Speeding by itself is no measure of selfish driving, but I've never seen a speeder who stuck to his lane and didn't tailgate when encountering a slower driver. Speeders tend to tailgate, swerve in and out of lanes, cut people off, and generally act as if they are the only ones on the road.
Habitual speeders and selfish drivers almost always try to blame the "slow drivers," and claim that speed limits are too low.
Hey, it's a joke, okay? A way of blowing off steam, not a serious suggestion. I do exactly what you say, and just suck it up when someone cuts me off or acts like an ass on the road. Life is too short to waste worrying about the behavior of assholes. But it's still fun to speculate about ways of making those who think the rules don't apply to them pay.
Guess what? I have never been in an accident and never been ticketed in 18 years of driving. I always signal, never drive more than 5 miles over the speed limit, always let people in when they signal, maintain a safe following distance, and generally don't act like an ass on the road.
Am I better than other drivers? Perhaps, it depends on what you mean by better. What I am is a safe and courteous driver.
You are so right, I've seen this over and over in this type of discussion. It becomes a flamefest between selfish assholes defending their God-given right to be selfish assholes, and the rest of us, who are so irate from having to deal with these idiots every commute that we can't think clearly about the topic.
Here's a thought: how about all you selfish pricks shut the hell up and start driving as if there were other people on the road?
No shit. What we really need is a site to report speeders, red light runners, drunk drivers, people putting on makeup or reading while driving, people going 25 in the fast lane of the freeway with their left blinker on, tail-gaters, and people who swerve in and out of lanes trying to get ahead of anyone else. Cops aren't a problem if you aren't driving wrong, it's the thoughtless, selfish drivers on the road.
I want a site that lets me coordinate with others to piss these types off, say, by getting together and driving in formation at exactly the speed limit, blocking the bastards. Gater-baiter.com?
Anyone know where I can get paintball ammunition loaded with glass etching creme or paint remover?
Nice try, but where does it say the government screwed up? "400 new or clarified technical requirements" does not mean "the government missed or mis-stated 400 requirements." It could mean, for instance, the government added one new requirement and clarified 399 requirements the contractor had gotten wrong.
But more than likely the gist of what you and the other folks who responded said is correct: both parties probably made mistakes. I'm just tired of this cynical, "The government always screws up and wastes our money but corporations can do no wrong" attitude I see among online libertarian types. It seems like an attitude designed and marketed by some PR firm trying to sell the idea of doing away with government and privatizing everything.
That, and nuance always gets in the way of a good rant.
Sorry, the reality of the situation is that due to private industry malfeasance, the government will have to do things the same old way, and won't be saving the money they hoped to. So take your loonitarian anti-government attitude and shove it, because once again, it is a corporation that is to blame.
No, no, listen. Cholesterol is a type of fat. Fat floats. You know what else floats? Ducks! So you shouldn't eat anything that weighs as much as a duck. And you should dunk your rabbits in coffee before eating them.
This is "The Industry Standard" we're talking about. They don't care who's doing what for free. If it's not making significant people significant amounts of money, it may as well not exist. Can you show that podcast has propelled any of these new business models into actual profitability? If not, you won't get folks like "The Industry Standard" to listen to you saying how transformative and disruptive it is, because without the cash flow, it simply isn't to them.
Now that's actually true, but not as described in the article. Front to back doesn't matter, but the upper bank of oars has to be longer to make it to the water, doesn't it? And the length from the fulcrum to the rower would be about the same, or only a little longer. So the upper oarsmen would have less mechanical advantage.
I think what this illustrates is that the original ancient Greek writer didn't know a lot about galleys.
Ah, but maybe you were an educated person taken as a prisoner of war and enslaved. Perhaps you'd already read the treatise, perhaps whilst helping prepare for said war. Then, you see, you could politely ask your overseer to let you work the inside of the oars. Being suitably impressed with your grasp of physics, they would undoubtedly let you do so.
The problem is, you would rapidly figure out that you were badly mistaken in your choice. Working the inside oar gives mechanical advantage, sure, but what does that mean? You trade distance for effort. You are literally running back and forth while the guy near the edge barely moves.
This is well documented in later times when countries actually used galley slaves instead of free citizens like the Greeks used. The Greek oarsmen worked one to an oar, and each had to be well trained and motivated to work together efficiently. All the rowing positions in Greek galleys were nearly equidistant from the fulcrum. The oars in larger Greek galleys were arranged in banks, one above the other. In Roman or Turkish galleys, oars were manned by groups of slaves, and in this case the outermost position was the most desirable as it required the least movement and effort. In Greek galleys, the most desirable position was on the uppermost bank of oars because you didn't have your face pressed into the ass of the guy above you.
Well I think ISPs should use the "Turn them upside down, shake them, and keep whatever falls out of their pockets" business model. Because I don't wear pants.
Okay, any time someone mentions trepanation, I have to tell my trepanation story. I went to a conference on psychedelics called Mindstates in Berkeley back in '01. Lots of interesting presentations, but by far the most... intense was a presentation by a woman who had drilled a fucking hole in her own head and made a home movie showing her doing it.
This was back in the seventies, and her anthropology professor had a theory that trepanation allowed blood to flow through the brain like it does through an infant's more flexible skull, raising the base mental state. So she tries to find a doctor to do it to her. No luck! Who would have supposed it would be hard to find a doctor to drill a hole in your head? Who knew you could do it yourself with a Dremel while filming the whole thing?
The film starts out with lovely footage of her walking through a park, looking at doves and sunrises. Then she goes to her apartment, sits down in front of a mirror, puts some bandages across her brow to keep the blood out of her eyes, applies some topical anesthetic, cuts open a small flap of skin on her forehead, and proceeds to drill through her own skull. After she finishes, she sews up the flap, bandages up, lights down, end of film.
The real kicker is that she noticed very little change in her mental state afterwards. Years later, the bone grew back and the hole closed, but by this time she could find doctors in South America more than willing to indulge an eccentric Brit. So she had a larger hole installed. Even though she couldn't tell any real difference.
The whole time I'm watching, I'm thinking, how do you know when to stop? Seriously, a quarter inch to far could be... problematic. I think I left hand prints gouged into the arms of my chair. Even in a conference about psychedelics, that was by far the most surreal thing I saw.
Christ on a kitten huffing bender, man, what are you on about? I can't even figure out whether you are right-loony, left-loony, libertarian-loony, or just an Ayn Rand fetishist based on this post. How you managed to read ANY of that into this preview of Stephenson's new book, I'll never know.
Look, this is the Internets, you have to be more specific in your insults and more obvious in your humor.;)
Out of 7!!! Who the #$%! ever said "Oh that chick is a 7, I need to do her now!" Software should conform to the normal 10pt ranking scale damnit! This is Slashdot. A seven is more than most of us can ever hope for.
"I've never done a ten, but I did five twos in one night!" --George Carlin
Offtopic? Yes, but HILARIOUSLY offtopic. Come on, this is great absurdist humor. BadAnalogyGuy is like Garrison Keillor and Robin Williams crack addicted love-child.
I can't wait until my car radio has 10,000 stations and I have to wade through them all to try to find something that doesn't suck. I too wish to pay someone to limit my choices. I find the vast array of products and services available to us here in the free market economies to be frightening and confusing. I really need someone to tell me what to wear, what kind of car to drive, what to eat, what kind of people are attractive, and generally what sort of lifestyle to adopt. Should I be gay? Wave a large American flag? Wear all black and mope a lot? I have no idea, and the thought of getting it wrong frightens me.
Unfortunately, when I look for someone to tell me what to do I find... a vast array of products and services that will do so. How do I know which one to listen to? I really need one large entity that answers all my questions with certainty and finality. Freedom is highly over-rated. Give me the security of being a nameless, faceless member of the herd. Give me the warm, fuzzy feeling of having a benevolent daddy figure watching over me and telling me what to do and what not to.
Hehe, jes' making a lil' joke. Glad to hear you haven't actually squashed any children. But pedestrians have the right of way all the time. Most are either too polite or too scared to step into a crosswalk when they don't have a stop sign or light protecting them and a car is coming, but the law is the law. If they are in the crosswalk, you stop. Goes double if they are kids and a crossing guard escorts them. How many seconds do you really lose by stopping? And why do so many drivers seem to assume that their time is more important than anyone else's?
When I was in Rome, a friend there told me not to look before crossing the street. Drivers there are used to people darting into the street without looking. If you do look, they know you've seen them, and won't stop.
Don't know where you live, but I've lived all over the US, and in every city, county and state I've lived in, pedestrians have the right of way at all corners and crosswalks, which are the only places I've ever seen crossing guards.
This whole "crossing guards suck" and "Why do they always blame the driver?" line of reasoning seems like a personal tangent to me. You didn't, uhhhh, run over a kid by any chance, did you?
Any sufficiently stupid government initiative is indistinguishable from magic. That is to say, it doesn't work in the real world, but the masses like to watch the charlatans on stage do it any way.
Slashdot Mirror
Speeding by itself is no measure of selfish driving, but I've never seen a speeder who stuck to his lane and didn't tailgate when encountering a slower driver. Speeders tend to tailgate, swerve in and out of lanes, cut people off, and generally act as if they are the only ones on the road.
Habitual speeders and selfish drivers almost always try to blame the "slow drivers," and claim that speed limits are too low.
Hey, it's a joke, okay? A way of blowing off steam, not a serious suggestion. I do exactly what you say, and just suck it up when someone cuts me off or acts like an ass on the road. Life is too short to waste worrying about the behavior of assholes. But it's still fun to speculate about ways of making those who think the rules don't apply to them pay.
No, idiot, what I'll get is no tickets and no accidents, plus the happy feeling of knowing I'm not an ass.
You know who gets defensive and insulting when stories like this pop up? Drivers who are secretly ashamed of the fact that they drive like assholes.
Guess what? I have never been in an accident and never been ticketed in 18 years of driving. I always signal, never drive more than 5 miles over the speed limit, always let people in when they signal, maintain a safe following distance, and generally don't act like an ass on the road.
Am I better than other drivers? Perhaps, it depends on what you mean by better. What I am is a safe and courteous driver.
You are so right, I've seen this over and over in this type of discussion. It becomes a flamefest between selfish assholes defending their God-given right to be selfish assholes, and the rest of us, who are so irate from having to deal with these idiots every commute that we can't think clearly about the topic.
Here's a thought: how about all you selfish pricks shut the hell up and start driving as if there were other people on the road?
No shit. What we really need is a site to report speeders, red light runners, drunk drivers, people putting on makeup or reading while driving, people going 25 in the fast lane of the freeway with their left blinker on, tail-gaters, and people who swerve in and out of lanes trying to get ahead of anyone else. Cops aren't a problem if you aren't driving wrong, it's the thoughtless, selfish drivers on the road.
I want a site that lets me coordinate with others to piss these types off, say, by getting together and driving in formation at exactly the speed limit, blocking the bastards. Gater-baiter.com?
Anyone know where I can get paintball ammunition loaded with glass etching creme or paint remover?
Nice try, but where does it say the government screwed up? "400 new or clarified technical requirements" does not mean "the government missed or mis-stated 400 requirements." It could mean, for instance, the government added one new requirement and clarified 399 requirements the contractor had gotten wrong.
But more than likely the gist of what you and the other folks who responded said is correct: both parties probably made mistakes. I'm just tired of this cynical, "The government always screws up and wastes our money but corporations can do no wrong" attitude I see among online libertarian types. It seems like an attitude designed and marketed by some PR firm trying to sell the idea of doing away with government and privatizing everything.
That, and nuance always gets in the way of a good rant.
Sorry, the reality of the situation is that due to private industry malfeasance, the government will have to do things the same old way, and won't be saving the money they hoped to. So take your loonitarian anti-government attitude and shove it, because once again, it is a corporation that is to blame.
No, no, listen. Cholesterol is a type of fat. Fat floats. You know what else floats? Ducks! So you shouldn't eat anything that weighs as much as a duck. And you should dunk your rabbits in coffee before eating them.
Well, to be fair, the twelve moths were all February, so not quite eight years.
This is "The Industry Standard" we're talking about. They don't care who's doing what for free. If it's not making significant people significant amounts of money, it may as well not exist. Can you show that podcast has propelled any of these new business models into actual profitability? If not, you won't get folks like "The Industry Standard" to listen to you saying how transformative and disruptive it is, because without the cash flow, it simply isn't to them.
Now that's actually true, but not as described in the article. Front to back doesn't matter, but the upper bank of oars has to be longer to make it to the water, doesn't it? And the length from the fulcrum to the rower would be about the same, or only a little longer. So the upper oarsmen would have less mechanical advantage.
I think what this illustrates is that the original ancient Greek writer didn't know a lot about galleys.
http://graymonk.mu.nu/archives/2007/01/roman_navy_on_t.html
http://graymonk.mu.nu/archives/2007/01/superb_models.html
Look at the oars in all three cases. They are almost exactly the same length throughout each ship.
Ah, but maybe you were an educated person taken as a prisoner of war and enslaved. Perhaps you'd already read the treatise, perhaps whilst helping prepare for said war. Then, you see, you could politely ask your overseer to let you work the inside of the oars. Being suitably impressed with your grasp of physics, they would undoubtedly let you do so.
The problem is, you would rapidly figure out that you were badly mistaken in your choice. Working the inside oar gives mechanical advantage, sure, but what does that mean? You trade distance for effort. You are literally running back and forth while the guy near the edge barely moves.
This is well documented in later times when countries actually used galley slaves instead of free citizens like the Greeks used. The Greek oarsmen worked one to an oar, and each had to be well trained and motivated to work together efficiently. All the rowing positions in Greek galleys were nearly equidistant from the fulcrum. The oars in larger Greek galleys were arranged in banks, one above the other. In Roman or Turkish galleys, oars were manned by groups of slaves, and in this case the outermost position was the most desirable as it required the least movement and effort. In Greek galleys, the most desirable position was on the uppermost bank of oars because you didn't have your face pressed into the ass of the guy above you.
Well I think ISPs should use the "Turn them upside down, shake them, and keep whatever falls out of their pockets" business model. Because I don't wear pants.
Okay, any time someone mentions trepanation, I have to tell my trepanation story. I went to a conference on psychedelics called Mindstates in Berkeley back in '01. Lots of interesting presentations, but by far the most... intense was a presentation by a woman who had drilled a fucking hole in her own head and made a home movie showing her doing it.
This was back in the seventies, and her anthropology professor had a theory that trepanation allowed blood to flow through the brain like it does through an infant's more flexible skull, raising the base mental state. So she tries to find a doctor to do it to her. No luck! Who would have supposed it would be hard to find a doctor to drill a hole in your head? Who knew you could do it yourself with a Dremel while filming the whole thing?
The film starts out with lovely footage of her walking through a park, looking at doves and sunrises. Then she goes to her apartment, sits down in front of a mirror, puts some bandages across her brow to keep the blood out of her eyes, applies some topical anesthetic, cuts open a small flap of skin on her forehead, and proceeds to drill through her own skull. After she finishes, she sews up the flap, bandages up, lights down, end of film.
The real kicker is that she noticed very little change in her mental state afterwards. Years later, the bone grew back and the hole closed, but by this time she could find doctors in South America more than willing to indulge an eccentric Brit. So she had a larger hole installed. Even though she couldn't tell any real difference.
The whole time I'm watching, I'm thinking, how do you know when to stop? Seriously, a quarter inch to far could be... problematic. I think I left hand prints gouged into the arms of my chair. Even in a conference about psychedelics, that was by far the most surreal thing I saw.
But why don't you make ten the highest number, and go for that?
Christ on a kitten huffing bender, man, what are you on about? I can't even figure out whether you are right-loony, left-loony, libertarian-loony, or just an Ayn Rand fetishist based on this post. How you managed to read ANY of that into this preview of Stephenson's new book, I'll never know.
;)
Look, this is the Internets, you have to be more specific in your insults and more obvious in your humor.
Software should conform to the normal 10pt ranking scale damnit! This is Slashdot. A seven is more than most of us can ever hope for.
"I've never done a ten, but I did five twos in one night!"
--George Carlin
You know, rk, I like you. You're not like the other people, here, in the slashdotpark.
Offtopic? Yes, but HILARIOUSLY offtopic. Come on, this is great absurdist humor. BadAnalogyGuy is like Garrison Keillor and Robin Williams crack addicted love-child.
Unfortunately, when I look for someone to tell me what to do I find... a vast array of products and services that will do so. How do I know which one to listen to? I really need one large entity that answers all my questions with certainty and finality. Freedom is highly over-rated. Give me the security of being a nameless, faceless member of the herd. Give me the warm, fuzzy feeling of having a benevolent daddy figure watching over me and telling me what to do and what not to.
Hehe, jes' making a lil' joke. Glad to hear you haven't actually squashed any children. But pedestrians have the right of way all the time. Most are either too polite or too scared to step into a crosswalk when they don't have a stop sign or light protecting them and a car is coming, but the law is the law. If they are in the crosswalk, you stop. Goes double if they are kids and a crossing guard escorts them. How many seconds do you really lose by stopping? And why do so many drivers seem to assume that their time is more important than anyone else's?
When I was in Rome, a friend there told me not to look before crossing the street. Drivers there are used to people darting into the street without looking. If you do look, they know you've seen them, and won't stop.
Don't know where you live, but I've lived all over the US, and in every city, county and state I've lived in, pedestrians have the right of way at all corners and crosswalks, which are the only places I've ever seen crossing guards.
This whole "crossing guards suck" and "Why do they always blame the driver?" line of reasoning seems like a personal tangent to me. You didn't, uhhhh, run over a kid by any chance, did you?
Any sufficiently stupid government initiative is indistinguishable from magic. That is to say, it doesn't work in the real world, but the masses like to watch the charlatans on stage do it any way.