Any company that has voter history files (which I too have used in campaigns) obtains the information from exit polls and other surveys, or guesses based on party affiliation, demographics, residency, and other factors. The information is useful statistically for targeting campaigns, but it is not directly based on votes and is not always accurate on an individual level.
I wouldn't be so quick to say that electronic voting machines are "horseshit." Using closed machines is, of course, absurd, and elections can be effectively conducted without electronic machines, but electronic machines do have some advantages. Electronic voting machines are significantly easier to make accessible, both for the disabled and for voters whose first language isn't English, then purely paper-based voting systems.
By the way, HR 550 is not really an electronic voting bill. It is careful not to require electronic voting machines, but to require a voter-verified paper audit trail for all voting systems, electronic or not.
Holt's bill requires that any voting software be open source, which is a dramatic improvement in transparency. That, in combination with the requirement of random audits in at least 2% of precincts, gives me confidence in elections conducted under this bill.
''(8) PROHIBITION OF USE OF UNDISCLOSED SOFTWARE IN VOTING SYSTEMS.
No voting system shall at any time contain or use any undisclosed software. Any voting system containing or using software shall disclose the source code, object code, and executable representation of that software to the Commission, and the Commission shall make that source code, object code, and executable representation available for inspection upon request to any person."
"The voting system shall not preserve the voter-verifiable paper records in any manner that makes it possible to associate a voter with the record of the voter's vote."
OK; I'll bite. I work in a US House office (a veteran Member with a completely safe seat). About the only thing that will reliably affect the Member's vote is a lot of letters from constituents (with your name and accurate return address). Nearly every letter from a constituent gets a response with the Member's position on the issue, as well.
Certainly, the Member has his own opinions and convictions, and there are conflicting views from different constituents, but your views absolutely do matter and are heard.
I think my boss is a bit more fanatical than most about replying to mail, but every Representative absolutely takes constituent letters seriously. Very few Representatives take ranting on Slashdot seriously.
Send the letter electronically if it's timely; all paper mail goes through screening for chemicals, so it takes a couple weeks to get through.
(Any opinion letter from a non-constituent goes straight to the recycle bin - there are just too many of them.)
The entire paragraph in question, from the article:
Do you use any Linux?
As a policy, I don't run anything that competes with Microsoft. My goal is to make sure Microsoft products are the best products in the world. It's an easy choice for me, in that sense--to run Microsoft technology. We don't run Unix. We don't run Linux. We don't run Oracle. We're 100 percent Windows, SQL Server.
We do, in areas on the client, have an open-source client running--just for competitive analysis. As an IT organization, I have no skills and no ability and no purchasing of those products. We don't even run J2EE. Everything is.Net.
A well armed populace is harder to oppress then an unarmed populous.... No, you do not need an assault weapon for hunting. But you do need it for personal defense against an oppressive government. That is the justification for allowing them to be possessed.
Like it or not, the reality is that an assault weapon is no defense against the US government, should it be so oppressive that a militaristic response is the only possible one. To hold off a truly determined American army, you need tanks and antiaircraft missiles, or perhaps even nuclear weapons.
In 1789, a citizens' militia standing up to the ruling power was certainly realistic (such a militia had just won the Revolutionary War), but it's not realistic today. However, we do have some semblance of a democracy with something like a free press today; those are the safeguards we must use. I would say that the relevant statement today is that a well informed populace is harder to oppress than a poorly informed one.
I'm not normally one to oppose a piece of the Constitution, but the reality is that assault weapons are only useful for killing of civilians in temper tantrums or gang warfare.
(Weapons that can't be used for massive killing sprees, either for hunting or self defense, make more sense to me, but only with safety locks and criminal background checks.)
More to the point, Apple is doing this voluntarily, whereas Microsoft tried to settle an antitrust lawsuit by donating Microsoft products to schools (and extending their monopoly)--a whole different kettle of fish.
Astrophysics is dominated by Suns (as workstations), with a significant Linux presence; very few astronomers use Windows. All the analysis software I've used (in five different institutions) is Unix-based, which effectively means Suns, Linux, and Macs.
However, more and more astrophysicists are using Macs these days. Apple laptops are very popular, and people are also starting to use Macs as workstations and servers. It's hard to guess at numbers, so I'll note anecdotally that my (small) lab is in the process of replacing our 4 aging Suns with G5 towers. We're also considering an XServe cluster to run some moderately substantial simulations. I don't think we're unusual in those regards.
It was not possible from within the Jaguar GUI. (I submitted a bug report about it to Apple, and am glad to see that they fixed it.)
The easiest way to remove servers is to edit the Mail preferences file. Open ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist (either in Property List Editor--if you have the developer tools installed--or any text editor) and find the entry "Delivery Accounts". Delete any you don't want.
Unfortunately, I have used Windows enough so that familiarity is not an issue.
Also, familiarity is beside the point--the issue here is not knowing where the button is (muscle memory), but how the windowing system forgives a slip of the mouse by a few pixels. My experience is that the Mac is much better in that regard.
OS X's close and minimize (and zoom) buttons are all separated by several pixels, so you're much less likely to hit one when you mean to hit another. Windows, on the other hand, has no separation between the buttons, so if you miss the maximize button by one pixel, you close the window.
Consequently, I have accidently closed windows in Windows numerous times (even though I use Windows rarely), while I have essentially never done so in OS X (which I use all the time).
Also, cell networks on the ground cover populated areas and major highways--coverage in unpopulated areas is spotty at best, even with carriers with a good network. Airplanes are not usually flying over populated areas or major highways, so coverage would likely be poor for most of a flight even before you consider the plane's speed and altitude (although altitude helps somewhat in areas with few cell towers because hills don't get in the way).
I guess the relevant statistic is what fraction of the country's land area actually has cell coverage? Rate plan maps always have large areas that aren't covered, particularly across the midwest and west, and those maps include large areas that don't actually have coverage anyway.
While calls were made from planes on 9/11, were the planes at cruising altitude (~30 000 ft.) when the calls were made? I was under the impression that most of the calls were made not long before the flights crashed, when the planes were probably well below 10 000 ft.
(I don't know how much that distance affects signal strength with a clear line of sight, but a factor of 3 in distance means a factor of 9 in the surface area the signal is spread over.)
As others have said, it largely comes down to the incredible amount of time and resources Apple has thrown into honest-to-God human interface research, and then implemented the GUI using that research in a cohesive organization with strong leadership. Linux, in contrast, largely uses a bunch of very good programmers who implement improvements to the GUI that each individual thinks are needed. (Of course, it's not nearly that simple, but oversimplifications are easier to explain.)
Apple's open source policies show how well Apple understands what open source collaboration is outstanding for: technical things like the basic operating system, networking code, an HTML rendering engine, etc.; areas where it's relatively easy to identify a bug or a missing feature and quantify speed--the challenge is fixing those bugs, which individuals can do on their own. A corporation like Apple is best suited to applying a cohesive finish to the open source building blocks. That is the difference between a good--but not quite right for day-to-day use--interface like KDE, GNOME, et al. and the OS X interface. I don't know if any open projects will ever produce an interface that's as good as what OS X has; they may, but it's a big hurdle that I'm not sure they're in a good position to overcome.
(I should probably throw in the caveat that I have relatively limited experience with anything besides Macs and Solaris (CDE/Openwin--bleh--not my own machines).)
Now, you'd think that Microsoft could do better, but that's a different story.
Ah, what the heck, I'll blow away my moderation points and actually try to say something...
Uh, I hate to say it, but Jobs said at the keynote today that 10.3 will cost $129. (See MacCentral's coverage, among others.)
As you alluded to, Apple would probably have called Jaguar 10.5 and Panther 11.0 if it weren't for the marketing pain of OS XI--they want to put OS 11 off as long as they can. However, both 10.2 and 10.3 are major upgrades that Apple felt were worth charging the upgrade price for. Apple didn't charge for 10.1 because, by their own admission, 10.0 wasn't really ready for prime time (although I have been using OS X full time since the public beta), so Apple thought it fair not to charge early adopters to get the first ready-for-prime-time release of OS X.*
I happen to think that both 10.2 and 10.3 are worth the upgrade fee and think that it is perfectly fair for Apple to charge for them, but that point is definitely open to debate. That said, I am a student, so it will (most likely) only cost me $70.:)
*Fair is, of course, a relative term--one could look at it this way: Apple presumably thought that a lot of their customers would think it unfair if they charged for 10.1, so they thought the long term costs of charging more than a $20 distribution cost would be more harmful than the lost revenue would be helpful.
Quite frankly, I would say it's the umps we need to get RID of that are fooled by this junk. Yes, a good catcher can frame pitches. Why is this a good thing? There is NOTHING in the rule book to suggest the legitimacy of this sort of nonsense. So if a pitcher sets his catcher up a foot outside the strike zone and hits his spot, it's a strike?
No, of course it's not. Framing isn't making a bad pitch look good--it's making a good pitch look good. As you say, the catcher isn't a neutral observer, so if the catcher can't make a pitch look good, it doesn't deserve to be called a strike, even if it just caught the corner. The ump shouldn't be calling a ball a strike because it's well framed, and no (good) umps do. The ump should only give borderline pitches to the pitcher if they're well framed--otherwise, the catcher is making him look like a fool, and there's no reason the ump should do that.
Framing aside, the strike zone slightly wider than the plate that umps want to call just makes for a better game because it allows finesse pitchers (including Maddux, although he certainly shouldn't get a wider strike zone than a rookie) to make good pitches. It's not in the rulebook because the plate is 17 inches wide and is not about to change, but no players have a problem with the wider strike zone as long as the umps are consistent, which, by and large, they are. If QuesTec can help check their consistency, that's great. If it forces them to make the strike zone narrower than most umps have called it for years, that's a bad thing, which will lead to even more home runs (the last thing baseball needs!) and fewer effective control pitchers.
Calling balls and strikes strictly by the rulebook isn't necessarily an entirely laudable goal. What any ballplayer will tell you is that the plate ump's most important job is to call a consistent strike zone over the course of the game--pitchers and hitters can adjust quickly if the ump has been giving the pitcher the benefit of the doubt on the outside corner or the pitch at the knees all day. Normally, I think that rules are there for a reason and should be followed precisely--if you don't like the rule, change it, don't violate it. However, ball/strike calls are always quite a bit subjective, and I don't think that's a bad thing. The major league strike zone has long tended to be a bit shorter (knees to a bit above the belt rather than knees to halfway between the belt and the shoulders) and a bit wider (a ball width or two wider than the plate itself) than the rulebook strike zone, which makes the game better by allowing finesse pitchers to make good pitches, without calling any locations that hitters simply can't reach a strike.
Also, human umpires are much more likely to call a strike if the catcher makes the pitch good: if the catcher sets up on the outside corner, and the pitcher puts it right in the middle of the glove, a good ump will call it a strike, where as if the catcher sets up on the inside corner, and the pitch goes to the outside corner, making the catcher lunge across the plate to catch the pitch, the pitcher is not getting the call if it's close. In a nutshell, if the pitcher looks like he threw exactly the pitch he meant to, he gets the benefit of the doubt on a close pitch, whereas if it looks like an accident, he doesn't get the benefit of the doubt.
Part of the reason for this is that the catcher is making the ump look like a fool by calling the pitch a strike if the catcher has to lunge for it. All the umpires in the stands have no idea if a pitch is inside or outside--you simply can't tell unless you're right behind the plate. The catcher's movement is all that most fans and players on the bench have to go by, so the catcher is expected to help the ump to make the call on a close pitch.
That subtlety is an important and recognized part of the game that QuesTec will always miss, and as both a catcher and a hitter, I think QuesTec's undiscriminating enforcement of the exact rulebook strike zone is bad for the game. It might be useful as a tool to give to umps to see where they disagreed with the machine (which is being done after every game now), but it shouldn't be used to determine salary and postseason assignments--there's a lot more to umpiring than agreeing exactly with the machine.
It's true that roads outside cities are much more expensive to maintain than rural roads, but there are also far more vehicles driving (and paying gas tax, which is different in different areas in many states--I don't know about Oregon) in cities. Therefore, the cost per car of driving in Portland may or may not be more costly than elsewhere in the state.
I don't know if the cost of road maintenance scales linearly with traffic or not--does anybody else?
Note that the original poster was comparing a 9000 lb. non-specified giant SUV (the Expedition was just an example) to a 2650 lb. car, not the numbers you quoted. I don't know whose numbers are right, but your numbers don't contradict each other; i.e. you don't say that a 9000 lb. vehicle doesn't cause ~167 times more damage than a 2650 lb. vehicle.
>Are there a lot of phones that don't have vibrate?
Yes. Including mine. I've looked into getting one, but you have to buy a vibrating battery for $35-40. Not terribly expensive, but I'd rather save the money and silence my phone in the theater. Also, for my phone, you can only get a Ni-MH vibrating batter (not Li-ion).
Some people don't seem to realize that missing a call is not the end of the world--that's why we have caller ID logs and voicemail.
Prepaid phones haven't caught on here in the States like in Europe, largely because, when I last looked in May, prepaid plans couldn't be bought here for less than about US$30, and that expires after 3 months rather than a year. Pay as you go in the U.K., expensive as it is, is much cheaper than in the States. Also, whereas every little shop (at least in London) has top-up cards available, they are hard to come by in the U.S.
However, 30 seconds of shopping around makes it seem like prepaid plans are much more reasonable now than they used to be. A $10 Cingular prepaid card gets you $0.50/min, and a $30 one gets $0.30/min, which isn't horrible.
Also, what the provdiers don't tell you is that any mobile phone in the U.S., even a deactivated one, can make a free 911 call, as long as there's a compatible cell tower in range.
(This is why a bit of well-placed regulation would be a good thing--American regulators have let the market determine the pricing schemes, and that means that it is impossible to get a halfway decent plan, even for occasional use, without paying $30/month and a 1-year contract, making it very difficult to change providers if you see a cheaper plan or a decent pay-as-you-go rate.)
"none of those three browsers makes it easy for you to disable Flash."
I don't know about Windows, but on a Mac, you find the plugins folder (/Library/Internet Plug-Ins on OS X) and remove the Flash plug-in. That will disable Flash for every browser. (The only problem is that there are one or two web site that actually use Flash in a useful way, and those are of course disabled by removing the plug-in. Also, some sights might ask you to download the 'needed' plug-in; ignore them.)
For this reason, it seems to me that Flash ads would be counter-productive for slashdot, in addition to the editors' basic opposition to Flash ads. Most other ad-driven sights on the web have a rather small percentage of their visitors that hate Flash enough and have the technical know-how to disable Flash. However, it seems to me that enough slashdot users would have Flash disabled to make a serious dent in the number of ad views if they use Flash ads.
Of course, the advertisers probably aren't smart enough to realize that; they probably just use the Yahoo statistics and assume that the slashdot demographics are the same.
"What i want is to get those things off my list of updates to download."
In Software Update, select the update(s) you don't want and choose "Make Inactive" from the Update menu.
Slashdot Mirror
Any company that has voter history files (which I too have used in campaigns) obtains the information from exit polls and other surveys, or guesses based on party affiliation, demographics, residency, and other factors. The information is useful statistically for targeting campaigns, but it is not directly based on votes and is not always accurate on an individual level.
I wouldn't be so quick to say that electronic voting machines are "horseshit." Using closed machines is, of course, absurd, and elections can be effectively conducted without electronic machines, but electronic machines do have some advantages. Electronic voting machines are significantly easier to make accessible, both for the disabled and for voters whose first language isn't English, then purely paper-based voting systems.
By the way, HR 550 is not really an electronic voting bill. It is careful not to require electronic voting machines, but to require a voter-verified paper audit trail for all voting systems, electronic or not.
Holt's bill requires that any voting software be open source, which is a dramatic improvement in transparency. That, in combination with the requirement of random audits in at least 2% of precincts, gives me confidence in elections conducted under this bill.
The voter does not take the paper trail away from the polling place; if one did, how would it be used for an audit.
From the bill:
"The voting system shall not preserve the voter-verifiable paper records in any manner that makes it possible to associate a voter with the record of the voter's vote."
OK; I'll bite. I work in a US House office (a veteran Member with a completely safe seat). About the only thing that will reliably affect the Member's vote is a lot of letters from constituents (with your name and accurate return address). Nearly every letter from a constituent gets a response with the Member's position on the issue, as well.
Certainly, the Member has his own opinions and convictions, and there are conflicting views from different constituents, but your views absolutely do matter and are heard.
I think my boss is a bit more fanatical than most about replying to mail, but every Representative absolutely takes constituent letters seriously. Very few Representatives take ranting on Slashdot seriously.
Send the letter electronically if it's timely; all paper mail goes through screening for chemicals, so it takes a couple weeks to get through.
(Any opinion letter from a non-constituent goes straight to the recycle bin - there are just too many of them.)
The entire paragraph in question, from the article:
Like it or not, the reality is that an assault weapon is no defense against the US government, should it be so oppressive that a militaristic response is the only possible one. To hold off a truly determined American army, you need tanks and antiaircraft missiles, or perhaps even nuclear weapons.
In 1789, a citizens' militia standing up to the ruling power was certainly realistic (such a militia had just won the Revolutionary War), but it's not realistic today. However, we do have some semblance of a democracy with something like a free press today; those are the safeguards we must use. I would say that the relevant statement today is that a well informed populace is harder to oppress than a poorly informed one.
I'm not normally one to oppose a piece of the Constitution, but the reality is that assault weapons are only useful for killing of civilians in temper tantrums or gang warfare.
(Weapons that can't be used for massive killing sprees, either for hunting or self defense, make more sense to me, but only with safety locks and criminal background checks.)
More to the point, Apple is doing this voluntarily, whereas Microsoft tried to settle an antitrust lawsuit by donating Microsoft products to schools (and extending their monopoly)--a whole different kettle of fish.
See, e. g., this and this.
Astrophysics is dominated by Suns (as workstations), with a significant Linux presence; very few astronomers use Windows. All the analysis software I've used (in five different institutions) is Unix-based, which effectively means Suns, Linux, and Macs.
However, more and more astrophysicists are using Macs these days. Apple laptops are very popular, and people are also starting to use Macs as workstations and servers. It's hard to guess at numbers, so I'll note anecdotally that my (small) lab is in the process of replacing our 4 aging Suns with G5 towers. We're also considering an XServe cluster to run some moderately substantial simulations. I don't think we're unusual in those regards.
It was not possible from within the Jaguar GUI. (I submitted a bug report about it to Apple, and am glad to see that they fixed it.)
The easiest way to remove servers is to edit the Mail preferences file. Open ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist (either in Property List Editor--if you have the developer tools installed--or any text editor) and find the entry "Delivery Accounts". Delete any you don't want.
Unfortunately, I have used Windows enough so that familiarity is not an issue.
Also, familiarity is beside the point--the issue here is not knowing where the button is (muscle memory), but how the windowing system forgives a slip of the mouse by a few pixels. My experience is that the Mac is much better in that regard.
OS X's close and minimize (and zoom) buttons are all separated by several pixels, so you're much less likely to hit one when you mean to hit another. Windows, on the other hand, has no separation between the buttons, so if you miss the maximize button by one pixel, you close the window.
Consequently, I have accidently closed windows in Windows numerous times (even though I use Windows rarely), while I have essentially never done so in OS X (which I use all the time).
Also, cell networks on the ground cover populated areas and major highways--coverage in unpopulated areas is spotty at best, even with carriers with a good network. Airplanes are not usually flying over populated areas or major highways, so coverage would likely be poor for most of a flight even before you consider the plane's speed and altitude (although altitude helps somewhat in areas with few cell towers because hills don't get in the way).
I guess the relevant statistic is what fraction of the country's land area actually has cell coverage? Rate plan maps always have large areas that aren't covered, particularly across the midwest and west, and those maps include large areas that don't actually have coverage anyway.
While calls were made from planes on 9/11, were the planes at cruising altitude (~30 000 ft.) when the calls were made? I was under the impression that most of the calls were made not long before the flights crashed, when the planes were probably well below 10 000 ft.
(I don't know how much that distance affects signal strength with a clear line of sight, but a factor of 3 in distance means a factor of 9 in the surface area the signal is spread over.)
As others have said, it largely comes down to the incredible amount of time and resources Apple has thrown into honest-to-God human interface research, and then implemented the GUI using that research in a cohesive organization with strong leadership. Linux, in contrast, largely uses a bunch of very good programmers who implement improvements to the GUI that each individual thinks are needed. (Of course, it's not nearly that simple, but oversimplifications are easier to explain.)
Apple's open source policies show how well Apple understands what open source collaboration is outstanding for: technical things like the basic operating system, networking code, an HTML rendering engine, etc.; areas where it's relatively easy to identify a bug or a missing feature and quantify speed--the challenge is fixing those bugs, which individuals can do on their own. A corporation like Apple is best suited to applying a cohesive finish to the open source building blocks. That is the difference between a good--but not quite right for day-to-day use--interface like KDE, GNOME, et al. and the OS X interface. I don't know if any open projects will ever produce an interface that's as good as what OS X has; they may, but it's a big hurdle that I'm not sure they're in a good position to overcome.
(I should probably throw in the caveat that I have relatively limited experience with anything besides Macs and Solaris (CDE/Openwin--bleh--not my own machines).)
Now, you'd think that Microsoft could do better, but that's a different story.
Uh, I hate to say it, but Jobs said at the keynote today that 10.3 will cost $129. (See MacCentral's coverage, among others.)
As you alluded to, Apple would probably have called Jaguar 10.5 and Panther 11.0 if it weren't for the marketing pain of OS XI--they want to put OS 11 off as long as they can. However, both 10.2 and 10.3 are major upgrades that Apple felt were worth charging the upgrade price for. Apple didn't charge for 10.1 because, by their own admission, 10.0 wasn't really ready for prime time (although I have been using OS X full time since the public beta), so Apple thought it fair not to charge early adopters to get the first ready-for-prime-time release of OS X.*
I happen to think that both 10.2 and 10.3 are worth the upgrade fee and think that it is perfectly fair for Apple to charge for them, but that point is definitely open to debate. That said, I am a student, so it will (most likely) only cost me $70. :)
*Fair is, of course, a relative term--one could look at it this way: Apple presumably thought that a lot of their customers would think it unfair if they charged for 10.1, so they thought the long term costs of charging more than a $20 distribution cost would be more harmful than the lost revenue would be helpful.
No, of course it's not. Framing isn't making a bad pitch look good--it's making a good pitch look good. As you say, the catcher isn't a neutral observer, so if the catcher can't make a pitch look good, it doesn't deserve to be called a strike, even if it just caught the corner. The ump shouldn't be calling a ball a strike because it's well framed, and no (good) umps do. The ump should only give borderline pitches to the pitcher if they're well framed--otherwise, the catcher is making him look like a fool, and there's no reason the ump should do that.
Framing aside, the strike zone slightly wider than the plate that umps want to call just makes for a better game because it allows finesse pitchers (including Maddux, although he certainly shouldn't get a wider strike zone than a rookie) to make good pitches. It's not in the rulebook because the plate is 17 inches wide and is not about to change, but no players have a problem with the wider strike zone as long as the umps are consistent, which, by and large, they are. If QuesTec can help check their consistency, that's great. If it forces them to make the strike zone narrower than most umps have called it for years, that's a bad thing, which will lead to even more home runs (the last thing baseball needs!) and fewer effective control pitchers.
Calling balls and strikes strictly by the rulebook isn't necessarily an entirely laudable goal. What any ballplayer will tell you is that the plate ump's most important job is to call a consistent strike zone over the course of the game--pitchers and hitters can adjust quickly if the ump has been giving the pitcher the benefit of the doubt on the outside corner or the pitch at the knees all day. Normally, I think that rules are there for a reason and should be followed precisely--if you don't like the rule, change it, don't violate it. However, ball/strike calls are always quite a bit subjective, and I don't think that's a bad thing. The major league strike zone has long tended to be a bit shorter (knees to a bit above the belt rather than knees to halfway between the belt and the shoulders) and a bit wider (a ball width or two wider than the plate itself) than the rulebook strike zone, which makes the game better by allowing finesse pitchers to make good pitches, without calling any locations that hitters simply can't reach a strike.
Also, human umpires are much more likely to call a strike if the catcher makes the pitch good: if the catcher sets up on the outside corner, and the pitcher puts it right in the middle of the glove, a good ump will call it a strike, where as if the catcher sets up on the inside corner, and the pitch goes to the outside corner, making the catcher lunge across the plate to catch the pitch, the pitcher is not getting the call if it's close. In a nutshell, if the pitcher looks like he threw exactly the pitch he meant to, he gets the benefit of the doubt on a close pitch, whereas if it looks like an accident, he doesn't get the benefit of the doubt.
Part of the reason for this is that the catcher is making the ump look like a fool by calling the pitch a strike if the catcher has to lunge for it. All the umpires in the stands have no idea if a pitch is inside or outside--you simply can't tell unless you're right behind the plate. The catcher's movement is all that most fans and players on the bench have to go by, so the catcher is expected to help the ump to make the call on a close pitch.
That subtlety is an important and recognized part of the game that QuesTec will always miss, and as both a catcher and a hitter, I think QuesTec's undiscriminating enforcement of the exact rulebook strike zone is bad for the game. It might be useful as a tool to give to umps to see where they disagreed with the machine (which is being done after every game now), but it shouldn't be used to determine salary and postseason assignments--there's a lot more to umpiring than agreeing exactly with the machine.
It's true that roads outside cities are much more expensive to maintain than rural roads, but there are also far more vehicles driving (and paying gas tax, which is different in different areas in many states--I don't know about Oregon) in cities. Therefore, the cost per car of driving in Portland may or may not be more costly than elsewhere in the state.
I don't know if the cost of road maintenance scales linearly with traffic or not--does anybody else?
Note that the original poster was comparing a 9000 lb. non-specified giant SUV (the Expedition was just an example) to a 2650 lb. car, not the numbers you quoted. I don't know whose numbers are right, but your numbers don't contradict each other; i.e. you don't say that a 9000 lb. vehicle doesn't cause ~167 times more damage than a 2650 lb. vehicle.
However, IANATE.
House Roll Call Vote on HR 395: 418 Yea, 7 Nay (5 Republican, 2 Democrat), 9 Not Voting
>Are there a lot of phones that don't have vibrate?
Yes. Including mine. I've looked into getting one, but you have to buy a vibrating battery for $35-40. Not terribly expensive, but I'd rather save the money and silence my phone in the theater. Also, for my phone, you can only get a Ni-MH vibrating batter (not Li-ion).
Some people don't seem to realize that missing a call is not the end of the world--that's why we have caller ID logs and voicemail.
Prepaid phones haven't caught on here in the States like in Europe, largely because, when I last looked in May, prepaid plans couldn't be bought here for less than about US$30, and that expires after 3 months rather than a year. Pay as you go in the U.K., expensive as it is, is much cheaper than in the States. Also, whereas every little shop (at least in London) has top-up cards available, they are hard to come by in the U.S.
However, 30 seconds of shopping around makes it seem like prepaid plans are much more reasonable now than they used to be. A $10 Cingular prepaid card gets you $0.50/min, and a $30 one gets $0.30/min, which isn't horrible.
Also, what the provdiers don't tell you is that any mobile phone in the U.S., even a deactivated one, can make a free 911 call, as long as there's a compatible cell tower in range.
(This is why a bit of well-placed regulation would be a good thing--American regulators have let the market determine the pricing schemes, and that means that it is impossible to get a halfway decent plan, even for occasional use, without paying $30/month and a 1-year contract, making it very difficult to change providers if you see a cheaper plan or a decent pay-as-you-go rate.)
I'd say it means that Darwin lacks most of the stuff that sets Mac OS X apart from all the other Unixes.
"none of those three browsers makes it easy for you to disable Flash."
I don't know about Windows, but on a Mac, you find the plugins folder (/Library/Internet Plug-Ins on OS X) and remove the Flash plug-in. That will disable Flash for every browser. (The only problem is that there are one or two web site that actually use Flash in a useful way, and those are of course disabled by removing the plug-in. Also, some sights might ask you to download the 'needed' plug-in; ignore them.)
For this reason, it seems to me that Flash ads would be counter-productive for slashdot, in addition to the editors' basic opposition to Flash ads. Most other ad-driven sights on the web have a rather small percentage of their visitors that hate Flash enough and have the technical know-how to disable Flash. However, it seems to me that enough slashdot users would have Flash disabled to make a serious dent in the number of ad views if they use Flash ads.
Of course, the advertisers probably aren't smart enough to realize that; they probably just use the Yahoo statistics and assume that the slashdot demographics are the same.
"What i want is to get those things off my list of updates to download." In Software Update, select the update(s) you don't want and choose "Make Inactive" from the Update menu.