Sheesh, you posted screenshots of your mp3 collection complete with your IP!! You know the RIAA is going to hax0r your box and send you IMs now, right??:-)
Hahaha, imagine the RIAA trying to connect to 192.168.*.*. Gee, why isn't it working?
So I'd say Ballmer wasn't really all that far off either...
I would disagree. Here's what Ballmer said again: That's an area where the Unix guys are ahead of us, because of the way they do redirection -- they can patch a file and then change the symbolic link.
I interpreted that comment as referring to the convention of symlinking, for instance, libjpeg.so to libjpeg.so.6 to libjpeg.so.6.0.1. If libjpeg needs to be upgraded, just create libjpeg.so.6.0.2 and change your symlinks. However, as the original poster said, the ability to patch without rebooting really has nothing to do with this.
Mozilla tabs are just a fucking MDI interface, any dumbass has been able to write an MDI app in MFC for the past ten years. MDI sucked in 1995, and it still sucks now.
Tabbed browsing is, as far as I'm concerned, the most important ease-of-use enhancement in the history of web browsers. I cringe when I have to use my gf's computer to browse the web, since she only has IE. I hate having 14 windows open all over the desktop, and another 44 popup ads underneath.
Just because any dumbass COULD have done it does not negate the fact that no dumbass HAD done it (well, perhaps SOMEONE had in one of the less popular browsers, and kudos to them if they had, but IE certainly didn't have it -- though I guarantee tabs will show up in IE soon). The same could be said about just about every invention: any dumbass could have come up with it. In hindsight, the technology behind the telephone, the phonograph, the airplane, the internal combustion engine, are all no-brainers. That doesn't make their invention any less innovative or revolutionary.
That's funny My Windows machine has a command line, used quite often. Matter of fact name a windows without a command line.
Neither Windows 2000 nor Windows XP have a command line that's accessibly without booting the entire OS, graphics and all. Windows 9x allowed you to hit F8 at boot and bypass all that crap, and just go straight to a command prompt. DOS let you hit F5 and skip autoexec.bat processing (the fact that MS changed F5 in Win9x to boot into safe mode never ceased to piss me off). Linux lets you boot into single user mode without loading all its daemons (and w/out loading X, if you happen to default to runlevel 5). Besides, the CLI Windows 2000/XP offers you once you've finally booted the OS and logged in is worthless.
It may be flat out unconstitutional, but since nobody will ever make it to the Supreme Court with it, it would (if passed) remain law until congress repeals it.
The Supreme Court is NOT the only court that can declare laws unconstitutional. They just happen to have the final say in the matter. Think of the 9th Circuit declaring the pledge unconstitutional.
Nobody guarantees that Usenet is accurate, or the web. They capture any garbage anyone ever produces, and Google indexes it for everyone. The reader knows this, and distinguishing wheat from chaff is usually possible, and not too hard.
The stakes involved with Usenet or the web being inaccurate are typically far lower. If you read inaccurate data on the web, what happens? Nothing, really. If the FBI has inaccurate data in their database that says you're a murderer, what happens? They follow you around and arrest you the first time you doing anything suspicious.
And distinguising wheat from chaff on the internet is a bit easier than in a person-information database. Sure, I can use reason to determine that the website that says that the earth is flat is inaccurate. It's a lot harder for someone who doesn't know anything about you except for what they're reading in your file to determine that the information saying you're a serial killer is inaccurate.
If I have a mark on my record that I killed my great-great-grampa, followed by some authoritative marks that I really didn't and that first mark was in error, that looks fair to me. Not editing history is a good thing.
Personally, I would prefer to NOT have a mark on my record saying I killed my great-great-grandpa, no matter how many marks were added saying I didn't do it. And removing the killer mark doesn't look like editing history to me. It looks a lot more like telling the truth.
Why does anyone need to 'get around'? Until the last 100 years, everyone basically remained in an area of a few square miles for most of their lives.
And before (nearly) everyone had a car, everything everyone needed to survive was within walking distance. Work, the grocery store, the drug store, the doctor, EVERYTHING. I live 12 miles from where I work. I live 4 miles from the nearest grocery store. I'm guessing here, but I probably live about 5 miles from my doctor.
Look at monkeys, and tell me I'm wrong. You're wrong. Last I knew, monkeys lived within inches of their food. Humans did too, when we were all subsistence farmers or hunters. Now a lot of us live in cities. How much food do you see being grown within most metropolitan regions of the US?
I don't know about you, but walking a few miles to a store doesn't take all day.
No, it doesn't, for me and (presumably) you. But ask the average American (whose idea of exercise is to lift the remote off the table and walk to the bathroom a couple times a day) to walk 3 miles to a grocery store, then 3 miles back while carrying 30 pounds of groceries, and it could take a while.
you'd be forced to produce your OWN [food]. Now that's a funny thought. I live in a city. Where do you propose I grow this food? Where do you propose I get the seeds? Etc.
Those who can't care for themselves are already cared for by others, so the disabled and elderly have their bases covered for the most part.
Both my grandmothers are in their 80s, neither are cared for by others, and neither would be able to walk to the grocery store, let alone back with an armful of groceries.
Our society is not so unethical that in such an experiment, we would just abandon those in need.
No, but when I'm spending 8 hours a day at work, 6 hours a day walking back and forth to work, and a few hours walking back and forth to the grocery store, I have little time to walk 150 miles to bring my grandma groceries.
First, I didn't mention the world.
From your original post: A more interesting study would be to stop all petroleum based engines for a month. Since the US does not have a monopoly on petroleum based engines, I merely assumed you meant the world. I apologize.
Second, if my experiment came about from an uncontrollable event, you would probably be the first to die.
Ha. Not likely. I'm a backpacker, so I know my edible plants, and I'm in excellent shape. It's the fat ignorant slobs that mostly populate the country that I think would die.
Some businesses do not accept cash anymore, or very reluctantly.
I have NEVER encountered a business that does not accept cash. As for renting a car or getting a hotel room, I have, with cash, no problem.
How about paying for a res[t]aurant meal with a cheque?
Checks aren't anonymous. And besides, I understand why businesses are reluctant to accept checks. You never know if one will bounce (as opposed to credit cards, which nowadays are verified instantly).
How do you suggest we counter the liability of loaning books to strangers?
Simple. I suggest we don't loan books to strangers. I wasn't the one advocating anonymous borrowing. Personally I think the solution is for libraries to just destroy borrowing records after the book is returned. I have no problem with libraries keeping historical data on how many times a book was borrowed, but there's no reason they should keep individual borrowing histories. And from other comments, it appears as though many libraries already use that policy. Anonymous borrowing is totally unnecessary.
It's just like those super-scary GPS equipped cell phones that they're always using to track poor people.
No one is forcing you to use those super-scary GPS equipped cell phones. If you don't like it, use a pay phone. No one is forcing you to use your platinum credit card. If you don't like it, use cash. And so on. On the other hand, many poor people can't afford to drive the 8 mile-per-gallon SUV that they don't have to the local Barnes and Noble and sip cappuccinos and buy a hundred dollars worth of books. For these people, a free library is their only chance to read (and that is, after all, the point of a free library - to give everyone the opportunity to read for free). Everyone on/. seems to believe that privacy and anonymity are a basic human right, but then the original poster turns around and implies that no, those things are just a privilege of the wealthy. Personally I don't give a damn if Big Brother knows what I read, I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy in the argument.
A more interesting study would be to stop all petroleum based engines for a month (including jets), and measure the impact on the climate...Alas, this will never happen, because people are addicted to their lifestyles.
Are you kidding? You're asking every single person in the world to roll back their technology over 100 years. How would ANYONE get around? It has nothing to do with addiction to lifestyle, it has to do with that technology being necessary for most people's LIVES, since so few people have any alternate means of transportation. Since the advent of the supermarket, corner markets no longer exist (sure, convenience stores exist, but have you ever tried to actually eat a meal from a convenience store that consists of more than chips and beer?). The majority of the population would have a hard time getting to and from a grocery store, typically located several miles from their home. For most people, walking that far would be an all-day proposition, or out of the question entirely. Not many people have a horse and buggy anymore, and a bike that isn't set up to carry a load is woefully inadequate to the task of hauling large quantities of groceries. Not to mention the fact that farmers wouldn't be able to harvest their crops without their petroleum-burning tractors, combines, etc, so even after your little experiment was over, people STILL couldn't eat. Few people would be able to get to work, since few people live within a short distance of their jobs (the car made suburbs possible). Do you consider natural gas- or oil-fired power plants to be petroleum based engines? If so, we wouldn't have much electricity either. In short, the economy would completely shut down, thousands of people would die, and your "interesting study" would have a disastrous effect on the world.
It is already being tested as such. A friend of mine received a 'warning' stating that the State Troopers where aware of his excessive (140+) speed and would not take kindly to another incident of this kind. How did they know? The warning cited E-Zpass toll both logging.
First of all, as a New Yorker and a frequent traveller of the NYS Thruway, I would be happy if the State Troopers used any method they could to get your asshole friend off the road and preventing him from killing me if he's driving over 140 miles an hour. I have little problem with breaking the speed limit, especially since everyone does it, and highways (especially the NYS Thruway) are designed to be safe at speeds in excess of 80mph. But more than double the speed limit is absolutely ridiculous and totally unsafe, considering that the average flow of traffic isn't much more than 75. No one is looking in their rear-view mirror for a car approaching them at 65mph over their own speed, and anyone could easily pull out in front of that car to pass another, and there's nothing that could be done to prevent a (very bad) accident.
Now, for normal, sane speeders who don't go much faster than 10 or 15 mph over the speed limit, the state is not going to bother sending these people tickets. Why? Because EZPass saves the state money. Toll-takers actually make a decent amount of money, and having automatic toll collection systems saves money by requiring fewer human collectors. As soon as people found out that tickets were automatically being issued for speeding, no one would use the system anymore, and the Thruway Authority would have one big, expensive, useless system on their hands. See other posts for other problems with automated ticket issuing (most notably the fact that the system has no idea who is driving the vehicle, and speeding tickets are issued to individuals, not vehicles).
Well, then, I guess walking must also be a privilege, yes? No.
Then, pray tell, what is the difference between the two?
One involves moving a 2500 pound hunk of steel at 60 miles an hour down the highway, the other involves your 175-pound body slowly plodding along at 4 or 5 mph. The kinetic energy carried by a car (and thus its ability to cause death and destruction) is several orders of magnitude higher than that of a person walking. Further, walking is something that everyone (with rare exception) has been doing since the age of one, and is a natural human activity, whereas driving is most definitely an acquired skill (if you don't believe me, go watch a 16-year old drive for the first time).
Then how about riding your bicycle? Is that a right or a privilege?
Honestly, I'm not entirely sure. It feels like more of a right than driving, but less of a privilege than walking.
Think it's a matter of whether or not you do it on "public" property?
No.
If there is any property we have the right to use, it's public property. But for you to be consistent in using the "public property" argument, then walking on the sidewalk (public property) must be a privilege, not a right.
There are pieces of public property that the public at large does not have the right to venture on, whether walking, bicycling, or driving. Various government installations are forbidden. Some activities are prohibited only in certain areas. Pedestrians and bicyclists, for example, are not allowed on Interstate highways. Cars are not allowed to drive through a fountain that people can walk through.
Understand this: the entire point behind the founding of the U.S. was to give the people the right to do any damned thing they please so long as in doing so they don't interfere in the rights of others.
And you don't believe that letting EVERYONE drive no matter what their age or ability (which is what you seem to desire, since you believe that driving is a right), wouldn't interfere with the rights of others? Haha. I had a friend back in high school that got in five accidents in the first couple years after getting her license (and these were all her fault, it wasn't just a run of bad luck). As far as I'm concerned, the privilege of driving is one that should be a lot harder to earn than it currently is.
Try living in southern Arizona for a while.:D We've got a damned fine excuse to carry water with us everywhere we go (think 5% humidity and 100+ degree heat in the summer).
Actually, areas with higher humidity are worse for causing dehydration than really dry areas. When the humidity is low, sweating works well for keeping you cool. In high humidity it doesn't work so well since the sweat doesn't evaporate as fast, so your body keeps pumping out more and more sweat to try to cool off, thus dehydrating you faster.
Well obviously when you're exercising you should be drinking more or less constantly. It doesn't take much intense exercise to dehydrate a person. I'm a serious bicyclist, and on a 50 mile training ride a couple days ago, I had my 50-oz Camelbak, but accidentally left my extra water bottle sitting on the kitchen table. I emptied the Camelbak 10 miles from home (no gas stations on the way to fill up), and it took me the rest of the night of more or less constantly drinking fluids to get my headache to go away.
The phenomenon the original poster was referring to doesn't involve people engaging in physical activity. Everyone seems to feel the need to carry around their own personal water/soda supply nowadays. In my college classes, it seems that about half the people have a drink sitting on their desk. A person can't go fifty minutes without a drink? Give me a break. This is definitely a major cause of obesity in the US, since a soda has about 150 calories per 8 oz, and most soda machines are stocked with 20 oz bottles. There's 375 calories consumed because someone was too stupid to just go to a drinking fountain instead. Drink a few sodas and you've consumed the number of calories you're supposed to for the entire day.
They could have easily taken over the infrastructure of a modernized computer-bent, encryption-shielded society such as the US or Japan.
Primality testing and factorization are not one and the same. It is possible to know that a number is not prime without knowing its factors. Breaking encryption requires factoring the product of two huge primes (it is already known that the number you're trying to factor is NOT prime, so Primes being in P is more or less useless by itself for this particular application), and factorization has yet to be shown to be in P.
And up until 5 minutes ago, I had never heard of this guy. Why not? Because from reading the Wired news article, all he did was work on Gnutella. Gnutella. Who cares. After reading your post I thought maybe this guy had invented the Internet. People die all the time. And according to the article, "Kan's suicide was not completely unexpected, according to some of his friends. They had hoped Kan was winning his hard-fought battle against depression exacerbated by personal problems." I battled depression too and I'm a programmer, should/. run an article on me now? I would be willing to bet that far more/. readers have seen Office Space and are interested in a red stapler than know who this guy was. Oh, and did I mention, he died on June 29. It is now July 11. The story has been on Wired for almost 2 days now. Isn't it a little late for you to go into this rant? And as other posters mentioned, just because he had fancy cars and respect and money doesn't mean he was happy.
And the other day I bought a can of Pringles and it was printed in both English and Spanish. Do you have a point? Did you ever think that perhaps the company, in some twisted scheme to make more of a profit, may sell their product to Spanish-speaking countries and not limit themselves to just the US/Canadian market?
Slashdot Mirror
Sheesh, you posted screenshots of your mp3 collection complete with your IP!! You know the RIAA is going to hax0r your box and send you IMs now, right?? :-)
Hahaha, imagine the RIAA trying to connect to 192.168.*.*. Gee, why isn't it working?
You have a citation for that?
here you go. Clause b.
So I'd say Ballmer wasn't really all that far off either...
I would disagree. Here's what Ballmer said again:
That's an area where the Unix guys are ahead of us, because of the way they do redirection -- they can patch a file and then change the symbolic link.
I interpreted that comment as referring to the convention of symlinking, for instance, libjpeg.so to libjpeg.so.6 to libjpeg.so.6.0.1. If libjpeg needs to be upgraded, just create libjpeg.so.6.0.2 and change your symlinks. However, as the original poster said, the ability to patch without rebooting really has nothing to do with this.
Mozilla tabs are just a fucking MDI interface, any dumbass has been able to write an MDI app in MFC for the past ten years. MDI sucked in 1995, and it still sucks now.
Tabbed browsing is, as far as I'm concerned, the most important ease-of-use enhancement in the history of web browsers. I cringe when I have to use my gf's computer to browse the web, since she only has IE. I hate having 14 windows open all over the desktop, and another 44 popup ads underneath.
Just because any dumbass COULD have done it does not negate the fact that no dumbass HAD done it (well, perhaps SOMEONE had in one of the less popular browsers, and kudos to them if they had, but IE certainly didn't have it -- though I guarantee tabs will show up in IE soon). The same could be said about just about every invention: any dumbass could have come up with it. In hindsight, the technology behind the telephone, the phonograph, the airplane, the internal combustion engine, are all no-brainers. That doesn't make their invention any less innovative or revolutionary.
That's funny My Windows machine has a command line, used quite often. Matter of fact name a windows without a command line.
Neither Windows 2000 nor Windows XP have a command line that's accessibly without booting the entire OS, graphics and all. Windows 9x allowed you to hit F8 at boot and bypass all that crap, and just go straight to a command prompt. DOS let you hit F5 and skip autoexec.bat processing (the fact that MS changed F5 in Win9x to boot into safe mode never ceased to piss me off). Linux lets you boot into single user mode without loading all its daemons (and w/out loading X, if you happen to default to runlevel 5). Besides, the CLI Windows 2000/XP offers you once you've finally booted the OS and logged in is worthless.
It may be flat out unconstitutional, but since nobody will ever make it to the Supreme Court with it, it would (if passed) remain law until congress repeals it.
The Supreme Court is NOT the only court that can declare laws unconstitutional. They just happen to have the final say in the matter. Think of the 9th Circuit declaring the pledge unconstitutional.
Nobody guarantees that Usenet is accurate, or the web. They capture any garbage anyone ever produces, and Google indexes it for everyone. The reader knows this, and distinguishing wheat from chaff is usually possible, and not too hard.
The stakes involved with Usenet or the web being inaccurate are typically far lower. If you read inaccurate data on the web, what happens? Nothing, really. If the FBI has inaccurate data in their database that says you're a murderer, what happens? They follow you around and arrest you the first time you doing anything suspicious.
And distinguising wheat from chaff on the internet is a bit easier than in a person-information database. Sure, I can use reason to determine that the website that says that the earth is flat is inaccurate. It's a lot harder for someone who doesn't know anything about you except for what they're reading in your file to determine that the information saying you're a serial killer is inaccurate.
If I have a mark on my record that I killed my great-great-grampa, followed by some authoritative marks that I really didn't and that first mark was in error, that looks fair to me. Not editing history is a good thing.
Personally, I would prefer to NOT have a mark on my record saying I killed my great-great-grandpa, no matter how many marks were added saying I didn't do it. And removing the killer mark doesn't look like editing history to me. It looks a lot more like telling the truth.
3 trillion amount to less than is spent on social security. the US spends a WHOLE lot more than that
According to the Office of Management and Budget, total spending of the U.S. Fed. govt in fiscal year 2002 was $2.052 trillion.
it is entirely possible that the government or even local charities would be willing to make one-time donations to qualified patrons
How can it be determined who is a qualified patron if that patron is to remain anonymous?
Why does anyone need to 'get around'? Until the last 100 years, everyone basically remained in an area of a few square miles for most of their lives.
And before (nearly) everyone had a car, everything everyone needed to survive was within walking distance. Work, the grocery store, the drug store, the doctor, EVERYTHING. I live 12 miles from where I work. I live 4 miles from the nearest grocery store. I'm guessing here, but I probably live about 5 miles from my doctor.
Look at monkeys, and tell me I'm wrong.
You're wrong. Last I knew, monkeys lived within inches of their food. Humans did too, when we were all subsistence farmers or hunters. Now a lot of us live in cities. How much food do you see being grown within most metropolitan regions of the US?
I don't know about you, but walking a few miles to a store doesn't take all day.
No, it doesn't, for me and (presumably) you. But ask the average American (whose idea of exercise is to lift the remote off the table and walk to the bathroom a couple times a day) to walk 3 miles to a grocery store, then 3 miles back while carrying 30 pounds of groceries, and it could take a while.
you'd be forced to produce your OWN [food].
Now that's a funny thought. I live in a city. Where do you propose I grow this food? Where do you propose I get the seeds? Etc.
Those who can't care for themselves are already cared for by others, so the disabled and elderly have their bases covered for the most part.
Both my grandmothers are in their 80s, neither are cared for by others, and neither would be able to walk to the grocery store, let alone back with an armful of groceries.
Our society is not so unethical that in such an experiment, we would just abandon those in need.
No, but when I'm spending 8 hours a day at work, 6 hours a day walking back and forth to work, and a few hours walking back and forth to the grocery store, I have little time to walk 150 miles to bring my grandma groceries.
First, I didn't mention the world.
From your original post: A more interesting study would be to stop all petroleum based engines for a month. Since the US does not have a monopoly on petroleum based engines, I merely assumed you meant the world. I apologize.
Second, if my experiment came about from an uncontrollable event, you would probably be the first to die.
Ha. Not likely. I'm a backpacker, so I know my edible plants, and I'm in excellent shape. It's the fat ignorant slobs that mostly populate the country that I think would die.
Some businesses do not accept cash anymore, or very reluctantly.
I have NEVER encountered a business that does not accept cash. As for renting a car or getting a hotel room, I have, with cash, no problem.
How about paying for a res[t]aurant meal with a cheque?
Checks aren't anonymous. And besides, I understand why businesses are reluctant to accept checks. You never know if one will bounce (as opposed to credit cards, which nowadays are verified instantly).
How do you suggest we counter the liability of loaning books to strangers?
Simple. I suggest we don't loan books to strangers. I wasn't the one advocating anonymous borrowing. Personally I think the solution is for libraries to just destroy borrowing records after the book is returned. I have no problem with libraries keeping historical data on how many times a book was borrowed, but there's no reason they should keep individual borrowing histories. And from other comments, it appears as though many libraries already use that policy. Anonymous borrowing is totally unnecessary.
It's just like those super-scary GPS equipped cell phones that they're always using to track poor people.
/. seems to believe that privacy and anonymity are a basic human right, but then the original poster turns around and implies that no, those things are just a privilege of the wealthy. Personally I don't give a damn if Big Brother knows what I read, I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy in the argument.
No one is forcing you to use those super-scary GPS equipped cell phones. If you don't like it, use a pay phone. No one is forcing you to use your platinum credit card. If you don't like it, use cash. And so on. On the other hand, many poor people can't afford to drive the 8 mile-per-gallon SUV that they don't have to the local Barnes and Noble and sip cappuccinos and buy a hundred dollars worth of books. For these people, a free library is their only chance to read (and that is, after all, the point of a free library - to give everyone the opportunity to read for free). Everyone on
The only problem I see with this is that some people might not be able to come up with the deposit -- they could use the old, non-anonymous system.
Oh, so anonymity is the privilege of the wealthy, and not the right of the people? How equitable.
A more interesting study would be to stop all petroleum based engines for a month (including jets), and measure the impact on the climate...Alas, this will never happen, because people are addicted to their lifestyles.
Are you kidding? You're asking every single person in the world to roll back their technology over 100 years. How would ANYONE get around? It has nothing to do with addiction to lifestyle, it has to do with that technology being necessary for most people's LIVES, since so few people have any alternate means of transportation. Since the advent of the supermarket, corner markets no longer exist (sure, convenience stores exist, but have you ever tried to actually eat a meal from a convenience store that consists of more than chips and beer?). The majority of the population would have a hard time getting to and from a grocery store, typically located several miles from their home. For most people, walking that far would be an all-day proposition, or out of the question entirely. Not many people have a horse and buggy anymore, and a bike that isn't set up to carry a load is woefully inadequate to the task of hauling large quantities of groceries. Not to mention the fact that farmers wouldn't be able to harvest their crops without their petroleum-burning tractors, combines, etc, so even after your little experiment was over, people STILL couldn't eat. Few people would be able to get to work, since few people live within a short distance of their jobs (the car made suburbs possible). Do you consider natural gas- or oil-fired power plants to be petroleum based engines? If so, we wouldn't have much electricity either. In short, the economy would completely shut down, thousands of people would die, and your "interesting study" would have a disastrous effect on the world.
It is already being tested as such. A friend of mine received a 'warning' stating that the State Troopers where aware of his excessive (140+) speed and would not take kindly to another incident of this kind. How did they know? The warning cited E-Zpass toll both logging.
First of all, as a New Yorker and a frequent traveller of the NYS Thruway, I would be happy if the State Troopers used any method they could to get your asshole friend off the road and preventing him from killing me if he's driving over 140 miles an hour. I have little problem with breaking the speed limit, especially since everyone does it, and highways (especially the NYS Thruway) are designed to be safe at speeds in excess of 80mph. But more than double the speed limit is absolutely ridiculous and totally unsafe, considering that the average flow of traffic isn't much more than 75. No one is looking in their rear-view mirror for a car approaching them at 65mph over their own speed, and anyone could easily pull out in front of that car to pass another, and there's nothing that could be done to prevent a (very bad) accident.
Now, for normal, sane speeders who don't go much faster than 10 or 15 mph over the speed limit, the state is not going to bother sending these people tickets. Why? Because EZPass saves the state money. Toll-takers actually make a decent amount of money, and having automatic toll collection systems saves money by requiring fewer human collectors. As soon as people found out that tickets were automatically being issued for speeding, no one would use the system anymore, and the Thruway Authority would have one big, expensive, useless system on their hands. See other posts for other problems with automated ticket issuing (most notably the fact that the system has no idea who is driving the vehicle, and speeding tickets are issued to individuals, not vehicles).
--Driving is a privilege, not a right.--
Really?
In fact, yes.
Well, then, I guess walking must also be a privilege, yes?
No.
Then, pray tell, what is the difference between the two?
One involves moving a 2500 pound hunk of steel at 60 miles an hour down the highway, the other involves your 175-pound body slowly plodding along at 4 or 5 mph. The kinetic energy carried by a car (and thus its ability to cause death and destruction) is several orders of magnitude higher than that of a person walking. Further, walking is something that everyone (with rare exception) has been doing since the age of one, and is a natural human activity, whereas driving is most definitely an acquired skill (if you don't believe me, go watch a 16-year old drive for the first time).
Then how about riding your bicycle? Is that a right or a privilege?
Honestly, I'm not entirely sure. It feels like more of a right than driving, but less of a privilege than walking.
Think it's a matter of whether or not you do it on "public" property?
No.
If there is any property we have the right to use, it's public property. But for you to be consistent in using the "public property" argument, then walking on the sidewalk (public property) must be a privilege, not a right.
There are pieces of public property that the public at large does not have the right to venture on, whether walking, bicycling, or driving. Various government installations are forbidden. Some activities are prohibited only in certain areas. Pedestrians and bicyclists, for example, are not allowed on Interstate highways. Cars are not allowed to drive through a fountain that people can walk through.
Understand this: the entire point behind the founding of the U.S. was to give the people the right to do any damned thing they please so long as in doing so they don't interfere in the rights of others.
And you don't believe that letting EVERYONE drive no matter what their age or ability (which is what you seem to desire, since you believe that driving is a right), wouldn't interfere with the rights of others? Haha. I had a friend back in high school that got in five accidents in the first couple years after getting her license (and these were all her fault, it wasn't just a run of bad luck). As far as I'm concerned, the privilege of driving is one that should be a lot harder to earn than it currently is.
As for basing it on printed toll tickets, it can't be that hard to obliterate the entry time printed on it.
Basing it on the time printed on the tickets is useless. I've gotten tickets printed with the wrong DAY, let alone the wrong time.
And did the driver who went 9 miles in 8 minutes "turn any people into road pizza"?? Nope.
:-)
We don't know. He didn't say
Try living in southern Arizona for a while. :D We've got a damned fine excuse to carry water with us everywhere we go (think 5% humidity and 100+ degree heat in the summer).
Actually, areas with higher humidity are worse for causing dehydration than really dry areas. When the humidity is low, sweating works well for keeping you cool. In high humidity it doesn't work so well since the sweat doesn't evaporate as fast, so your body keeps pumping out more and more sweat to try to cool off, thus dehydrating you faster.
When I'm really active I do this constantly.
Well obviously when you're exercising you should be drinking more or less constantly. It doesn't take much intense exercise to dehydrate a person. I'm a serious bicyclist, and on a 50 mile training ride a couple days ago, I had my 50-oz Camelbak, but accidentally left my extra water bottle sitting on the kitchen table. I emptied the Camelbak 10 miles from home (no gas stations on the way to fill up), and it took me the rest of the night of more or less constantly drinking fluids to get my headache to go away.
The phenomenon the original poster was referring to doesn't involve people engaging in physical activity. Everyone seems to feel the need to carry around their own personal water/soda supply nowadays. In my college classes, it seems that about half the people have a drink sitting on their desk. A person can't go fifty minutes without a drink? Give me a break. This is definitely a major cause of obesity in the US, since a soda has about 150 calories per 8 oz, and most soda machines are stocked with 20 oz bottles. There's 375 calories consumed because someone was too stupid to just go to a drinking fountain instead. Drink a few sodas and you've consumed the number of calories you're supposed to for the entire day.
They could have easily taken over the infrastructure of a modernized computer-bent, encryption-shielded society such as the US or Japan.
Primality testing and factorization are not one and the same. It is possible to know that a number is not prime without knowing its factors. Breaking encryption requires factoring the product of two huge primes (it is already known that the number you're trying to factor is NOT prime, so Primes being in P is more or less useless by itself for this particular application), and factorization has yet to be shown to be in P.
Gene Kan is dead. Got it? Dead.
/. run an article on me now? I would be willing to bet that far more /. readers have seen Office Space and are interested in a red stapler than know who this guy was. Oh, and did I mention, he died on June 29. It is now July 11. The story has been on Wired for almost 2 days now. Isn't it a little late for you to go into this rant? And as other posters mentioned, just because he had fancy cars and respect and money doesn't mean he was happy.
And up until 5 minutes ago, I had never heard of this guy. Why not? Because from reading the Wired news article, all he did was work on Gnutella. Gnutella. Who cares. After reading your post I thought maybe this guy had invented the Internet. People die all the time. And according to the article, "Kan's suicide was not completely unexpected, according to some of his friends. They had hoped Kan was winning his hard-fought battle against depression exacerbated by personal problems." I battled depression too and I'm a programmer, should
Why would the weekend have to be contiguous.
Because otherwise it could no longer be called a weekEND.
And the other day I bought a can of Pringles and it was printed in both English and Spanish. Do you have a point? Did you ever think that perhaps the company, in some twisted scheme to make more of a profit, may sell their product to Spanish-speaking countries and not limit themselves to just the US/Canadian market?