You can never say definitively which of the many radiation exposures caused an individual death or illness. When we say that deaths are directly attributable to a particular cause, we're referring to deaths in aggregate. For example, you might have 3,400 cancer deaths per million people in people who have had a particular medical procedure, where there are statistically about 3,219 deaths among the general population (maybe excluding people who have had that procedure, depending on your point of view), so 181 people died because of the procedure. I'm oversimplifying here, of course, but that's the basic idea.
With that grammar fix, it resolves the ambiguity one way or the other. Not nearly as fun as the one-eyed eater who eats one-horned, flying purple people, though.
Absolutely. Java is a terrible choice for anything remotely realtime, and any sort of autonomous control system for a vehicle meets that definition, by definition. I hope that they at least ensure that objects are always reused and that their code never relies on any garbage collector. Otherwise, this is quite literally an accident waiting to happen.
You aren't taking into account that it makes no sense to drive a car at its limit for long. No car, economy or high performance can handle the rigors of being close to its maximum for long.
Actually, in terms of car life, vehicles that are mostly driven at 65-80 MPH on the highway last much longer than vehicles that are mostly driven in town, with fewer breakdowns and other problems. What causes the most damage to vehicles is in-town driving at slower speeds. Between the steering, the constant starting and stopping, etc., you have a perfect recipe for wearing cars out.
Ask any race team (especially the non professionals who like to race street cars on the track) and you'll see how often things break when you push a car to its limits.
To be pedantic, race teams push cars beyond their safe limits. They burn up tires because they're peeling out all the way around every curve. They break struts because they're operating at G forces that are beyond the vehicle's true tolerances. And so on. Yes, the vehicles can handle such abuse for a short period of time, but that doesn't mean they are operating at their limit. They're operating way, way past it, and every minute those cars remain functional is more luck than anything else.
...the redneck farmer in the other lane might swerve his 1950's pickup into that chain of cars without a computer to tell the chain of cars it's coming.
This is why the law should require all cars, including vintage cars, to have a transmitter installed that reports steering wheel position, brake activation, and vehicle location. It's not ideal, but it would at least help automated vehicles identify manually driven vehicles and avoid them better.
The radiation produced by the scanners is non-ionizing. RF is non-ionizing. It's not an X-ray, or an MRI, or a CT, all of which use ionizing radiation. So you lose points for that one.
Wrong on multiple counts:
The Rapiscan machines are backscatter X-ray machines, which by definition produce ionizing radiation. The millimeter wave machines do not. So when you go into these things, you have about a 50/50 chance of getting a dose of ionizing radiation, depending on which of the two manufacturers built the box.
MRI machines do not use ionizing radiation.
Please take the time to learn about the technology before attempting to lecture people about how it works.
Actually, I was comparing retail to retail. Thermal imaging cameras are available off-the-shelf to anybody who wants one for about $4,000. Now admittedly, the price might go up somewhat due to the sudden surge in demand, but it's not going to go up by 1.6 orders of magnitude....
And most of the elevated people-movers at airports, some (not all) of the Disney parks, etc. are driverless, or if there's a human driver, the driver isn't physically present in the vehicle. IIRC, even BART was designed to be driverless, though the trains are not operated in that mode, last I checked.
unhindered: when you get a packet, move it on when you can.
Devil's advocate: it's possible to create a network that complies with these rules that is still unusable for many purposes. Multimedia communication is becoming a more and more important part of the Internet landscape, whether you're talking about AIM A/V, Skype, HTTP live streaming, or whatever. HIgh latency or large variations in latency can kill all of those sorts of uses of the Internet. Sending packets on as soon as you receive them produces just the sorts of high latency with wide variation necessary to ensure that these types of services are infeasible under even light backbone congestion. That's why we have technologies like QoS routing.
A proper network neutrality law should allow for load balancing (limiting the data rate of heavy users during periods of high congestion to allow room for other people's traffic), QoS (limiting the data rate of bulk traffic to allow for near-isochronous delivery of latency-sensitive traffic), and various other things while preventing limiting throughput based on what server you are connecting to on the other end, preventing companies from charging non-customers for better access to their customers, preventing limits on heavy users during off-peak times, preventing limits on bulk transfers when the bandwidth is not otherwise being used for latency-sensitive traffic, etc.
Thus, network neutrality is not simple. The reason we won't ever have net neutrality laws is that it is fundamentally so complex that maybe three or four members of Congress can even understand it. And that's actually an optimistic estimate; a more likely estimate is zero members. Heck, I don't even understand all the ramifications of it, and I've been working as a software engineer for more than a decade, including writing some networking software. It's a fundamentally complex issue, and any attempts to dumb it down will only result in laws that are catastrophically bad.
Happens all the time. As a general rule, if they are a thoughtful, well-reasoned liberal, they are allowed to talk.
You're joking, right? The left-leaning people I've seen on Fox are almost invariably meek, timid people who can't even get a word in edgewise between interruptions. You can't tell if they are thoughtful or well-reasoned, because they get at most half a sentence out before some jerk right-winger interrupts them and shouts over them. And the interviewer never has the balls to tell the right-winger to shut the hell up and let him speak. What I've seen has been so biased that it scarcely qualifies as news. The one time I saw a strong person on the left (who tore into the person on the right in a breathtakingly pointed and accurate fashion), they never aired that interview segment again.
Don't get me wrong, CNN is often no better. This is what happens when the industry as a whole feels that paying reporters a living wage is overrated. What we really need are journalists who understand the issues and have the guts to catch politicians in lies and noisespin and call them on it.
I would think that the cosmic radiation dose you get on the airplane is much more deadly than even that.
Matters not. Radiation exposure risk is cumulative over your life. If this kills more people than the terrorists, it really doesn't matter if something else unrelated also kills more people than the terrorists; there are still the same number of additional deaths directly attributable to these machines and only these machines.
This would still not make it any less objectionable from my perspective. As long as the distortion is occurring in software, it isn't acceptable. As long as the non-distorted data exists for even a microsecond on some hard drive somewhere, the data can be:
stored for later examination without the distortion applied
sent somewhere else for later examination without the distortion applied
copied by someone who hacked into the computers
And that's assuming that they don't just tell us that they're applying this distortion while not really doing so. Given the number of lies the TSA has told about these things so far, I don't trust these people as far as I can throw them.
Only one thing will make these less objectionable: not using them. If you're going to blur the heck out of the image anyway, why not replace those $170,000 machines with $4,000 infrared-based thermal imaging cameras and be done with it? They're 1/42nd the cost, and they do the blurring in hardware due to the nature of the energy emissions being detected. They're also much faster than the TSA's expensive toys---you could walk through like you do a metal detector instead of having to wait for a scan---and they're passive, so there's no exposure to dangerous ionizing radiation (and before you say that this is a small amount of radiation, I'll point out that no amount of ionizing radiation is safe according to BEIR VII from the National Academies of Science).
No, these unholy abominations have to go. They're a fundamental invasion of our privacy, and a perfect example of wasteful government spending.
Heh. This is, sadly, true. Which is why there should be an appropriate standards body in charge of saying what does and does not constitute a proper audit. Just not a government-controlled standards body.
Don't be fucking ridiculous. Hundreds of accidents saved due to traffic slowdowns? I thought we had a mechanism for detecting that: It's called a fuckload of stationary cars in front of you with their brake lights on. If you can't see it half a mile in advance you are either on an incredibly badly designed road or you cannot fucking see.
It's not just not seeing the backups. It's the stupid lane changing maniacs trying to force their way through the backups. If every one of those people got text message alerts notifying them of backups, and if every one of those backups were adequately reported by someone calling on a cell phone, many of those accidents would not happen because the people who were in a hurry would find an alternate route around the problem and would miss the backup entirely. When I listen to traffic reports in the San Francisco Bay area, it's almost inevitable that in any backup, there will always be at least one, and often two or three additional accidents in the backup. Backups cause accidents, whether you want to admit it or not. Not fatal accidents, generally speaking, but accidents.
Finally if you're one of the endless supply of cunts who insist on navigating complex junctions with high speed traffic (Black Dam roundabout onto M3 J7 in particular), by talking on your phone...
Stop right there. I'm talking about an hour-long commute at night on U.S. interstate highways and similar, which A. have few (if any) complex junctions by any stretch of the imagination, and B. involves sitting there driving for twenty miles going in a straight line without even changing lanes. I always stop talking before any exit ramp, and that's as complex as the junctions get. It is not only possible, but easy to drive responsibly while having low-stress phone conversations. Some of us are that sensible, and our rights should not be taken away merely because a few idiots don't know how to drive. Spank the idiots with fines for unsafe driving. We already have laws on the books to cover that adequately without introducing new draconian laws that contribute nothing of value.
Drunk drivers also fail to keep the car between the lines, sometimes losing consciousness completely. Drunk driving isn't just about reaction time. When you stop drinking, you are still impaired for a long time. More importantly, when driving under the influence of alcohol, even after that longer reaction time, your judgment---your ability to figure out how best to handle a dangerous situation---is still significantly impaired.
With a cell phone, that is not the case. When you stop talking and stop listening to the phone, you are no longer impaired. Thus, the argument over cell phone use is entirely about reaction time. Reaction time does not paint a complete picture of driving safety any more than latency alone paints an accurate picture of network performance, and for precisely the same reason. When driving, 99.9% of the time, reaction time is unimportant (at least in the U.S.). If you find that people are constantly pulling out in front of you or are driving dangerously in such a way that you have to react quickly more than once every couple of months, you should move somewhere with drivers who know how to drive.
By contrast, staying on your side of the road and not veering off into a tree is important almost all the time. Therefore, the probability of an accident due to alcohol impairment is orders of magnitude higher even if the reaction times are otherwise equal.
I think we'd be far better off if the government weren't coming up with the standards in any significant way. They've shown little understanding of security (and particularly computer security) in the past. Far better if they instead pass laws that simply mandate certain types of companies conduct regular security audits by their choice of external auditors, coupled with penalties if those audits find that the companies are not following established industry standards.
Alternatively, the government could create a standards organization consisting of industry leaders and security researchers to create and maintain appropriate standards if they don't think the existing industry standards are good enough.
Either way, HomeSec is already too big and bloated to be useful. The last thing we need is for them to do more.
What you are demonstrating is a failure of the education system, and more specifically, a failure of the driver ed curriculum. I drive while talking on the cell phone all the time. I know the road like the back of my hand, and I keep a longer stopping distance to compensate for the extended reaction time. When I see vehicles encroaching on that stopping distance or changing lanes rapidly in front of me or braking, I say "hold on" and I switch my focus fully over to the road until road conditions improve. It really isn't hard at all if you are taught how to handle it. This happens at least once every couple of weeks. Don't tell me that people can't stop talking on the phone, because I do it all the time. If other people don't, it's probably because they are physically holding the phone and don't want to drop it. That's why hands-free laws are almost inarguably a good idea. It frees you from having to take the time to comfortably put down the phone. That's not the same as banning all phone conversations, though.
The main reason for all the accidents is that driver education classes naively say "don't talk on the phone" and "don't be distracted" instead of properly teaching people how to handle distraction (which is, quite frankly, unavoidable, whether it's talking on a cell phone, yelling at someone on talk radio that you disagree with, or conversing with the person sitting next to you in the car). In short, these sorts of laws don't solve the problem. They make it worse by naively painting distraction as an avoidable situation when it really isn't.
Exactly, according to my phone I've called *911 3 times in the last 2 months, all to report either accidents or disabled vehicles in travel lanes without flashers.
Don't forget calls to area news radio stations to report traffic backups. Those reports reduce dangerous traffic slowdowns that would otherwise result in significant numbers of accidents in the backup. For every wreck caused by cell phones, there are dozens of wrecks prevented by them---maybe even hundreds.
Also, for people who have to drive late at night, cell phones provide a way for other people to help you stay awake. This saves lives directly.
When are these moron politicians going to get it through their thick skulls that you cannot legislate common sense?
Not to mention that two clauses should always have a combining comma unless they are very short, and the pronoun "I" should always be capitalized.
...than a corpse, I'm certain...
At least he/she didn't forget the apostrophe in "I'm", though. The fact that I'm impressed by that is quite depressing.
I don't necessarily agree that the lecture is merely a supplement to the reading, though. It has always been my experience that the lectures cover the material that the professor considers important, so except for the occasional prof who uses the test from the textbook (rare these days, since it is assumed that those tests are easily available and are often used as study aids), listening and absorbing the lecture is usually all you need to make a good grade in the class. The book is mostly there for people who don't absorb material as easily through their ears.
Interesting. As an edge-only iPhone user, I've noticed my dropped call increasing astronomically from an average of one drop every three or four weeks to often two or three drops per day. All since early 2010. My guess is they're robbing Peter to pay Paul rather than building out their infrastructure as they should.
As for me, I bought my nonrefundable tickets before these damnable scanners were installed at San Jose airport. So for many of us, the airlines have our money, and short of a lawsuit, we don't really have a choice but to put up with it. Next year, however, I'll be getting a sleeper car on Amtrak. Even traveling halfway across the country, it's absolutely worth it to me to pay several times as much and spend three times as long just to not have to put up with the TSA's bullshit.
More people shifting from open federated protocols to the closed world of Facebook is a bad thing. I sincerely hope that it doesn't happen.
It won't, or at least not for long. Facebook is too fundamentally broken. My account was hacked yesterday, and some d**n bot sent out chat messages to my friends trying to get them to sign up for IQ tests. I didn't feel violated, just annoyed. I kicked the bot with an account block/password reset, and I doubt I'll have problems again for a while.
The reason for that happening was twofold:
Facebook, to my knowledge, has no system for detecting distributed password guessing on an account and notifying the owner of the account or requiring additional authentication beyond the password in order to make forward progress (e.g. receiving an email at the registered account). Instead, they don't do anything until somebody reports the account as having been hijacked, by which time the attacker has been doing things for who-knows-how-long.
I used my lowest security password because I have about as much trust in Facebook's ability to keep my passwords safe as I do in the TSA to keep my flights safe.
Why, you might ask, do I consider Facebook to be completely unable to keep passwords safe? Because their entire security model is fundamentally broken, so I don't trust them at all. Here's a quick look of some of the more egregious flaws:
Connections are made in-the-clear over HTTP instead of HTTPS. It's unclear if this applies to login credentials or not.
Facebook forces you back to the HTTP site even if you connect via HTTPS. Every single solitary link generated programmatically by Facebook is an HTTP link even if you connected via HTTPS. That's a fundamental security screw-up, as it makes the site impossible to use in a secure fashion.
Facebook relies on cookies as the sole access tokens instead of using proper browser-based security such as user certificates or HTTP digest authentication. This means that anyone who can sniff a single request now has full access to your account merely by capturing the site cookies and replaying them with a new request.
Facebook has no mechanism for requiring additional authentication when a client connects from a previously unknown IP address or IP range.
Facebook has no mechanism for preventing keyboard sniffers from obtaining your login credentials.
The net effect of this is that Facebook is at the very bottom tier as far as my trust tiers go. I do not use any password on that site that I care about, and I treat everything on Facebook as inherently untrustworthy.
For this reason, I will never use Facebook as my primary email platform. It simply does not have the same trust as email (which itself has a fairly low level of trust because of the ease of spoofing). And I know that most of my friends (even those who are not particularly technically inclined) know this also. So unless Facebook massively improves their security story, they will not supersede email.
Slashdot Mirror
You can never say definitively which of the many radiation exposures caused an individual death or illness. When we say that deaths are directly attributable to a particular cause, we're referring to deaths in aggregate. For example, you might have 3,400 cancer deaths per million people in people who have had a particular medical procedure, where there are statistically about 3,219 deaths among the general population (maybe excluding people who have had that procedure, depending on your point of view), so 181 people died because of the procedure. I'm oversimplifying here, of course, but that's the basic idea.
Yeah, you're missing either a comma or a hyphen.
I was born a steel-driving man.
or
I was born a steel, driving man.
With that grammar fix, it resolves the ambiguity one way or the other. Not nearly as fun as the one-eyed eater who eats one-horned, flying purple people, though.
Okay, here's a relatively recent citation to get you started:
[Cumulative Radiation Exposure Shows Increased Cancer Risk For Emergency Department Patients]
That said, it has been common knowledge in medical and scientific circles for decades, so it really doesn't need a citation.
You are assuming that this has not already happened....
Absolutely. Java is a terrible choice for anything remotely realtime, and any sort of autonomous control system for a vehicle meets that definition, by definition. I hope that they at least ensure that objects are always reused and that their code never relies on any garbage collector. Otherwise, this is quite literally an accident waiting to happen.
Actually, in terms of car life, vehicles that are mostly driven at 65-80 MPH on the highway last much longer than vehicles that are mostly driven in town, with fewer breakdowns and other problems. What causes the most damage to vehicles is in-town driving at slower speeds. Between the steering, the constant starting and stopping, etc., you have a perfect recipe for wearing cars out.
To be pedantic, race teams push cars beyond their safe limits. They burn up tires because they're peeling out all the way around every curve. They break struts because they're operating at G forces that are beyond the vehicle's true tolerances. And so on. Yes, the vehicles can handle such abuse for a short period of time, but that doesn't mean they are operating at their limit. They're operating way, way past it, and every minute those cars remain functional is more luck than anything else.
This is why the law should require all cars, including vintage cars, to have a transmitter installed that reports steering wheel position, brake activation, and vehicle location. It's not ideal, but it would at least help automated vehicles identify manually driven vehicles and avoid them better.
Wrong on multiple counts:
Please take the time to learn about the technology before attempting to lecture people about how it works.
Actually, I was comparing retail to retail. Thermal imaging cameras are available off-the-shelf to anybody who wants one for about $4,000. Now admittedly, the price might go up somewhat due to the sudden surge in demand, but it's not going to go up by 1.6 orders of magnitude....
And most of the elevated people-movers at airports, some (not all) of the Disney parks, etc. are driverless, or if there's a human driver, the driver isn't physically present in the vehicle. IIRC, even BART was designed to be driverless, though the trains are not operated in that mode, last I checked.
Devil's advocate: it's possible to create a network that complies with these rules that is still unusable for many purposes. Multimedia communication is becoming a more and more important part of the Internet landscape, whether you're talking about AIM A/V, Skype, HTTP live streaming, or whatever. HIgh latency or large variations in latency can kill all of those sorts of uses of the Internet. Sending packets on as soon as you receive them produces just the sorts of high latency with wide variation necessary to ensure that these types of services are infeasible under even light backbone congestion. That's why we have technologies like QoS routing.
A proper network neutrality law should allow for load balancing (limiting the data rate of heavy users during periods of high congestion to allow room for other people's traffic), QoS (limiting the data rate of bulk traffic to allow for near-isochronous delivery of latency-sensitive traffic), and various other things while preventing limiting throughput based on what server you are connecting to on the other end, preventing companies from charging non-customers for better access to their customers, preventing limits on heavy users during off-peak times, preventing limits on bulk transfers when the bandwidth is not otherwise being used for latency-sensitive traffic, etc.
Thus, network neutrality is not simple. The reason we won't ever have net neutrality laws is that it is fundamentally so complex that maybe three or four members of Congress can even understand it. And that's actually an optimistic estimate; a more likely estimate is zero members. Heck, I don't even understand all the ramifications of it, and I've been working as a software engineer for more than a decade, including writing some networking software. It's a fundamentally complex issue, and any attempts to dumb it down will only result in laws that are catastrophically bad.
You're joking, right? The left-leaning people I've seen on Fox are almost invariably meek, timid people who can't even get a word in edgewise between interruptions. You can't tell if they are thoughtful or well-reasoned, because they get at most half a sentence out before some jerk right-winger interrupts them and shouts over them. And the interviewer never has the balls to tell the right-winger to shut the hell up and let him speak. What I've seen has been so biased that it scarcely qualifies as news. The one time I saw a strong person on the left (who tore into the person on the right in a breathtakingly pointed and accurate fashion), they never aired that interview segment again.
Don't get me wrong, CNN is often no better. This is what happens when the industry as a whole feels that paying reporters a living wage is overrated. What we really need are journalists who understand the issues and have the guts to catch politicians in lies and noisespin and call them on it.
Matters not. Radiation exposure risk is cumulative over your life. If this kills more people than the terrorists, it really doesn't matter if something else unrelated also kills more people than the terrorists; there are still the same number of additional deaths directly attributable to these machines and only these machines.
This would still not make it any less objectionable from my perspective. As long as the distortion is occurring in software, it isn't acceptable. As long as the non-distorted data exists for even a microsecond on some hard drive somewhere, the data can be:
And that's assuming that they don't just tell us that they're applying this distortion while not really doing so. Given the number of lies the TSA has told about these things so far, I don't trust these people as far as I can throw them.
Only one thing will make these less objectionable: not using them. If you're going to blur the heck out of the image anyway, why not replace those $170,000 machines with $4,000 infrared-based thermal imaging cameras and be done with it? They're 1/42nd the cost, and they do the blurring in hardware due to the nature of the energy emissions being detected. They're also much faster than the TSA's expensive toys---you could walk through like you do a metal detector instead of having to wait for a scan---and they're passive, so there's no exposure to dangerous ionizing radiation (and before you say that this is a small amount of radiation, I'll point out that no amount of ionizing radiation is safe according to BEIR VII from the National Academies of Science).
No, these unholy abominations have to go. They're a fundamental invasion of our privacy, and a perfect example of wasteful government spending.
Heh. This is, sadly, true. Which is why there should be an appropriate standards body in charge of saying what does and does not constitute a proper audit. Just not a government-controlled standards body.
It's not just not seeing the backups. It's the stupid lane changing maniacs trying to force their way through the backups. If every one of those people got text message alerts notifying them of backups, and if every one of those backups were adequately reported by someone calling on a cell phone, many of those accidents would not happen because the people who were in a hurry would find an alternate route around the problem and would miss the backup entirely. When I listen to traffic reports in the San Francisco Bay area, it's almost inevitable that in any backup, there will always be at least one, and often two or three additional accidents in the backup. Backups cause accidents, whether you want to admit it or not. Not fatal accidents, generally speaking, but accidents.
Stop right there. I'm talking about an hour-long commute at night on U.S. interstate highways and similar, which A. have few (if any) complex junctions by any stretch of the imagination, and B. involves sitting there driving for twenty miles going in a straight line without even changing lanes. I always stop talking before any exit ramp, and that's as complex as the junctions get. It is not only possible, but easy to drive responsibly while having low-stress phone conversations. Some of us are that sensible, and our rights should not be taken away merely because a few idiots don't know how to drive. Spank the idiots with fines for unsafe driving. We already have laws on the books to cover that adequately without introducing new draconian laws that contribute nothing of value.
Drunk drivers also fail to keep the car between the lines, sometimes losing consciousness completely. Drunk driving isn't just about reaction time. When you stop drinking, you are still impaired for a long time. More importantly, when driving under the influence of alcohol, even after that longer reaction time, your judgment---your ability to figure out how best to handle a dangerous situation---is still significantly impaired.
With a cell phone, that is not the case. When you stop talking and stop listening to the phone, you are no longer impaired. Thus, the argument over cell phone use is entirely about reaction time. Reaction time does not paint a complete picture of driving safety any more than latency alone paints an accurate picture of network performance, and for precisely the same reason. When driving, 99.9% of the time, reaction time is unimportant (at least in the U.S.). If you find that people are constantly pulling out in front of you or are driving dangerously in such a way that you have to react quickly more than once every couple of months, you should move somewhere with drivers who know how to drive.
By contrast, staying on your side of the road and not veering off into a tree is important almost all the time. Therefore, the probability of an accident due to alcohol impairment is orders of magnitude higher even if the reaction times are otherwise equal.
I think we'd be far better off if the government weren't coming up with the standards in any significant way. They've shown little understanding of security (and particularly computer security) in the past. Far better if they instead pass laws that simply mandate certain types of companies conduct regular security audits by their choice of external auditors, coupled with penalties if those audits find that the companies are not following established industry standards.
Alternatively, the government could create a standards organization consisting of industry leaders and security researchers to create and maintain appropriate standards if they don't think the existing industry standards are good enough.
Either way, HomeSec is already too big and bloated to be useful. The last thing we need is for them to do more.
What you are demonstrating is a failure of the education system, and more specifically, a failure of the driver ed curriculum. I drive while talking on the cell phone all the time. I know the road like the back of my hand, and I keep a longer stopping distance to compensate for the extended reaction time. When I see vehicles encroaching on that stopping distance or changing lanes rapidly in front of me or braking, I say "hold on" and I switch my focus fully over to the road until road conditions improve. It really isn't hard at all if you are taught how to handle it. This happens at least once every couple of weeks. Don't tell me that people can't stop talking on the phone, because I do it all the time. If other people don't, it's probably because they are physically holding the phone and don't want to drop it. That's why hands-free laws are almost inarguably a good idea. It frees you from having to take the time to comfortably put down the phone. That's not the same as banning all phone conversations, though.
The main reason for all the accidents is that driver education classes naively say "don't talk on the phone" and "don't be distracted" instead of properly teaching people how to handle distraction (which is, quite frankly, unavoidable, whether it's talking on a cell phone, yelling at someone on talk radio that you disagree with, or conversing with the person sitting next to you in the car). In short, these sorts of laws don't solve the problem. They make it worse by naively painting distraction as an avoidable situation when it really isn't.
Don't forget calls to area news radio stations to report traffic backups. Those reports reduce dangerous traffic slowdowns that would otherwise result in significant numbers of accidents in the backup. For every wreck caused by cell phones, there are dozens of wrecks prevented by them---maybe even hundreds.
Also, for people who have to drive late at night, cell phones provide a way for other people to help you stay awake. This saves lives directly.
When are these moron politicians going to get it through their thick skulls that you cannot legislate common sense?
Not to mention that two clauses should always have a combining comma unless they are very short, and the pronoun "I" should always be capitalized.
At least he/she didn't forget the apostrophe in "I'm", though. The fact that I'm impressed by that is quite depressing.
I don't necessarily agree that the lecture is merely a supplement to the reading, though. It has always been my experience that the lectures cover the material that the professor considers important, so except for the occasional prof who uses the test from the textbook (rare these days, since it is assumed that those tests are easily available and are often used as study aids), listening and absorbing the lecture is usually all you need to make a good grade in the class. The book is mostly there for people who don't absorb material as easily through their ears.
Whoosh.
Interesting. As an edge-only iPhone user, I've noticed my dropped call increasing astronomically from an average of one drop every three or four weeks to often two or three drops per day. All since early 2010. My guess is they're robbing Peter to pay Paul rather than building out their infrastructure as they should.
As for me, I bought my nonrefundable tickets before these damnable scanners were installed at San Jose airport. So for many of us, the airlines have our money, and short of a lawsuit, we don't really have a choice but to put up with it. Next year, however, I'll be getting a sleeper car on Amtrak. Even traveling halfway across the country, it's absolutely worth it to me to pay several times as much and spend three times as long just to not have to put up with the TSA's bullshit.
An alternative root server would solve the problem. The domain would simply be mysite.alternic or whatever instead of mysite.com.
It won't, or at least not for long. Facebook is too fundamentally broken. My account was hacked yesterday, and some d**n bot sent out chat messages to my friends trying to get them to sign up for IQ tests. I didn't feel violated, just annoyed. I kicked the bot with an account block/password reset, and I doubt I'll have problems again for a while.
The reason for that happening was twofold:
Why, you might ask, do I consider Facebook to be completely unable to keep passwords safe? Because their entire security model is fundamentally broken, so I don't trust them at all. Here's a quick look of some of the more egregious flaws:
The net effect of this is that Facebook is at the very bottom tier as far as my trust tiers go. I do not use any password on that site that I care about, and I treat everything on Facebook as inherently untrustworthy.
For this reason, I will never use Facebook as my primary email platform. It simply does not have the same trust as email (which itself has a fairly low level of trust because of the ease of spoofing). And I know that most of my friends (even those who are not particularly technically inclined) know this also. So unless Facebook massively improves their security story, they will not supersede email.