I believe it was "No, you are not. I have a Nokia N3100 that I use to make calls. I get 4+ days of idle, 6+ hours talk time, and it works well with my BMW (a kind of car). I also have an N95 (1 day/2 hours) that I sometimes use at my desk or when I need a GPRS modem."
GPRS is a cell phone protocol, and by GPRS modem, the poster was referring to tethering. Clear as mud?
The thing is, at least in the U.S., if those companies spent the same money outfitting their roofs with solar panel arrays, they'd be reducing the baseline power during the day, allowing a significant reduction in coal plants. Here in the U.S., we get the bulk of our power (nearly half) from coal. We're beaten by India at about 65% and China at about 82%, admittedly, but getting China to switch from coal is going to require significant effort, and India is already pushing to move from coal to nuclear, making investments there somewhat shortsighted. And in terms of total use (rather than percentages), we're #2 behind only China.
This means that the best thing most U.S. businesses can do carbon-wise is to actually be electrically (and thus carbon) neutral, not buy their way into some perceived neutrality. That's what really gets on my nerves about the whole thing. If you cut the baseline power use somewhere else, you may be more likely to get the reduction from some more expensive (but cleaner) source of energy like oil or natural gas---or worse, cause some other solar power plant in that region to not get built.
For companies in other countries with lower percentages of coal usage, building locally is usually still better to a lesser degree, though, in that every penny of your costs for constructing alternative power systems goes into materials or labor costs, while carbon offsets would lose a cut off the top for the carbon offset vendor, plus a cut for the power company doing the project, plus the contractor, plus who knows how many other people and companies. And unlike building a solar farm on your own business's roof, a power company is unlikely to roll the cost savings from an externally-funded solar power project into more alternative energy production. Add to that the cost savings that a local deployment would provide for your business, and you'd have to be silly to buy carbon credits.
If you really want to do a good thing carbon-wise, build out a section of solar infrastructure on the roof of your business, then add the power savings each month into a fund to build out additional solar infrastructure. Repeat until you are energy neutral, then a few years later, build a solar power plant and sell bulk power back to the grid. Repeat until satisfied.
The whole concept is junk science. It's basically saying that you can urinate in someone's swimming pool if you filter an equal amount of salt out of the ocean.
The real world doesn't work that way. In the real world, local effects are just as bad as global effects, and there's no guarantee that opposite local effects in two places will ever actually cancel each other out. It's a nice way to help people feel good about themselves, but in the grand scheme of things, it is naive to think that carbon offsets, no matter how large, can undo the damage of the carbon you shouldn't have emitted in the first place....
Dongles need to be in a class by themselves. Software rarely provides copy protection on the install media, but when it does, it is usually forgeable with some effort, thus allowing you to have a backup in case the disc goes bad. Dongles, by contrast, are often irreplaceable, nearly non-duplicatable devices without which you have no license.
I think we also need laws that provide governance over dongles, requiring that if a dongle is lost or stolen, the manufacturer must agree to replace the license key for no more than some reasonable percentage (say 5%) of the cost of the software unless they can show in a court of law that they had reasonable cause to believe that the theft did not occur. Some companies will do it for free, others charge the full replacement price of the software, which IMHO is unreasonable. Because of that last group, I will not purchase software that uses dongles. It is simply too great a risk.
It is annoying, but activation isn't inherently a problem for most people. It is usually something you only do once and then forget about it. The problem with activation is not the inconvenience---that's relatively minor.
The real problem with activation-based DRM is that companies frequently ignore the million-dollar question: what happens if/when the company goes out of business or decides they don't want to maintain the DRM scheme anymore? One day, Microsoft may disintegrate. One of their DRM systems already did, IIRC. Those folks were stuck with products that suddenly could not be migrated to new hardware.
I think we need a new law here: any company employing any content protection mechanism must either A. contain a dead-man's switch code (which they must provide to all current and former customers if they go under or decide to shut down the DRM servers), B. post an untouchable bond sufficient to cover the operation of the DRM servers in perpetuity, C. provide a tool that converts from an obsolete DRM scheme to a newer one with no additional restrictions, or D. provide a piece of software that removes the DRM (or a replacement copy of the software that does not use DRM) at the time of dissolution or termination of the DRM scheme.
Further, this obligation must be automatically and unavoidably inherited by any company that purchases DRM-covered assets from any other company.
Any hardware manufacturers who build devices that support DRM-laden formats should similarly be required to A. post a bond to cover the cost of any future upgrades to the DRM scheme if they go under AND B. agree to release the source code and development tools sufficient for the DRM scheme creator to update the hardware manufacturer's firmware with the new DRM scheme if the original DRM company chooses option C. above.
I would go one step further and apply this to non-activation-based DRM schemes (e.g. DVDs) as a requirement for any company to provide unlock tools if and when that manufacturer stops producing content in the format in question. Oh, one more rule: no DRM scheme should be permitted to prevent the user's ability to make an identical backup copy of any protected content.
Yes, you should. It is combining two complete clauses. If both clauses were short, it would be optional, but it is always correct to use a comma in this case.
If you want to complain about something, complain about the comma splice in the last sentence. It should either be a period (followed by a capital letter) or a semicolon.
--David the Grammarian
P.S. Just to bring this back on topic, if you want to make it a lot harder for this to happen, use a prepaid credit card and pay with cash.
Note: there are two short clauses in that last sentence.:-)
The funny thing about that is that 50% of those brands of cereals tastes like sticks and twigs, but 100% of the political parties taste like sticks and twigs.
No, no, you got it all wrong. 50% of the political parties taste like sticks and twigs. The other 50% taste like twigs and sticks.
That's what the steel spikes are for. They impale your tires and dig into the pavement in the event of traction loss. Gets rather expensive after hydroplaning a couple of times, though.
In other news, Volvo has announced a cutting-edge strategy for surviving the economic slump through their exclusive partnership with Goodyear and Michelin....
Yes, I've used a GPS receiver. In fact, I've used two different GPS receivers---one by Garmin, one by Tom Tom. Neither works reliably when you have a rock cliff next to you. I've gotten results that suddenly jump by as much as a quarter mile. If you're using that for distance calculations, your travel just increased by half a mile.
You're attacking my minor points while completely ignoring the main point.... My main point was that GPS is A. frequently inaccurate, B. a really bad way of determining how far you have driven, C. has the potential for being a serious privacy violation, and D. presents a huge infrastructure cost, both in terms of every gas station having to spend tens of thousands of dollars to replace or retrofit their pumps and in terms of every single vehicle in the entire U.S. costing hundreds of dollars extra. And all of this so that Oregon can get what will probably average out at $1-200 per hybrid vehicle sold spread over the lifetime of the vehicle. In what sane universe does that make ANY sense?
That said, if you're that bothered by having to do a little extra work on your taxes, you could always have your state charge a hybrid title tax. Charge $100 for every ten MPG over 30 MPG. You'll end up bringing in the same amount of money, but the cost to the general public will be far, far less.
I was going to post pretty much the same thing. Ignoring kids using their parents' email accounts, the only reason anyone ever has for taking someone else's password is to pose as them. There is exactly zero valid reason for anyone to be forced to give up their passwords.
Perhaps more importantly, as soon as those registered sex offenders turn in their passwords, those accounts are effectively compromised. That means that from that point forward, they are free to sexually prey upon anyone online without any risk of successful prosecution. In effect, by requiring these people to give their passwords away to third parties, they are giving sexual predators a free pass to do pretty much anything they want online....
Wow. Two stories about state governments run by idiots on Slashdot today alone. That has to be some kind of record....
What I don't get is this: why in h*ll would they put a privacy-violating GPS device in to count mileage when:
GPS doesn't work reliably in cities with tall buildings, frequently losing signal, and thus completely unable to record mileage where it is most important to do so,
GPS doesn't work reliably in mountainous terrain, frequently putting you miles off course (thus artificially inflating your drive distance by a mile in the course of a tenth of a second) or losing the signal entirely for miles at a time.
GPS doesn't work in tunnels.
GPS is trivially jammed or spoofed.
Your car already has a perfectly good odometer.
Even if we assume that the GPS will merely be used to determine where you are, half the Oregon borders are in the mountains, so you may well find yourself getting billed for miles not driven within the state. Not to mention that you're probably adding a couple hundred bucks to the cost of every automobile, all for the sole purpose of giving the government more revenue.
To add insult to injury, at 1.2 cents per mile, you would have to go almost 17,000 extra miles in that hybrid beyond what you would have gotten on that amount of fuel in a non-hybrid car. With typical hybrids getting maybe 5-10% higher MPG on average, the break-even point is when the car has gone between 170k and 340k miles. If everybody just paid that same $200 to the state as a tax on the sale of a new vehicle, it would give the state probably twice as much money as they would make off of this, all for the same cost to the consumer, all without violating people's privacy.
Here's a more sane proposal: when you apply for your tags, make one line on the form be the current odometer reading. Charge an additional license fee based on the mileage. Once the vehicle starts going in for smog checks, this can be corroborated by periodic reporting by the smog check station, so there's low risk of significant cheating.
Allow people who do a substantial amount of out-of-state driving to apply for a tax credit on his/her personal income tax for driving outside the state. Require them to provide some corroborating evidence (receipts from out of state hotels or gas stations during the period in question, pay stubs proving an out-of-state job, etc.).
By making the small percentage of people who regularly drive outside the state spend an extra ten minutes filling out their income tax forms, you save the cost of additional hardware in new vehicles, additional hardware at the pumps (the cost of which will be paid by everyone), etc. and you avoid all the privacy questions. More to the point, since all new cars sold anywhere would then have to have these devices (since car makers won't build a separate model just for Oregon, even if these GPS devices only cost $100, my plan will save almost 2 billion dollars annually nationwide in unnecessary hardware when compared with the Oregon governor's plan.
Just to put that number in perspective, that's billion with a 'B'---enough money to bail out on the order of 20,000 home owners who are defaulting on their mortgages. Anyone in favor of something so asinine should be publicly flogged.... The people of Oregon deserve someone with better math and problem solving skills than this....
Outgoing calls work because the tower doesn't have to phone home to make an outgoing call. Incoming calls don't work because the tower near you has to contact the primary tower in the city where your cell phone's phone number is registered to tell it that the phone is currently hanging off a different tower. What is probably happening here is that the inter-tower communication is not working. This is probably because of the same trunk line failure that is causing the data to not work. In other words, chances are, the tower near you is working fine, but your home tower (wherever that is) is dead as a doornail.
Or as Cacadril wrote right below this while I was composing my previous message, it may well be that the Verizon service provided integrated access to MSN/Yahoo/GMail from within their webmail and that they'll have to use the new ISP's version of that service instead of Verizon's because they're losing access to the Verizon portal. I find that explanation a little dubious since AFAIK MSN doesn't provide IMAP (making a Verizon-provided web front end difficult), but that is a million times more plausible an explanation than the ridiculous notion that an ISP would deliberately block access to MSN, Yahoo, and Google's webmail services....
If you read far enough down in the replies, you'll find out that the entire Slashdot story is completely bogus. They're shutting down access to Verizon's web portal. Users will get their ISP email from a different site. Users of MSN, Yahoo, etc. will no longer be able to use those services' IMAP support to get their email from Verizon because the company is no longer part of Verizon. Therefore, if they are using a third-party site to access their Verizon email, they will now have to use the Fairpoint webmail interface for their webmail.
This, of course, raises questions about why they can't just use IMAP from the Fairpoint servers, which probably implies that the new Fairpoint service doesn't provide IMAP from outside the network, but while that would suck, it's hardly on the same scale as blocking web portals to dozens of web-based email services, some of which cannot realistically be re-served using a Fairpoint web front end because they don't provide IMAP..... The "violate net neutrality" interpretation of the article makes absolutely zero sense....
That's because JTAG A. is specialized hardware that very, very few people have access to, and B. almost always involves soldering a connector onto the device's board because it almost NEVER gets shipped with the headers populated in production hardware. So yes, safe to say if it requires soldering inside the unit, that qualifies as bricked.... That's significantly different than a software issue.
BTW, at least one of the people in that thread is (with 85% probability) seeing an NVidia chip failure. I wouldn't be surprised if several of them were that. The original poster also has some sort of hardware problem. And so on. These issues are all over the map, but are getting lumped together because they have the same symptoms and all happened right around the time of a software update. I strongly suspect that this is yet another non-story in which people jump to very wrong conclusions and mistakenly see patterns where none exist. It happens after pretty much every Mac OS X update, and apart from fairly minor things like "X feature of Y app doesn't work" or "X application crashes now", they almost never pan out.... (The one time in my memory that they did, it was caused by APE.)
There was another study in Virginia that showed that while fatalities decreased (right angle crashes), total accidents increased significantly after putting in red-light cameras, and this effect did not diminish over time. Source: thenewspaper.com. I'm sure you'll find a similar refutation of the Texas study; it is still too soon to see that.
There was another study from the Univ. of South Florida with similar results.
In short, traffic cameras show no statistical improvement in accident rate, and in some cases show no improvement in injury rate, either. By contrast, yellow light studies consistently show a significant improvement, and have never been shown to cause any increase in accidents.
As for comparisons with yellow light cameras, I'm having a hard time digging those up, but here's a story about an experiment on one particularly bad intersection in Fort Collins. Here's a study on all-red intervals that is also relevant here. Either way, it should be clear that if studies show red light enforcement increases the number of accidents and yellow light timing changes decrease it, it doesn't take a genius to know that photo enforcement is not a good solution to the problem.
Politics tends to attract those who want power, and those who want power are seldom in the best interests of those who are being led. Therefore, an ideal political structure would include a benevolent dictator randomly chosen from the population, who would be deposed if another group of a dozen randomly chosen people decide to throw him/her out. It would then have a mock electoral process to elect fake leaders. The resulting political body's sole purpose for existence would be bringing politicians out of the woodwork and keeping them isolated from polite society.
I hereby nominate CmdrTaco as the first benevolent dictator. All in favor, say aye!
I'm talking about the studies that have compared the effectiveness of adding red light cameras versus making the yellow light longer. There have been several studies on that, and they have all consistently and conclusively stated that increasing the yellow cycle is more effective. Sorry, guess I should have been more precise in qualifying the word "every". I just assumed it was obvious from the context.
Science cannot require blind faith. An untestable theory requires blind faith. Therefore, an untestable theory is not science. String theory is an untestable theory. Therefore, string theory is not science. Q.E.D.
I haven't seen a city in California whose times aren't already unsafely short. You can't tell me that a two second yellow is EVER safe, yet I've seen them that short in Sunnyvale, and many, many intersections at only three. And I've seen three seconds with zero all-red seconds for lights that allow left turns across five lanes of traffic. If you enter at the speed limit as it turns yellow, you will be in the intersection for at least two seconds while the light is green in the other direction. I can count at least a dozen lights between Fair Oaks and Sunnyvale roads alone that are dangerous, and those aren't even the intersections with cameras....
The other dirty thing they do to try to anger drivers and make them run red lights is to time the lights so you hit every second light red reproducibly. Again, the two major roads through Sunnyvale are timed in this way for the vast majority of the day. Not only does it increase the rate of road rage significantly, it encourages people to exceed the speed limit to beat the lights, encourages people to run the lights when they change to red right in front of them, and likely wastes millions of gallons of gasoline every year in California alone, all so they can raise a little more red light revenue at a few intersections....
IMHO, we need a California-wide ballot measure to demand citizen oversight committees be in charge of all traffic light management. That's the only way the abuse will stop. And red light cameras are abuse. Every study of red light cameras has shown that increasing the length of yellow lights to a minimum of seven seconds has the same benefits in terms of sideswipe accident reduction without the increased rate of rear end collisions, without wasting tons of fuel, without causing road rage, etc. Unfortunately, the people in power are not about to admit that they were wrong, so the only way to fix the problem is to wrest control away form them through a referendum.
At least speed cameras are illegal in California. We got one right, anyway. It's a good thing, too. There's a radar sign on Highway 17 that routinely overestimates the speed of oncoming traffic by up to 15 MPH. If such a device were handing out speeding tickets, I'd have a thousand of them, all while going the speed limit, all with a confused look on my face staring at the completely incorrect speed on the sign....
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I believe it was "No, you are not. I have a Nokia N3100 that I use to make calls. I get 4+ days of idle, 6+ hours talk time, and it works well with my BMW (a kind of car) . I also have an N95 (1 day/2 hours) that I sometimes use at my desk or when I need a GPRS modem."
GPRS is a cell phone protocol, and by GPRS modem, the poster was referring to tethering. Clear as mud?
The thing is, at least in the U.S., if those companies spent the same money outfitting their roofs with solar panel arrays, they'd be reducing the baseline power during the day, allowing a significant reduction in coal plants. Here in the U.S., we get the bulk of our power (nearly half) from coal. We're beaten by India at about 65% and China at about 82%, admittedly, but getting China to switch from coal is going to require significant effort, and India is already pushing to move from coal to nuclear, making investments there somewhat shortsighted. And in terms of total use (rather than percentages), we're #2 behind only China.
This means that the best thing most U.S. businesses can do carbon-wise is to actually be electrically (and thus carbon) neutral, not buy their way into some perceived neutrality. That's what really gets on my nerves about the whole thing. If you cut the baseline power use somewhere else, you may be more likely to get the reduction from some more expensive (but cleaner) source of energy like oil or natural gas---or worse, cause some other solar power plant in that region to not get built.
For companies in other countries with lower percentages of coal usage, building locally is usually still better to a lesser degree, though, in that every penny of your costs for constructing alternative power systems goes into materials or labor costs, while carbon offsets would lose a cut off the top for the carbon offset vendor, plus a cut for the power company doing the project, plus the contractor, plus who knows how many other people and companies. And unlike building a solar farm on your own business's roof, a power company is unlikely to roll the cost savings from an externally-funded solar power project into more alternative energy production. Add to that the cost savings that a local deployment would provide for your business, and you'd have to be silly to buy carbon credits.
If you really want to do a good thing carbon-wise, build out a section of solar infrastructure on the roof of your business, then add the power savings each month into a fund to build out additional solar infrastructure. Repeat until you are energy neutral, then a few years later, build a solar power plant and sell bulk power back to the grid. Repeat until satisfied.
The whole concept is junk science. It's basically saying that you can urinate in someone's swimming pool if you filter an equal amount of salt out of the ocean.
The real world doesn't work that way. In the real world, local effects are just as bad as global effects, and there's no guarantee that opposite local effects in two places will ever actually cancel each other out. It's a nice way to help people feel good about themselves, but in the grand scheme of things, it is naive to think that carbon offsets, no matter how large, can undo the damage of the carbon you shouldn't have emitted in the first place....
Dongles need to be in a class by themselves. Software rarely provides copy protection on the install media, but when it does, it is usually forgeable with some effort, thus allowing you to have a backup in case the disc goes bad. Dongles, by contrast, are often irreplaceable, nearly non-duplicatable devices without which you have no license.
I think we also need laws that provide governance over dongles, requiring that if a dongle is lost or stolen, the manufacturer must agree to replace the license key for no more than some reasonable percentage (say 5%) of the cost of the software unless they can show in a court of law that they had reasonable cause to believe that the theft did not occur. Some companies will do it for free, others charge the full replacement price of the software, which IMHO is unreasonable. Because of that last group, I will not purchase software that uses dongles. It is simply too great a risk.
It is annoying, but activation isn't inherently a problem for most people. It is usually something you only do once and then forget about it. The problem with activation is not the inconvenience---that's relatively minor.
The real problem with activation-based DRM is that companies frequently ignore the million-dollar question: what happens if/when the company goes out of business or decides they don't want to maintain the DRM scheme anymore? One day, Microsoft may disintegrate. One of their DRM systems already did, IIRC. Those folks were stuck with products that suddenly could not be migrated to new hardware.
I think we need a new law here: any company employing any content protection mechanism must either A. contain a dead-man's switch code (which they must provide to all current and former customers if they go under or decide to shut down the DRM servers), B. post an untouchable bond sufficient to cover the operation of the DRM servers in perpetuity, C. provide a tool that converts from an obsolete DRM scheme to a newer one with no additional restrictions, or D. provide a piece of software that removes the DRM (or a replacement copy of the software that does not use DRM) at the time of dissolution or termination of the DRM scheme.
Further, this obligation must be automatically and unavoidably inherited by any company that purchases DRM-covered assets from any other company.
Any hardware manufacturers who build devices that support DRM-laden formats should similarly be required to A. post a bond to cover the cost of any future upgrades to the DRM scheme if they go under AND B. agree to release the source code and development tools sufficient for the DRM scheme creator to update the hardware manufacturer's firmware with the new DRM scheme if the original DRM company chooses option C. above.
I would go one step further and apply this to non-activation-based DRM schemes (e.g. DVDs) as a requirement for any company to provide unlock tools if and when that manufacturer stops producing content in the format in question. Oh, one more rule: no DRM scheme should be permitted to prevent the user's ability to make an identical backup copy of any protected content.
Yes, you should. It is combining two complete clauses. If both clauses were short, it would be optional, but it is always correct to use a comma in this case.
If you want to complain about something, complain about the comma splice in the last sentence. It should either be a period (followed by a capital letter) or a semicolon.
--David the Grammarian
P.S. Just to bring this back on topic, if you want to make it a lot harder for this to happen, use a prepaid credit card and pay with cash.
Note: there are two short clauses in that last sentence. :-)
No, no, you got it all wrong. 50% of the political parties taste like sticks and twigs. The other 50% taste like twigs and sticks.
Actually, BRCA is very relevant. The same gene is believed to play a role in prostate cancer.
That's what the steel spikes are for. They impale your tires and dig into the pavement in the event of traction loss. Gets rather expensive after hydroplaning a couple of times, though.
In other news, Volvo has announced a cutting-edge strategy for surviving the economic slump through their exclusive partnership with Goodyear and Michelin....
No, that is always recommended. How else are you going to get the bean counters to spring for some new kit?
I'm used to it at the federal level. I can't think of that many recently at the state level, though. :-)
Wait... they banned <3 but not the one that looks like a middle finger?
Just to be clear, I never advocated bailing out homeowners. It is just an attempt to show the mind-boggling scale of the waste involved....
Yes, I've used a GPS receiver. In fact, I've used two different GPS receivers---one by Garmin, one by Tom Tom. Neither works reliably when you have a rock cliff next to you. I've gotten results that suddenly jump by as much as a quarter mile. If you're using that for distance calculations, your travel just increased by half a mile.
You're attacking my minor points while completely ignoring the main point.... My main point was that GPS is A. frequently inaccurate, B. a really bad way of determining how far you have driven, C. has the potential for being a serious privacy violation, and D. presents a huge infrastructure cost, both in terms of every gas station having to spend tens of thousands of dollars to replace or retrofit their pumps and in terms of every single vehicle in the entire U.S. costing hundreds of dollars extra. And all of this so that Oregon can get what will probably average out at $1-200 per hybrid vehicle sold spread over the lifetime of the vehicle. In what sane universe does that make ANY sense?
That said, if you're that bothered by having to do a little extra work on your taxes, you could always have your state charge a hybrid title tax. Charge $100 for every ten MPG over 30 MPG. You'll end up bringing in the same amount of money, but the cost to the general public will be far, far less.
I was going to post pretty much the same thing. Ignoring kids using their parents' email accounts, the only reason anyone ever has for taking someone else's password is to pose as them. There is exactly zero valid reason for anyone to be forced to give up their passwords.
Perhaps more importantly, as soon as those registered sex offenders turn in their passwords, those accounts are effectively compromised. That means that from that point forward, they are free to sexually prey upon anyone online without any risk of successful prosecution. In effect, by requiring these people to give their passwords away to third parties, they are giving sexual predators a free pass to do pretty much anything they want online....
Wow. Two stories about state governments run by idiots on Slashdot today alone. That has to be some kind of record....
What I don't get is this: why in h*ll would they put a privacy-violating GPS device in to count mileage when:
Even if we assume that the GPS will merely be used to determine where you are, half the Oregon borders are in the mountains, so you may well find yourself getting billed for miles not driven within the state. Not to mention that you're probably adding a couple hundred bucks to the cost of every automobile, all for the sole purpose of giving the government more revenue.
To add insult to injury, at 1.2 cents per mile, you would have to go almost 17,000 extra miles in that hybrid beyond what you would have gotten on that amount of fuel in a non-hybrid car. With typical hybrids getting maybe 5-10% higher MPG on average, the break-even point is when the car has gone between 170k and 340k miles. If everybody just paid that same $200 to the state as a tax on the sale of a new vehicle, it would give the state probably twice as much money as they would make off of this, all for the same cost to the consumer, all without violating people's privacy.
Here's a more sane proposal: when you apply for your tags, make one line on the form be the current odometer reading. Charge an additional license fee based on the mileage. Once the vehicle starts going in for smog checks, this can be corroborated by periodic reporting by the smog check station, so there's low risk of significant cheating.
Allow people who do a substantial amount of out-of-state driving to apply for a tax credit on his/her personal income tax for driving outside the state. Require them to provide some corroborating evidence (receipts from out of state hotels or gas stations during the period in question, pay stubs proving an out-of-state job, etc.).
By making the small percentage of people who regularly drive outside the state spend an extra ten minutes filling out their income tax forms, you save the cost of additional hardware in new vehicles, additional hardware at the pumps (the cost of which will be paid by everyone), etc. and you avoid all the privacy questions. More to the point, since all new cars sold anywhere would then have to have these devices (since car makers won't build a separate model just for Oregon, even if these GPS devices only cost $100, my plan will save almost 2 billion dollars annually nationwide in unnecessary hardware when compared with the Oregon governor's plan.
Just to put that number in perspective, that's billion with a 'B'---enough money to bail out on the order of 20,000 home owners who are defaulting on their mortgages. Anyone in favor of something so asinine should be publicly flogged.... The people of Oregon deserve someone with better math and problem solving skills than this....
Outgoing calls work because the tower doesn't have to phone home to make an outgoing call. Incoming calls don't work because the tower near you has to contact the primary tower in the city where your cell phone's phone number is registered to tell it that the phone is currently hanging off a different tower. What is probably happening here is that the inter-tower communication is not working. This is probably because of the same trunk line failure that is causing the data to not work. In other words, chances are, the tower near you is working fine, but your home tower (wherever that is) is dead as a doornail.
Or as Cacadril wrote right below this while I was composing my previous message, it may well be that the Verizon service provided integrated access to MSN/Yahoo/GMail from within their webmail and that they'll have to use the new ISP's version of that service instead of Verizon's because they're losing access to the Verizon portal. I find that explanation a little dubious since AFAIK MSN doesn't provide IMAP (making a Verizon-provided web front end difficult), but that is a million times more plausible an explanation than the ridiculous notion that an ISP would deliberately block access to MSN, Yahoo, and Google's webmail services....
If you read far enough down in the replies, you'll find out that the entire Slashdot story is completely bogus. They're shutting down access to Verizon's web portal. Users will get their ISP email from a different site. Users of MSN, Yahoo, etc. will no longer be able to use those services' IMAP support to get their email from Verizon because the company is no longer part of Verizon. Therefore, if they are using a third-party site to access their Verizon email, they will now have to use the Fairpoint webmail interface for their webmail.
This, of course, raises questions about why they can't just use IMAP from the Fairpoint servers, which probably implies that the new Fairpoint service doesn't provide IMAP from outside the network, but while that would suck, it's hardly on the same scale as blocking web portals to dozens of web-based email services, some of which cannot realistically be re-served using a Fairpoint web front end because they don't provide IMAP..... The "violate net neutrality" interpretation of the article makes absolutely zero sense....
That's because JTAG A. is specialized hardware that very, very few people have access to, and B. almost always involves soldering a connector onto the device's board because it almost NEVER gets shipped with the headers populated in production hardware. So yes, safe to say if it requires soldering inside the unit, that qualifies as bricked.... That's significantly different than a software issue.
BTW, at least one of the people in that thread is (with 85% probability) seeing an NVidia chip failure. I wouldn't be surprised if several of them were that. The original poster also has some sort of hardware problem. And so on. These issues are all over the map, but are getting lumped together because they have the same symptoms and all happened right around the time of a software update. I strongly suspect that this is yet another non-story in which people jump to very wrong conclusions and mistakenly see patterns where none exist. It happens after pretty much every Mac OS X update, and apart from fairly minor things like "X feature of Y app doesn't work" or "X application crashes now", they almost never pan out.... (The one time in my memory that they did, it was caused by APE.)
There was another study in Virginia that showed that while fatalities decreased (right angle crashes), total accidents increased significantly after putting in red-light cameras, and this effect did not diminish over time. Source: thenewspaper.com. I'm sure you'll find a similar refutation of the Texas study; it is still too soon to see that.
There was another study from the Univ. of South Florida with similar results.
In short, traffic cameras show no statistical improvement in accident rate, and in some cases show no improvement in injury rate, either. By contrast, yellow light studies consistently show a significant improvement, and have never been shown to cause any increase in accidents.
Here are five more studies on the subject.
As for comparisons with yellow light cameras, I'm having a hard time digging those up, but here's a story about an experiment on one particularly bad intersection in Fort Collins. Here's a study on all-red intervals that is also relevant here. Either way, it should be clear that if studies show red light enforcement increases the number of accidents and yellow light timing changes decrease it, it doesn't take a genius to know that photo enforcement is not a good solution to the problem.
Politics tends to attract those who want power, and those who want power are seldom in the best interests of those who are being led. Therefore, an ideal political structure would include a benevolent dictator randomly chosen from the population, who would be deposed if another group of a dozen randomly chosen people decide to throw him/her out. It would then have a mock electoral process to elect fake leaders. The resulting political body's sole purpose for existence would be bringing politicians out of the woodwork and keeping them isolated from polite society.
I hereby nominate CmdrTaco as the first benevolent dictator. All in favor, say aye!
I'm talking about the studies that have compared the effectiveness of adding red light cameras versus making the yellow light longer. There have been several studies on that, and they have all consistently and conclusively stated that increasing the yellow cycle is more effective. Sorry, guess I should have been more precise in qualifying the word "every". I just assumed it was obvious from the context.
Science cannot require blind faith. An untestable theory requires blind faith. Therefore, an untestable theory is not science. String theory is an untestable theory. Therefore, string theory is not science. Q.E.D.
I haven't seen a city in California whose times aren't already unsafely short. You can't tell me that a two second yellow is EVER safe, yet I've seen them that short in Sunnyvale, and many, many intersections at only three. And I've seen three seconds with zero all-red seconds for lights that allow left turns across five lanes of traffic. If you enter at the speed limit as it turns yellow, you will be in the intersection for at least two seconds while the light is green in the other direction. I can count at least a dozen lights between Fair Oaks and Sunnyvale roads alone that are dangerous, and those aren't even the intersections with cameras....
The other dirty thing they do to try to anger drivers and make them run red lights is to time the lights so you hit every second light red reproducibly. Again, the two major roads through Sunnyvale are timed in this way for the vast majority of the day. Not only does it increase the rate of road rage significantly, it encourages people to exceed the speed limit to beat the lights, encourages people to run the lights when they change to red right in front of them, and likely wastes millions of gallons of gasoline every year in California alone, all so they can raise a little more red light revenue at a few intersections....
IMHO, we need a California-wide ballot measure to demand citizen oversight committees be in charge of all traffic light management. That's the only way the abuse will stop. And red light cameras are abuse. Every study of red light cameras has shown that increasing the length of yellow lights to a minimum of seven seconds has the same benefits in terms of sideswipe accident reduction without the increased rate of rear end collisions, without wasting tons of fuel, without causing road rage, etc. Unfortunately, the people in power are not about to admit that they were wrong, so the only way to fix the problem is to wrest control away form them through a referendum.
At least speed cameras are illegal in California. We got one right, anyway. It's a good thing, too. There's a radar sign on Highway 17 that routinely overestimates the speed of oncoming traffic by up to 15 MPH. If such a device were handing out speeding tickets, I'd have a thousand of them, all while going the speed limit, all with a confused look on my face staring at the completely incorrect speed on the sign....