The ISPs are being browbeat by a politician that is threatening fines. Don't like it? Vote the Fuck out of office. ISPs aren't at fault here.
They could stand up to the guy. If they aren't doing anything illegal then he shouldn't be able to get anything to stick to them. The only way to stop bullies is to stop bending over for them.
Your local police drink and drive, so you should be able to as well? Seems like an argument against police corruption, not drunk driving laws. "The other guy does it too" is never an excuse.
People are guilty of other offenses, so they shouldn't criticize this one? This just makes no sense. Let's not criticize anything, ever, because at some point we've all done something wrong! That's just not how it works. The fact that I occasionally do bad things does not remove my right to criticize other people who do bad things. I'm not saying that you're evil. I'm just saying that you're doing a bad thing, and should stop.
And lastly, I agree completely that people should only be arrested if they are truly impaired. However, and this is the part where I'm sure we really disagree, I don't think that any significant number of people are able to exceed the legal limit without being significantly impaired. People think that they can drink a few beers and still drive fine, but they are wrong. That is where the real danger lies. People who are so drunk that they get to the point where they realize they are too dangerous to drive aren't all that much of a problem. It's the people like you, who think that they can drink a few beers and not have it affect their driving, who are really dangerous, because you think you aren't.
Well, your choice of lifestyle is in fundamental conflict with the law and with safe operation of your vehicle. While this is unfortunate, that doesn't mean that you're right and the law is wrong.
And just because "everybody does it" does not make it right either.
Your story of habitual drunk driving is not going to win you any points in your fight against your perceived mistreatment at the hands of police. In fact this perfectly illustrates the point from my original post. Maybe if that cop had thrown your ass in jail when you were a teenager, you would have wised up and wouldn't be out constantly endangering the lives of others now. Instead, you got the message that drunk driving was fine as long as you're "careful", and surprise surprise, you continue to do it, even to the point of railing against the police who try to stop you.
While I'm sure you couldn't possibly care less about my opinion, my advice would be to move to a location where you can walk or take public transportation to these bars you love so much.
A single-user OS with all GUI frameworks built in C++. Yeah, I think I'll pass. I'm extremely glad that Apple bought NeXT instead, where we got a real UNIX without that horrible abomination of a programming language twisting itself into every facet of the frameworks.
You claim that many people can drive just fine at.08 BAC, do you have any cites or evidence for this? I ask simply because I don't believe it. I know that there are many people who think that they can drive just fine at.08 BAC (or some other level), but this is mainly because moderate amounts of alcohol tend to mess with your perception in such a way that you feel like you're doing the same as before, when in fact your reactions and judgement are significantly degraded. People who believe that they experience no impairment after "just a couple of beers" are, from what I've seen, just plain wrong about it.
Your rant against the police is very strange to me. You're taking charge of a large, dangerous machine, one which is dangerous not only to yourself but to anyone who comes near you. You owe it to yourself and to society to be in good mental condition when you do this.
I don't drink and drive, period. If I'm driving somewhere within the next couple of hours I do not drink. If I want to have a beer with dinner, I make sure that I can stay in the area for a while afterwards, or I go someplace within walking distance, or I have somebody else drive. I tried driving with "just one beer" a couple of times. I felt fine, with no effect on my driving. Thinking about it afterwards I realized that my reactions were significantly slower, and my judgement was much worse. So I never did it again.
I consider the legal limit to be quite a bit higher than it should be. I'm a pilot, and the FAA has very strict limits on alcohol. The BAC limit is.04, which is basically any detectable alcohol in the blood. In addition to this limit, they have a strict limit (hard to enforce, of course) that you may not drink any alcohol in the eight hours before you take the controls of an aircraft. This is vastly more strict than any automobile laws I'm aware of. But guess what, I've never heard any pilot complain about the rules.
The trick to avoiding police action is quite simple: if you drink, do not drive. They won't be able to convict you of anything if there isn't any alcohol in your blood. And you shouldn't have any alcohol in your blood while operating a car, no matter what the law allows.
I agree that the law should be based on a much broader definition of impairment, rather than being so specific to alcohol. But I think the standard of impairment should be much lower than it is as well.
Just because people can get away with similarly bad behavior doesn't mean that the law against this bad behavior shouldn't be enforced. If you want to make it fair, start punishing them all. If you are too impaired to drive, don't drive. If you drive anyway, you should go to jail. The source of the impairment shouldn't matter.
As for the.08 number being arbitrary, this is true, but I think that the problem is more that there will be people who are impaired below this number than that there are people who won't be impaired above it. A lot of heavy drinkers end up becoming pretty good at hiding inebriation, but that only applies to looking sober; your car doesn't care whether you're hiding it or not.
I don't think that you can decide whether or not your choices have had a good result with your children until they reach the age of, say, 25.
I know plenty of people who did great in school, were well-behaved, never got into trouble, and anybody who met them before the age of 15 or 16 would have said that they were perfect and would no doubt grow up to be highly successful.
Go forward a few years and they've flunked out of college, gotten into car accidents, trouble with the law, etc.
And on the contrary, I know plenty of people who had lots of trouble as children and are greatly successful and happy as adults.
So let's see how your two great children are doing when they're young adults, and then maybe we can see how good of a parent you are.
(And you may well be a great parent. My only point is that you really just can't know yet.)
I take issue with this attitude that if you don't have children then you can't know what's good for raising them.
I see no evidence that having a baby burst through your vagina, or inserting your penis into somebody else's vagina at the right moment, suddenly causes you to have wonderful secret child-rearing knowledge which is not given to the general population.
In fact I see a lot of evidence to the contrary. Having children generally makes people extremely emotional and robs them of a lot of their rational decision-making capabilities. There are tons of bad parents out there, and if you have children then you are quite likely to be one of them.
This applies very strongly to the question of how protective you should be of your children. Parents are instinctually very protective of their children, but these instincts were honed on the African plains where danger lurked behind every bush and in every tree. If you totally follow your protective instincts today, you'll end up exposing your child to no danger whatsoever, and they won't be able to survive once they reach the age of majority and move out of the house, assuming you didn't make them so afraid of the outside world that they live in your basement for the rest of their lives.
So let's skip this silly back and forth about whether the poster has children or not. If the argument is bad, refute the argument, not the person making it. If the argument is good, then accept it. It has nothing to do with whether or not you've had a paltry few years of experience raising a couple of children.
I got pulled over once half tanked, but, was close to home and the cop let me drive home warning I'd go to jail if he saw me out again that night, man, you'd not see THAT happen again these days
And well you shouldn't! You endangered everybody you encountered on the road that night. In my opinion, the cop was irresponsible to let you go. If getting pulled over for DWI vas a virtual guarantee of a visit to jail (assuming that you actually fail the test, of course) then maybe fewer people would be so casual about operating complicated and deadly machinery while under the influence of mind-numbing drugs.
No, I've been coming here a long time. If I were new I probably wouldn't care. But the incredible insipidness and vapidity of most posters is finally starting to get to me.
In the sane world, you get an estimate up-front, and if the contractor goes over then he'd better either eat the cost or have a damned good reason for the extra money.
Maybe you think that an extra $200 for a coffee table is unimportant. You'd be in a small minority with that view. But start applying that overrun to every piece of furniture in your house and you'll see how it ends up being a big deal.
Yes, and? The scenario you describe has happened countless times throughout history. Exploration and advancement is a slow process. Acting as though the human race is somehow unworthy of going into space because we haven't been back to the Moon in forty years is simply ridiculous. When it's four hundred years then maybe you'll have a point.
Let's re-cast this into computer terms, since that seems to be the only thing people really grasp rationally here (and even then, not so much).
So some early IBM mainframe from the 1960s was full of bugs. IBM had to go through huge contortions to stamp out enough bugs to make the thing usable.
Now it's 2008 and we're working on some project and, guess what, it's full of bugs! Now you come along and say, IBM was stamping out bugs in the 1960s, it's been done already, this should be easy now!
But of course it's not. The process doesn't get easy just because somebody else did it before. It's not some kind of mistake that you make once and then learn from and never make again. It's just part of how you build software. Likewise, working hard to shave weight from the vehicle is just part of how you build aerospace hardware.
That's a non sequitur. To paraphrase the classic quote, a few million here, a few million there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money. All these "little" overruns add up.
Your analogy is also busted. If you have a $40,000 budget, this would be the equivalent of your coffee table costing $200 more than expected. I know very few people who wouldn't be upset at getting ripped off to the tune of $200 on a piece of furniture.
Having an example is not the same as having the plans, of course. It's like having a binary without the source code. It's much more painful than it would be if you had the original plans.
Of course as another guy noted, they do have the plans, they're just about as useful as source code from that era would be.
It's really tragic thing. Maybe we don't deserve to be a spacefaring race.
Have some patience, man! It's like having the Vikings visit the Americas, get killed, never return, and then you complain that "Maybe we don't deserve to be a seafaring race."
A little over a century ago, man wasn't even flying airplanes. The first human was sent into space less than fifty years ago. There's no real reason to think that large-scale space exploration and even colonization won't happen. There's also no real reason to think that it will, or should, happen within the next fifty years, or even within the next two hundred years. The amount of time that humanity has so far been visiting space is but a blink of an eye in historical terms.
How about the fact that bandwidth from one user to another topologically nearby user is often essentially free? If you're sending a large file to ten people on the same ISP in the same neighborhood, it is extremely inefficient to send that same file to each person individually, and extremely efficient to send it once, and have each of those ten people share the pieces they have to the other nine locally.
This is the concept behind the poorly named "P4P" technology that some ISPs were experimenting with, and for popular media it sounds like a fantastic idea.
Could you please elaborate on what the problem is?
They can't protect their content. This is the basic fallacy of DRM which we discuss on this site all the time.
We can't protect our methods. If they are known on the internet then they can be discovered by the content providers. It matters not a whit whether we discuss it on this site or not, they will still find out.
The ultimate reason for both of these is the same: information cannot be protected unless all parties who can access it are absolutely trustworthy.
That's all I said before. Does this way make more sense to you?
How do they work then? Obviously wear leveling is a reality, and unless it's going to perform two physical writes for every logical write (to swap blocks) it must have some concept of what areas are free.
Slashdot Mirror
A UNIX "user" does not correspond to an actual human interactive user, you know.
The ISPs are being browbeat by a politician that is threatening fines. Don't like it? Vote the Fuck out of office. ISPs aren't at fault here.
They could stand up to the guy. If they aren't doing anything illegal then he shouldn't be able to get anything to stick to them. The only way to stop bullies is to stop bending over for them.
Your position seems rather chaotic.
Your local police drink and drive, so you should be able to as well? Seems like an argument against police corruption, not drunk driving laws. "The other guy does it too" is never an excuse.
People are guilty of other offenses, so they shouldn't criticize this one? This just makes no sense. Let's not criticize anything, ever, because at some point we've all done something wrong! That's just not how it works. The fact that I occasionally do bad things does not remove my right to criticize other people who do bad things. I'm not saying that you're evil. I'm just saying that you're doing a bad thing, and should stop.
And lastly, I agree completely that people should only be arrested if they are truly impaired. However, and this is the part where I'm sure we really disagree, I don't think that any significant number of people are able to exceed the legal limit without being significantly impaired. People think that they can drink a few beers and still drive fine, but they are wrong. That is where the real danger lies. People who are so drunk that they get to the point where they realize they are too dangerous to drive aren't all that much of a problem. It's the people like you, who think that they can drink a few beers and not have it affect their driving, who are really dangerous, because you think you aren't.
Well, your choice of lifestyle is in fundamental conflict with the law and with safe operation of your vehicle. While this is unfortunate, that doesn't mean that you're right and the law is wrong.
And just because "everybody does it" does not make it right either.
Your story of habitual drunk driving is not going to win you any points in your fight against your perceived mistreatment at the hands of police. In fact this perfectly illustrates the point from my original post. Maybe if that cop had thrown your ass in jail when you were a teenager, you would have wised up and wouldn't be out constantly endangering the lives of others now. Instead, you got the message that drunk driving was fine as long as you're "careful", and surprise surprise, you continue to do it, even to the point of railing against the police who try to stop you.
While I'm sure you couldn't possibly care less about my opinion, my advice would be to move to a location where you can walk or take public transportation to these bars you love so much.
It's for all the designated drivers!
I'm sure there's somebody, somewhere, who actually believes that.
A single-user OS with all GUI frameworks built in C++. Yeah, I think I'll pass. I'm extremely glad that Apple bought NeXT instead, where we got a real UNIX without that horrible abomination of a programming language twisting itself into every facet of the frameworks.
You claim that many people can drive just fine at .08 BAC, do you have any cites or evidence for this? I ask simply because I don't believe it. I know that there are many people who think that they can drive just fine at .08 BAC (or some other level), but this is mainly because moderate amounts of alcohol tend to mess with your perception in such a way that you feel like you're doing the same as before, when in fact your reactions and judgement are significantly degraded. People who believe that they experience no impairment after "just a couple of beers" are, from what I've seen, just plain wrong about it.
Your rant against the police is very strange to me. You're taking charge of a large, dangerous machine, one which is dangerous not only to yourself but to anyone who comes near you. You owe it to yourself and to society to be in good mental condition when you do this.
I don't drink and drive, period. If I'm driving somewhere within the next couple of hours I do not drink. If I want to have a beer with dinner, I make sure that I can stay in the area for a while afterwards, or I go someplace within walking distance, or I have somebody else drive. I tried driving with "just one beer" a couple of times. I felt fine, with no effect on my driving. Thinking about it afterwards I realized that my reactions were significantly slower, and my judgement was much worse. So I never did it again.
I consider the legal limit to be quite a bit higher than it should be. I'm a pilot, and the FAA has very strict limits on alcohol. The BAC limit is .04, which is basically any detectable alcohol in the blood. In addition to this limit, they have a strict limit (hard to enforce, of course) that you may not drink any alcohol in the eight hours before you take the controls of an aircraft. This is vastly more strict than any automobile laws I'm aware of. But guess what, I've never heard any pilot complain about the rules.
The trick to avoiding police action is quite simple: if you drink, do not drive. They won't be able to convict you of anything if there isn't any alcohol in your blood. And you shouldn't have any alcohol in your blood while operating a car, no matter what the law allows.
I agree that the law should be based on a much broader definition of impairment, rather than being so specific to alcohol. But I think the standard of impairment should be much lower than it is as well.
Just because people can get away with similarly bad behavior doesn't mean that the law against this bad behavior shouldn't be enforced. If you want to make it fair, start punishing them all. If you are too impaired to drive, don't drive. If you drive anyway, you should go to jail. The source of the impairment shouldn't matter.
As for the .08 number being arbitrary, this is true, but I think that the problem is more that there will be people who are impaired below this number than that there are people who won't be impaired above it. A lot of heavy drinkers end up becoming pretty good at hiding inebriation, but that only applies to looking sober; your car doesn't care whether you're hiding it or not.
I don't think that you can decide whether or not your choices have had a good result with your children until they reach the age of, say, 25.
I know plenty of people who did great in school, were well-behaved, never got into trouble, and anybody who met them before the age of 15 or 16 would have said that they were perfect and would no doubt grow up to be highly successful.
Go forward a few years and they've flunked out of college, gotten into car accidents, trouble with the law, etc.
And on the contrary, I know plenty of people who had lots of trouble as children and are greatly successful and happy as adults.
So let's see how your two great children are doing when they're young adults, and then maybe we can see how good of a parent you are.
(And you may well be a great parent. My only point is that you really just can't know yet.)
I take issue with this attitude that if you don't have children then you can't know what's good for raising them.
I see no evidence that having a baby burst through your vagina, or inserting your penis into somebody else's vagina at the right moment, suddenly causes you to have wonderful secret child-rearing knowledge which is not given to the general population.
In fact I see a lot of evidence to the contrary. Having children generally makes people extremely emotional and robs them of a lot of their rational decision-making capabilities. There are tons of bad parents out there, and if you have children then you are quite likely to be one of them.
This applies very strongly to the question of how protective you should be of your children. Parents are instinctually very protective of their children, but these instincts were honed on the African plains where danger lurked behind every bush and in every tree. If you totally follow your protective instincts today, you'll end up exposing your child to no danger whatsoever, and they won't be able to survive once they reach the age of majority and move out of the house, assuming you didn't make them so afraid of the outside world that they live in your basement for the rest of their lives.
So let's skip this silly back and forth about whether the poster has children or not. If the argument is bad, refute the argument, not the person making it. If the argument is good, then accept it. It has nothing to do with whether or not you've had a paltry few years of experience raising a couple of children.
And no, I have no children.
I got pulled over once half tanked, but, was close to home and the cop let me drive home warning I'd go to jail if he saw me out again that night, man, you'd not see THAT happen again these days
And well you shouldn't! You endangered everybody you encountered on the road that night. In my opinion, the cop was irresponsible to let you go. If getting pulled over for DWI vas a virtual guarantee of a visit to jail (assuming that you actually fail the test, of course) then maybe fewer people would be so casual about operating complicated and deadly machinery while under the influence of mind-numbing drugs.
No, I've been coming here a long time. If I were new I probably wouldn't care. But the incredible insipidness and vapidity of most posters is finally starting to get to me.
I swear to God. Did you just read the word "mercury" and then immediately jump down to post? The telescope in question is not using mercury.
In the sane world, you get an estimate up-front, and if the contractor goes over then he'd better either eat the cost or have a damned good reason for the extra money.
Maybe you think that an extra $200 for a coffee table is unimportant. You'd be in a small minority with that view. But start applying that overrun to every piece of furniture in your house and you'll see how it ends up being a big deal.
Yes, and? The scenario you describe has happened countless times throughout history. Exploration and advancement is a slow process. Acting as though the human race is somehow unworthy of going into space because we haven't been back to the Moon in forty years is simply ridiculous. When it's four hundred years then maybe you'll have a point.
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard (today).
Let's re-cast this into computer terms, since that seems to be the only thing people really grasp rationally here (and even then, not so much).
So some early IBM mainframe from the 1960s was full of bugs. IBM had to go through huge contortions to stamp out enough bugs to make the thing usable.
Now it's 2008 and we're working on some project and, guess what, it's full of bugs! Now you come along and say, IBM was stamping out bugs in the 1960s, it's been done already, this should be easy now!
But of course it's not. The process doesn't get easy just because somebody else did it before. It's not some kind of mistake that you make once and then learn from and never make again. It's just part of how you build software. Likewise, working hard to shave weight from the vehicle is just part of how you build aerospace hardware.
That's a non sequitur. To paraphrase the classic quote, a few million here, a few million there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money. All these "little" overruns add up.
Your analogy is also busted. If you have a $40,000 budget, this would be the equivalent of your coffee table costing $200 more than expected. I know very few people who wouldn't be upset at getting ripped off to the tune of $200 on a piece of furniture.
Having an example is not the same as having the plans, of course. It's like having a binary without the source code. It's much more painful than it would be if you had the original plans.
Of course as another guy noted, they do have the plans, they're just about as useful as source code from that era would be.
It's really tragic thing. Maybe we don't deserve to be a spacefaring race.
Have some patience, man! It's like having the Vikings visit the Americas, get killed, never return, and then you complain that "Maybe we don't deserve to be a seafaring race."
A little over a century ago, man wasn't even flying airplanes. The first human was sent into space less than fifty years ago. There's no real reason to think that large-scale space exploration and even colonization won't happen. There's also no real reason to think that it will, or should, happen within the next fifty years, or even within the next two hundred years. The amount of time that humanity has so far been visiting space is but a blink of an eye in historical terms.
Beyond that, who buys pre-built systems these days anyway?
About 271 million people in 2007. Seriously, if you think that most people build their own systems, you need to get out more.
Is OSX innovative? Perhaps...but again, it's based off something anyway (i.e. linux).
What a pointless thing to say. Everything is based off something else.
People who have never created anything worthwhile always ignore the importance of actually creating, as opposed to simply coming up with the ideas.
How about the fact that bandwidth from one user to another topologically nearby user is often essentially free? If you're sending a large file to ten people on the same ISP in the same neighborhood, it is extremely inefficient to send that same file to each person individually, and extremely efficient to send it once, and have each of those ten people share the pieces they have to the other nine locally.
This is the concept behind the poorly named "P4P" technology that some ISPs were experimenting with, and for popular media it sounds like a fantastic idea.
Could you please elaborate on what the problem is?
They can't protect their content. This is the basic fallacy of DRM which we discuss on this site all the time.
We can't protect our methods. If they are known on the internet then they can be discovered by the content providers. It matters not a whit whether we discuss it on this site or not, they will still find out.
The ultimate reason for both of these is the same: information cannot be protected unless all parties who can access it are absolutely trustworthy.
That's all I said before. Does this way make more sense to you?
How do they work then? Obviously wear leveling is a reality, and unless it's going to perform two physical writes for every logical write (to swap blocks) it must have some concept of what areas are free.