...while "automatic", it does not install automatically unless you've enabled automatic software updates. If you haven't, it takes the same form regular updates do: a little dialog pops up in the corner of the desktop alerting you about the update, asking what you want to do.
You are incorrect. It automatically installed on three different macs that I own, and I never enable automatic update.
Maybe I'm just a terrible person whose sense of childlike wonder and love of lasers has shriveled; but isn't 'clearing leaves' the sort of job where a simple nozzle blowing compressed air(turned on and off based on sensor input if it turns out that you can implement a sensor system at lower cost than just running the compressor a bit more often) at the track immediately in front of the wheels would be more than adequate for the purpose?
You're missing the damage that compressed air / water does to the substrate of the track. It undermines the foundations of the line. They already do this, but it costs them more money to repair the line than it would if the leaves were just burnt on the spot.
If that's really all true and you're not exaggerating or bending anything, that's flat out mega-corruption - how do you UNcondemn a house, if no changes whatsoever were made to the structure?
Have you considered getting a lawyer, or at least giving this story to a newspaper? I know it was only "$800", but if they get away with that today, then tomorrow, who knows.
Watch the TV show Hoarders. Cities condemn houses for trash violations from time to time. They even have demoed the house after the homeowner refused to clean it up because it was cheaper for the city to tear it down and cell the land than to try and clean it up.
The FBI's problem is that, soon, even warrants won't be sufficient to pry open the encryption protecting consumer level devices.
Yep, that's the FBI's problem. Tough cookies. If FBI agents want an easy job, they should become software developers or managers or something. Law enforcement has these restrictions put upon them to make it difficult. Not because we support crime, but because it's the agents are in a position of power and need to be kept under control.
They could have probably achieved the same thing by just having people use their wifi service? No GPS needed. The bonus is devices such as tablets could be used too. Sure it would mean needing to sign into wifi, but maybe giving people choice between wifi and GPS?
Maybe as an extension, they could even have someone walk the line, in busy locations, taking orders on a tablet, equipped with a card reader?
The wait in most coffee shops isn't the time to place your order, but to fill your order. Unless you're having just a straight pre-brewed cup of coffee, they aren't going to speed things up by using an iPad to take your order in line. If they do order favorites, for instance, you might be able to one tap your coffee order when you know you're about 5 minutes out from the store and walk right in and pick it up. If I'm already in the store, I'd rather just go to the front of the line and flirt with the cute baristas that seem to work in every coffee place in the world.
Well the second paragraph of the summary makes it pretty clear it isn't just a database of "people who look like they could be criminals". They are repeat offenders of serious crimes. I don't really even get what you mean by "biased slice of the population". Yeah it's biased, because they have to include bad guys in the list. Otherwise what do you mean? Data isn't racist, which was my original point. I'm assuming unless they are the most bigotted people on the planet and somehow programmed that into their algorithm, their lists include a pretty fair percentage of each race, according to their relative rates of committing the crimes they are singling out as important.
His point is that the police may be racially profiling to begin with. If they are more suspicious of black people, more likely to arrest a black person to begin with, then the data base is going to be artificially skewed towards information about black people. There may be plenty of white people that are doing the exact same thing without ever being caught because they aren't getting stop and frisked and found to be in possession of drugs, for instance.
250 km of seabed, with 50 miles between islands...i suppose consistency of units would be a lot to ask for...
The Brits are confused about units. They can't decide whether to use SI, Imperial, or Ancient Hebrew measurements. Just be thankful they didn't measure the distance in palms or spans.
There's this thing called RADIO, invented by a rather clever chap called MARCONI. It allows untethered communication between two points. It doesn't, therefore, rely on cables. It's also potentially much faster than any cable-based system and not prone to submarines colliding with it. Which happens a LOT up Scapa way.
Sounds like those sub captains need more training... The sub should never touch the floor.
That is incorrect. There are only certain stretches of various autobahns that have unrestricted speed laws. When you're driving through busy areas they have speed limits as low as 90 km/h. They also have electronic signs that can vary the speed limit based on traffic. My cousins who are from Germany say that, in some areas, they have sensors in the road that will detect when you are speeding and take a photo of you and they mail you a citation. I know that I was hit with a speed camera on the autobahn near Hannover, but the rental company never billed me for the speeding ticket.
Have you compared the average car in Germany with the ones in the USA? Furthermore, in Germany there are mandatory periodic technical inspections, and these are no joke. Half the cars I see in the USA would never pass these inspections. Also, getting a driver license in Germany is HARD, and the average Autobahn driver is very well disciplined compared to his USA counterpart (exceptions exist, I know I know...)
I've driven on the autobahn in Germany. I came back to the US and I couldn't stand to drive for months. The average US driver does not have a good enough understanding of courtesy and physics to drive safely on the autobahn.
Maybe you just have small hands but I found Blackberry phones to be completely useless. I can't type or even dial a phone number on them without a serious case of fat finger syndrome. It takes forever for me to type out the simplest things on a blackberry.
Except there is no case. He is not wanted for any crime by Sweden. He is wanted for questioning. In nearly any other western country, you could tell the police to piss off, but not Sweden. They can arrest you just to talk to you, but choosing to not talk to them is not a crime. The UK has made the bogus claim that, because he doesn't want to be arrested for such a thing, means that he is a fugitive of UK law. How preposterous. If an Englishmen in America didn't want to talk to the police of Mozambique that does not mean in itself that the Americans can reasonably arrest him for being a fugitive of US law.
They can take you into custody to question you in the US, also. You don't have to answer any of their questions, but they can definitely take you into custody.
It's relative: I averaged something like 60ms pings, while everyone else had 20-30ms pings (DSL was still fairly new back then). Not like I was roughing it at 250+ like in the old modem days.
60ms isn't bad. I was expecting somewhere in the 300-500ms range. That is the kind of latency I've seen with other wireless internet links from back in the day.
Only real issue I had was with the lag, which made it rough for FPS gaming, though doable.
It was only doable because everyone else had low latency links. If you were in a game where everyone had high latency links like yours, the game would be completely unplayable. As it was, the people who had low latency links probably hated playing with you, and I don't blame them at all.
Wow. Just wow. There are some real gems in that article:
"I remember my parents and some other adults talking about profanity to some kid," Haselton says.[8] "I just thought, 'Why not declare on midnight, January 1, that all swear words are not swear words anymore? Then there will be no such thing as foul language.'"
What the hell kind of idiot thinks things like this? He obviously does not understand human expression or language (hence the 1M line diatribes). Most of the content of his Wikipedia entry consists of quotes of himself. My guess is that he has some sock puppet that he uses to edit his own Wikipedia page. The drivel on there is worse than the stuff he posts on Slashdot. Best of all, the guy thinks he's a freaking rocket scientist.
To find out who's the youngest linux kernel developer who (to have some objective criteria) had a patch accepted into the mainstream line.
Or you know, anything else besides something based on multiple choice and memorization.
That's not a good guide at all. When I was 23, I submitted a patch to kernel.org for an issue with the USB HID driver. Some idiot had gone to sleep with a spinlock. I submitted that patch as per all the guidelines on kernel.org at the time. The bug (which would grind your computer to a halt with the correct hardware attached), remained unpatched for 6 kernel versions before some mainstream kernel dev took my exact same patch and submitted it under his own name. If you don't already have a name, or if you don't have the weight of a giant corporation behind you, you'll never get your patch into the kernel, even if its a simple one line fix that is obvious.
Or you just need one malicious actor in charge of an enterprise deployment server. This is especially an issue if you have a BYOD policy and one bad apple that wants to steal peoples banking credentials. If I am used to installing apps from my corporation on my phone, anyone who has control of that deployment machine could potentially attack my device. That includes nefarious people who gain access to the deployment server over the internet.
I know that a private citizen does not have to perform a background check. I might just feel better about doing the background check before I gave someone a gun, that is all. And the whole point of the FFL is to unlink you from that gun. You've transferred it, and you have it in a legal register showing that you no longer own it. But, as you say, if there is no link to you and the gun to begin with, then you have nothing to worry about from that standpoint.
The only thing that is not illegal, that could be implied by your comment, is the sale of a firearm from one private citizen to another without the aid of an FFL. Personally, I think anyone who would make such a sale without the aid of an FFL is an idiot, as it could lead to legal complications in the future.
I've sold guns that way, but then I've always bought my guns without the use of a FFL, so the sale would *never* be traced to me. Well, theoretically, the person I sold it to could try to identify me, but that would fail, so the gun check would turn up someone in the '80s that bought it from a FFL, and got rid of it. That person is probably dead anyway. So all the tracking will find a dead end that leads nowhere. Not sure how that'd get anyone in trouble, unless you think the types of people to sell guns second-hand without a license would always buy it from an FFL themselves?
If I owned a gun and sold it to a private citizen, I would want to transfer through an FFL strictly so that I have documented proof that I transferred ownership. The reason being that I would not want the gun traced back to me if some sort of crime were committed with it. In the case that you mention, where you bought the gun from a private citizen, I see no reason not to sell it without the help of an FFL from a legal standpoint. Does an FFL perform a criminal background check when you do a private party transfer? If so, I might still want to do it for that reason.
Technically, you still have to pay state sales tax on purchases made over the Internet. You just exploit the fact that the states can't force Internet retailers to collect those taxes and send them to the state as a way to skip out on paying your taxes.
You are completely incorrect. The interstate commerce clause specifically forbids a state from charging sales tax on interstate commerce. States that want to tax interstate commerce charge a "use tax". Whether such a tax is legal, I don't know. The argument in favor of a use tax is that it puts the tax burden on the buyer instead of the seller, and therefore does not impede interstate commerce. But you are definitely not charged sales tax on interstate purchases entirely because the federal government has not authorized one.
and as long as the identities of gun owners is somehow considered sacrosanct and unrecorded, purchases under false pretenses will happen.
Any time you purchase a gun from an FFL (Federally licensed dealer) they must run a background check and must record your identity. They keep those records indefinitely. The only time you can purchase a gun and have it be unrecorded, is if a private citizen buys directly from another private citizen in person. Only an FFL holder is allowed to ship or receive a firearm through any courier service. Purchasing a gun o behalf of someone else is illegal. Purchasing a gun from an FFL using a fake identity is also illegal. You also have to certify that you are not being treated for any mental health disorders, and that you do not have a restraining order against you. You cannot be a drug addict. What you are talking about is already illegal. The only thing that is not illegal, that could be implied by your comment, is the sale of a firearm from one private citizen to another without the aid of an FFL. Personally, I think anyone who would make such a sale without the aid of an FFL is an idiot, as it could lead to legal complications in the future.
I'm curious how a command economy with what amounts to a captive labor force runs out money.
I don't dispute that the Soviet economy as a whole was ineffective, but lack of money for defense spending seems kind of hard to comprehend.
I can see labor efficiency getting worse, hard currency reserves being depleted, but when you can direct labor and physical capital for anything you want, how do you run out of money?
FWIW, I've mostly believed the Soviet Economy Collapse in Competition With The US meme, mainly because it seems to fit and no other explanation has really been offered.
Their command economy was not efficient enough to produce all of the supplies they needed. They often had to buy Western grain to feed people. The leaders of the country wanted Western luxuries but, due to their restricted economy, had very limited hard money that was useful outside of the USSR. Hell, even the US relied on the USSR for some things. To build the SR-71, the CIA used shell companies throughout the world to buy titanium from the Soviets.
Slashdot Mirror
...while "automatic", it does not install automatically unless you've enabled automatic software updates. If you haven't, it takes the same form regular updates do: a little dialog pops up in the corner of the desktop alerting you about the update, asking what you want to do.
You are incorrect. It automatically installed on three different macs that I own, and I never enable automatic update.
big binary blobs (my term, BBBs)
They prefer to be called big beautiful blobs, and some people really like them that way.
Maybe I'm just a terrible person whose sense of childlike wonder and love of lasers has shriveled; but isn't 'clearing leaves' the sort of job where a simple nozzle blowing compressed air(turned on and off based on sensor input if it turns out that you can implement a sensor system at lower cost than just running the compressor a bit more often) at the track immediately in front of the wheels would be more than adequate for the purpose?
You're missing the damage that compressed air / water does to the substrate of the track. It undermines the foundations of the line. They already do this, but it costs them more money to repair the line than it would if the leaves were just burnt on the spot.
If that's really all true and you're not exaggerating or bending anything, that's flat out mega-corruption - how do you UNcondemn a house, if no changes whatsoever were made to the structure? Have you considered getting a lawyer, or at least giving this story to a newspaper? I know it was only "$800", but if they get away with that today, then tomorrow, who knows.
Watch the TV show Hoarders. Cities condemn houses for trash violations from time to time. They even have demoed the house after the homeowner refused to clean it up because it was cheaper for the city to tear it down and cell the land than to try and clean it up.
The FBI's problem is that, soon, even warrants won't be sufficient to pry open the encryption protecting consumer level devices.
Yep, that's the FBI's problem. Tough cookies. If FBI agents want an easy job, they should become software developers or managers or something. Law enforcement has these restrictions put upon them to make it difficult. Not because we support crime, but because it's the agents are in a position of power and need to be kept under control.
They could have probably achieved the same thing by just having people use their wifi service? No GPS needed. The bonus is devices such as tablets could be used too. Sure it would mean needing to sign into wifi, but maybe giving people choice between wifi and GPS?
Maybe as an extension, they could even have someone walk the line, in busy locations, taking orders on a tablet, equipped with a card reader?
The wait in most coffee shops isn't the time to place your order, but to fill your order. Unless you're having just a straight pre-brewed cup of coffee, they aren't going to speed things up by using an iPad to take your order in line. If they do order favorites, for instance, you might be able to one tap your coffee order when you know you're about 5 minutes out from the store and walk right in and pick it up. If I'm already in the store, I'd rather just go to the front of the line and flirt with the cute baristas that seem to work in every coffee place in the world.
Well the second paragraph of the summary makes it pretty clear it isn't just a database of "people who look like they could be criminals". They are repeat offenders of serious crimes. I don't really even get what you mean by "biased slice of the population". Yeah it's biased, because they have to include bad guys in the list. Otherwise what do you mean? Data isn't racist, which was my original point. I'm assuming unless they are the most bigotted people on the planet and somehow programmed that into their algorithm, their lists include a pretty fair percentage of each race, according to their relative rates of committing the crimes they are singling out as important.
His point is that the police may be racially profiling to begin with. If they are more suspicious of black people, more likely to arrest a black person to begin with, then the data base is going to be artificially skewed towards information about black people. There may be plenty of white people that are doing the exact same thing without ever being caught because they aren't getting stop and frisked and found to be in possession of drugs, for instance.
250 km of seabed, with 50 miles between islands...i suppose consistency of units would be a lot to ask for...
The Brits are confused about units. They can't decide whether to use SI, Imperial, or Ancient Hebrew measurements. Just be thankful they didn't measure the distance in palms or spans.
There's this thing called RADIO, invented by a rather clever chap called MARCONI. It allows untethered communication between two points. It doesn't, therefore, rely on cables. It's also potentially much faster than any cable-based system and not prone to submarines colliding with it. Which happens a LOT up Scapa way.
Sounds like those sub captains need more training... The sub should never touch the floor.
You are aware that the Zune Marketplace music (PlaysForSure v2) would only work on a Zune right? And that PlaysForSure v1 would not work.
Good thing for Microsoft there is no one with a Zune to sue them.
The German Autobahns are unrestricted.
That is incorrect. There are only certain stretches of various autobahns that have unrestricted speed laws. When you're driving through busy areas they have speed limits as low as 90 km/h. They also have electronic signs that can vary the speed limit based on traffic. My cousins who are from Germany say that, in some areas, they have sensors in the road that will detect when you are speeding and take a photo of you and they mail you a citation. I know that I was hit with a speed camera on the autobahn near Hannover, but the rental company never billed me for the speeding ticket.
Have you compared the average car in Germany with the ones in the USA? Furthermore, in Germany there are mandatory periodic technical inspections, and these are no joke. Half the cars I see in the USA would never pass these inspections. Also, getting a driver license in Germany is HARD, and the average Autobahn driver is very well disciplined compared to his USA counterpart (exceptions exist, I know I know...)
I've driven on the autobahn in Germany. I came back to the US and I couldn't stand to drive for months. The average US driver does not have a good enough understanding of courtesy and physics to drive safely on the autobahn.
Maybe you just have small hands but I found Blackberry phones to be completely useless. I can't type or even dial a phone number on them without a serious case of fat finger syndrome. It takes forever for me to type out the simplest things on a blackberry.
Except there is no case. He is not wanted for any crime by Sweden. He is wanted for questioning. In nearly any other western country, you could tell the police to piss off, but not Sweden. They can arrest you just to talk to you, but choosing to not talk to them is not a crime. The UK has made the bogus claim that, because he doesn't want to be arrested for such a thing, means that he is a fugitive of UK law. How preposterous. If an Englishmen in America didn't want to talk to the police of Mozambique that does not mean in itself that the Americans can reasonably arrest him for being a fugitive of US law.
They can take you into custody to question you in the US, also. You don't have to answer any of their questions, but they can definitely take you into custody.
It's relative: I averaged something like 60ms pings, while everyone else had 20-30ms pings (DSL was still fairly new back then). Not like I was roughing it at 250+ like in the old modem days.
60ms isn't bad. I was expecting somewhere in the 300-500ms range. That is the kind of latency I've seen with other wireless internet links from back in the day.
Only real issue I had was with the lag, which made it rough for FPS gaming, though doable.
It was only doable because everyone else had low latency links. If you were in a game where everyone had high latency links like yours, the game would be completely unplayable. As it was, the people who had low latency links probably hated playing with you, and I don't blame them at all.
Bennett Haselton (born November 20, 1978) is a frequent commenter on the website Slashdot.org, where he is widely disliked by readers.
Wow. Just wow. There are some real gems in that article:
What the hell kind of idiot thinks things like this? He obviously does not understand human expression or language (hence the 1M line diatribes). Most of the content of his Wikipedia entry consists of quotes of himself. My guess is that he has some sock puppet that he uses to edit his own Wikipedia page. The drivel on there is worse than the stuff he posts on Slashdot. Best of all, the guy thinks he's a freaking rocket scientist.
To find out who's the youngest linux kernel developer who (to have some objective criteria) had a patch accepted into the mainstream line. Or you know, anything else besides something based on multiple choice and memorization.
That's not a good guide at all. When I was 23, I submitted a patch to kernel.org for an issue with the USB HID driver. Some idiot had gone to sleep with a spinlock. I submitted that patch as per all the guidelines on kernel.org at the time. The bug (which would grind your computer to a halt with the correct hardware attached), remained unpatched for 6 kernel versions before some mainstream kernel dev took my exact same patch and submitted it under his own name. If you don't already have a name, or if you don't have the weight of a giant corporation behind you, you'll never get your patch into the kernel, even if its a simple one line fix that is obvious.
Or you just need one malicious actor in charge of an enterprise deployment server. This is especially an issue if you have a BYOD policy and one bad apple that wants to steal peoples banking credentials. If I am used to installing apps from my corporation on my phone, anyone who has control of that deployment machine could potentially attack my device. That includes nefarious people who gain access to the deployment server over the internet.
I know that a private citizen does not have to perform a background check. I might just feel better about doing the background check before I gave someone a gun, that is all. And the whole point of the FFL is to unlink you from that gun. You've transferred it, and you have it in a legal register showing that you no longer own it. But, as you say, if there is no link to you and the gun to begin with, then you have nothing to worry about from that standpoint.
The only thing that is not illegal, that could be implied by your comment, is the sale of a firearm from one private citizen to another without the aid of an FFL. Personally, I think anyone who would make such a sale without the aid of an FFL is an idiot, as it could lead to legal complications in the future.
I've sold guns that way, but then I've always bought my guns without the use of a FFL, so the sale would *never* be traced to me. Well, theoretically, the person I sold it to could try to identify me, but that would fail, so the gun check would turn up someone in the '80s that bought it from a FFL, and got rid of it. That person is probably dead anyway. So all the tracking will find a dead end that leads nowhere. Not sure how that'd get anyone in trouble, unless you think the types of people to sell guns second-hand without a license would always buy it from an FFL themselves?
If I owned a gun and sold it to a private citizen, I would want to transfer through an FFL strictly so that I have documented proof that I transferred ownership. The reason being that I would not want the gun traced back to me if some sort of crime were committed with it. In the case that you mention, where you bought the gun from a private citizen, I see no reason not to sell it without the help of an FFL from a legal standpoint. Does an FFL perform a criminal background check when you do a private party transfer? If so, I might still want to do it for that reason.
Technically, you still have to pay state sales tax on purchases made over the Internet. You just exploit the fact that the states can't force Internet retailers to collect those taxes and send them to the state as a way to skip out on paying your taxes.
You are completely incorrect. The interstate commerce clause specifically forbids a state from charging sales tax on interstate commerce. States that want to tax interstate commerce charge a "use tax". Whether such a tax is legal, I don't know. The argument in favor of a use tax is that it puts the tax burden on the buyer instead of the seller, and therefore does not impede interstate commerce. But you are definitely not charged sales tax on interstate purchases entirely because the federal government has not authorized one.
and as long as the identities of gun owners is somehow considered sacrosanct and unrecorded, purchases under false pretenses will happen.
Any time you purchase a gun from an FFL (Federally licensed dealer) they must run a background check and must record your identity. They keep those records indefinitely. The only time you can purchase a gun and have it be unrecorded, is if a private citizen buys directly from another private citizen in person. Only an FFL holder is allowed to ship or receive a firearm through any courier service. Purchasing a gun o behalf of someone else is illegal. Purchasing a gun from an FFL using a fake identity is also illegal. You also have to certify that you are not being treated for any mental health disorders, and that you do not have a restraining order against you. You cannot be a drug addict. What you are talking about is already illegal. The only thing that is not illegal, that could be implied by your comment, is the sale of a firearm from one private citizen to another without the aid of an FFL. Personally, I think anyone who would make such a sale without the aid of an FFL is an idiot, as it could lead to legal complications in the future.
With his bare hands, while riding on a bear.
But what the world really wants to know is: Will he be wearing a shirt?
I'm curious how a command economy with what amounts to a captive labor force runs out money.
I don't dispute that the Soviet economy as a whole was ineffective, but lack of money for defense spending seems kind of hard to comprehend.
I can see labor efficiency getting worse, hard currency reserves being depleted, but when you can direct labor and physical capital for anything you want, how do you run out of money?
FWIW, I've mostly believed the Soviet Economy Collapse in Competition With The US meme, mainly because it seems to fit and no other explanation has really been offered.
Their command economy was not efficient enough to produce all of the supplies they needed. They often had to buy Western grain to feed people. The leaders of the country wanted Western luxuries but, due to their restricted economy, had very limited hard money that was useful outside of the USSR. Hell, even the US relied on the USSR for some things. To build the SR-71, the CIA used shell companies throughout the world to buy titanium from the Soviets.