Hard for me to see how I was reckless, unless that includes using a left turn lane to make a left turn. But I'll describe the episode and let you decide.
I pulled into the left turn lane across from my workplace, and settled in to wait for oncoming traffic to ease up. Lots off traffic, moving pretty fast. But not fast enough for one dude, who pulled into the center lane to pass. Obviously didn't see me before he began his maneuver, but the fact that I was in his way didn't cause him to say "oops" and cancel. No, he sped up, gambling that he could find an opening before he collided with me. He did, but just barely.
There may have been a near-death experience there, but it surely wasn't mine. I was driving a big old pre-OPEC Buick, and wearing a seat belt. Mr. Traffic Acrobat was driving VW Rabbit, and I think it's a safe bet he wasn't buckled up.
So, although my life was never in danger, I do resent the fact the he could have made me late for work, gotten blood and brains all over my windshield, and maybe even ruined my radiator.
That's not at all what I said. My argument is that the conspiracy is not as pervasive as people find it convenient to believe. If you meet somebody who claims to have been the victim of an illegal revenue-oriented speed trap, I think the odds are may 1,000 to one against their claim being valid.
Revenue speed traps have typically been set up by rural jurisdictions who prey on outsiders that don't know the local roads, don't vote in local elections, and find it very inconvenient to contest their tickets. That's real enough, but it gets transferred to every speeding ticket in the world. And it must be pretty rare these days, since most people travel by interstate, not local roads.
Now that logic is being transferred to the red light camera bugaboo. There are so many problems with this conspiracy theory I don't know where to start. When we began this discussion, I took the claims that some jurisdictions were illegally shortening their yellow lights at face value. But now that I think about it, that's very hard to believe. That could get the city or county sued — and these entities live in terror of litigation.
Of course, I could be wrong. I'll admit it if you point me at some data. But it has to be real data, not the usual blog rumors.
You're correct, but that's another issue. What matters here is not the merits of the lawsuit. It's the ability of plaintiff's lawyer to drag in a blogger who's only relationship to the suit is that she's spoken out against it. That would be disturbing even if the case had obvious merit.
I just read her motion to quash the supoena, and it has a very interesting claim: there's no indication if it was every approved by a judge. If that's the case, you have to wonder what stupid games this lawyer is playing.
I was expecting some patronizing, ad hominem arguments, but "band camp"? Come on, you can do better than that!
My opinions, such as they are, are informed by the following well-documented facts. Thousands of people die every year in intersection accidents. Most people break traffic rules right and left. Not just legal things like speed limits, but common sense concepts, like slowing down instead of speeding up when you see a yellow light.
In the face of that, we have a conspiracy theory that says that cities are deliberately making their interesections more dangerous just to generate revenue. Add to that the bad driver's usual ability to rationalize the fact that nothing's his fault, and somehow I can't avoid the idea that a self-righteous story linked in a self-righteous Slashdot post is utter crap.
Your logic escapes me. If a protocol has nothing in the way of error checking and uses a noisy channel, the data is very suspect indeed. The submitter had an axe to grind, and posted a link to somebody else's rant, not a news article. That's certainly a transmission with a maximum of noise and a minimum of error checking.
Here's another failure of logic. Go look up the word flamebait. (Preferrably in the Slashdot FAQs, since that's the definition that applies here.) It is not a synonym for "bullshit".
Not to worry though, I've already been downmodded as "Troll". Of course, that word doesn't apply to me either, no matter how stupid you think I am. But hey, it's all about shutting up people saying what you don't want to hear, isn't it?
I never said they were. Like all conspiracies, the conspiracy to squeeze law-abiding drivers probably exists. But, like all conspiracies, pretty much all the people who claim to be victims of it are full of shit.
No, I have not RTFA. Anything that begins with the standard "they must want the revenue" rationalization is self-deluding crap.
I used to work in Santa Clara, CA, on a street where the drivers where demonstrably crazy. It had 2 lanes plus a center left turn lane. The 35 MPH posted limit was eminently reasonable. Yet people routinely drove much faster, even using the center lane as a passing lane. Worst of all, it was a short street, so that speeding cut a few seconds at most off your commute.
One day, I narrowly escaped a headon collision with a particularly stupid speeder-weaver. I pried my fingers off the steering wheel, went to my office, and wrote a letter to the local police chief detailing conditions on this road, and suggesting a few minor improvements in enforcement.
I didn't get a few minor improvements — I got a major crackdown. I guess that letter was even scarier than I realized. A lot of my co-workers got ticketed. Did any of them admit to being bad drivers. No of course not. They were all perfect drivers. They all agreed that Santa Clara must need the extra revenue.
Face it, bozos. None of you is as good a driver as you think you are. If you think yellow lights are two short, don't fucking race them.
Everybody is not you. And jeez, $120 year is not that much when you consider the other costs of keeping a pet: vet bills, cleaning, paying for boarding or sitting when you're on vacation... And that's if you have some mongrel that you just keep for company.
I had this cat I was very fond of. Disappeared one day, and I never found out what happened to him. That was years ago, and I still miss the dude. That experience makes the Zoombak sound pretty cheap.
Aussie ISPs seem to be ahead of ours on several fronts. Aside from the packet shaping thing (a pretty good idea) there's the fact that they seem to be set up to support people who want DSL but not POTS. Ours are not, mostly. Rather a big omission in an era when everybody has a cell phone. None of the ISPs that serve California consumers seem to grasp this. With one notable exception, they either don't do it at all, or they offer expensive plans that are obviously aimed at business users. The one exception is AT&T/Yahoo, which does offer it — but you can't sign up over the web (in theory you can, but the application has trouble finding addresses) and none of their employees are properly trained in the procedures for setting it up.
Bandwidth costs are a lot lower in the US so they've been able to keep offering "unlimited" for a lot longer knowing that the majority of users would subsidise the few who actually do use a lot of bandwidth, but the increasing speeds of consumer internet connections coupled with the increasing amount of high-bandwidth content available means the camel's back has to break, eventually. Yes, it does. Judging from the trouble I had last night watching streamed TV from a couple of different sites, it already has. But U.S. ISPs aren't even looking at limiting downloads. Instead, they're trying to get money out of the people who serve bandwidth-heavy applications.
That's certainly not going to happen. "Network neutrality" aside, the applications that really use up the bandwidth are video streams. Ultimately, the service providers here are the entertainment conglomerates that create the content. They are not going to share: the recent writers strike was mainly about sharing Internet revenue; the TV networks and movie studios shut down for months, at a huge cost, rather to give in. They claimed that they haven't even figured out how to pay themselves for streaming content. That may or may not be BS, but ISPs are going to get the same answer.
Why the different strategy in the U.S. and Oz? Despite what you say, it appears so me that competition between ISPs actually motivated the use of bandwidth caps. After all, BSing about "unlimited bandwidth" is not going to work if your competitors are offering reliable service and you're not. And in the U.S., competition between telecom providers is a total joke.
Not only did you not read the article, you misread the submission. You seem to have taken the question "Why can't the world be happy with a good old desktop?" at face value. Please go read this and give it another try.
I agree that it's dishonest to advertise a service as "unlimited" when it's not. Not only should they admit that they impose limits, they should be required to specify what the limits are.
But let's be honest here. For years now, geeks have been pretending that bandwidth is an unlimited resource. We've had huge ranting flamefests on Slashdot whenever anybody suggests that you should pay a per-packet charge for your data, or that you be restricted for re-selling your packets. That's not the only reason ISPs have to pretend that they're selling unlimited flat-rate access, but it's a big one.
Let's examine the choices here:
Keep the flat fee structure, and force ISPs to build up so they can actually support all the bandwidth people are trying to squeeze out of it. That's expensive, and would price access out of a lot of user's reach. It's also difficult to specify, since it's a moving target.
And don't say, "they can just build up so that there's enough bandwidth in case everybody wants to use the system at once." No telecom network operates on that basis. If it were feasible, the landline phone system wouldn't crash every time there's a natural disaster and everybody runs to the phone to see if Aunt Bee is OK.
Require ISP to specify caps and fees for being allowed to exceed them. That's probably the most practical approach, and certainly one most users could live with. But as I said, geeks have always resisted this model.
Meter bandwidth and charge per-packet. Same problem.
Make content providers pay for the extra cost of serving their high-bandwidth applications. That's what the ISPs are pushing for, but it would destroy the "everybody's a publisher" model that's made the internet so popular.
Muddle along as we have been, with deliberately obfuscated usage rules that work OK for most people. Not my first choice, but probably what we'll end up doing.
If you really want to follow the process, you need to know all the steps. Getting that into a video would be a major production in itself. I'd settle for a written summary.
But we've seen AMD "lose" the CPU war before, and recover. Hopefully that will happen again. Don't hope too hard. AMD did well by capitalizing on Intel's mistakes. In particular, they grabbed the lead in the x64 marketplace (hell, they invented the x64 marketplace) while Intel was wasting its time and fortune on the Itanium boondoggle.
That's not an opportunity that's going to come twice. Plus, this time, it's AMD that's fumbled, releasing a key product with a fatal bug. Intel is huge, and can afford to make a mistake now and then. AMD can't.
What you say is especially true in the entertainment industry. Reneging on a verbal contract to star in Boxing Helena cost Kim Bassinger millions. Many people who saw the flick say she got off cheap!
The problem is, his worst movies are all based on video games. Once you've played the game, you're required to see the movie. It's, like, a law or something.
Slashdot Mirror
Hard for me to see how I was reckless, unless that includes using a left turn lane to make a left turn. But I'll describe the episode and let you decide.
I pulled into the left turn lane across from my workplace, and settled in to wait for oncoming traffic to ease up. Lots off traffic, moving pretty fast. But not fast enough for one dude, who pulled into the center lane to pass. Obviously didn't see me before he began his maneuver, but the fact that I was in his way didn't cause him to say "oops" and cancel. No, he sped up, gambling that he could find an opening before he collided with me. He did, but just barely.
There may have been a near-death experience there, but it surely wasn't mine. I was driving a big old pre-OPEC Buick, and wearing a seat belt. Mr. Traffic Acrobat was driving VW Rabbit, and I think it's a safe bet he wasn't buckled up.
So, although my life was never in danger, I do resent the fact the he could have made me late for work, gotten blood and brains all over my windshield, and maybe even ruined my radiator.
BTW, you're a moron.
That's not at all what I said. My argument is that the conspiracy is not as pervasive as people find it convenient to believe. If you meet somebody who claims to have been the victim of an illegal revenue-oriented speed trap, I think the odds are may 1,000 to one against their claim being valid.
Revenue speed traps have typically been set up by rural jurisdictions who prey on outsiders that don't know the local roads, don't vote in local elections, and find it very inconvenient to contest their tickets. That's real enough, but it gets transferred to every speeding ticket in the world. And it must be pretty rare these days, since most people travel by interstate, not local roads.
Now that logic is being transferred to the red light camera bugaboo. There are so many problems with this conspiracy theory I don't know where to start. When we began this discussion, I took the claims that some jurisdictions were illegally shortening their yellow lights at face value. But now that I think about it, that's very hard to believe. That could get the city or county sued — and these entities live in terror of litigation.
Of course, I could be wrong. I'll admit it if you point me at some data. But it has to be real data, not the usual blog rumors.
I didn't dismiss the story because because of it's plausibility. I dismissed it because it was a standard-issue rant.
You're correct, but that's another issue. What matters here is not the merits of the lawsuit. It's the ability of plaintiff's lawyer to drag in a blogger who's only relationship to the suit is that she's spoken out against it. That would be disturbing even if the case had obvious merit.
I just read her motion to quash the supoena, and it has a very interesting claim: there's no indication if it was every approved by a judge. If that's the case, you have to wonder what stupid games this lawyer is playing.
I was expecting some patronizing, ad hominem arguments, but "band camp"? Come on, you can do better than that!
My opinions, such as they are, are informed by the following well-documented facts. Thousands of people die every year in intersection accidents. Most people break traffic rules right and left. Not just legal things like speed limits, but common sense concepts, like slowing down instead of speeding up when you see a yellow light.
In the face of that, we have a conspiracy theory that says that cities are deliberately making their interesections more dangerous just to generate revenue. Add to that the bad driver's usual ability to rationalize the fact that nothing's his fault, and somehow I can't avoid the idea that a self-righteous story linked in a self-righteous Slashdot post is utter crap.
I know, it's totally lazy of me.
Your logic escapes me. If a protocol has nothing in the way of error checking and uses a noisy channel, the data is very suspect indeed. The submitter had an axe to grind, and posted a link to somebody else's rant, not a news article. That's certainly a transmission with a maximum of noise and a minimum of error checking.
Here's another failure of logic. Go look up the word flamebait. (Preferrably in the Slashdot FAQs, since that's the definition that applies here.) It is not a synonym for "bullshit".
Not to worry though, I've already been downmodded as "Troll". Of course, that word doesn't apply to me either, no matter how stupid you think I am. But hey, it's all about shutting up people saying what you don't want to hear, isn't it?
I never said they were. Like all conspiracies, the conspiracy to squeeze law-abiding drivers probably exists. But, like all conspiracies, pretty much all the people who claim to be victims of it are full of shit.
Wrong, I'm a troll. At least, that's what the moderators say.
No, I have not RTFA. Anything that begins with the standard "they must want the revenue" rationalization is self-deluding crap.
I used to work in Santa Clara, CA, on a street where the drivers where demonstrably crazy. It had 2 lanes plus a center left turn lane. The 35 MPH posted limit was eminently reasonable. Yet people routinely drove much faster, even using the center lane as a passing lane. Worst of all, it was a short street, so that speeding cut a few seconds at most off your commute.
One day, I narrowly escaped a headon collision with a particularly stupid speeder-weaver. I pried my fingers off the steering wheel, went to my office, and wrote a letter to the local police chief detailing conditions on this road, and suggesting a few minor improvements in enforcement.
I didn't get a few minor improvements — I got a major crackdown. I guess that letter was even scarier than I realized. A lot of my co-workers got ticketed. Did any of them admit to being bad drivers. No of course not. They were all perfect drivers. They all agreed that Santa Clara must need the extra revenue.
Face it, bozos. None of you is as good a driver as you think you are. If you think yellow lights are two short, don't fucking race them.
Fuck off.
Everybody is not you. And jeez, $120 year is not that much when you consider the other costs of keeping a pet: vet bills, cleaning, paying for boarding or sitting when you're on vacation... And that's if you have some mongrel that you just keep for company.
I had this cat I was very fond of. Disappeared one day, and I never found out what happened to him. That was years ago, and I still miss the dude. That experience makes the Zoombak sound pretty cheap.
That's certainly not going to happen. "Network neutrality" aside, the applications that really use up the bandwidth are video streams. Ultimately, the service providers here are the entertainment conglomerates that create the content. They are not going to share: the recent writers strike was mainly about sharing Internet revenue; the TV networks and movie studios shut down for months, at a huge cost, rather to give in. They claimed that they haven't even figured out how to pay themselves for streaming content. That may or may not be BS, but ISPs are going to get the same answer.
Why the different strategy in the U.S. and Oz? Despite what you say, it appears so me that competition between ISPs actually motivated the use of bandwidth caps. After all, BSing about "unlimited bandwidth" is not going to work if your competitors are offering reliable service and you're not. And in the U.S., competition between telecom providers is a total joke.
Not only did you not read the article, you misread the submission. You seem to have taken the question "Why can't the world be happy with a good old desktop?" at face value. Please go read this and give it another try.
But let's be honest here. For years now, geeks have been pretending that bandwidth is an unlimited resource. We've had huge ranting flamefests on Slashdot whenever anybody suggests that you should pay a per-packet charge for your data, or that you be restricted for re-selling your packets. That's not the only reason ISPs have to pretend that they're selling unlimited flat-rate access, but it's a big one.
Let's examine the choices here:
And don't say, "they can just build up so that there's enough bandwidth in case everybody wants to use the system at once." No telecom network operates on that basis. If it were feasible, the landline phone system wouldn't crash every time there's a natural disaster and everybody runs to the phone to see if Aunt Bee is OK.
If you really want to follow the process, you need to know all the steps. Getting that into a video would be a major production in itself. I'd settle for a written summary.
They tend to quack up!
No, it didn't.
That's not an opportunity that's going to come twice. Plus, this time, it's AMD that's fumbled, releasing a key product with a fatal bug. Intel is huge, and can afford to make a mistake now and then. AMD can't.
Yes, having only one company making x64 chips would be an end to competition and cheap CPUs.
But WTF does everybody seem to think that there's only one company making Blu-Ray players?
What you say is especially true in the entertainment industry. Reneging on a verbal contract to star in Boxing Helena cost Kim Bassinger millions. Many people who saw the flick say she got off cheap!
Never mind a blaster shot. How about a stormtrooper who can hold off an Ewok with a rock?!
That's never stopped us before!
The problem is, his worst movies are all based on video games. Once you've played the game, you're required to see the movie. It's, like, a law or something.
Or he could wait for the DVD. Or he could go to aintitcool.com. Or he could just ask somebody. I was making a joke, damnit!