Yeah, over forty people could be killed and half of downtown destroyed! Oh wait, that wasn't a pipeline.
What rock didn't get that news?
Even so, in what world is transporting oil in vehicles safer? Is your heart at ease when an SUV drives around crossing gates, barely clearing the tracks before a 40 car train of tankers moving at 70MPH rolls through? Do you live for the moments when you're driving among several of these tankers on the interstate? Or behind one at a railroad crossing (while it was a gasoline truck, I can't imagine the effect of oil being much better).
It's not just that. Think of these four statements: Don't drink the bleach, it's dangerous. Don't cross the street, it's dangerous. Don't climb the tree/fence/on top of cars, it's dangerous. Don't run on the pavement, it's dangerous (real rule instituted at my grade school after I had graduated, where recess was held in the parking lot).
Too many rules closes too many doors. Kids will then decide on their own which rule is ok to break, and their safety now completely depends on their ability to assess which of the abovementioned activities is least dangerous. If *some* stuff they want to do (ie: climbing trees and fences) is allowed and some isn't, they'll probably take the path of least resistance.
Nobody should be surprised at this decision, Obama stated that nothing would change except for who is holding the data that is collected. The solution is to vote out every career politician and elect people of high moral character.
Except by default someone has to be a career politician to get anywhere. To get from "mayor of small town" to "US Senate" you need to win a series of progressively more aggressive elections (effectively making a career out of it). The best solution to this is to decentralize power to the point where the decisions made by people closer to the "mayor of a small town" level are more important in your day-to-day life than those made by "US Senator".
Barring that, I think something crazy like this would work: randomly select 9 registered voters as candidates for each electable position (from the pool of people eligible to vote for that position). Fund their campaigns, and disallow anyone outside that pool from campaigning. Think of it as a political version of the draft or jury duty. As seemingly bad as this scheme sounds, I find it hard to imagine the end result being any worse than what we have right now.
As it should be. In theory, states with crappier records should look to Massachusetts to fix their system. In the process they may find themselves outperforming Massachusetts.
How are taxes a company's fault? They're the government's and no one else.
In response to this the city government decided to impose a $1 fee for every individual occurrence of a private bus stopping at a city bus stop. It's estimated to cost each bus company $100,000/year (which if they're locked into a contract with Google, Apple, et al will in the short term punish the bus company rather than the company they're taking people to). That seems like a pretty fair arrangement (and they could raise the fee later, after giving the bus companies time to renegotiate), yet the people are still screaming that it's not enough. If the fees get too high the bus companies will either go bankrupt (if locked into their current contract) or will find it cost effective to pool their resources to purchase some buildings, knock them down, and build off street bus stops (which will turn a few precious parking spaces into driveways in the process).
The protesters are as fanatical and illogical as PETA and should best be ignored at this point...
Since you seem to have a habit of cutting out half my comments to distort their meaning, and failing to address those parts which you cut out, I can only assume you are incapable of a proper debate. I bid you adieu...
The first and last of these things I can do with any game I have purchased, either via a physical disk or via a persistent login/download link from e.g. shrapnel. The middle one is the only one that is at all unique and it doesnt seem important at all in context of the DRM.
Disk is useless if lost, damaged, or 1000 miles away in a cabinet while you're on a business trip. The middle one is very useful if you want to play games on a PC in a computer lab or library. Back in my college days, being able to plug an external drive into a lab PC and play counterstrike was quite handy for killing time between classes. And the steam DRM is basically: it needs to phone home about once a month. So once a month it uses about 2 megabytes of bandwidth for DRM, big friggin deal. It's akin to putting a velvet rope up to keep people from walking into unauthorized areas.
I object to bullshit pronouncements about how the Free Software community somehow is or should be grateful to Valve for this, as if they were doing us a favor.
When you put it that way (key being Free Software community) I do agree. However, as a member of the Linux community, I am grateful, because gaming is the *LAST* thing keeping Windows on my primary desktop. If Steam's entire catalog could run natively on Linux, I would only need windows for two games. And at that point, it becomes time-effective for me to investigate getting wine to work.
And if "attracting more people" is cause for diluting the mission of Debian then it will be a bad, not a good thing. The ifs in the previous sentence will be optimised out by any decent compiler.
I don't see how what Valve is doing is diluting the mission of Debian at all, at least not any more than the existence of the non-free repository. A key reason Debian is well known in the Linux community is because whatever people want/need to use can be easily used. What makes them special compared to most others is that Debian defaults to a free configuration. If Debian *didn't* play ball with binary blob distributors, I suspect it would be just as well known as these distros.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree here... my line of thinking falls closer to the "Open Source Software" camp than the "Free Software" camp...
If your gaming PC does not connect to the internet, I'm guessing you don't do much multiplayer...
That said: Steam's DRM is the least evil of them all, since it lets you re-download your games on any PC, anywhere as long as you remember your password. The "freedom" to not care if my gigs of games are wiped out in a hard drive failure, to copy the steam directory as-is to any PC on the same architecture and being able to straight up play, and to arbitrarily delete game files if I temporarily need the space is far more important to me than the freedom to look at arbitrary code.
I've heard Stallman speak, and he does make sense: if a program isn't behaving the way you want, the freedom to go in and correct that is very important towards reducing your stress while making your tasks easier. However, games by their very nature are unnecessary for getting actual work done. If you don't agree with a game's licensing, etc, you will never be forced to use it. Conversely, how many people are forced to use Microsoft Office every day?
This is a "choose your battles" scenario. Either 1) let Valve attract more people to Debian for desktop use. They'll play their closed source games when bored, and use the open source productivity software to get actual work done. Or, 2) fight them on this, they take their ball and go home, and the people they would have attracted continue to regard the FOSS movement as a bunch of loons that like to look gift horses in the mouth.
Credit unions are required by law to restrict membership, but some try to make it as broad as possible. One of the local ones in my area requires either you be an employee of a select few companies, a member of a select few unions, or a resident of any county they have a branch in. That third option is why most of the poor of our region end up with them. They have no fees, and the only minimum is to keep a $5 "share" in the credit union. Check cashing places don't even bother to set up shop in town (for the tin foil hatters the local grocery store chain cashes checks for $2), even in the areas with section 8 housing and $300/month rent for 2 bedrooms.
I can think of another real world addiction: buying/collecting tons of useless crap, and hoard everything they see. The funny thing is, getting these people onto games like WoW would only improve their life - instead of wasting money on crap that takes up precious space in tiny apartments, for $15 / month they can satisfy the collector urge without cluttering the apartment.
The funny thing is, once I realized this effect, I was able to benefit from it without actually playing the game. Every time I think "it'd be neat to have $USELESS_THING", I'd switch my thoughts over to "or I could reactivate my WoW account and work towards $TIMESINK_ACHIEVEMENT" and with that, I avoid both wasting time and buying useless crap.
I feel like a possible solution for this is to figure out what the most important tasks on your list are, and do them in reverse order. The "stressing out your staff" method doesn't work if they give their staff a proper priority list (as that would relieve their stress). This will backfire spectacularly on your stress inducing manager as suddenly *they* are stressed because the important shit isn't getting done, and the worst thing they can say about you is that you are incapable of prioritizing correctly, which is technically the job of management to begin with.
Later, I ended the interview when he told me I couldn't use the whiteboard to make it easier for me to show him the answer.
I hope it was with something like "I don't feel I'd fit in with a company that doesn't believe in using the most efficient tools for the task at hand".
I'd never heard of a stress interview, but now I know of its existence I'll try and have fun with it should I find myself in that position...
I can think of a few reasons: 1. You live in a bad enough neighborhood that there is a not-insignificant chance of someone stealing your gas. 2. You drive so infrequently that using three month old E10 gas causes damage to your engine.
If you don't have highly developed suburbs, why would anyone need to travel 100km to the city every day?
There's people who commute from Philadelphia to NYC every day. I'd imagine it's because the rent/taxes are much cheaper and the train is only 1:30, which is roughly the same amount of time someone at the southern tip of Staten Island would spend getting to midtown.
With high(er) speed rail you can do neat things like that in more places.
The worst part is, many towns build around railroads exorcised their train stations and rail lines. So places which once had a centrally located rail station now have a trail running through downtown, and (at best) a station 10 miles away from town with a parking lot the size of the town. Even worse, the "network effect" of a local bus system bringing people to downtown (which works great with downtown train stations) is lost because the train station is now at a "spoke" of the system, rather than the hub.
And the above is the best case scenario. At worst, they didn't even bother putting in a replacement station, and the area became completely automobile-ized.
A lot of plane crashes *do* have survivors... and the ones that didn't were often hit by $RANDOM_FLYING_OBJECT.
That said, there's pretty much no difference between an iPad and hardcover book anyway... except someone is more likely to try and hold on to their $400 ipad versus a $3 used book, even if there are better things you could be doing with your hands during an emergency, like flailing them about randomly.
International flights would probably still be mostly silent, for quite a few reasons: 1. The attendants enforce closing the window shade and limited conversation to help passengers sleep, this would be no different. 2. International roaming charges for every country who's tower you've connected to (not to mention the massive battery drain in an environment with limited charging options) 3. The FCC has no say in the matter once you're out of the US anyway, until all the countries follow the same rules they still need to be most restrictive...
On the bus, the driver has to listen to the same chatter the passengers do. If a passenger is too annoying they'll just pull over and wait for them to get off the phone. At this point even the apathetic passengers will "help" enforce the social contract...
I wish they were only local interactions with government. The problem is the federal government is taking the lion's share of taxes. The states can only add their own taxes to a point. If my state tax rate and federal tax rate were switched, we'd have some pretty amazing and useful services...
Considering there are only three roads into Manhattan (many jobs) from Jersey (many residents), it is a big deal when someone intentionally fouls up the already terrible rush hour traffic on one of them.
It's also somewhat comical because this same Governor single handedly scuttled a shovel ready (and mostly paid for) project to build a new rail tunnel into Manhattan... it's almost like he wants to encourage residents to move to the same state they're employed in, which would *not* work out for Jersey at all...
It's called "Programs and Features" now. It was actually a good rename, because no one ever used it to add new programs (all the add button did was run anything called setup.exe on removable media), only see what was installed and remove what they don't want.
That said, Microsoft should have made "add or remove programs" a keyword for it, instead of just remove, simply for people used to the old name like me.
I don't understand why these are mutually exclusive.. I have a matte screen protector on my phone and can still poke at it (and not only that, fingerprints don't show up as easily). Someone out there should make touchscreen matte monitors (I don't think a 28" screen protector would be all that easy to apply...).
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Yeah, over forty people could be killed and half of downtown destroyed! Oh wait, that wasn't a pipeline.
What rock didn't get that news?
Even so, in what world is transporting oil in vehicles safer? Is your heart at ease when an SUV drives around crossing gates, barely clearing the tracks before a 40 car train of tankers moving at 70MPH rolls through? Do you live for the moments when you're driving among several of these tankers on the interstate? Or behind one at a railroad crossing (while it was a gasoline truck, I can't imagine the effect of oil being much better).
It's not just that. Think of these four statements:
Don't drink the bleach, it's dangerous.
Don't cross the street, it's dangerous.
Don't climb the tree/fence/on top of cars, it's dangerous.
Don't run on the pavement, it's dangerous (real rule instituted at my grade school after I had graduated, where recess was held in the parking lot).
Too many rules closes too many doors. Kids will then decide on their own which rule is ok to break, and their safety now completely depends on their ability to assess which of the abovementioned activities is least dangerous. If *some* stuff they want to do (ie: climbing trees and fences) is allowed and some isn't, they'll probably take the path of least resistance.
Nobody should be surprised at this decision, Obama stated that nothing would change except for who is holding the data that is collected. The solution is to vote out every career politician and elect people of high moral character.
Except by default someone has to be a career politician to get anywhere. To get from "mayor of small town" to "US Senate" you need to win a series of progressively more aggressive elections (effectively making a career out of it). The best solution to this is to decentralize power to the point where the decisions made by people closer to the "mayor of a small town" level are more important in your day-to-day life than those made by "US Senator".
Barring that, I think something crazy like this would work: randomly select 9 registered voters as candidates for each electable position (from the pool of people eligible to vote for that position). Fund their campaigns, and disallow anyone outside that pool from campaigning. Think of it as a political version of the draft or jury duty. As seemingly bad as this scheme sounds, I find it hard to imagine the end result being any worse than what we have right now.
As it should be. In theory, states with crappier records should look to Massachusetts to fix their system. In the process they may find themselves outperforming Massachusetts.
How are taxes a company's fault? They're the government's and no one else.
In response to this the city government decided to impose a $1 fee for every individual occurrence of a private bus stopping at a city bus stop. It's estimated to cost each bus company $100,000/year (which if they're locked into a contract with Google, Apple, et al will in the short term punish the bus company rather than the company they're taking people to). That seems like a pretty fair arrangement (and they could raise the fee later, after giving the bus companies time to renegotiate), yet the people are still screaming that it's not enough. If the fees get too high the bus companies will either go bankrupt (if locked into their current contract) or will find it cost effective to pool their resources to purchase some buildings, knock them down, and build off street bus stops (which will turn a few precious parking spaces into driveways in the process).
The protesters are as fanatical and illogical as PETA and should best be ignored at this point...
Since you seem to have a habit of cutting out half my comments to distort their meaning, and failing to address those parts which you cut out, I can only assume you are incapable of a proper debate. I bid you adieu...
The first and last of these things I can do with any game I have purchased, either via a physical disk or via a persistent login/download link from e.g. shrapnel. The middle one is the only one that is at all unique and it doesnt seem important at all in context of the DRM.
Disk is useless if lost, damaged, or 1000 miles away in a cabinet while you're on a business trip. The middle one is very useful if you want to play games on a PC in a computer lab or library. Back in my college days, being able to plug an external drive into a lab PC and play counterstrike was quite handy for killing time between classes. And the steam DRM is basically: it needs to phone home about once a month. So once a month it uses about 2 megabytes of bandwidth for DRM, big friggin deal. It's akin to putting a velvet rope up to keep people from walking into unauthorized areas.
I object to bullshit pronouncements about how the Free Software community somehow is or should be grateful to Valve for this, as if they were doing us a favor.
When you put it that way (key being Free Software community) I do agree. However, as a member of the Linux community, I am grateful, because gaming is the *LAST* thing keeping Windows on my primary desktop. If Steam's entire catalog could run natively on Linux, I would only need windows for two games. And at that point, it becomes time-effective for me to investigate getting wine to work.
And if "attracting more people" is cause for diluting the mission of Debian then it will be a bad, not a good thing. The ifs in the previous sentence will be optimised out by any decent compiler.
I don't see how what Valve is doing is diluting the mission of Debian at all, at least not any more than the existence of the non-free repository. A key reason Debian is well known in the Linux community is because whatever people want/need to use can be easily used. What makes them special compared to most others is that Debian defaults to a free configuration. If Debian *didn't* play ball with binary blob distributors, I suspect it would be just as well known as these distros.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree here... my line of thinking falls closer to the "Open Source Software" camp than the "Free Software" camp...
If your gaming PC does not connect to the internet, I'm guessing you don't do much multiplayer...
That said: Steam's DRM is the least evil of them all, since it lets you re-download your games on any PC, anywhere as long as you remember your password. The "freedom" to not care if my gigs of games are wiped out in a hard drive failure, to copy the steam directory as-is to any PC on the same architecture and being able to straight up play, and to arbitrarily delete game files if I temporarily need the space is far more important to me than the freedom to look at arbitrary code.
I've heard Stallman speak, and he does make sense: if a program isn't behaving the way you want, the freedom to go in and correct that is very important towards reducing your stress while making your tasks easier. However, games by their very nature are unnecessary for getting actual work done. If you don't agree with a game's licensing, etc, you will never be forced to use it. Conversely, how many people are forced to use Microsoft Office every day?
This is a "choose your battles" scenario. Either 1) let Valve attract more people to Debian for desktop use. They'll play their closed source games when bored, and use the open source productivity software to get actual work done. Or, 2) fight them on this, they take their ball and go home, and the people they would have attracted continue to regard the FOSS movement as a bunch of loons that like to look gift horses in the mouth.
Credit unions are required by law to restrict membership, but some try to make it as broad as possible. One of the local ones in my area requires either you be an employee of a select few companies, a member of a select few unions, or a resident of any county they have a branch in. That third option is why most of the poor of our region end up with them. They have no fees, and the only minimum is to keep a $5 "share" in the credit union. Check cashing places don't even bother to set up shop in town (for the tin foil hatters the local grocery store chain cashes checks for $2), even in the areas with section 8 housing and $300/month rent for 2 bedrooms.
I can think of another real world addiction: buying/collecting tons of useless crap, and hoard everything they see. The funny thing is, getting these people onto games like WoW would only improve their life - instead of wasting money on crap that takes up precious space in tiny apartments, for $15 / month they can satisfy the collector urge without cluttering the apartment.
The funny thing is, once I realized this effect, I was able to benefit from it without actually playing the game. Every time I think "it'd be neat to have $USELESS_THING", I'd switch my thoughts over to "or I could reactivate my WoW account and work towards $TIMESINK_ACHIEVEMENT" and with that, I avoid both wasting time and buying useless crap.
Well of course, that part is obvious. But while looking, you need *something* to make your crappy job less crappy...
I feel like a possible solution for this is to figure out what the most important tasks on your list are, and do them in reverse order. The "stressing out your staff" method doesn't work if they give their staff a proper priority list (as that would relieve their stress). This will backfire spectacularly on your stress inducing manager as suddenly *they* are stressed because the important shit isn't getting done, and the worst thing they can say about you is that you are incapable of prioritizing correctly, which is technically the job of management to begin with.
Later, I ended the interview when he told me I couldn't use the whiteboard to make it easier for me to show him the answer.
I hope it was with something like "I don't feel I'd fit in with a company that doesn't believe in using the most efficient tools for the task at hand".
I'd never heard of a stress interview, but now I know of its existence I'll try and have fun with it should I find myself in that position...
A company where you can take a vacation whenever you want sounds like a good gig...
I can think of a few reasons:
1. You live in a bad enough neighborhood that there is a not-insignificant chance of someone stealing your gas.
2. You drive so infrequently that using three month old E10 gas causes damage to your engine.
If you don't have highly developed suburbs, why would anyone need to travel 100km to the city every day?
There's people who commute from Philadelphia to NYC every day. I'd imagine it's because the rent/taxes are much cheaper and the train is only 1:30, which is roughly the same amount of time someone at the southern tip of Staten Island would spend getting to midtown.
With high(er) speed rail you can do neat things like that in more places.
The worst part is, many towns build around railroads exorcised their train stations and rail lines. So places which once had a centrally located rail station now have a trail running through downtown, and (at best) a station 10 miles away from town with a parking lot the size of the town. Even worse, the "network effect" of a local bus system bringing people to downtown (which works great with downtown train stations) is lost because the train station is now at a "spoke" of the system, rather than the hub.
And the above is the best case scenario. At worst, they didn't even bother putting in a replacement station, and the area became completely automobile-ized.
The popularity of QuietCars on trains (even commuter trains now) seems to indicate that they *are* annoying enough...
A lot of plane crashes *do* have survivors... and the ones that didn't were often hit by $RANDOM_FLYING_OBJECT.
That said, there's pretty much no difference between an iPad and hardcover book anyway... except someone is more likely to try and hold on to their $400 ipad versus a $3 used book, even if there are better things you could be doing with your hands during an emergency, like flailing them about randomly.
International flights would probably still be mostly silent, for quite a few reasons:
1. The attendants enforce closing the window shade and limited conversation to help passengers sleep, this would be no different.
2. International roaming charges for every country who's tower you've connected to (not to mention the massive battery drain in an environment with limited charging options)
3. The FCC has no say in the matter once you're out of the US anyway, until all the countries follow the same rules they still need to be most restrictive...
On the bus, the driver has to listen to the same chatter the passengers do. If a passenger is too annoying they'll just pull over and wait for them to get off the phone. At this point even the apathetic passengers will "help" enforce the social contract...
I wish they were only local interactions with government. The problem is the federal government is taking the lion's share of taxes. The states can only add their own taxes to a point. If my state tax rate and federal tax rate were switched, we'd have some pretty amazing and useful services...
Considering there are only three roads into Manhattan (many jobs) from Jersey (many residents), it is a big deal when someone intentionally fouls up the already terrible rush hour traffic on one of them.
It's also somewhat comical because this same Governor single handedly scuttled a shovel ready (and mostly paid for) project to build a new rail tunnel into Manhattan... it's almost like he wants to encourage residents to move to the same state they're employed in, which would *not* work out for Jersey at all...
It's called "Programs and Features" now. It was actually a good rename, because no one ever used it to add new programs (all the add button did was run anything called setup.exe on removable media), only see what was installed and remove what they don't want.
That said, Microsoft should have made "add or remove programs" a keyword for it, instead of just remove, simply for people used to the old name like me.
I don't understand why these are mutually exclusive.. I have a matte screen protector on my phone and can still poke at it (and not only that, fingerprints don't show up as easily). Someone out there should make touchscreen matte monitors (I don't think a 28" screen protector would be all that easy to apply...).