can afford to blow money on stock in ways that someone with no savings who has been out of a job for five years can't.
Or given that the first round sold out almost immediately and the next batch isn't due until August (according to Newark's inventory, anyway). So yeah, saying that they are "available for purchase" is something of a stretch....
At this rate, I'm not expecting to be able to bulk order in the quantities I'd be interested in buying until at least 2013, by which time I doubt I'll still care.
IIRC, the virus has to be targeted at specific structures on the exterior of a specific type of cancer cell, so it is unlikely that anyone who doesn't have cancer could usefully be a carrier. This makes the chances of it spreading among the general population effectively zero.
Dude. I'm not saying that the quality of education shouldn't be improved for the people in the middle. I'm saying that it isn't in the best interests of the company doing the hiring to reject someone in the hopes that doing so might somehow magically cause that person's home state to change its political beliefs.
First, it probably won't change things. The reason this is happening is that a sizable percentage of people in that state have religious beliefs that run counter to evolution. The people who believe in strict creationism aren't going to change their beliefs just because a bunch of schools won't take their kids. Statistically, the majority of their kids will choose to attend a religious institution anyway, so it doesn't affect them much. And because they have strong ties to the local culture, the majority who do not go to a religious institution will go to a college that is not very far away. Thus, unless the state schools in Tennessee made the decision to reject students whose counties elected to take advantage of the law (which would hurt enrollment), it is unlikely that college entrance policies will have any impact on this law.
Similarly, they're not going to change their beliefs because a company in another state won't hire them. Statistically, the majority of their kids will choose jobs within about a 100 mile radius because they have strong ties to the culture of that area. Thus, those measures cannot practically cause the Tennessee legislature to reverse such legislation because the majority of their constituents won't be impacted by those measures, and thus won't have reason to pressure the legislature to do so.
More importantly, the people such measures would most harshly affect—the people whose kids can't wait to get out of there—are likely to be in the minority by a fair margin. When it comes to causing political change, it really doesn't matter how much you hurt a minority group because they will always be in the minority and cannot realistically hope to change the balance of power (short of committing genocide, anyway).
Second, it hurts the company or university. A company not hiring someone or a university not admitting someone because they feel that the education system in that person's hometown is substandard is a good way to miss hiring a lot of great people. More importantly, it's inherently an invalid assumption for any kids who are smart enough to realistically get into an ivy league institution because, as I said, intelligent people will find ways to educate themselves no matter how bad the education system is.
Finally, you have to remember that those kids you're suggesting banning from employment and education didn't live in a state because they wanted to. They lived there because that's where their parents had a job. You should judge a candidate based on his or her merits. Judging someone based on where he or she was born or who his or her parents were is really no better than judging someone by the color of his or her skin.
Oh, and just to clarify, lest you think I'm being critical of Tennessee's education system, it isn't the best, but it is nowhere near the worst. By many metrics, California is much worse, and nobody in their right mind would suggest banning students from California. It is shameful using kids as political pawns, and it's clear that this is what is being advocated here, not for their benefit, but because of fundamentally unworkable notions of scientific purity that just don't make sense in the real world.
Finally, I would add that in places where a sizable percentage of students hold strict creationist beliefs, discussing creationism (provided the point-of-view is neutral) in science classes is actually moderately useful, in my opinion—not because I subscribe to a strict creationist view (I don't), but because students in those schools face a constant struggle between teachers who are telling them one thing and religious leaders who are telling them something entirely different. Having an op
Actually, this is probably a smart move. One of the reasons their products don't compete very well is that the people within their company who should be their target audience don't actually use the products they make, and thus don't report bugs, don't complain about the clunky interface, etc. By forcing their marketing people to "live on" their own stuff (dogfooding), eventually the quality should start to improve.
Speaking as someone from Tennessee who works for a very large and well-respected corporation, I take issue with that assertion. The quality of an education system has little bearing on quality of a particular student's education. The intelligent find ways to educate themselves even in the absence of proper teaching.
It's not like one gets cumulative latencies - the 230ms is constant in time.
Actually, you do. Consider HTTP:
Client requests the page text.
(latency x)
Client gets the response and requests the JavaScript code.
(latency x)
Client gets the JavaScript code and runs it. The code requests several images.
(latency x)
The images are displayed.
Total effective latency for the images is 3x. Latency is very much cumulative when one request depends on another. It is only non-cumulative when you are solely using the link for batched downloads. This is why satellite and cellular Internet service can border on unusable for some tasks.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it doesn't. It says that talking to passengers is less distracting than talking on the phone. In other words, the nominal case for the cell phone is worse than the nominal case for an adult passenger. However, when you examine the worst case, their relative levels of distraction reverse fairly dramatically.
Try comparing the driving errors made by someone talking on the phone to an adult versus someone with seven kids jumping around the back seat, hitting each other with those long foam sticks, throwing food, and one kid complaining that he/she is feeling nauseated while another kid keeps reaching around the seat and covering your eyes.
Trust me, passengers can be much more distracting than a telephone. In the worst case, you can throw the phone out the window. And although in theory, I suppose you could do the same thing with your kids, I'm pretty sure there are laws about that.
No, it's not best. It's a fucking car wreck waiting to happen. Sure, if all of our roads had sanely designed exits ramps that were all consistently laid out, it would work. The reality of the matter, though, is that quite often, my Garmin or my TomTom will tell me either to get ready to exit or to take an exit, and I look at the exit structure and see two or three different possible ways to interpret that sentence because of two or three different exits.
Now when this happens, I have maybe half a second to interpret the instructions correctly. One second, tops. If I have some bullshit design like what NHTSA wants, there's no possibility of being able to successfully interpret it in the time available, and thus there are only two possible outcomes: either I miss the exit and waste ten or fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to get back to where I was going (in which case the navigators become no better than printed directions off of Google maps) or I make the right decision, but too late, and dramatically increase the risk of an accident.
Now if you had said that it should disable the ability to type in locations while driving, I might agree, but disabling the display while driving? What the **** is the point of a navigation system that doesn't tell you where you are at a glance? The whole point of a navigation system is to free you from having to count exit numbers and other such things that distract you from the road and to make it possible to instantly see where you are and where you're going to be a couple of seconds ahead. If a navigation system can't do that, then it is a useless waste of money.
NHTSA is just plain wrong, pure and simple. There's no grey area here. They simply have no concept of the harm that their proposal will cause on many roads.
That's why you shouldn't be reading while driving (on a cell phone or otherwise). This has no real bearing on GPS devices. If anything, on the whole, GPS devices significantly reduce distractions while driving, precisely because they do the exact opposite of what NHTSA wants. The information GPS units provide isn't distracting because A. drivers rarely look over at them, and B. when they do look over at them, it's because they need to know where they are now—not two or three seconds ago or two or three seconds from now. If drivers weren't looking at the device for such information, they would be slamming on their brakes and looking all around for a road sign, all the while not noticing that they've veered into the next lane over, etc.
My backup drive is a fireproof 2 TB enclosure attached to an Airport Extreme, using Time Machine. That holds backups for my laptop and my home server. Most of the stuff I care about is on one of those two machines. The server is backed up continuously. I kick off a backup on the laptop every week or two. And when I'm working on important projects that aren't under external version control on a server somewhere, I back them up by hand onto a flash drive whenever I'm done working on them.
Beyond that, everything else is media, which I back up periodically to large external drives that I bring them to work.
More like "Go over to your friend's house, change, then convince your friend to carry your uniform in his/her backpack."
So if I decide to allow people to create accounts and talk about my books on patriotsbooks.com (when the site goes live), I'm probably in violation of their rules. And even if they don't decide to go after me for doing so, the fact that they could do so makes it an unacceptably risky proposition to remain a member of Facebook.
Hint: every author in the world is looking at these rules and deciding whether to leave Facebook forever at this moment.
Wearing a bomb, no. Carrying a gun, yes. Then again, a terrorist caught wearing a bomb is just going to set it off right there in the security line anyway, so it really doesn't matter what the security people do....
I said the national guard, whose duty is to defend the constitution, not the TSA, whose duty is to usurp it.
Citation needed. To the best of my ability to determine, nobody has yet succeeded in removing Cinavia from any movie except by either:
Thus, both solutions are effectively useless for feeding a ripped copy of a movie from a home media center to a hypothetical Cinavia-equipped TV, nor would either solution be usable for mass piracy.
To my knowledge, nobody said that you couldn't hijack a plane before 9/11. It was always possible, and still is. The assumption was that if a hijacker came on board with a knife, the people would pummel him/her, whereas a gun was considerably more lethal. Thus, they protected against the latter and not the former. What they didn't count on was thirty years of complacency brought about by a lack of incidents.
No, we go back to pre-9/11 security screenings, period, even after disasters take place. When you can prove that a newer screening technology significantly improves security without fundamentally invading the privacy of the people being screened, we'll consider it. Short of such proof, we must assume that the new systems aren't actually making us safer, which means that A. we should not be spending millions of dollars every year on them, and B. we should not be subjected to the invasion of privacy that they cause.
Rubber bullets, tasers, whatever. They don't necessarily have to be lethally armed.
Also, security theater may be useful to a limited degree, but security theater that makes people feel violated is unacceptable. If you're going to cross those sorts of lines as the TSA does every day, there had damn well be a damn good reason, and the public has a right to know in detail what that reason is. That means we expect:
Anything less than all of the above is a gross abrogation of the government's responsibility to protect the public good.
Yes, there's non-zero value to having some visible security. I would argue that the security checkpoints aren't useful at providing visible security, though; the screeners are not even armed. They're about as relevant to security as the bag checkers on your way out of Fry's. If someone gets caught, they can simply run away, and there's probably a pretty good chance they'd make it to a car waiting for them curbside.
Want to make people honestly feel safer? Station armed national guard or actual police at every checkpoint like they did right after 9/11. Then ditch the body scanners in lieu of either metal detectors or nothing at all, and perform a cursory X-ray of people's bags. Train the national guard troops to make eye contact with every passenger. That would be about a thousand times more effective at making people feel safer and a billion times more effective at scaring the bejeezus out of would-be attackers than what they're doing now, all while being a lot less invasive for legitimate travelers.
More to the point, if you ask those questions, the burden of proof lies on you, the employer, to prove that it did not affect your hiring decision. After all, why would you have asked if you didn't care about the answer? Therefore, although it is not illegal per se, it is de facto illegal.
So this only occurs when the trees are growing in areas with significant levels of uranium ore?
I think it would be just as effective to spam Sarkozy with porn site links, and upon detecting visits, accuse him of being a porn star. After all, only someone planning to make pornography could possibly want to go to a site containing pornography.
Cinavia on a player doesn't bother me because I don't buy pirated copies of movies. From my perspective as a legitimate, non-pirating movie viewer, so long as Cinavia is only on the players, it's actually a pretty good DRM concept. It makes the more problematic variety of piracy—people selling pirated copies of movies—much harder or even impossible while still not affecting the public's ability to rip their media to carry with them on vacation, stream it from a home media server, or any of our other basic fair use rights.
However, if I bought a TV and discovered that it had Cinavia on it, the TV would go back to the vendor as defective. It would be a very expensive mistake for a TV manufacturer to pull such a stunt.
Static electricity occurs when one thing rubs against another thing. Trees have a lot more surface area for the wind to rub against than empty fields.
10% of your annual income shouldn't break you financially unless you are only making $20,000 per year. Then that's three months' rent.
It should probably be more like:
Or you might merge the two middle categories into a single category at 5% or 10%. Either way, such a scheme would prevent unscrupulous businesspeople from taking advantage of people who cannot afford to be taken advantage of. And that should be a cap on total spending for any given year, not a maximum per investment.
Also, there should be no cap if your net worth is above some figure, regardless of income. Let's call it a million dollars, though this is somewhat arbitrary. The idea, of course, is that someone with a few million bucks in the bank who decides to not work for five years can afford to blow money on stock in ways that someone with no savings who has been out of a job for five years can't.
You mean besides increased risk of hemorrhagic strokes and other internal bleeding?
Or given that the first round sold out almost immediately and the next batch isn't due until August (according to Newark's inventory, anyway). So yeah, saying that they are "available for purchase" is something of a stretch....
At this rate, I'm not expecting to be able to bulk order in the quantities I'd be interested in buying until at least 2013, by which time I doubt I'll still care.
IIRC, the virus has to be targeted at specific structures on the exterior of a specific type of cancer cell, so it is unlikely that anyone who doesn't have cancer could usefully be a carrier. This makes the chances of it spreading among the general population effectively zero.
Dude. I'm not saying that the quality of education shouldn't be improved for the people in the middle. I'm saying that it isn't in the best interests of the company doing the hiring to reject someone in the hopes that doing so might somehow magically cause that person's home state to change its political beliefs.
First, it probably won't change things. The reason this is happening is that a sizable percentage of people in that state have religious beliefs that run counter to evolution. The people who believe in strict creationism aren't going to change their beliefs just because a bunch of schools won't take their kids. Statistically, the majority of their kids will choose to attend a religious institution anyway, so it doesn't affect them much. And because they have strong ties to the local culture, the majority who do not go to a religious institution will go to a college that is not very far away. Thus, unless the state schools in Tennessee made the decision to reject students whose counties elected to take advantage of the law (which would hurt enrollment), it is unlikely that college entrance policies will have any impact on this law.
Similarly, they're not going to change their beliefs because a company in another state won't hire them. Statistically, the majority of their kids will choose jobs within about a 100 mile radius because they have strong ties to the culture of that area. Thus, those measures cannot practically cause the Tennessee legislature to reverse such legislation because the majority of their constituents won't be impacted by those measures, and thus won't have reason to pressure the legislature to do so.
More importantly, the people such measures would most harshly affect—the people whose kids can't wait to get out of there—are likely to be in the minority by a fair margin. When it comes to causing political change, it really doesn't matter how much you hurt a minority group because they will always be in the minority and cannot realistically hope to change the balance of power (short of committing genocide, anyway).
Second, it hurts the company or university. A company not hiring someone or a university not admitting someone because they feel that the education system in that person's hometown is substandard is a good way to miss hiring a lot of great people. More importantly, it's inherently an invalid assumption for any kids who are smart enough to realistically get into an ivy league institution because, as I said, intelligent people will find ways to educate themselves no matter how bad the education system is.
Finally, you have to remember that those kids you're suggesting banning from employment and education didn't live in a state because they wanted to. They lived there because that's where their parents had a job. You should judge a candidate based on his or her merits. Judging someone based on where he or she was born or who his or her parents were is really no better than judging someone by the color of his or her skin.
Oh, and just to clarify, lest you think I'm being critical of Tennessee's education system, it isn't the best, but it is nowhere near the worst. By many metrics, California is much worse, and nobody in their right mind would suggest banning students from California. It is shameful using kids as political pawns, and it's clear that this is what is being advocated here, not for their benefit, but because of fundamentally unworkable notions of scientific purity that just don't make sense in the real world.
Finally, I would add that in places where a sizable percentage of students hold strict creationist beliefs, discussing creationism (provided the point-of-view is neutral) in science classes is actually moderately useful, in my opinion—not because I subscribe to a strict creationist view (I don't), but because students in those schools face a constant struggle between teachers who are telling them one thing and religious leaders who are telling them something entirely different. Having an op
Actually, this is probably a smart move. One of the reasons their products don't compete very well is that the people within their company who should be their target audience don't actually use the products they make, and thus don't report bugs, don't complain about the clunky interface, etc. By forcing their marketing people to "live on" their own stuff (dogfooding), eventually the quality should start to improve.
Speaking as someone from Tennessee who works for a very large and well-respected corporation, I take issue with that assertion. The quality of an education system has little bearing on quality of a particular student's education. The intelligent find ways to educate themselves even in the absence of proper teaching.
Actually, you do. Consider HTTP:
Total effective latency for the images is 3x. Latency is very much cumulative when one request depends on another. It is only non-cumulative when you are solely using the link for batched downloads. This is why satellite and cellular Internet service can border on unusable for some tasks.