if you are walking or riding along the side of a road, choose to walk/ ride on the side that makes you face traffic
Walk facing traffic, ride with traffic.
When on foot, you can much easier jump out of the way laterally, possibly over a barrier that may provide protection (which you should probably be behind anyway). On a bicycle, it is difficult to impossible to do this in the amount of time between "oh shit that car will hit me" and it hitting you. On a bicycle, you are better off going with traffic which will reduce the net velocity of you v. the car. For example, if the car is moving 35 MPH and you are riding 25 MPH, it is a 10 MPH hit to the rear tire v. a 60 MPH front-on collision. Guess which one is more survivable when you do not have 2,000 lbs of car surrounding you?
I would also advise having mirrors and lights on your bicycle to make yourself more visible and to make it easier to spot SUVs whose drivers are too busy yapping on the goddamn cell phone to pay attention to the road.
While its easy to laugh at people inside the bubble, be aware they have no easy way out as their political landscape has become a house a mirrors, set up by google.
Your post actually made sense up until that point. This has been going on far longer than Google has existed.
Not in Ohio, at least not for adults such as myself. Why should the police offer need access to my phone? Let the D.A. issue a subpeona to Verizon for, say, the 10 minutes before the crash to see if I was talking or texting. Again, not a crime, but it could convince a jury that I was being a douchebox.
Not quite: https://campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body. What if you could feed your body everything it needed: nothing more, nothing less. I don't think 3D printing is required here, just powder plus water.
You keep your guns around "never checked or maintained"?
I clean my pistol after every time I fire it, and no more than 30 days since the last cleaning regardless. It must be serviceable and ready to defend my home on a moment's notice. I check and maintain it regularly, as should any responsible gun owner.
It isn't hypocrisy, but it isn't what it appears on the surface. This is good old fashioned protectionism. Ain't nobody going to mess with a U.S. based company except the U.S. government.
Do you remove the safety from your gun as well? After all, a defective safety can mean that your gun will refuse to fire when you pull the trigger.
My Glock was manufactured without an active safety mechanism. This means there are mechanisms to prevent accidental discharge, but there is no safety switch. Glocks are reliable enough that a large number of police departments use them.
So, how's that constitutional law working for shotguns that are "too short?"
Have you fired a shotgun before? While I have never fired a weapon at a living creature, including humans, I have seen what they can do. A 16" shotgun did enough damage that I felt confident it would kill a man. I have spoken with law enforcement officers who collaborate that. Shorter barrels spread the shot out more and make it more... painful, or so I have been told. A sawed off shotgun is not so much about self-defense as it is torture. Imagine the skin and half the bone from your torso and face being ripped off while you slowly, painfully, bleed to death. The last time I fired a shotgun I blew away a stack of cans and half the tree stump they were stacked on.
Again, this is just what I have been told. I stick to pistols. I have no need for rifles, "scary-looking assault" or otherwise, or shotguns. The SCOTUS has been fairly consistent with regards to affirming our right to bear arms that are suitable for self-defense. A pistol I can conceal or wear openly on my waist and that is easily maneuverable in close quarters such as my home is ideal for self-defense.
This is not a good solution. It simply means entrenching a new tier of businesses who have their own needs, costs, vulnerabilities, liabilities - and above all, their own lobbyists, whose job is then to make sure the system never ever ever gets simplified.
Please keep in mind I said there is a solution. I never said it was a good solution or that the tax situation in the U.S. is ideal. If anything, this is an example of the government discouraging sales (the tax means I have less money to spend and encourages me to hoard money, only spending on the most important things), while simultaneously increasing the burden on the seller (pay for a tax service, or hire more people to keep track of sales tax), reducing their capital to make business improvements or sell at a price that may increase volume and improve the economy.
There is a reason why "tax" has synonyms, and none of them are positive.
I am not saying the situation is good nor are the solutions ideal for all users. Only that they are out there. Sales tax sucks for a lot of reasons. First, it is inconsistent. There are thousands of rates out there, and it is impossible to know what to charge unless your business is researching tax rates. Second, it depresses commerce. It the flow of electrons is electricity, the flow of dollars is economy. Sales taxes are like a billion ohm resistor on the economy.
Nothing short of a Constitutional amendment will fix the situation, so we have to learn to live with it until it blows up big enough for a lot of people in government to be willing to fight for fixing it.
Either that or abolish the sales tax altogether in favor of the corporate or income tax.
I agree. Sales tax is dumb in a lot of ways. Abolishing it would make this so much easier. In the meantime, there are solutions to the problem of "how much sales tax do I collect and where do I send it?
So, you are saying that these people maintain these sites and I can set up an automatic way to calculate the sales tax for any address in the U.S. without having to lay out money periodically for updates to that information?
No, I am saying there are tax databases. I said "vendors" provide this information implying it is not free. While far from ideal, there are solutions.
Finding out that oops, this country in this state raised their tax rate and you didn't know but now they're taking you to court for not paying the right fees is not how you want to run a business.
Use a tax service. They tell you what the tax rates are, and some of them deal with the liability issue. If you didn't collect taxes correctly because of their data, they'll cover it. It's insane, actually. Taxes change on an almost daily basis somewhere in the U.S. Between legitimate tax rate changes at any level from city, county, to state, to tax holidays, etc. nobody can keep track of this shit unless they're in the business of keeping track of it... which is why tax services are so helpful. My customers all use them. When your core business is selling widgets, you can't keep track of thousands of tax jurisdictions.
If you think political dissidents in this country are routinely destroyed than you are as naive as can be.
Perhaps you should read up on U.S. history. We have a long history of doing just that. Look as far back as Reconstruction, the civil rights movements in the 1960s, and other figures such as Malcolm X. I think our government has learned from these and are far more subtle now, though.
Governments have been corrupt for thousands of years, as long as we have had governments. Many other governments in this world are corrupt as well: what makes the U.S. so special? Absolute power corrupts absolutely. So the most powerful nation on the planet with regards to military and economy is somehow the land of peace and love? Where the government does not try to keep its hegemony on world influence? The diplomatic cable leaks serve only to prove that the U.S. government is corrupt and bends rules to get its way.
I am no conspiracy theorist. I just believe in human nature: people want more power and influence than the others around them. Put 535 people like that into Congress, another 2+cabinet into the White House, let them appoint their lackies to government jobs, what is going to happen? Shit like Swartz's case. This is why we need stronger restrictions on what government can and cannot do, and it has to be enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Finally, we need someone willing to enforce those restrictions. I vote for Batman: his existence is just as likely as our government restricting its own power.
The Core-2-Quad 6600 (q6600) was released in Jan 2007. The chip is such a workhorse that it will run any of the new games out their. The limiter is the video card capabilities.
While the GPU is certainly a much bigger factor, the Q6600 is showing its age. I just handed one down to my wife after upgrading to a Core i7 Ivy Bridge. Part of the problem is while the GPU is the more limiting factor, CPU still plays a role: and after seven 7 years, games will tax a Q6600. The second issue is that architecture doesn't support PCI Express 2 or greater. While the cards are backwards and forwards compatible, this does not mean you will get acceptable performance. If you can't move data fast enough, that new GPU won't really shine. Compatibility does not equal "takes full advantage of."
Oh and you might want to look up "Jon Stweart Ron Paul" to see how badly the primaries are rigged, he got footage that doesn't even try to hide how badly its rigged. It even shows that at places where Paul might have had a snowball's chance in hell the MSM treated him as "he who shall not be named" with talking heads practically tap dancing around their sentences so they would NOT ever speak his name, with it going so far as one naming the first, second, and FOURTH place finishers without even saying the words third place much less the fact that Paul took it.
The party bosses decide who will get the nomination. Every once in a while they don't, but it is a choice between two douchebags and not one douchebag and someone who actually cares about his constituents.
Good points, although it is difficult to say exactly how Linux dropped the ball.
I think the licensing is part of the issue, but a small one. While the GPL is viral and licenses such as BSD and Apache are friendlier to business, I'm not sure that it matters just how the kernel is licensed (keep in mind it is not strictly GPL, it has some slight but important modifications).
Linux has one key feature that sets it apart from most other operating systems. Some argue it is good, some argue it is bad. I say it is what it is, but it explains why things unfolded the way they did. There is no Jobs or Gates. While Linus may have control over the kernel, that is the extent of his domain. He can yell at the KDE or Canonical people until he is blue in the face, and may as well fart in the wind. Likewise, Shuttleworth can yell at Linus all he wants, but cannot do what he wants to the kernel outside of his own distribution.
This is both a strength and a weakness. It ensures that one person cannot sink the ship (Xfree/Xorg is a good example), but it also ensures that one person cannot unify it and make it stronger. I believe to succeed outside of the data center, Linux needs that unifying force to make decisions and force people to abide by them. But it will never happen.
Sometimes I wonder if Red Hat should just fork the whole damn thing and make their own OS. They are the closest Linux vendor to having that critical mass, but probably still don't have enough market share to make a dent.
It is Windows that breaks public facing API's constantly, but you are too ignorant to know that.
Actually, Windows still has tons of crap left over from Windows 95 still hanging around. Part of the problem with Windows is the API has grown tremendously while keeping the old stuff around (which is why you have stuff like CreateWindow and CreateWindowX as API calls) that it can be confusing to figure out the right way to do anything unless you are writing on top of a GUI framework that abstracts all that crap away from you.
The proper way to do this is to deprecate old APIs when a new one comes out, then remove it in the next major revision. For example, if Vista introduced some new API intended to replace, not supplement, an old one, Windows 7 would remove it. This would also assume that application developers would maintain their code and update it. This may not be a safe assumption.
I use Linux, I use Windows, and I like them both. Both have their fair share of issues, but you are right: Linux is too fragmented, and "death by committee" is literally just that: it is going to kill it.
Someone needs to focus on a Linux desktop for the masses. It needs to be backed by someone like Google (think Android) who has the resources to do it right. Stable ABI, maybe fork the kernel and core libraries, and make it just work. Ripping out the UI every few years and smearing poop all over it (I'm looking at you, Ubuntu) is simply not acceptable. Breaking backwards compatibility is not acceptable.
The more things you add to a car that distract the driver the less safe they'll be.
Distractions aside, let's say it is the middle of February and I am trying to operate this thing at 6:30 AM, like I will be in a few minutes from now when I leave for work. Let us also assume the touch screen has similar tactile properties to my smartphone.
I doubt this will work with gloves on. If I take off my gloves, my fingertips will be hard as rock and that also does not work. In my experience, touch screens require fingers that are not too dry, not too wet, not too cold/hard. Winter could make these things nearly impossible to use, which would create a catch-22 if these things control the heater and defrost.
I will take my old school knobs any day. I can operate them by feel, increasing safety. They work the same regardless of what the weather or season is.
Another thing that will annoy me the next time I buy a car is crap like putting an iPhone port in it. Great: my family uses Android. Even if we did use iPhone, you know the next version that Apple shits out will change the connector anyway. Why not focus on the technology under the hood and stop feeling compelled to add the latest buzzword to the dashboard?
Slashdot Mirror
Walk facing traffic, ride with traffic.
When on foot, you can much easier jump out of the way laterally, possibly over a barrier that may provide protection (which you should probably be behind anyway). On a bicycle, it is difficult to impossible to do this in the amount of time between "oh shit that car will hit me" and it hitting you. On a bicycle, you are better off going with traffic which will reduce the net velocity of you v. the car. For example, if the car is moving 35 MPH and you are riding 25 MPH, it is a 10 MPH hit to the rear tire v. a 60 MPH front-on collision. Guess which one is more survivable when you do not have 2,000 lbs of car surrounding you?
I would also advise having mirrors and lights on your bicycle to make yourself more visible and to make it easier to spot SUVs whose drivers are too busy yapping on the goddamn cell phone to pay attention to the road.
The lower receiver is molded out of plastic, but the slide, barrel, and chamber are all metal. The parts that are under high stress.
Your post actually made sense up until that point. This has been going on far longer than Google has existed.
Not in Ohio, at least not for adults such as myself. Why should the police offer need access to my phone? Let the D.A. issue a subpeona to Verizon for, say, the 10 minutes before the crash to see if I was talking or texting. Again, not a crime, but it could convince a jury that I was being a douchebox.
Not quite: https://campaign.soylent.me/soylent-free-your-body. What if you could feed your body everything it needed: nothing more, nothing less. I don't think 3D printing is required here, just powder plus water.
I clean my pistol after every time I fire it, and no more than 30 days since the last cleaning regardless. It must be serviceable and ready to defend my home on a moment's notice. I check and maintain it regularly, as should any responsible gun owner.
Obligatory Penny-Arcade: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22.
It isn't hypocrisy, but it isn't what it appears on the surface. This is good old fashioned protectionism. Ain't nobody going to mess with a U.S. based company except the U.S. government.
My Glock was manufactured without an active safety mechanism. This means there are mechanisms to prevent accidental discharge, but there is no safety switch. Glocks are reliable enough that a large number of police departments use them.
Really? This is the U.S. government we are talking about here. They waste more money than that on a daily basis.
Have you fired a shotgun before? While I have never fired a weapon at a living creature, including humans, I have seen what they can do. A 16" shotgun did enough damage that I felt confident it would kill a man. I have spoken with law enforcement officers who collaborate that. Shorter barrels spread the shot out more and make it more... painful, or so I have been told. A sawed off shotgun is not so much about self-defense as it is torture. Imagine the skin and half the bone from your torso and face being ripped off while you slowly, painfully, bleed to death. The last time I fired a shotgun I blew away a stack of cans and half the tree stump they were stacked on.
Again, this is just what I have been told. I stick to pistols. I have no need for rifles, "scary-looking assault" or otherwise, or shotguns. The SCOTUS has been fairly consistent with regards to affirming our right to bear arms that are suitable for self-defense. A pistol I can conceal or wear openly on my waist and that is easily maneuverable in close quarters such as my home is ideal for self-defense.
Please keep in mind I said there is a solution. I never said it was a good solution or that the tax situation in the U.S. is ideal. If anything, this is an example of the government discouraging sales (the tax means I have less money to spend and encourages me to hoard money, only spending on the most important things), while simultaneously increasing the burden on the seller (pay for a tax service, or hire more people to keep track of sales tax), reducing their capital to make business improvements or sell at a price that may increase volume and improve the economy.
There is a reason why "tax" has synonyms, and none of them are positive.
I am not saying the situation is good nor are the solutions ideal for all users. Only that they are out there. Sales tax sucks for a lot of reasons. First, it is inconsistent. There are thousands of rates out there, and it is impossible to know what to charge unless your business is researching tax rates. Second, it depresses commerce. It the flow of electrons is electricity, the flow of dollars is economy. Sales taxes are like a billion ohm resistor on the economy.
Nothing short of a Constitutional amendment will fix the situation, so we have to learn to live with it until it blows up big enough for a lot of people in government to be willing to fight for fixing it.
I agree. Sales tax is dumb in a lot of ways. Abolishing it would make this so much easier. In the meantime, there are solutions to the problem of "how much sales tax do I collect and where do I send it?
No, I am saying there are tax databases. I said "vendors" provide this information implying it is not free. While far from ideal, there are solutions.
Use a tax service. They tell you what the tax rates are, and some of them deal with the liability issue. If you didn't collect taxes correctly because of their data, they'll cover it. It's insane, actually. Taxes change on an almost daily basis somewhere in the U.S. Between legitimate tax rate changes at any level from city, county, to state, to tax holidays, etc. nobody can keep track of this shit unless they're in the business of keeping track of it... which is why tax services are so helpful. My customers all use them. When your core business is selling widgets, you can't keep track of thousands of tax jurisdictions.
They don't need to, this problem has already been solved:
I have customers that use these vendors for taxes as well. The software I work on at my day job integrates quite nicely with these:
Perhaps you should read up on U.S. history. We have a long history of doing just that. Look as far back as Reconstruction, the civil rights movements in the 1960s, and other figures such as Malcolm X. I think our government has learned from these and are far more subtle now, though.
Governments have been corrupt for thousands of years, as long as we have had governments. Many other governments in this world are corrupt as well: what makes the U.S. so special? Absolute power corrupts absolutely. So the most powerful nation on the planet with regards to military and economy is somehow the land of peace and love? Where the government does not try to keep its hegemony on world influence? The diplomatic cable leaks serve only to prove that the U.S. government is corrupt and bends rules to get its way.
I am no conspiracy theorist. I just believe in human nature: people want more power and influence than the others around them. Put 535 people like that into Congress, another 2+cabinet into the White House, let them appoint their lackies to government jobs, what is going to happen? Shit like Swartz's case. This is why we need stronger restrictions on what government can and cannot do, and it has to be enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Finally, we need someone willing to enforce those restrictions. I vote for Batman: his existence is just as likely as our government restricting its own power.
While the GPU is certainly a much bigger factor, the Q6600 is showing its age. I just handed one down to my wife after upgrading to a Core i7 Ivy Bridge. Part of the problem is while the GPU is the more limiting factor, CPU still plays a role: and after seven 7 years, games will tax a Q6600. The second issue is that architecture doesn't support PCI Express 2 or greater. While the cards are backwards and forwards compatible, this does not mean you will get acceptable performance. If you can't move data fast enough, that new GPU won't really shine. Compatibility does not equal "takes full advantage of."
The party bosses decide who will get the nomination. Every once in a while they don't, but it is a choice between two douchebags and not one douchebag and someone who actually cares about his constituents.
You lost me there: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22.
Good points, although it is difficult to say exactly how Linux dropped the ball.
I think the licensing is part of the issue, but a small one. While the GPL is viral and licenses such as BSD and Apache are friendlier to business, I'm not sure that it matters just how the kernel is licensed (keep in mind it is not strictly GPL, it has some slight but important modifications).
Linux has one key feature that sets it apart from most other operating systems. Some argue it is good, some argue it is bad. I say it is what it is, but it explains why things unfolded the way they did. There is no Jobs or Gates. While Linus may have control over the kernel, that is the extent of his domain. He can yell at the KDE or Canonical people until he is blue in the face, and may as well fart in the wind. Likewise, Shuttleworth can yell at Linus all he wants, but cannot do what he wants to the kernel outside of his own distribution.
This is both a strength and a weakness. It ensures that one person cannot sink the ship (Xfree/Xorg is a good example), but it also ensures that one person cannot unify it and make it stronger. I believe to succeed outside of the data center, Linux needs that unifying force to make decisions and force people to abide by them. But it will never happen.
Sometimes I wonder if Red Hat should just fork the whole damn thing and make their own OS. They are the closest Linux vendor to having that critical mass, but probably still don't have enough market share to make a dent.
Actually, Windows still has tons of crap left over from Windows 95 still hanging around. Part of the problem with Windows is the API has grown tremendously while keeping the old stuff around (which is why you have stuff like CreateWindow and CreateWindowX as API calls) that it can be confusing to figure out the right way to do anything unless you are writing on top of a GUI framework that abstracts all that crap away from you.
The proper way to do this is to deprecate old APIs when a new one comes out, then remove it in the next major revision. For example, if Vista introduced some new API intended to replace, not supplement, an old one, Windows 7 would remove it. This would also assume that application developers would maintain their code and update it. This may not be a safe assumption.
I use Linux, I use Windows, and I like them both. Both have their fair share of issues, but you are right: Linux is too fragmented, and "death by committee" is literally just that: it is going to kill it.
Someone needs to focus on a Linux desktop for the masses. It needs to be backed by someone like Google (think Android) who has the resources to do it right. Stable ABI, maybe fork the kernel and core libraries, and make it just work. Ripping out the UI every few years and smearing poop all over it (I'm looking at you, Ubuntu) is simply not acceptable. Breaking backwards compatibility is not acceptable.
Distractions aside, let's say it is the middle of February and I am trying to operate this thing at 6:30 AM, like I will be in a few minutes from now when I leave for work. Let us also assume the touch screen has similar tactile properties to my smartphone.
I doubt this will work with gloves on. If I take off my gloves, my fingertips will be hard as rock and that also does not work. In my experience, touch screens require fingers that are not too dry, not too wet, not too cold/hard. Winter could make these things nearly impossible to use, which would create a catch-22 if these things control the heater and defrost.
I will take my old school knobs any day. I can operate them by feel, increasing safety. They work the same regardless of what the weather or season is.
Another thing that will annoy me the next time I buy a car is crap like putting an iPhone port in it. Great: my family uses Android. Even if we did use iPhone, you know the next version that Apple shits out will change the connector anyway. Why not focus on the technology under the hood and stop feeling compelled to add the latest buzzword to the dashboard?