When I see somebody holding a phone instead of driving, I call the police.
Why? Because about 5 years ago I was almost hit by somebody talking on a phone who drove straight through a red light, and just barely squeezed between my car and the car in front. She never even noticed because she was too busy punching the phone's keypad. I figure I'd rather be as "ass" in the eyes of a driver, then a corpse under their wheels, or have a mangled $25,000 car I have to fix.
IMHO.
Please don't mod me down just because you disagree.
It's the year 2005. You know that Toyota cars have a programming bug that causes cars to accelerate, and ignore any other inputs (ignores the brakes or switching gear to neutral). What do you do?
It's the year 1970. You know that Ford cars have a design flaw that makes them the gas tank explode in an accident. What do you do?
In the 1970 instance, a book author wrote a tell-all called "Unsafe At Any Speed" which revealed Ford's design flaw. In the 2005 case, I'd simply post what I discovered to Toyota-oriented websites and also call the U.S. Government Product Safety Commission. Otherwise Ford/Toyota would never have fixed the problems with their cars.
I'd also report this software bug, since the vendor seems inclinded to pretend it does not exist. Better to be a whistle-blower and save lives than wait until damage is done. You can't resurrect corpses, but you can warn people while they're still alive, so they can act to protect themselves.
IMHO.
Please don't mod me down just 'cause you disagree.
It sounds like Google is already using that idea since "less than 1% of sites are affected" by the speed rating. In other words only those 1% of slow sites that are > Yslow would be downgraded in rank. Those sites Yslow have no affect.
I looked athe wikipedia commons for "child pornography" and "lolicon"
I see no child porn. What I see is nudity (not a crime) and drawings (also not a crime, since there's no victim).
What we got here is an asshole trying to impose his mental illness (bodyphobia) upon us and upon wikipedia, via the force of government. Fuck him. Also get him a psychiatrist.
>>>didn't you know that cartoons are banned as well? It's not about the children, it's about enforcing societies moral standards.
Moral standards that originated ~4000 years ago from a bunch of desert nomads in Arabia. I see no reason why our modern society should be shackled by the superstitions of a bunch of primitives. Instead I propose a better standard:
Is there a victim whose individual rights have been violated?
- If yes, then arrest the person who committed the child rape. - If no, then no crime has been committed (as is the case of your drawings/cartoons) and nobody to arrest.
I work for the government. I design digital CCAs and FPGAs/ASICs. I am a productive member of society.
Just like those who would insist marijuana users are "degenerates" you confuse possession with mind sickness, and therefore want to throw them into jail, even though they've done no harm to anyone. The reality is that most users are not criminals.
Should child pornography be outlawed? I think so. There's a victim. Child nudity, or nudity in general? No. Drawings? No.
>>>>>.....victimless and harmless to real people..... The whole lolicon issue is one brilliant example of this - why should anyone care if someone masturbates to an image of a drawn child? >>>>> >>This is just it, it's not harmless..... even if viewing child porn causes not additional harm to the child depicted >>
Somebody doesn't know how to read.
A DRAWING of sex involves NO child.
No child == no victim == no individual rights violated == no crime.
As for wikipedia, it does NOT have images of child pornography (sex). It has images of nudity, and a nude animal (which includes us) is not something to fear. Stop being afraid of bodies and their true appearance. Stop being afraid of Nature in its natural form. Nudity is also not a crime except in the minds of demented, sick people who have body phobia (i.e. they are mentally ill).
I was just thinking to myself, "So what if Microsoft or some orther megacrop knows my personal tastes and targets ads that I'd be interested in seeing?" Then you had to mention the government. It never occurred to me that the US Congress or EU Parliament might simply TAKE the information and use it for their own nefarious purposes.
What I found funny was the quote from the legal brief: "They morphed from valued, responsible executives into insubordinate, self-serving schemers who attempted to hijack Activision's assets for their own personal gain."
>>>his message hints at an end to the "social promotion" and "everyone is equal" memes that has plagued the system
But that's not enough. You also need to start FIRING people just like in private industry people get fired for pisspoor conduct, or whole businesses go bankrupt (like Circuit City). Under the current system you have school principals who literally think, "It doesn't matter if my students don't learn shit. I am guaranteed this job for life, so I can just slack off and not improve the education." It is the thinking of a monopoly.
Therefore I propose a PRO-CHOICE solution (ya know... "pro-choice", like Daley and other Democrats claim to support, but keep pushing one-size-fits-all monopolies, like Uncle Sam Hospitals):
- Don't like your school? Think having water leaking through class roofs sucks? - Fine. - We the politicians will let you choose any other government school you wish (I hear the suburban schools are superior quality). In exchange we will make you exempt from the School Tax. The ~$3000 you save can then be used to pay that out-of-district school's tuition.*
- And Theroofs'R'Collpsin' High School that sucks so bad, no students want to go there? Shut it down. Like Circuit City. If customers don't like your school/store enough to attend, choosing to take their business to another school, then there's no reason to allow it to continue. Layoff the administrators just like engineers, programmers, and other workers get laid off during hard times.
- Pro-Choice and Competitive. - Break the back of the monopoly. Monopolies (comcast, microsoft, verizon) are the opposite of progress.
* * I don't know what it's like in other states, but in my state if you go to a neighboring school district you get charged tuition. If for example I decided to quit Annapolis High and goto Baltimore High instead, then I'd have to pay an annual tuition, even though both are government schools.
It would just be wasted as a "babysitting service" like the first 4 years of high school typically are. The amount of time my teachers spend goofing-off in class, not teaching anything, was ridiculous. When I got to college the professors taught the same material in about one-quarter the time. - Take the existing 4 years and concentrate them. Instead of Algebra 1 and 2, make it a combined course. Then take the resulting extra year and teach some "tech oriented" like Programming.
Final thought - I wonder where Mayor Daley thinks he'll get the money? You can't get more juice out of an already-squeezed orange. A wiser course is to hold costs at present levels, and make sure the 12 years in school are maximized to full potential rather than wasted.
(But of course "I'll give your kids an extra 13th year" will probably sell better to voters.)
>>>$200 Billion won't even get 768k to every home in the country, [pbs.org]
This article is repeated again-and-again by Slashdotters, but it has no citations. Without citations which I can double-check and verify his numbers/claims, it has even less value than a college student's paper.
As for cost, we could have dug-up a couple million miles in the 1980s and wired the country for 10 Megabit/s fiber at a cost of 1-2 trillion dollars, but we would have simply wasted a lot of money (because 10 Mbit/s is now obsolete). IMHO it makes more sense to progress step-by-step as technology allows, the same we gradually increased computer speeds from 1 megahertz to 8 megahertz to 100 megahertz to 333 megahertz and so on.
The businesses that made poor decisions (Chase, AIG, etc) would have died in 2009, and then the healthy companies (like Ford, Apple, Microsoft) could have rebuilt on top of their broken bones in 2010, with a better stronger economy. Survival of the fittest. - Instead we have chosen to save a bunch of crippled, corrupt corporations, and they are dragging us down into a decade-long malaise (think 1930s).
Second, having your half-million-dollar Retirement savings shrink to only half the value (by 2020) is preferable? No, not really. That's a loss of ~$250,000 in real personal wealth.
speedtest.net, which means they are taking a direct sampling from the actual user connections - no politics involved. No "massaging" of the numbers trying to produce the result desired (either faster or slower). There really is no more accurate data than that coming from speedtest's surveys.
AND speedtest.net is hella more accurate than the US-FCC's lame test (which claimed I only had 350k when I actually have 750kbit/s).
>>>our federal government decided that keeping our national currency...might be slightly more important than getting our national internet structure slightly faster >>>
Sounds good but:
The federal government is actually destroying US currency. When the Fed bailed-out banks like Bank of America and Chase, they didn't handover actual money. They simply added 9 zeroes to the Bank's account. In other words the Federal Bank Monopoly created money out of thin air.
Problem: Doing that devalues all the other dollars. Where $1 might have bought a half-gallon of milk, in 2-3 years it will require $1.50 because the currency was devalued by the Fed. By the end of the decade you'll need 2 dollars because the currency will be worth half as much, thanks to the Fed's devaluation of the paper (adding zeroes to accounts).
>>>[granting power to Congress to regulate commerce INSIDE the states] would be against the very foundation of our country and the concept of state sovereignty
- It would make us look like the European Union. Which is why any such amendment to the US would likely fail to pass, and we can stop this nonsense of Congress regulating inside our bedrooms, bathrooms, et cetera.
Mod points are not meant to be used to Damage users. If you disagree with the signature about Booth killing a leader, then say so. Do NOT damage his karma. That makes you no better than someone who stabs a person with a knife, just because he didn't like the stabbee's comment.
Mod points are not to be used to attack other slashdotters. That is not their purpose. Read the FAQ: "Simply disagreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it down. Likewise, agreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it up. The goal here is to share ideas. To sift through the haystack and find needles."
I don't see any difference between the MPEG4 codecs ((H.264+AAC) and the OGG codecs (Theora+Vorbis). The two images look identical. It's too bad the author did not provide larger images.
I've always used the MPEG4 codec, both for audio (AAC+SBR) and video (AVC/H.264), since it can provide quality equal to MP3 or MPEG2, but at half the speed.
>>>the US won't remain *first* in the technology race.
We're actually 2nd right now, behind the Russian Federation (~10 Mbit/s) but ahead of the EU (~7 Mbit/s), Brazil, Australia, Canada, China (~2 Mbit/s), and other continent-sized federations.
And if you look at individual states, Delaware is #1 at almost 20 Mbit/s (average) with other northeastern states taking 2nd, 3rd, 4th places. Washington State also offers high average internet speed.
...granting power to Congress to regulate commerce INSIDE the states. That appears to be the only way they (and the FCC) can regulate a company like Comcast of Baltimore, or Comcast of Oklahoma, or other wholly intrastate companies.
Otherwise without that amendment, the regulation responsibility falls to the Maryland Government's Public Utility Commission, Oklahoma's PUC, et cetera...... the same way electricity and natural gas companies are regulated.
>>>somehow 5.x and 6.x were skipped (?) in the switch to year branding
According to wikpedia: "Microsoft Office 4.0 was released containing Word 6.0, Excel 5.0, PowerPoint 4.0". Then Word was incremented to 7.0, and the Office Suite was unified around Word 7.0, and they all took-on that "7.0" as their number. (Probably to avoid confusing users.)
This seems to be modus operandi for Microsoft. - Windows NT 1.0 became 3.1 for the initial release. - Windows NT 6.1 is called "seven" (or is it Mojave?). - Office Suite 5.0 was renamed 7.0 to be consistent with its internal Word 7.0 program.
Well as someone who is using Internet Explorer 6 (no tabs)* it's annoying to have 10 open tasks across the bottom of my Windows bar.
BUT I don't see how using Mac OS or Ubuntu Linux would make that any better? You'd still have the same flaw with multiple tasks. True you could "pile" the ten windows on top of one another, but I don't like that functionality either. I prefer a tabbed browser.
* * Yeah I know. But IE6 is all my employer will let us use. Else I'd have upgraded.
Well if you really want modular (addons), Opera has those too. - And the reason I mentioned Europe is due to the difference in market. Just as the Sega Master System and Commodore Amiga had more popularity in Europe versus America, so too does Opera have more popularity. The EU and Russia are Opera's main markets.
Slashdot Mirror
When I see somebody holding a phone instead of driving, I call the police.
Why? Because about 5 years ago I was almost hit by somebody talking on a phone who drove straight through a red light, and just barely squeezed between my car and the car in front. She never even noticed because she was too busy punching the phone's keypad. I figure I'd rather be as "ass" in the eyes of a driver, then a corpse under their wheels, or have a mangled $25,000 car I have to fix.
IMHO.
Please don't mod me down just because you disagree.
It's the year 2005. You know that Toyota cars have a programming bug that causes cars to accelerate, and ignore any other inputs (ignores the brakes or switching gear to neutral). What do you do?
It's the year 1970. You know that Ford cars have a design flaw that makes them the gas tank explode in an accident. What do you do?
In the 1970 instance, a book author wrote a tell-all called "Unsafe At Any Speed" which revealed Ford's design flaw. In the 2005 case, I'd simply post what I discovered to Toyota-oriented websites and also call the U.S. Government Product Safety Commission. Otherwise Ford/Toyota would never have fixed the problems with their cars.
I'd also report this software bug, since the vendor seems inclinded to pretend it does not exist. Better to be a whistle-blower and save lives than wait until damage is done. You can't resurrect corpses, but you can warn people while they're still alive, so they can act to protect themselves.
IMHO.
Please don't mod me down just 'cause you disagree.
It sounds like Google is already using that idea since "less than 1% of sites are affected" by the speed rating. In other words only those 1% of slow sites that are > Yslow would be downgraded in rank. Those sites Yslow have no affect.
I looked athe wikipedia commons for "child pornography" and "lolicon"
I see no child porn. What I see is nudity (not a crime) and drawings (also not a crime, since there's no victim).
What we got here is an asshole trying to impose his mental illness (bodyphobia) upon us and upon wikipedia, via the force of government. Fuck him. Also get him a psychiatrist.
>>>didn't you know that cartoons are banned as well? It's not about the children, it's about enforcing societies moral standards.
Moral standards that originated ~4000 years ago from a bunch of desert nomads in Arabia. I see no reason why our modern society should be shackled by the superstitions of a bunch of primitives. Instead I propose a better standard:
Is there a victim whose individual rights have been violated?
- If yes, then arrest the person who committed the child rape.
- If no, then no crime has been committed (as is the case of your drawings/cartoons) and nobody to arrest.
1.
I work for the government.
I design digital CCAs and FPGAs/ASICs.
I am a productive member of society.
Just like those who would insist marijuana users are "degenerates" you confuse possession with mind sickness, and therefore want to throw them into jail, even though they've done no harm to anyone. The reality is that most users are not criminals.
Should child pornography be outlawed? I think so. There's a victim.
Child nudity, or nudity in general? No.
Drawings? No.
>>>>>.....victimless and harmless to real people..... The whole lolicon issue is one brilliant example of this - why should anyone care if someone masturbates to an image of a drawn child?
>>>>>
>>This is just it, it's not harmless..... even if viewing child porn causes not additional harm to the child depicted
>>
Somebody doesn't know how to read.
A DRAWING of sex involves NO child.
No child == no victim == no individual rights violated == no crime.
As for wikipedia, it does NOT have images of child pornography (sex). It has images of nudity, and a nude animal (which includes us) is not something to fear. Stop being afraid of bodies and their true appearance. Stop being afraid of Nature in its natural form. Nudity is also not a crime except in the minds of demented, sick people who have body phobia (i.e. they are mentally ill).
Da-mit.
I was just thinking to myself, "So what if Microsoft or some orther megacrop knows my personal tastes and targets ads that I'd be interested in seeing?" Then you had to mention the government. It never occurred to me that the US Congress or EU Parliament might simply TAKE the information and use it for their own nefarious purposes.
What I found funny was the quote from the legal brief: "They morphed from valued, responsible executives into insubordinate, self-serving schemers who attempted to hijack Activision's assets for their own personal gain."
Sounds like my ex.
>>>his message hints at an end to the "social promotion" and "everyone is equal" memes that has plagued the system
But that's not enough. You also need to start FIRING people just like in private industry people get fired for pisspoor conduct, or whole businesses go bankrupt (like Circuit City). Under the current system you have school principals who literally think, "It doesn't matter if my students don't learn shit. I am guaranteed this job for life, so I can just slack off and not improve the education." It is the thinking of a monopoly.
Therefore I propose a PRO-CHOICE solution (ya know... "pro-choice", like Daley and other Democrats claim to support, but keep pushing one-size-fits-all monopolies, like Uncle Sam Hospitals):
- Don't like your school? Think having water leaking through class roofs sucks?
- Fine.
- We the politicians will let you choose any other government school you wish (I hear the suburban schools are superior quality). In exchange we will make you exempt from the School Tax. The ~$3000 you save can then be used to pay that out-of-district school's tuition.*
- And Theroofs'R'Collpsin' High School that sucks so bad, no students want to go there? Shut it down. Like Circuit City. If customers don't like your school/store enough to attend, choosing to take their business to another school, then there's no reason to allow it to continue. Layoff the administrators just like engineers, programmers, and other workers get laid off during hard times.
- Pro-Choice and Competitive.
- Break the back of the monopoly.
Monopolies (comcast, microsoft, verizon) are the opposite of progress.
*
* I don't know what it's like in other states, but in my state if you go to a neighboring school district you get charged tuition. If for example I decided to quit Annapolis High and goto Baltimore High instead, then I'd have to pay an annual tuition, even though both are government schools.
It would just be wasted as a "babysitting service" like the first 4 years of high school typically are. The amount of time my teachers spend goofing-off in class, not teaching anything, was ridiculous. When I got to college the professors taught the same material in about one-quarter the time. - Take the existing 4 years and concentrate them. Instead of Algebra 1 and 2, make it a combined course. Then take the resulting extra year and teach some "tech oriented" like Programming.
Final thought - I wonder where Mayor Daley thinks he'll get the money? You can't get more juice out of an already-squeezed orange. A wiser course is to hold costs at present levels, and make sure the 12 years in school are maximized to full potential rather than wasted.
(But of course "I'll give your kids an extra 13th year" will probably sell better to voters.)
>>>$200 Billion won't even get 768k to every home in the country, [pbs.org]
This article is repeated again-and-again by Slashdotters, but it has no citations. Without citations which I can double-check and verify his numbers/claims, it has even less value than a college student's paper.
As for cost, we could have dug-up a couple million miles in the 1980s and wired the country for 10 Megabit/s fiber at a cost of 1-2 trillion dollars, but we would have simply wasted a lot of money (because 10 Mbit/s is now obsolete). IMHO it makes more sense to progress step-by-step as technology allows, the same we gradually increased computer speeds from 1 megahertz to 8 megahertz to 100 megahertz to 333 megahertz and so on.
First off the economy would not have collapsed.
The businesses that made poor decisions (Chase, AIG, etc) would have died in 2009, and then the healthy companies (like Ford, Apple, Microsoft) could have rebuilt on top of their broken bones in 2010, with a better stronger economy. Survival of the fittest. - Instead we have chosen to save a bunch of crippled, corrupt corporations, and they are dragging us down into a decade-long malaise (think 1930s).
Second, having your half-million-dollar Retirement savings shrink to only half the value (by 2020) is preferable? No, not really. That's a loss of ~$250,000 in real personal wealth.
speedtest.net, which means they are taking a direct sampling from the actual user connections - no politics involved. No "massaging" of the numbers trying to produce the result desired (either faster or slower). There really is no more accurate data than that coming from speedtest's surveys.
AND speedtest.net is hella more accurate than the US-FCC's lame test (which claimed I only had 350k when I actually have 750kbit/s).
The 9th and 10th Amendment has been nullified by the 9 old, unelected farts on the U.S. Government's court.
>>>our federal government decided that keeping our national currency...might be slightly more important than getting our national internet structure slightly faster
>>>
Sounds good but:
The federal government is actually destroying US currency. When the Fed bailed-out banks like Bank of America and Chase, they didn't handover actual money. They simply added 9 zeroes to the Bank's account. In other words the Federal Bank Monopoly created money out of thin air.
Problem: Doing that devalues all the other dollars. Where $1 might have bought a half-gallon of milk, in 2-3 years it will require $1.50 because the currency was devalued by the Fed. By the end of the decade you'll need 2 dollars because the currency will be worth half as much, thanks to the Fed's devaluation of the paper (adding zeroes to accounts).
>>>[granting power to Congress to regulate commerce INSIDE the states] would be against the very foundation of our country and the concept of state sovereignty
- It would make us look like the European Union.
Which is why any such amendment to the US would
likely fail to pass, and we can stop this nonsense
of Congress regulating inside our bedrooms, bathrooms, et cetera.
Mod points are not meant to be used to Damage users. If you disagree with the signature about Booth killing a leader, then say so. Do NOT damage his karma. That makes you no better than someone who stabs a person with a knife, just because he didn't like the stabbee's comment.
It makes you no better than this person: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hznSuacEN_I
Or this person: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWnxlFbYjVY
Or this person: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EId7itYniR4
Mod points are not to be used to attack other slashdotters. That is not their purpose. Read the FAQ: "Simply disagreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it down. Likewise, agreeing with a comment is not a valid reason to mark it up. The goal here is to share ideas. To sift through the haystack and find needles."
>>> http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html
I don't see any difference between the MPEG4 codecs ((H.264+AAC) and the OGG codecs (Theora+Vorbis). The two images look identical. It's too bad the author did not provide larger images.
I've always used the MPEG4 codec, both for audio (AAC+SBR) and video (AVC/H.264), since it can provide quality equal to MP3 or MPEG2, but at half the speed.
How does OGG compare to MPEG4?
>>>the US won't remain *first* in the technology race.
We're actually 2nd right now, behind the Russian Federation (~10 Mbit/s) but ahead of the EU (~7 Mbit/s), Brazil, Australia, Canada, China (~2 Mbit/s), and other continent-sized federations.
And if you look at individual states, Delaware is #1 at almost 20 Mbit/s (average) with other northeastern states taking 2nd, 3rd, 4th places. Washington State also offers high average internet speed.
...granting power to Congress to regulate commerce INSIDE the states. That appears to be the only way they (and the FCC) can regulate a company like Comcast of Baltimore, or Comcast of Oklahoma, or other wholly intrastate companies.
Otherwise without that amendment, the regulation responsibility falls to the Maryland Government's Public Utility Commission, Oklahoma's PUC, et cetera...... the same way electricity and natural gas companies are regulated.
IHMO.
Please don't mod me down if you disagree.
>>>somehow 5.x and 6.x were skipped (?) in the switch to year branding
According to wikpedia: "Microsoft Office 4.0 was released containing Word 6.0, Excel 5.0, PowerPoint 4.0". Then Word was incremented to 7.0, and the Office Suite was unified around Word 7.0, and they all took-on that "7.0" as their number. (Probably to avoid confusing users.)
This seems to be modus operandi for Microsoft.
- Windows NT 1.0 became 3.1 for the initial release.
- Windows NT 6.1 is called "seven" (or is it Mojave?).
- Office Suite 5.0 was renamed 7.0 to be consistent with its internal Word 7.0 program.
Well as someone who is using Internet Explorer 6 (no tabs)* it's annoying to have 10 open tasks across the bottom of my Windows bar.
BUT I don't see how using Mac OS or Ubuntu Linux would make that any better? You'd still have the same flaw with multiple tasks. True you could "pile" the ten windows on top of one another, but I don't like that functionality either. I prefer a tabbed browser.
*
* Yeah I know. But IE6 is all my employer will let us use. Else I'd have upgraded.
Well if you really want modular (addons), Opera has those too. - And the reason I mentioned Europe is due to the difference in market. Just as the Sega Master System and Commodore Amiga had more popularity in Europe versus America, so too does Opera have more popularity. The EU and Russia are Opera's main markets.