I'm only asking because I'm on the lookout for techniques to derail a discussion. A "misdirect" is calling attention to something irrelevant but intended to provoke an emotional response. It's used to push more-relevant posts down the page - hopefully below the fold.
You must be new here. The majority of the intelligent and thoughtful discourse evaporated when Slashdot was bought out by Dice. If you want to see what the future looks like, punch in beta.slashdot.org. Then vomit in your mouth. It's been replaced with paid schills and hobbyists. There are a few of us left from the old guard, but we're only here because, frankly, there's nowhere else to go. Every promising new forum website seems to be shortly after swallowed whole by "Web 2.0" and it promptly goes to shit in an effort to look trendy and hip, at the expense of actual content and relevant discourse.
The post you're replying to was not accidental. It was quite deliberate. Like all things Web 2.0, very little of what is passed off as original or user-contributed content actually is. About a third of the posts here on Slashdot are now by 3rd parties who may or may not be affiliated with Dice, who in turn are just subcontractors for larger business ventures; Shell companies within shell companies.
It's part of a new "dark net" of small companies in quiet office complexes filled with nothing but a few cubes and employees who show up and are handed a 3 ring binder with pre-cooked posts and responses to "criticism" of whatever position they're being paid to represent under a pseudonym.
Please be more respectful in the future, as we're wrong more often than we like to think.
He wasn't being disrespectful because he thought my post was technically inaccurate, he was being disrespectful because a lot of people don't like me on slashdot because I have strong opinions and mercilessly club their favorite things, which they feel deserve special treatment. Whether it's mac, linux, windows, open source, copyright, left, right, obama, palin, tea partier, communist, and the list goes on... any opinion I state winds up pissing off some fanboy. That's why I put it as my tagline --
Not only do people downmod me for telling them their favorite band sucks, but they also upmod people who put down the evil heretic that is me. That's the only reason this guy got any points: It's GIT hate mail and a lot of lurker mods just eat it up.
the new LTS (Long Term Stable) version of Ubuntu Linux will automatically enable TRIM for your SSD. Good news for hardware enthusiasts!"
And terrible news for encryption experts. Enabling TRIM tells your adversary which sectors contain data and which don't. It's a great asset to cryptanalysis and also destroys plausible deniability that there's a filesystem present on the drive, and how much data is present in it -- thus eliminating the "shadow volume" option of Truecrypt and others.
The *entry level* salaries for Google and Apple engineers in Silicon Valley is $105K. That's over fifty bucks an hour assuming a 40-hour work week.
I said software engineers, not software engineers at google. So you can knock about 10 grand off right there. And until you provide a citation about how much Google pays its employees, we're going with the state average. $95k a year comes out to $45.67 an hour. This is actually more than San Fransciso lists for the profession -- $40.66. We'll go with the more generous figure here.
So you're making $45.67 an hour. Woo! Big time money now. But Uncle Sam just showed up, and he wants his cut. Your biweekly was $1,826.80. Now it's $1,376.72 if you take a single deduction and are single. That's $688.36 per week net. As it turns out, taxes in California are a bitch.
MIT has created a Living Wage Calculator. I linked it directly to San Francisco for you.
They estimate that you need to net $1,929 to be above poverty. You're making about a third more than that. Coincidentally, most financial experts will tell you that having about 25-35% of your income as discretionary is the ideal case: Less and you can't really save any money for retirement, etc.
So as you can see, $95k might seem a princely sum to you, but it's not really. Especially when to get it you're working 80 hour weeks so your net per hour is about $8.60.
So no, if we're gonna mod people up or down on the basis of factual statements, you're going to -1 land, bud.
This is hardly an idea without precedent would better serve the needs of the constituents while be very much in the spirit of the Constitution. Virginia, New York and Massachusetts split and gave us a handful of other states. When states become two politically oriented in one direction for only a given geographical ares while ignoring the wishes and values of the other states they can and should split.
I'm not sure it was due to political orientation so much as the more basic "There's more people in these here hills, and we ought to have representatives for them to talk to less than a week away by horse."
That isn't to say your premise is invalid -- those people's interests are going unrepresented and splitting them off may better address those needs. But to be honest, New York and California both need to be punched in the face repeatedly by the feds, then bent over and hammered in the ass until they stop trying to force the rest of the country to acceed to their fucked up laws.
Let me ask you a question. Which more accurately describes America today: a) the government fears the people; or b) the people fear the government.
How about c) you're using a false dichotomy after already having your pants dropped over the use of circular logic. Don't double down on stupid -- there's more than two ways to approach the problem. Pop open your wallet. Flip over the dollar you got in there. What does it say on the back?
Can you really not imagine why they might do this? How much money is T3 making off of this, and who are they brib^H^H^H^H contributing campaign funds to?
There's a simpler explanation than bribery: What's the average age of a US Senator? 57 years old. Average. Google to them is like space aged rocket science. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. A lot of the government's actions can be explained by simple senility -- these people aren't just out of touch with society, in many cases they're in a phase of life marked by significant decline in cognitive reasoning, and studies have been done suggesting that the elderly are far more trusting than they should be due to biochemical changes in the brain. Put another way: They're easily suckered.
This is an exceedingly obvious thing to have to point out, but it seems to be forgotten all the time by people who, were they to just divorce themselves from their own political views for a minute and contemplate the problem objectively, they'd realize that there is an organic element to the problem which far better explains the current circumstances than the radical ideas of conspiracies, bribery, and back room deals. I'm sure those happen, but they are far into the minority...
If the only thing with power over the government is the other parts of the government, then they certainly have nothing to fear from its citizens who can't even sue due to lack of standing (as determined by part of the government).
Circular logic works because circular logic works because...
Sigh. If only there were some historical document written, perhaps by the author I quoted that explained other remedies available to citizens... maybe then I wouldn't have to spoon feed the truth to people and they could infer from the quote the course of action needed. Or, I don't know, maybe just not falling asleep in civics class...
The only thing with power over the US Government is other parts of the US government.
Wrong. Thomas Jefferson, please excuse me waking you from your long nap, but I need an opinion. "When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty." Thank you Mr. Jefferson. You can now go lay down again. "Brrraaaaiiinnnss...." Yeah, I know. I miss 'em too, sir.
You really think you can walk up to the front door of Google, Apple, or Facebook executives' house and leave door hangers telling them what naughty boys they've been?
I can make damn sure he doesn't leave without military and/or police assistance. Give me ten people dedicated to the cause of bottling Sir Richy McDouchebag in his castle, and a blatant disregard of the law, and I can stuff him in his mansion for a good month before they catch my team and put the fear of God permanently into his self-entitled ass and make him shell out hundreds of millions for body guards, armed escorts, and bullet proof everythings.
But that's neither here nor there, and I don't feel terrorism is an effective deterrent anyway. You don't have to do any of that to get your point across; Simply dropping leaflets all over the neighborhood in bulk so everyone's lawn and mailbox is covered with and stuffed in them like it's election season is sufficiently effective and doesn't require any gross transgression of the law.
The point is to be persistent, patient, and on target. Don't go after the people who are just working there because it's a job. Recruit them, don't pull a Gandalf on their morning ride. Democracy works, but it takes persistence and a strength of will, not taking out your sexual frustrations on the 9 into downtown.
We are starting to see the social unrest caused by the wealth disparity in the US - a disparity of Third World proportions.
Starting to? The revolution came, and its high water mark was about a year ago when Homeland Security's jack-booted thugs coordinated a nationwide crackdown, arresting and imprisoning over six thousand protesters in a single day. Anyone remember Occupy? Nope. The police came and erected giant tarps and then moved in tanks, troops, and industrial equipment, and did a clean sweep of every protester on Wall St. in just a few hours, then took down the temporary walls, shined up the signs a little, and buffed out the dents where the protesters were thrown into walls, the ground, etc. And nary a word was spoken about it in our press.
Dude, look at China -- how often do you hear of protests there? You don't. Because the people there get rounded up and are never heard from again. And now in America, we have the highest per capita imprisonment rate of any country on Earth. Put two and two together.
There are too many stupid people on this planet, and our emergency response people are already overworked without having to respond to McNugget shortages.
You'd be surprised to learn that there's even dumber reasons people call -- the most common call a 911 dispatcher gets is not shots fired, debris in road, or any of that... it's what the current score is for whatever game is currently on in town. I shit you not, people call by the thousands.
People are dumb, stupid animals... but they occasionally get hurt, and need help. Even if 99% of the time, when they yell help it's over something utterly retarded, sooner or later, everyone is the 1% that really does need it. And that's why we have 911.
Apparently people have already forgotten this has been done before. Before there were smart phones, there were just plain cell phones... tiny little indestructible bricks with flip-open LCDs. And it was thought that having a fast way to call 911, a panic button if you will, would be a useful feature. So pressing and holding '9' on these phones would connect you to emergency services.
This feature was redacted from all phones, everywhere, within a couple years, because it innundated emergency services with so-called "butt dials" and wrong numbers. You do not want '911' to be a one-button push on a mobile device. It ends badly.
The tech industry is not only refusing to eat its own dog food, it's wilfully jacking up its costs and risk by insisting on stockpiling its live meat in one location.
I thought we were talking about San Francisco, not Mumbai. But on a different note, why do people live in New York when it costs so much to live there? Answer: Because that's where all the jobs are. And the infrastructure. It's a hundred square miles of urban superstructure built up over a hundred years. Duh. Why is it any kind of a surprise that tech businesses congregate together? Did we forget that human beings are social creatures? We are tribalistic. We naturally and instinctively seek out both social and physical environments most compatible with our disposition. And big surprise, we build our cities the same way -- there's the "young adult" sections, the "old people" sections, the jewish, chinese... drive around ANY city, anywhere, and you'll see clear signs of cultural delineation. Hell, the effect is so pronounced that researchers can calculate the socioeconomic prosperty of a given neighborhood down to the street level... by measuring the number of trees per square foot present. Yes: You can see culture from fucking space.
And yet, we're pissing and moaning about tech companies getting together? If you're in tech, you go where other techies are. Duh!
I didn't reply to you directly in case you thought that if I commented on the protesters I would somehow be in support of them. I'm merely pointing out that they can't get to "the Man" or even see "the Man" clearly so they are going after a barely related symptom and not a cause.
Which is really more of a failure of imagination on their part than anything. You wanna find The Man? Find a woman, tell her she's being cheated on by The Man... then just follow the sound of sirens to his house. But more seriously: These people have homes. They do not live in the Googleplex Borg Cube. Find out where they are, and then go protest *there*. And if you're going to engage in acts of criminal mischief, what better and thrilling place to do it than a gated community filled with rent-a-cops and self-important pricks? -_-
It's the 99% syndrome where you believe that because you are a member of a larger group means you're automatically more important.
Careful there, Sir Social Darwinist. Everybody is equally important. They have every right to protest. Peacefully. On the sidewalk. Just like the KKK, neo-nazis, and people who want Sarah Palin for President in 2016. Anyone who interferes with that's getting my American Free Speech Boot up their self-entitled ass.
But they didn't do that. They became violent. And 99%, 1%, or Percentile-agnostic, that's wrong. There is a time and a place for protesting, and it's not in front of the bus during the morning commute. That place is reserved for self-entitled bicyclists, angry motorists, and pedestrians on their cell phone wandering into traffic, thank you very much.
You know, because this country's problems are caused by paying good wages to STEM workers, and the solution is clearly to not do that. Someone should let politicians know.
I think they know. Have you seen the education budget for next year? They're planning on handing out rocks for our students to bang to make fire for science to "teach the controversy" about the four basic elements. In English, they've cut back to workbooks titled Thog Makes Word Sounds, and you can now hand in "book" reports by reading wikipedia. In social studies, kids are now giving class presentations on the different types of cat memes on the internet, and asked to explain why Putin on a horse was a seminal moment in early 21st century Euro-American relations. The list of travesties goes on.
She makes a valid point but I'd say it's not really relevant. People are protesting about their conditions and are going after a soft target because
... Because they're cowards. When Martin Luther King marched, he marched in the deep south, in the open streets. When Ghandi protested, he sat in plain public view, risking death, to champion non-violent revolution. In fact, you look back at the major protests and civil rights battles in this country and you'll find that "soft targets" weren't on the menu. That's what we call biting the hand that feeds you.
If you got a problem with The Man, go camp on The Man's front lawn, and make sure the whole world, and especially him, knows it. Don't instead decide to double park The Man's janitor so he can't get to work in the morning. There's nothing noble about that... it's the move of a coward raging in his own impotence.
That is the fundamental flaw of property taxes - the taxes can go up even if your property stayed exactly the same just because a bunch of people around you overpaid.
I suppose then that as people move into an area and it develops economically, building up infrastructure, amenities, and things like, I don't know, public transportation... people should not be expected to pay more for those things? What you call overpaying, others call investing.
The fact was it was economically viable the day they started running the Google buses. That more people have opted to move into those areas because it offers a convenience is a consequence of this. But it's like people who flock to a community because it has better schools, a vibrant night life, and a list of other things. These people are angry because the amenities provided by their neighborhood are too expensive for them to afford. Well, that sucks, but it's no reason to block up traffic and blame the buses for it.
Cities are organic, living things. People are always on the move; they buzz like an ant hive with activity. And so cities change. I have some sympathy for people who are reluctant to embrace change, but not a lot. You're adults -- making good out of shit is pretty much the working definition of adulthood. So suck it up cupcake, and move to someplace that's more affordable. Or sit there and make a public nuissance of yourself, get a criminal record, and then you really won't be able to afford to live there. It's your call.
No! Mod down -- This is Slashdot. We have standards! You can't use logic to win an argument unless you also insert at least one reference to Obama, Richard Stallman, Linus, Hitler, or make a care analogy. I SEE NO CAR ANALOGY, and only a vague reference to Hitler that does not qualify. Get with the program, noob.:)
This just in: The homeless and unemployed mobbed a bus full of people perceived to be rich, perhaps unaware of the 60-80 hour work weeks endured by software engineers, that once you take that into consideration, many in the industry make at, or less, than minimum wage.
-_- Guys... if you're gonna have a protest against the rich, go pitch a tent on the CEO's lawn, not in the middle of the street where a bunch of people only doing slightly better than you are take the bus to work every day. Not only will you win an Irony award from me, but you'll get arrested for obstructing traffic too -- and rightfully so. Time and place. First two things you learn in activism. Time. Place. Learn it.
Asimov's stories were all about how the three laws were not sufficient for the real world. The article recognises this, even if the summary doesn't.
Dice Unlimited Profits And Robotics, Inc., would like to remind you that it's new, hip brand of robotic authors have just enough AI to detect when something is sufficiently nerdy to post, but unfortunately lack the underlying wisdom of knowing why something is nerdy. Unfortunately, I expect our future killer robots in the sky will have similar pattern recognition problems... and wind up exterminating everyone because they are deemed insufficiently [insert ethnicity, nationality, race, etc., here] in pursuit of blind perfectionism.
Common sense has never been something attributed either to slashdot authors, or robotic evil overlords.
There's no reason to avoid using your bandwidth when you can use QoS
You seem to forget that many ISPs sport bandwidth caps, which is a misnomer; they're actually limiting the amount of data transferred during a given timeframe. QoS doesn't stop a fat bill from showing up the next month showing you used up 1.5TB on an account purchased at a 200GB level.
for the vast majority of people an automobile is an appliance, one that they care for about as much as their toaster
I don't agree. A toaster can be abused and run into the ground without hurting your wallet too much. People tend to sit up and take notice when you start talking about dropping half their yearly net income on something. Now, that doesn't mean they have common sense -- plenty of people have all the sense of a turnip, but to suggest they put a car in the same category as a toaster is absurd.
As for those sensors... no, it takes more than one failed sensor to blow up your engine. There is an oil pressure sensor, and an oil level sensor, at minimum, in the vehicles you mention. But let's ignore that and say they both simply give up the digital ghost without warning... the car's onboard computer will still trip out when you exceed the odometer tracking the miles since last oil change. But even if all of that technology fails, there is still one thing left to save your engine from mechanical oblivion: Your own eyes and ears.
Engines that are low on oil tend to run hot, and they tend to run hard. They don't accelerate, they feel like they're losing power, and dear god do they make noise as they die. All that overheating metal is going rat-a-tak-tak and war-warrrrr-waaaaahhhhhrrrrr.... as it dies, smoking and belching steam. If you fail to notice all of these signs, you don't deserve a car.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm only asking because I'm on the lookout for techniques to derail a discussion. A "misdirect" is calling attention to something irrelevant but intended to provoke an emotional response. It's used to push more-relevant posts down the page - hopefully below the fold.
You must be new here. The majority of the intelligent and thoughtful discourse evaporated when Slashdot was bought out by Dice. If you want to see what the future looks like, punch in beta.slashdot.org. Then vomit in your mouth. It's been replaced with paid schills and hobbyists. There are a few of us left from the old guard, but we're only here because, frankly, there's nowhere else to go. Every promising new forum website seems to be shortly after swallowed whole by "Web 2.0" and it promptly goes to shit in an effort to look trendy and hip, at the expense of actual content and relevant discourse.
The post you're replying to was not accidental. It was quite deliberate. Like all things Web 2.0, very little of what is passed off as original or user-contributed content actually is. About a third of the posts here on Slashdot are now by 3rd parties who may or may not be affiliated with Dice, who in turn are just subcontractors for larger business ventures; Shell companies within shell companies.
It's part of a new "dark net" of small companies in quiet office complexes filled with nothing but a few cubes and employees who show up and are handed a 3 ring binder with pre-cooked posts and responses to "criticism" of whatever position they're being paid to represent under a pseudonym.
Welcome to the real Web 2.0.
Please be more respectful in the future, as we're wrong more often than we like to think.
He wasn't being disrespectful because he thought my post was technically inaccurate, he was being disrespectful because a lot of people don't like me on slashdot because I have strong opinions and mercilessly club their favorite things, which they feel deserve special treatment. Whether it's mac, linux, windows, open source, copyright, left, right, obama, palin, tea partier, communist, and the list goes on... any opinion I state winds up pissing off some fanboy. That's why I put it as my tagline --
Not only do people downmod me for telling them their favorite band sucks, but they also upmod people who put down the evil heretic that is me. That's the only reason this guy got any points: It's GIT hate mail and a lot of lurker mods just eat it up.
the new LTS (Long Term Stable) version of Ubuntu Linux will automatically enable TRIM for your SSD. Good news for hardware enthusiasts!"
And terrible news for encryption experts. Enabling TRIM tells your adversary which sectors contain data and which don't. It's a great asset to cryptanalysis and also destroys plausible deniability that there's a filesystem present on the drive, and how much data is present in it -- thus eliminating the "shadow volume" option of Truecrypt and others.
The *entry level* salaries for Google and Apple engineers in Silicon Valley is $105K. That's over fifty bucks an hour assuming a 40-hour work week.
I said software engineers, not software engineers at google. So you can knock about 10 grand off right there. And until you provide a citation about how much Google pays its employees, we're going with the state average. $95k a year comes out to $45.67 an hour. This is actually more than San Fransciso lists for the profession -- $40.66. We'll go with the more generous figure here.
So you're making $45.67 an hour. Woo! Big time money now. But Uncle Sam just showed up, and he wants his cut. Your biweekly was $1,826.80. Now it's $1,376.72 if you take a single deduction and are single. That's $688.36 per week net. As it turns out, taxes in California are a bitch.
MIT has created a Living Wage Calculator. I linked it directly to San Francisco for you.
They estimate that you need to net $1,929 to be above poverty. You're making about a third more than that. Coincidentally, most financial experts will tell you that having about 25-35% of your income as discretionary is the ideal case: Less and you can't really save any money for retirement, etc.
So as you can see, $95k might seem a princely sum to you, but it's not really. Especially when to get it you're working 80 hour weeks so your net per hour is about $8.60.
So no, if we're gonna mod people up or down on the basis of factual statements, you're going to -1 land, bud.
This is hardly an idea without precedent would better serve the needs of the constituents while be very much in the spirit of the Constitution. Virginia, New York and Massachusetts split and gave us a handful of other states. When states become two politically oriented in one direction for only a given geographical ares while ignoring the wishes and values of the other states they can and should split.
I'm not sure it was due to political orientation so much as the more basic "There's more people in these here hills, and we ought to have representatives for them to talk to less than a week away by horse."
That isn't to say your premise is invalid -- those people's interests are going unrepresented and splitting them off may better address those needs. But to be honest, New York and California both need to be punched in the face repeatedly by the feds, then bent over and hammered in the ass until they stop trying to force the rest of the country to acceed to their fucked up laws.
Let me ask you a question. Which more accurately describes America today: a) the government fears the people; or b) the people fear the government.
How about c) you're using a false dichotomy after already having your pants dropped over the use of circular logic. Don't double down on stupid -- there's more than two ways to approach the problem. Pop open your wallet. Flip over the dollar you got in there. What does it say on the back?
E Pluribus Unum.
That is not latin for "Roll over and play dead."
Can you really not imagine why they might do this? How much money is T3 making off of this, and who are they brib^H^H^H^H contributing campaign funds to?
There's a simpler explanation than bribery: What's the average age of a US Senator? 57 years old. Average. Google to them is like space aged rocket science. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. A lot of the government's actions can be explained by simple senility -- these people aren't just out of touch with society, in many cases they're in a phase of life marked by significant decline in cognitive reasoning, and studies have been done suggesting that the elderly are far more trusting than they should be due to biochemical changes in the brain. Put another way: They're easily suckered.
This is an exceedingly obvious thing to have to point out, but it seems to be forgotten all the time by people who, were they to just divorce themselves from their own political views for a minute and contemplate the problem objectively, they'd realize that there is an organic element to the problem which far better explains the current circumstances than the radical ideas of conspiracies, bribery, and back room deals. I'm sure those happen, but they are far into the minority...
So... you're saying you agree with me?
Of course not. Then we'd both be wrong.
If the only thing with power over the government is the other parts of the government, then they certainly have nothing to fear from its citizens who can't even sue due to lack of standing (as determined by part of the government).
Circular logic works because circular logic works because...
Sigh. If only there were some historical document written, perhaps by the author I quoted that explained other remedies available to citizens... maybe then I wouldn't have to spoon feed the truth to people and they could infer from the quote the course of action needed. Or, I don't know, maybe just not falling asleep in civics class...
Of course a rich tech guru wants Silicon Valley to get its own government, so it can be freed from the dusty laws and regulations of
Replace "tech guru" with "cotton plantation owner" and suddenly it all makes sense.
The only thing with power over the US Government is other parts of the US government.
Wrong. Thomas Jefferson, please excuse me waking you from your long nap, but I need an opinion. "When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. When the government fears the people, there is liberty." Thank you Mr. Jefferson. You can now go lay down again. "Brrraaaaiiinnnss...." Yeah, I know. I miss 'em too, sir.
You really think you can walk up to the front door of Google, Apple, or Facebook executives' house and leave door hangers telling them what naughty boys they've been?
I can make damn sure he doesn't leave without military and/or police assistance. Give me ten people dedicated to the cause of bottling Sir Richy McDouchebag in his castle, and a blatant disregard of the law, and I can stuff him in his mansion for a good month before they catch my team and put the fear of God permanently into his self-entitled ass and make him shell out hundreds of millions for body guards, armed escorts, and bullet proof everythings.
But that's neither here nor there, and I don't feel terrorism is an effective deterrent anyway. You don't have to do any of that to get your point across; Simply dropping leaflets all over the neighborhood in bulk so everyone's lawn and mailbox is covered with and stuffed in them like it's election season is sufficiently effective and doesn't require any gross transgression of the law.
The point is to be persistent, patient, and on target. Don't go after the people who are just working there because it's a job. Recruit them, don't pull a Gandalf on their morning ride. Democracy works, but it takes persistence and a strength of will, not taking out your sexual frustrations on the 9 into downtown.
We are starting to see the social unrest caused by the wealth disparity in the US - a disparity of Third World proportions.
Starting to? The revolution came, and its high water mark was about a year ago when Homeland Security's jack-booted thugs coordinated a nationwide crackdown, arresting and imprisoning over six thousand protesters in a single day. Anyone remember Occupy? Nope. The police came and erected giant tarps and then moved in tanks, troops, and industrial equipment, and did a clean sweep of every protester on Wall St. in just a few hours, then took down the temporary walls, shined up the signs a little, and buffed out the dents where the protesters were thrown into walls, the ground, etc. And nary a word was spoken about it in our press.
Dude, look at China -- how often do you hear of protests there? You don't. Because the people there get rounded up and are never heard from again. And now in America, we have the highest per capita imprisonment rate of any country on Earth. Put two and two together.
There was a revolution... We lost.
There are too many stupid people on this planet, and our emergency response people are already overworked without having to respond to McNugget shortages.
You'd be surprised to learn that there's even dumber reasons people call -- the most common call a 911 dispatcher gets is not shots fired, debris in road, or any of that... it's what the current score is for whatever game is currently on in town. I shit you not, people call by the thousands.
People are dumb, stupid animals... but they occasionally get hurt, and need help. Even if 99% of the time, when they yell help it's over something utterly retarded, sooner or later, everyone is the 1% that really does need it. And that's why we have 911.
Apparently people have already forgotten this has been done before. Before there were smart phones, there were just plain cell phones... tiny little indestructible bricks with flip-open LCDs. And it was thought that having a fast way to call 911, a panic button if you will, would be a useful feature. So pressing and holding '9' on these phones would connect you to emergency services.
This feature was redacted from all phones, everywhere, within a couple years, because it innundated emergency services with so-called "butt dials" and wrong numbers. You do not want '911' to be a one-button push on a mobile device. It ends badly.
The tech industry is not only refusing to eat its own dog food, it's wilfully jacking up its costs and risk by insisting on stockpiling its live meat in one location.
I thought we were talking about San Francisco, not Mumbai. But on a different note, why do people live in New York when it costs so much to live there? Answer: Because that's where all the jobs are. And the infrastructure. It's a hundred square miles of urban superstructure built up over a hundred years. Duh. Why is it any kind of a surprise that tech businesses congregate together? Did we forget that human beings are social creatures? We are tribalistic. We naturally and instinctively seek out both social and physical environments most compatible with our disposition. And big surprise, we build our cities the same way -- there's the "young adult" sections, the "old people" sections, the jewish, chinese... drive around ANY city, anywhere, and you'll see clear signs of cultural delineation. Hell, the effect is so pronounced that researchers can calculate the socioeconomic prosperty of a given neighborhood down to the street level... by measuring the number of trees per square foot present. Yes: You can see culture from fucking space.
And yet, we're pissing and moaning about tech companies getting together? If you're in tech, you go where other techies are. Duh!
I didn't reply to you directly in case you thought that if I commented on the protesters I would somehow be in support of them. I'm merely pointing out that they can't get to "the Man" or even see "the Man" clearly so they are going after a barely related symptom and not a cause.
Which is really more of a failure of imagination on their part than anything. You wanna find The Man? Find a woman, tell her she's being cheated on by The Man... then just follow the sound of sirens to his house. But more seriously: These people have homes. They do not live in the Googleplex Borg Cube. Find out where they are, and then go protest *there*. And if you're going to engage in acts of criminal mischief, what better and thrilling place to do it than a gated community filled with rent-a-cops and self-important pricks? -_-
It's the 99% syndrome where you believe that because you are a member of a larger group means you're automatically more important.
Careful there, Sir Social Darwinist. Everybody is equally important. They have every right to protest. Peacefully. On the sidewalk. Just like the KKK, neo-nazis, and people who want Sarah Palin for President in 2016. Anyone who interferes with that's getting my American Free Speech Boot up their self-entitled ass.
But they didn't do that. They became violent. And 99%, 1%, or Percentile-agnostic, that's wrong. There is a time and a place for protesting, and it's not in front of the bus during the morning commute. That place is reserved for self-entitled bicyclists, angry motorists, and pedestrians on their cell phone wandering into traffic, thank you very much.
You know, because this country's problems are caused by paying good wages to STEM workers, and the solution is clearly to not do that. Someone should let politicians know.
I think they know. Have you seen the education budget for next year? They're planning on handing out rocks for our students to bang to make fire for science to "teach the controversy" about the four basic elements. In English, they've cut back to workbooks titled Thog Makes Word Sounds, and you can now hand in "book" reports by reading wikipedia. In social studies, kids are now giving class presentations on the different types of cat memes on the internet, and asked to explain why Putin on a horse was a seminal moment in early 21st century Euro-American relations. The list of travesties goes on.
Oh no, I think our politicians got that memo.
She makes a valid point but I'd say it's not really relevant. People are protesting about their conditions and are going after a soft target because
... Because they're cowards. When Martin Luther King marched, he marched in the deep south, in the open streets. When Ghandi protested, he sat in plain public view, risking death, to champion non-violent revolution. In fact, you look back at the major protests and civil rights battles in this country and you'll find that "soft targets" weren't on the menu. That's what we call biting the hand that feeds you.
If you got a problem with The Man, go camp on The Man's front lawn, and make sure the whole world, and especially him, knows it. Don't instead decide to double park The Man's janitor so he can't get to work in the morning. There's nothing noble about that... it's the move of a coward raging in his own impotence.
That is the fundamental flaw of property taxes - the taxes can go up even if your property stayed exactly the same just because a bunch of people around you overpaid.
I suppose then that as people move into an area and it develops economically, building up infrastructure, amenities, and things like, I don't know, public transportation... people should not be expected to pay more for those things? What you call overpaying, others call investing.
The fact was it was economically viable the day they started running the Google buses. That more people have opted to move into those areas because it offers a convenience is a consequence of this. But it's like people who flock to a community because it has better schools, a vibrant night life, and a list of other things. These people are angry because the amenities provided by their neighborhood are too expensive for them to afford. Well, that sucks, but it's no reason to block up traffic and blame the buses for it.
Cities are organic, living things. People are always on the move; they buzz like an ant hive with activity. And so cities change. I have some sympathy for people who are reluctant to embrace change, but not a lot. You're adults -- making good out of shit is pretty much the working definition of adulthood. So suck it up cupcake, and move to someplace that's more affordable. Or sit there and make a public nuissance of yourself, get a criminal record, and then you really won't be able to afford to live there. It's your call.
Mod up for use of logic!
No! Mod down -- This is Slashdot. We have standards! You can't use logic to win an argument unless you also insert at least one reference to Obama, Richard Stallman, Linus, Hitler, or make a care analogy. I SEE NO CAR ANALOGY, and only a vague reference to Hitler that does not qualify. Get with the program, noob. :)
This just in: The homeless and unemployed mobbed a bus full of people perceived to be rich, perhaps unaware of the 60-80 hour work weeks endured by software engineers, that once you take that into consideration, many in the industry make at, or less, than minimum wage.
-_- Guys... if you're gonna have a protest against the rich, go pitch a tent on the CEO's lawn, not in the middle of the street where a bunch of people only doing slightly better than you are take the bus to work every day. Not only will you win an Irony award from me, but you'll get arrested for obstructing traffic too -- and rightfully so. Time and place. First two things you learn in activism. Time. Place. Learn it.
Asimov's stories were all about how the three laws were not sufficient for the real world. The article recognises this, even if the summary doesn't.
Dice Unlimited Profits And Robotics, Inc., would like to remind you that it's new, hip brand of robotic authors have just enough AI to detect when something is sufficiently nerdy to post, but unfortunately lack the underlying wisdom of knowing why something is nerdy. Unfortunately, I expect our future killer robots in the sky will have similar pattern recognition problems... and wind up exterminating everyone because they are deemed insufficiently [insert ethnicity, nationality, race, etc., here] in pursuit of blind perfectionism.
Common sense has never been something attributed either to slashdot authors, or robotic evil overlords.
There's no reason to avoid using your bandwidth when you can use QoS
You seem to forget that many ISPs sport bandwidth caps, which is a misnomer; they're actually limiting the amount of data transferred during a given timeframe. QoS doesn't stop a fat bill from showing up the next month showing you used up 1.5TB on an account purchased at a 200GB level.
for the vast majority of people an automobile is an appliance, one that they care for about as much as their toaster
I don't agree. A toaster can be abused and run into the ground without hurting your wallet too much. People tend to sit up and take notice when you start talking about dropping half their yearly net income on something. Now, that doesn't mean they have common sense -- plenty of people have all the sense of a turnip, but to suggest they put a car in the same category as a toaster is absurd.
As for those sensors... no, it takes more than one failed sensor to blow up your engine. There is an oil pressure sensor, and an oil level sensor, at minimum, in the vehicles you mention. But let's ignore that and say they both simply give up the digital ghost without warning... the car's onboard computer will still trip out when you exceed the odometer tracking the miles since last oil change. But even if all of that technology fails, there is still one thing left to save your engine from mechanical oblivion: Your own eyes and ears.
Engines that are low on oil tend to run hot, and they tend to run hard. They don't accelerate, they feel like they're losing power, and dear god do they make noise as they die. All that overheating metal is going rat-a-tak-tak and war-warrrrr-waaaaahhhhhrrrrr.... as it dies, smoking and belching steam. If you fail to notice all of these signs, you don't deserve a car.