That depends greatly on your definition of "good". True, it is not as extensive a system, but that's largely because Boston isn't nearly so pathologically overcrowded as New York. But it's much easier to figure out where you're actually going on the T, the stations and trains are nicer and cleaner, and (very much unlike on the MTA), I have never feared for my life on the T.
Re:You shouldn't have to get total popular support
on
Victory in Holland
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· Score: 1
I didn't mention popularity at all. I mentioned upside potential - will there be significant benefits to the general welfare from a given expenditure?. Freeing the slaves was a Moral Imperative; that's enough upside potential for me. Helping the poor has good upside potential, but many of the ways our government tries to help them are wholly ineffectual, and therefore not a good use of our money. Please, if you must invoke slavery and Emancipation, at least do so in a relevant manner.
Ha, the measure required spending money. In Holland, Michigan, the cheapest town in America, that is usually a dead-bang loser.
Which is as it should be. The government shouldn't be spending the people's money on anything that doesn't have very strong upside potential. "That government governs best, which governs least" and all that. If only we could get the good people of Holland to export this attitude to the rest of the country...
Maybe it doesn't count as "News for Nerds," but for those of us who would like to keep some semblance of freedom in America, it's definitely "Stuff That Matters."
This is exactly why I stopped shopping at Kroger the day they started having a "Club Card" (well, that and the fact that they raised prices 50% overnight so they wouldn't lose any money on the card discount). It's annoying sometimes since all of the all-night groceries around here are Kroger, and I liked buying food at 2 AM, but I won't patronize businesses that punish me for wanting to maintain a little privacy.
I realize that I may be one of the only Slashdot geeks to have majored in Classical Languages instead of Computer Science, and no pedantry was intended in this post.
Oh, but let's be honest with ourselves, shall we? Once we moved on to a world where we read Slashdot, pedantry's about the only use we're going to get out of the major, isn't it?
My specialization was in Greek rather than Latin, so I'm going to stay out of the battle at hand as much as possible. But I was under the impression that virus was 4th declension, making the nominative plural virus; I think viruses sounds better for the plural if we're speaking English, though. Certainly virii would have to be wrong; even if we were dealing with the 2nd declension, the plural would, foolishly assuming regularity, be viri.
USPS does not lobby Congress; this is true. USPS goes to the Postal Rate Commission (PRC), and says "We're not making enough profit (pay no attention to the fact that we're supposed to be a not-for-profit public organization); we need to raise rates again!" The PRC, being accountable to no one, usually takes USPS at its word. The PRC then goes to Congress for rubber-stamp (as it were) approval of the rate increase.
UPS and FedEx do not want the First Class (letter) rate to go up. The more USPS can charge for a letter (roughly 400 million of which get sent each month in bill payments alone - yes, I'm pulling that number out of my ass. I personally send out 3 payments per month; someone cited 130 million US households receiving email; I suspect that 3 bills per month is below average), the less they can charge for the packages they compete against UPS and FedEx for.
Heading back the general direction of the article at hand: I bought a house a while back. Immediately thereafter, my volume of snail-mail spam went up dramatically. I've managed to track down things like the Triumvirate of Evil (Equifax, Experian, TRW-or-whatever-they-are-now) don't-even-THINK-about-giving-out-my-credit-histor y-without-my-written-consent) address, which has helped. But there's a problem: I was forced to sign the mortgage documents as "Qnivq F Yhpuva." Someone, somewhere, managed to pervert this into "Qnivq and F Yhpuva", so I still get a mailbox full of spam, only all of it is addressed to a nonexistent spouse. Anything I've ever found that is supposed to reduced spam flow, requires a stronger identifier than "F Yhpuva, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington". But of course F, never having pretended to have existed, has no such identifiers. As things now stand, anything addressed to F Yhpuva goes directly to the recycle bin (in little pieces if it's from a credit card company); I don't _think_ it's illegal to read mail addressed to obviously-nonexistent-person@reader's home, but I'm not really sure. If they implement "Email for every Snail Mailbox", what am I to do about this? If they give separate compartments for each person at the address (which they would have to, since it would be illegal, as things now stand, for my mother to open my mail, if we were receiving mail at the same address, unless she had my permission), do I face a Hobson's choice between a) committing mail fraud (or whatever crime) by reading my nonspouse's mail; or b) getting the USPS mad at me for clearly having the ability to read my mail without having them print it out (since mail addressed to Q Yhpuva will be dealt with in a timely manner), but forcing them to do so anyway? And of course, if the printed emails are treated as registered mail (I can't see why anyone would want to send registered mail to a nonperson, but you never can tell), I'll be angrily refusing delivery of each and every one.
I think I had a point here, but I've long since forgotten what it was. Oh yeah: USPS bad, FedEx not-so-bad.
And how exactly are people going to "hear" of those niche sites?
I would think this will happen pretty much the way it's always happened. I see an interesting site, I send an email to those of my friends who I think might care: "Hey John, take a look at www.starbucksissatan.com" And there will still be places like Slashdot to point people off in the more obscure directions.
I think that your rephrase is considerably more awkward than the original, but I agree that, if he means what we think that he means, it is a valid concern.
Are consumers really well served when one company controls more content and access than any other company in the world?
Isn't one company always going to be bigger than any other, and therefore control more content and/or access than any other? I don't like this merger any more than anybody else (had I not already been refusing to support Time Warner by subscribing to their cable service, I would have cancelled my cable this week), but this statement just doesn't make sense. Maybe he meant "more than all other companies; but I don't think AOL-Time Warner is going to be that big. Yet.
This is definitely the best use of karma bonus I have seen; thanks, Tau Zero, for giving me the opportunity to see such a beautiful piece of work, despite the misguided efforts of the moderators (and my own unfortunate tendency to threshold at 0).
Re:Just say no to anti-trust
on
AOL Nation
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· Score: 1
I think that proves my point. France has 'demonstrations' that look like riots to me on a regular basis.
In fairness, though, France has been having those sorts of riots on a regular basis for over 200 years now, under every form of government they've tried. I don't think European Socialism has any direct causal relationship in this instance.
Re:Just say no to anti-trust
on
AOL Nation
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· Score: 0
When twenty percent of the working population become jobless as a result of mergers, they're not going to be calling their congressmen; they're going to be rioting in the streets.
If, physically, your right to wave your fist ends at the tip of my nose
I don't think this actually has any bearing whatsoever on your argument, but my right to wave my fist does not end at the tip of your nose; it ends at the point where you can reasonably expect that I am trying to wave my fist on such a trajectory that it will come into contact with your nose. The tip of your nose is the boundary between the charge of assault, and the charge of assault-and-battery.
This looks to me like yet another example of technology that looks like a panacea to the let's-protect-people-from-themselves nanny governments, who adopt these things as requirements without considering all of the ramifications (cf. GPS-enforced speed limits, earlier this week). I could be way off base here, as the article wasn't really clear about the technology: is this an always-on feature, or something the driver switches on when he wants to know why there's a traffic jam? If it's the latter, I don't see that these pirates are such a huge problem (and as a voluntary thing, I can see where it might be a useful feature); if it's the former, why haven't I heard anyone objecting to the adoption of this technology before now?
I wouldn't try to hit Kentucky from Mars, for just that reason. I'd aim for Kansas, or Florida, or the Sahara (flat, flat, not flat but reasonably soft).
Of course, there's the smallish problem of there not being anything resembling polar ice caps in any of those places, which would be a problem for this particular mission. Maybe a flatish part of Siberia...
That post has a default of 1 because the poster was logged in, and no one has bothered to moderate it down yet; who would want to waste the moderator point?
I want to be an upstanding, responsible member of the Slashdot community. Could someone please explain to me why that post has been deemed Flamebait, instead of being recognized as a joke that apparently didn't come off, so that I may avoid committing such heinous errors in the future?
I ran into leap year problems on 02/29/1996, a date that clearly should have been recognized by any system anywhere...
I was travelling USAir (now US Airways, I think) from Memphis to Boston, with a layover in Charlotte. When I attempted to find my connecting gate, I discovered that the airport's systems didn't know there were any flights headed to Boston that evening. It seems that USAir's flight schedule was changing on March 1, and somebody's system (I never found out whether it was USAir or the Charlotte Airport, but since Logan knew to expect us I presume it was Charlotte's problem) wasn't programmed to recognize leap years.
So while any competently coded system will not have problems based on 02/29/2000, you should not discount the possibility of incompetent coding (and testing, for that matter).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, you seem to be confused as to which Harrison Ford movies are which. This is Star Wars, not Indiana Jones.
Which is as it should be. The government shouldn't be spending the people's money on anything that doesn't have very strong upside potential. "That government governs best, which governs least" and all that. If only we could get the good people of Holland to export this attitude to the rest of the country...
Oh, but let's be honest with ourselves, shall we? Once we moved on to a world where we read Slashdot, pedantry's about the only use we're going to get out of the major, isn't it?
My specialization was in Greek rather than Latin, so I'm going to stay out of the battle at hand as much as possible. But I was under the impression that virus was 4th declension, making the nominative plural virus; I think viruses sounds better for the plural if we're speaking English, though. Certainly virii would have to be wrong; even if we were dealing with the 2nd declension, the plural would, foolishly assuming regularity, be viri.
UPS and FedEx do not want the First Class (letter) rate to go up. The more USPS can charge for a letter (roughly 400 million of which get sent each month in bill payments alone - yes, I'm pulling that number out of my ass. I personally send out 3 payments per month; someone cited 130 million US households receiving email; I suspect that 3 bills per month is below average), the less they can charge for the packages they compete against UPS and FedEx for.
Heading back the general direction of the article at hand: I bought a house a while back. Immediately thereafter, my volume of snail-mail spam went up dramatically. I've managed to track down things like the Triumvirate of Evil (Equifax, Experian, TRW-or-whatever-they-are-now) don't-even-THINK-about-giving-out-my-credit-histor y-without-my-written-consent) address, which has helped. But there's a problem: I was forced to sign the mortgage documents as "Qnivq F Yhpuva." Someone, somewhere, managed to pervert this into "Qnivq and F Yhpuva", so I still get a mailbox full of spam, only all of it is addressed to a nonexistent spouse. Anything I've ever found that is supposed to reduced spam flow, requires a stronger identifier than "F Yhpuva, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington". But of course F, never having pretended to have existed, has no such identifiers. As things now stand, anything addressed to F Yhpuva goes directly to the recycle bin (in little pieces if it's from a credit card company); I don't _think_ it's illegal to read mail addressed to obviously-nonexistent-person@reader's home, but I'm not really sure. If they implement "Email for every Snail Mailbox", what am I to do about this? If they give separate compartments for each person at the address (which they would have to, since it would be illegal, as things now stand, for my mother to open my mail, if we were receiving mail at the same address, unless she had my permission), do I face a Hobson's choice between a) committing mail fraud (or whatever crime) by reading my nonspouse's mail; or b) getting the USPS mad at me for clearly having the ability to read my mail without having them print it out (since mail addressed to Q Yhpuva will be dealt with in a timely manner), but forcing them to do so anyway? And of course, if the printed emails are treated as registered mail (I can't see why anyone would want to send registered mail to a nonperson, but you never can tell), I'll be angrily refusing delivery of each and every one.
I think I had a point here, but I've long since forgotten what it was. Oh yeah: USPS bad, FedEx not-so-bad.
I would think this will happen pretty much the way it's always happened. I see an interesting site, I send an email to those of my friends who I think might care: "Hey John, take a look at www.starbucksissatan.com" And there will still be places like Slashdot to point people off in the more obscure directions.
Are consumers really well served when one company controls more content and access than any other company in the world?
Isn't one company always going to be bigger than any other, and therefore control more content and/or access than any other? I don't like this merger any more than anybody else (had I not already been refusing to support Time Warner by subscribing to their cable service, I would have cancelled my cable this week), but this statement just doesn't make sense. Maybe he meant "more than all other companies; but I don't think AOL-Time Warner is going to be that big. Yet.
This is definitely the best use of karma bonus I have seen; thanks, Tau Zero, for giving me the opportunity to see such a beautiful piece of work, despite the misguided efforts of the moderators (and my own unfortunate tendency to threshold at 0).
In fairness, though, France has been having those sorts of riots on a regular basis for over 200 years now, under every form of government they've tried. I don't think European Socialism has any direct causal relationship in this instance.
I don't think this actually has any bearing whatsoever on your argument, but my right to wave my fist does not end at the tip of your nose; it ends at the point where you can reasonably expect that I am trying to wave my fist on such a trajectory that it will come into contact with your nose. The tip of your nose is the boundary between the charge of assault, and the charge of assault-and-battery.
This looks to me like yet another example of technology that looks like a panacea to the let's-protect-people-from-themselves nanny governments, who adopt these things as requirements without considering all of the ramifications (cf. GPS-enforced speed limits, earlier this week). I could be way off base here, as the article wasn't really clear about the technology: is this an always-on feature, or something the driver switches on when he wants to know why there's a traffic jam? If it's the latter, I don't see that these pirates are such a huge problem (and as a voluntary thing, I can see where it might be a useful feature); if it's the former, why haven't I heard anyone objecting to the adoption of this technology before now?
Of course, there's the smallish problem of there not being anything resembling polar ice caps in any of those places, which would be a problem for this particular mission. Maybe a flatish part of Siberia...
That post has a default of 1 because the poster was logged in, and no one has bothered to moderate it down yet; who would want to waste the moderator point?
I want to be an upstanding, responsible member of the Slashdot community. Could someone please explain to me why that post has been deemed Flamebait, instead of being recognized as a joke that apparently didn't come off, so that I may avoid committing such heinous errors in the future?
They got as close as they could with The Godfather, too; they made Parts II and III as soon as Part I had made enough money for them to be able to.
obFawning: We love you, Uncle Orson!
I was travelling USAir (now US Airways, I think) from Memphis to Boston, with a layover in Charlotte. When I attempted to find my connecting gate, I discovered that the airport's systems didn't know there were any flights headed to Boston that evening. It seems that USAir's flight schedule was changing on March 1, and somebody's system (I never found out whether it was USAir or the Charlotte Airport, but since Logan knew to expect us I presume it was Charlotte's problem) wasn't programmed to recognize leap years.
So while any competently coded system will not have problems based on 02/29/2000, you should not discount the possibility of incompetent coding (and testing, for that matter).
Clearly, I deserve the unsung hero award. You say you've never heard of me, or my work? Yep, that proves that no one's singing my praises.
Definitely fits the rest of the criteria.