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User: mitchplanck

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  1. Re:More leftist censorship on GoDaddy Expels Neo-Nazi Site Over Article On Charlottesville Victim (bbc.co.uk) · · Score: 1
    We did have this in real estate for long time in this country. Even when it wasn't explicitly supported by law it was supported by the real estate agents and brokers and is called racial steering. This is why we have laws protecting certain statuses now. If you live in a small town and there is one baker who refuses to make your cake and the baker in the next town also refuses and the city with a baker who will make the cake is far away (think rural Texas or Montana or even the U.P of Michigan) then you are stuck driving 100 miles to get a cake. This may seem like small potatoes but it's not really cakes we are talking about.

    Our president was raised on this kind of racism and segregation: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/us/politics/donald-trump-housing-race.html so what he is doing now is no surprise.

  2. Old news on Satellite Images Can Map Poverty (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    I don't know why this is news. Givedirectly.org has been doing this for years. (https://www.givedirectly.org/operating-model)

  3. Let's assume... on Toyota To Let People Ride In Self-Driving Prius · · Score: 1
    I think the self-driving cars will become ubiquitous eventually. The bugs in the systems will be ironed out, there will be a few major failures which make big news and scare people but these things will be much safer than people-driven cars. My thinking then goes to 'what/how will that affect car design, road design, traffic patterns, etc.'

    Car design:
    Cars will become less powerful as they are vastly overpowered for most needs now, and they will become fancy living rooms on wheels. The seats may all face each other, entertainment systems will become a major focus of design, built in beds, etc. You get in a car, tell it were to drop you off, it then self parks somewhere and you use your cell phone to tell it where to pick you up.
    Trucks will become driverless vans, the same as all delivery type vehicles although some may still have passenger space for workers to help load and unload cargo. Pizza delivery vehicles won't even be cars, but little heated boxes on wheels.

    Road design:
    No traffic signs, guard rails, lines on the roads, probably many other changes would be possible as well.
    In areas with pedestrian traffic the walker has to push a crosswalk button, which would then broadcast a signal to nearby cars to stop or be aware of the pedestrian in the street and the walker could cross with very little delay. Run into the street and get hit - it's probably your fault.
    Cyclists would carry little transmitters which would let nearby cars know it's location and velocity, allowing the cars to give the appropriate allowance to them. This is if they are sharing road space.

    Insurance:
    Rates would drop by a huge amount and after a time of vetting they might even go away or become a small part of the purchase price of the car.

    This is just a start, the changes to society would be huge, the number of deaths would probably be in the 10s or 100s per year in the US if all vehicles are automatic instead of the 10s of thousands. I know several people who have been killed or seriously injured by vehicle accidents and would be very exited if/when this technology comes to bear.

  4. Re:end of the truck driver on Toyota To Let People Ride In Self-Driving Prius · · Score: 1

    Why would a driverless truck need the capability to be driven and thus stolen? Why have a cab? Just and engine in an aerodynamic faring with appropriate controls. The problem I would then see would the control channel being hacked (you wirelessly tell the 'truck' to go to a location, this system could be hacked). if the truck needs to be manually maneuvered then you use a model airplane style remote control device.

  5. Cleanup on Designer Creates "Euthanasia Roller Coaster" · · Score: 1

    I'd hate to be on the crew which has to remove the people at the end and do cleanup. Will the riders be required to wear diapers?

  6. Re:Borders Played a Pivotal Role in My Career on Borders Books, Dead At 40 · · Score: 1
    I live in Ann Arbor, I used to work for Borders, both in the retail store and then at corporate doing store support. This was back in the mid-90s, when life was good there, but they still paid crap. The Borders brothers had recently sold the company and the Waldenbooks aquisition was in progress, a whole bunch of the Walden employees moved to AA and we had two help desks for a while because the systems were so different.

    When I started in the store, I helped open #63, Fairlawn, OH. That store has been closed for a while now. We opened every box and stocked all the shelves, which were all empty. It was a huge store for a mid-90s book store. People came in droves, everyone was trained to work in the coffee shop which was run by regular staff. If we didn't have a book the customer was looking for, which often they didn't even know who wrote it or the title, we had to help them figure it out, we could order it. This was all new. The music section was huge, the staff in there knew a ton about music and if they didn't have it, they could order it. This was probably the widest selection of music around. My section was the computer book section, I stocked the shelves there and learned the field was so much more than I knew about before. We had a Netware network, so I learned about that and took a CNA class at the CompUSA (remember those?) next door. I learned what IP addresses where and how they worked!

    I then applied for and got a job in Ann Arbor on the store help desk. The building we started in was some offices in the front of a big warehouse, which was the main warehouse for the stores. The company continued to grow, constantly adding stores. I helped open the Bangor, MA store, beautiful city, nice store, I set up the computer systems there. With more growth we moved to a much bigger office which had once been a medical manufacturing building with a bunch of clean rooms. We didn't need the space to start and those stayed there for a while, along with a huge space next to the help desk area where we would take RC cars and stuff and play around. Borders liked to promote internally, which was nice, but that doesn't always work when you need experts, not low costs.One of our "DB admins" was from the help desk just like me and she didn't know much about being a real DB admin. She wound up deleting a ton of records out of a store's catalog, that had to get rebuilt and shipped out. I worked there when I heard about Amazon, thinking why would anyone want to buy books online (this was about '97 or '98). I left not much after that getting a 30% raise for doing the same work at Domino's corporate. I now make 4x from what I started at Border's corporate with another company and I don't see that stopping.

    I used to shop at Borders all the time but started migrating to Amazon and B&N. It seemed like the store atmosphere declined over time, the staff knew less and less, decisions were being made for money only reasons, all signs that it wasn't really well run. I work for a company now which has hired a number of people from Borders during their recent decline but I am worried about some friends I have which still work there. This is just another piece of crappy news for this part of Michigan which has seen so much in the past few years and was just slowly starting to turn around.

  7. Filter on Apple Camera Patent Lets External Transmitters Disable Features · · Score: 1

    When will you be able to buy an IR filter for this to disable this functionality?

  8. Re:publicly traded companies? on DOJ Seeks Mandatory Data Retention For ISPs · · Score: 1
    Let me rephrase this:

    You do realize that the public aren't "public" like the government, right? Despite the misnomer, the public are still private individuals (or groups of individuals). What the heck gives you the right to see ANYTHING they are doing?

  9. Re:Beat me to it. on Advice On Teaching Linux To CS Freshmen? · · Score: 1

    This is exactly why I get frustrated to see a CS degree as a requirement when applying for a Network Admin/Engineer job. They're not the same thing. Although I see more frequently that it's optional as you can substitute experience for it, which makes sense. Only recently have universities and colleges started offering Networking type degrees/programs.

  10. Fees on Jerry Brown Confiscates 48,000 Cell Phones · · Score: 1

    So who pays the early termination fees?

  11. A Word about the New South edition... on The Continued Censorship of Huckleberry Finn · · Score: 1
    A Word About the New South Edition...

    A new edition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, forthcoming from NewSouth Books in mid-February, does more than unite the companion boy books in one volume, as the author had intended. It does more even than restore a passage from the Huckleberry Finn manuscript that first appeared in Twain’s Life on the Mississippi and was subsequently cut from the work upon publication.

    In a bold move compassionately advocated by Twain scholar Dr. Alan Gribben and embraced by NewSouth, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn also replaces two hurtful epithets that appear hundreds of times in the texts with less offensive words, this intended to counter the “preemptive censorship” that Dr. Gribben observes has caused these important works of literature to fall off curriculum lists nationwide.

    In presenting his rationale for publication, eloquently developed in the book’s introduction, Dr. Gribben discusses the context of the racial slurs Twain used in these books. He also remarks on the irony of the fact that use of such language has caused Twain’s books to join the ranks of outdated literary classics Twain once humorously defined as works “which people praise and don’t read.”

    At NewSouth, we saw the value in an edition that would help the works find new readers. If the publication sparks good debate about how language impacts learning or about the nature of censorship or the way in which racial slurs exercise their baneful influence, then our mission in publishing this new edition of Twain’s works will be more emphatically fulfilled.

    Learn more about Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and read an excerpt from the introduction at www.newsouthbooks.com/twain. See also a feature story on the volume by Marc Shultz at Publishers Weekly.

  12. Yahoo!'s hiring! on Yahoo Lays Off 600; Free Beers and Jobs Flow · · Score: 1
  13. Digital Camera on Digitizing and Geocoding Old Maps? · · Score: 1

    Use a digital camera. It doesn't even have to be super high MP. Just stitch the images together.

  14. Re:Retard. on Man Sues Neighbor For Not Turning Off His Wi-Fi · · Score: 1

    I met a hearing-impaired IT guy once who had a hearing aid which allowed him to 'hear the Internet' in his terms. My guess is that when he was near cat5 cables or network cards which were transmitting data there was enough EM radiation on a frequency which his hearing aid was picking up and converting to an audible noise for him.

  15. Re:We should have listened to this wisdom on Broadband Rights & the Killer App of 1900 · · Score: 1

    If electricity hadn't become ubiquitous, we'd have a lot fewer carbon beings emitted today from power plants.

    There, fixed that for you. I'm not sure what you meant though...

  16. Re:And In Unrelated News... on Obama Kicks Off Massive Science Education Effort · · Score: 1
    The Catholic church is actually rather enlightened when it comes to evolution compared to many of the evangelistic Christian religions. From http://www.catholic.com/library/Adam_Eve_and_Evolution.asp:

    Concerning human evolution, the Church has a more definite teaching. It allows for the possibility that man’s body developed from previous biological forms, under God’s guidance, but it insists on the special creation of his soul. Pope Pius XII declared that "the teaching authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions . . . take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter—[but] the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God" (Pius XII, Humani Generis 36). So whether the human body was specially created or developed, we are required to hold as a matter of Catholic faith that the human soul is specially created; it did not evolve, and it is not inherited from our parents, as our bodies are.

  17. Re:Gravel roads are cheap but need more maintenanc on Broke Counties Turn Failing Roads To Gravel · · Score: 1

    You might want to check your facts - Michigan is ranked 11th in size (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_area)

  18. What I had to do on What Filters Are Right For Kids? · · Score: 1
    I've been using Adblock and OpenDNS for a while now, I never had a problem with my daughter (now 18) and going to bad sites. I had to clean out some adware a couple of times but nothing too bad.

    My son (now 12) is just getting to the porn age so I'm going to have to be a little more vigilant with him. The issue that he had a couple years ago was interesting though. He would see the ads or find a free offer or contest and would believe every word (but not read the fine print). We had to have several EXPLANATIONS with him that they weren't really going to send him a free XBOX360 or anything else for free or that he didn't win that contest. He gets it now but it wasn't easy.

  19. Did you RTFA? on CAN-SPAM Act Turns 5 Today — What Went Wrong? · · Score: 1
    Ok, I know it's a /. tradition not to read the article (I only read the 1st page) but even in the first page it talks about the changing nature of spam.

    Back then, 45% of all e-mails were unwanted pitches for such products as Viagra, penny stocks or porn sites.

    It's a bit different now.

    Today, more than 83% of spam contains a URL for a Web site that is trying to infect computers with malicious software.

    I've run spam scanning servers for a small ISP since 2000 and the changes that I've seen follow this trend. At one point I installed OCR scanning software for the penny stock image scams. Later it was PDF scanners. Then there was the password-protected zip files which had to be binary scanned. It's back to text now and lots of URL scanning. Grabbing the SARE signatures for ClamAV helps weed out that kind of crap.

    It's become very hard to blacklist IPs because so many of them are from botnets and scattered so widely.

    Basically, it's all a royal pain and a lot of work.

  20. Re:God, please let this be true. on Prescription Handguns For the Elderly and Disabled · · Score: 1

    If all guns were made of copper then we could get the criminals who are stealing copper to steal the copper guns and turn them in to the scrap dealers thus solving two problems in one!

  21. I remeber... on Spider Missing After Trip To Space Station · · Score: 1

    this episode, but I thought that Homer broke the ant farm, not the spider habitat.

  22. Totally Silent PC on Silencing a Hard Drive Using Household Items · · Score: 1

    I just submerged my PC in water and it's now totally silent. I think it's because water doesn't transmit sound as easily as air. It also stay's quite cool too.

  23. Re:Why ICANN? Why not ITU? on ICANN Releases Draft For New TLDs · · Score: 0

    So no one has hand.jobs or steve.jobs yet?

  24. Re:Well, someone paid a tax on Doing the Math On the New MacBook · · Score: 1

    Ok, the fact that you have a wife precludes you from the computer-based 'wet stain'.

  25. Re:Simple solution. on Computers Causing 2nd Hump In Peak Power Demand · · Score: 1

    Move laundry and other big users of electricity to the middle of the night

    I'd love to automate my laundry - get the robot to sort, figure out the temperature & how much soap to use depending on the stink factor, switch the wet laundry to the dryer (hanging up the line dry items while doing this), and then folding and putting it all away while remaining totally silent so it doesn't wake me while I sleep.