How did you catch HIV? Was it IV drug use? I only ask because I think it's exceedingly rare to catch HIV through straight sex -- I know like 15 HIV+ people (a friend of mine works in a clinic) and it's funny because to us we wonder who the straight people are that get it. It's almost always homosexual males that practice anal sex or IV drug users.
> The levy will only be in effect during business hours, move the couch at night. It's a sensible plan that doesn't ream natives too hard imho
I dunno, maybe you are right. Maybe it's not a big deal. Maybe it will make life better for all of us. To me it just screams that Bloomberg is trying really hard to get more money out of use somehow, and that's it.
And who knows what other machinations are going on that we don't know about. I mean he is also going to have to install cameras everywhere, and pay for all that infrastructure using government funds. Where do those contracts go? Who gets them? Who gets to install all the cameras? Who gets to staff the department(s) created to maintain and monitor all of us and to enforce the So86th rule?
And then when it's all said and done government will have grown a little bit -- maybe not a lot. Maybe just 1% larger -- and that's public money being spent on bullshit. And in the meantime I will have to pay $10 every time I want to drive to Manhattan.
It's just one small reason why life in NYC will suck even more..
PS: I live in Sunnyside LIC too. Where do you live? I'm on 47th St. and Skillman..
> This just isn't true. You can get a very nice 1k sqft apartment in a great bldg in Manhattan for $5k/month (which > is still incredibly high). $5/sqft/month is the going rate for apartments in lux bldgs - walkups are less, and I > don't know of ANYWHERE renting for $10/sqft/month.
Ok, so I made a mistake in the math. It is not a linear function. Yes, as you increase the square footage the price drops off.
At the LOW end (like 400- 600 sq foot -- which is ALL most people can afford) it is $5 for crappy, $10 for luxury, which is what I originally said,
Who can afford 1000 sq.ft. of ANYTHING in Manhattan? Noone I know -- only the finance dicks or the millionaires can.
Yes, if you can splurge on 1000 square feet the price drops DOWN to $5 a square foot. Sure. But can you afford $5k a month? I know I can't. I suppose if I could it would be a deal compared to $5/sq.ft. for non-luxury. And I also suppose that if I could I wouldn't be bitching here...
Anyway it doesn't help me any. My original numbers still stand, and yes, it's expensive and yes, it fucking sucks.
One other poster mentioned living in an outer borough as an option. Sure, it is, but then you have to deal with the subway. Either scenario sucks in some way -- and then you still end up probably spending just about as much for just a different lifestyle (which may be quieter on weekends with more space, but has the added commute annoyance thrown in during the week).
And living in an outer-borough without a car kind of sucks. And now that Bloomberg wants to charge us for driving into Manhattan -- it will suck even MORE! YAY!
Wow. That inspires me to do something. Actually I look at San Francisco as paradise compared to NYC -- but I know it has its problems too. It's just smaller and nicer than NYC so to me that place would be a welcome relief.
I really don't think charging $10 per car is going to fix the problem. Already the traffic is bad enough that most commuters do NOT drive to work. That is a myth. Do you know ANYONE that drives to work that is not rich?
Yes, rich people will pay the $10. They already pay $50/day to park their cars in private lots -- to them it's not a big deal.
To use average folk it means that the occasional time we want to drive into Manhattan during that time (yes, I have had to move furniture during work hours occasionally), we will be charged for it by the government.
That's just wrong. Why should I part with my money? Why should Bloomberg's fucking city government get more of my hard-earned $$? I already give that fucking guy hundreds of dollars in parking tickets each year -- why does he get even more money from me?
I like having the option of putting up with the traffic in order to drive to Manhattan. I sometimes NEED to. Charging me for it will definitely suck.
And on top of all the other things that suck about NYC -- having to pay this fine is probably just a straw on the camel's back.. the the camel's back is probably far from breaking -- but GOD I wish it would break soon and people would fucking say "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!! STOP FUCKING WITH US!! BUILD AFFORDABLE HOUSING!! FIX THE ROADS!! MAKE THE SUBWAY BETTER!! FINISH THE SECOND AVENUE LINE!!", etc..
> That made me chuckle, very true. I live in Sunnyside LIC, come in to the city every day, don't drive... And yet > somehow avoid the horrors of the rush hour subway experience... It's called a bicycle. This is a great city to be > a cyclist! Aside from this one issue.. oh what was it.
I agree with you mostly. I bike around everywhere too. But there are times when bikes are not convenient. When you have to move furniture, or when you are traveling as a group and you don't all have bikes. For those times I want to be able to not be subjected to the inhumanity of the subway. Cabs are nice then. And having to pay a premium to take cabs would suck.
Anyway you argue against cabs and against cars so I can't really agree with most of what you say. Yes I would like the city to be more bike friendly but penalizing drivers and cabs is not the right way to go about it. Just because it makes you happy doesn't mean it will make this world a better place...
> Spoken by someone who, despite having 20 (I'll not argue claimed) years in the city, doesnt know it.
I know the city quite well. Fuck you!;)
> I've never had any problem getting move tickets. I go to movie openings and first day showings all the time with my friends, it's a question of calling up moviefone, seeing which of a dozen theatres are playing the movie,
Okay yeah so in Brooklyn it's a little easier to get tickets. Big deal. My point was more about the crowding and the inconvenience and misery it causes. Anyway who goes to the movies in Brooklyn? I don't... and neither does most of the city except for the people ALREADY IN Brooklyn. I live in Queens. To get to brooklyn it takes me about 2+ hours because ALL THE TRAINS THERE EXCEPT THE G (which runs like once in a blue moon) HAVE TO GO THROUGH MANHATTAN FIRST. I can walk to Brooklyn faster.
> While I don't like Bloomberg's plan either..
Amen. It's fucked. Really it is.
> The subway really is one of most impressive things in the world. I've been all over the world, and I've *never* seen another system that compares (and I've lived in NY for 20+ years myself). I can't imagine, say, living in DC and having the subway stop running at night.
The subway runs "in theory" at night. By that it means that between the hours of 2am and 5am maybe you'll get home, or maybe not. Oh and it runs great if you live in Manhattan -- but try taking it to Queens. Maybe yuor Brooklyn lines are better -- but the 7 trains run so few and far between (really the 7 train which is my line has 1 train between 2am and 4am!!) that you are better off WALKING home. I frankly never take the subway at night... it takes too damned long. I'll pay the $20+ in cab fare rather than sit in the station for 1.5 hours waiting for the next train...
Anyway so what if the subway is open 24/7? It sucks all the other times so hard that doesn't make up for it. And sorry -- the DC subway is cleaner and if you've ever been to Europe the subways there are better. The Moscow subway is much better than NY's for any number of reasons...
> Dude, that's called supply and demand. What is your problem? Do you prefer rents to be lower and unavailable to anyone? Your complaint makes no sense.
Hmm that old Adam-smith argument. Yes clearly I am a communist that deserves to be burned alive. I also probably like Hitler and I killed all the Jews. It was me.
No man, my point is that it sucks. That's all. It fucking does. And you clearly have never lived here. From the sounds of it you are British -- "The public transport in... ". "Public transport" is a Britishism for public transportation. Anyway -- whatever. My point is that life in NYC sucks. You don't know the half of it. I can go on and on as to why it sucks. It just does. Until you have lived here you DO NOT UNDERSTAND!!;)
I am sure people in concentration camps tell you it sucked. It is just an abstract notion. Misery always is. Until you have lived that misery it's abstract and doesn't resonate with you at all. Fair enough -- move along. You clearly don't give a shit -- I never hoped everyone would. I just hoped some people would read this and care.
Aside from the fact that you only lived there 1 year so that's not quite enough time to get annoyed, let's go over what you said:
> Lived in Manhattan for a year. Commuted to NJ for a job, so I had a car. Parked on the street. Never got a ticket. Not even once.
I don't believe you. Sorry. I think you are lying. You probably mean well -- maybe you got 1 or 2 tickets and fought them or you just didn't care and paid them and so your lie is a white lie -- your point is you were never annoyed by the tickets. I believe that. You were only there for a year so getting annoyed wasn't going to be likely anyway.
While it is technically possible to NOT get any tickets within a year, it is so unlikely I am willing to risk calling you a liar and being wrong than to believe you. Also, your first year is the one where the notoriously complicated parking rules don't yet make sense so you are BOUND to screw it up. Oh also if you move your car as little as 1 minute after some restricted time takes effect you get a ticket immediately. The meter maids are like ninjas. I just don't believe you never ONCE fucked up -- parking your car every day.
You either parked in a garage or had REALLY good advice from people about where it is okay to park and/or you are extremely smart about figuring out the parking regulations. Sorry -- I don't believe you because I have known about 40 people like you that lived in Manhattan or Queens or Brooklyn and kept a car and were from out of town and EACH AND EVERY ONE of them got at least 1 ticket for something stupid -- ESPECIALLY in their first year. It is bound to happen because the parking rules are so complex and they take newcomers by surprise.
> Local bar was very low key. Everybody knew each other. No jaded BS, just casual folk out for a beer or a cocktail in the evening.
Yeah ok. I'll buy this. There are some decent local bars where people do know each other. True. I exaggerated the nightlife bit -- but really what town DOESN'T have at least 1 local bar where people know each other? Big whoop. I mean that's no different than anything else. Now.. the stuff that makes NY famous is all the other nightlife -- the big crazy bars or the clubs or whatnot. And that is what sucks and is a superficial existence.
> Subway is a drag during the commute hours, but if you get going a half hour early you miss the crowd
The commute hours are long. They are between 8am and 10:30 am or so. That's a huge window. Yeah, if you get on the subway at 7:50am it isn't so insane as at 8:50, granted. But try taking the subway every day to work. It's like chinese water torture. Even if you take it late enough to miss the morning rush (good luck arranging that since the highest paying jobs are in finance and finance people are stichlers about being to work on time and before the market opens!). Anyway -- even if you intend to take it and miss the rush hour window -- inevitably you will one day take it at 8:50 or at 4:00PM -- and when you do you will have one of the most dehumanizing experiences a person in any first world nation can possibly have. I know women that say they actually get GROPED by anonymous hands on the train. This can happen because of the crowding. You are literally smooshed against each other in inhuman and horribly uncomfortably hot and smelly ways.
I know what you are getting at -- it's an interesting question about leaving open the possibility for some sort of illegal activity in the interests of social progress.
I probably agree with you.
In a corrupt society with immoral laws, moral action may illegal in some or all circumstances. It is thus desirable for illegality to be allowed to take place in the interests of moral action, and possibly in the hopes that you can correct or overthrow the (immoral) social order in the first place.
Since there is no guarantee that our current society is now or always will be properly moral -- and that all laws are moral or that all illegal activity is immoral -- it is in the interest of morality to allow for some fraction of illegal activity to remain uncaught or unpunished.
Definitely true.
However, the way you phrased it it sounds pretty scary and you are going to lose the argument. Leave out the part about the rape and murder..;)
No no, you are right. Normally fix it rather than move -- which is what I meant to do. But it's too hard and I am tired already.
Yes, it is family and friends keeping me here. But I may have to start fresh somewhere else. Because honestly, life here is HORRIBLE. It's just all about working really hard with little to show for it and paying bills and that's it. There's little inherent beauty in it. And it wears on people and that's why everyone here is so stressed out and cold. It's not their fault.. a lot of competing for resources and hard work does that.
Yeah I want to get out. Unfortunately I never chose to live here. I was raised here and all my friends and family are here. I happen to really value both of those things -- it's hard to just move somewhere by yourself and be all alone and lose touch with the people that matter to you.
But I am beginning to convince myself I need to do that. Maybe I can convince a friend or two to join me. Who knows..
You know, life in NYC is so difficult. Here let me run through the million and 1 annoying things about living here:
- You want to live somewhere? Cool. So does everyone else. Rents are ridiculously high -- Manhattan rents START at $5 per square foot per month in rent -- and that's for a REALLY crappy tenement built in the 1920s with ROACHES and it may or may not have an elevator. "Luxury" apartments (what in other places you would consider just barely acceptable normal places to live) start at $10/sq foot per month.
- You want to go to the movies? Awesome! Plan on either buying your tickets 5 hours in advance online or not going at all or going at midnight on a Wednesday the second week the movie is out. Almost all the good shows are sold out. Oh also movie tickets start at $10 for your basic crappy theater.
- You want to have a car in Manhattan? Sorry it's impossible because there is NO PARKING. However, you can perhaps keep a car in one of the other boroughs like Brooklyn or Queens -- but don't forget to move your car twice a week because of "alternate side parking rules". It sounds simple enough but the average car owner in Queens spends about $250 per year on parking tickets because this alternate side system inevitably leads to your forgetting to move your car and getting a ticket. I personally spent about $400 in parking tickets last year. That's the cost of insurance in most states.
- You want to go to the beach on the weekend? Well you probably don't have a car (see previous point) so you either have to rent one (plan on spending at least $100/day for a crappy economy car) *or* you can take the Long Island Railroad with all the other schmucks. There's nothing like schlepping a cooler up and down stairs to catch a train that makes you just feel like a winner. Oh and if you do rent that car plan on spending 2 hours each way in bumper-to-bumper weekend traffic on the notoriously overburdened LIE.
- They say the subway is great. They are people that haven't really lived in NY for longer than 1 year. The first year is fun -- the subway feels new and exciting and it's very NEW YORK so newbies get into it. However, after taking it for 20+ years to school, work, etc I can say it is a horribly dehumanizing experience. I have gotten yelled at, pushed, mugged, lost, been stuck in trains for hours, and been subjected to all sorts of gruesome sounds and sights and smells. Also, at rush hour it's really a very unhappy experience since it's so crowded you literally have to push and fight people for a spot to stand. It's really quite uncivilized.
- The nightlife is cool, but people are jaded and cold and it's a bit of a superficial existence.
- And NOW Bloomberg wants to charge us money to drive down below 86th St. He is creating a straw man problem -- there is NO PROBLEM with traffic in Manhattan! Most people don't have cars anyway, and the pollution argument is just stupid (it really is -- I agree people shouldn't be driving -- but charging them money to drive in Manhattan is idiotic and doesn't help with pollution at all -- or if it does it's a drop in the bucket). Bloomberg just wants to create new and exciting ways to charge people money and to rip off the common taxpayer. He already doubled most city fines (everything from sanitation to parking to health and safety fines, etc). Now he wants to invent new fines. It's madness!
- The police here really don't care. Unless it's a major felony -- you can call them and you will be treated as if you are insane for having called them.
- Spying on the citizenry is just going to make it even more fun. Since the police hardly give a shit -- now they can have all this high tech gear with which to harass us.
Umm.. this function is retarded. It does nothing useful at all. In the non-error cases the allocated memory is lost forever as the caller is never informed of the address of the memory. Duh.
Here's an actually useful function that makes some iota of sense and doesn't even need the gotos:
int allocstuff(char **a, char **b)
{
*a = malloc(100);
if (!*a) return -1;
*b = malloc(100);
if (!*b) { free(*a); *a = NULL; return -1; }/* NB: it's ok to free a NULL pointer */
I have no clue. I looked up "vengence" on m-w.com and it suggested a bunch of alternatives. Amongst them was the word vengeance. Perhaps the/. editor meant vengeance and not 'vengence' (whatever that means)?
Seriously, this glaring spelling error completely distracted me and I was unable to even read the article. It annoys me that despite/. being a big commercial site now, they still lack the professionalism of even a small-town newspaper.
What the hell is wrong with our society? I don't believe that such a thing exists as being addicted to non-narcotics (such as games, sex, your friends, a good book). I think that's just called ENJOYING LIFE.
For example: Would we have called Leonardo DaVinci addicted to science because he spent long 20 hour days cutting up cadavers or studying mechanics?
Would we have called Einstein a hopeless physics junkie?
It's called having a passion. Doing what you love. What's so bad about it?
In this work-obsessed culture we live in, if you aren't working and doing something THE MAN tells you to do, you must be doing something wrong. You don't see clinics popping up for people that work at overtime at McDonalds because they can't pay their bills -- we find it absolutely OK to not see your family most of the week because your job makes you work from 8 till 8, but when a person comes home and wants to spend 3-4 hours doing something *they want to do* you have people thinking its some sort of a disease.
I don't get it. Where are the priorities? I really am an advocate of being a professional idler and trying to get out of wage slavery. What's so bad about playing a game for 40 hours a week (something you CHOOSE to do, and ENJOY)? Compare that to working which is something you HAVE to do or else you get evicted by some property owning assholes and end up living on the streets and going crazy!
2) GCC, while top notch in adherence to language specifications and portability, does not generate binary code that is as efficient as Microsoft or Borland's compilers. This is very noticeable when compiling the same code base (especially C++ code) on Linux via gcc, and on Windows using Borland and/or Visual C++. The latter two, though, have significant problems adhering to language standards. They also have the advantage of not having to work on anything but x86, so they can make assumptions that GCC has not been able to make. GCC 4 saw a big change in its optimization framework which promises to allow future versions of GCC to substantially catch up.
Wtf are you talking about?
Even if what you are saying about GCC is true, in general, you don't get that much of a performance benefit for desktop apps from the compiler you choose. Nope, not for desktop apps. Probably the shared library loader, the windowing/rendering environment, the kernel's responsiveness to interrupts and scheduling policies (kernel preemption is good for peppiness) and other things have a much bigger impact on the desktop experience than a few perecentage points of efficiency gained from a compiler.
Really native code is damned fast anyway, and compiler optimization is just icing on the speed-cake. And anyway GCC is a pretty good optimizing compiler. I take issue with the assertion that Microsoft or Borland's (bleh, Borland) compiler are that much better.
Now Intel's compiler is another matter altogether (which, by the way, you can use to compile an entire distro if you had the license and the time!).
Anyway, as far as Windows apps go: most apps you are likely to run *today* were compiled under Visual Studio 6 (which is a 1998 compiler), which is arguably worse than GCC 3.3.6 (the most common compiler used on most distros today) at optimization.
Why do developers still use VS 6? I am not sure -- but it seems to still be the most popular windows compiler for most windows developers to out there -- probably because it took microsoft so damned long to replace it that it got ingrained into everything people do.
Agile development with C++? Sure, it can be done. But one of the nice features of that language is its ability to model the application domain using Classes, Objects, Inheritance. If you don't take the time to model the problem correctly, you can painfully pay for it later on. Sometimes you get faster development times if you actually take a day or a week and model your problem so that it captures the essense of what you are trying to solve using objects, etc.
An iterative approach where you use a greedy method of implementing each new feature as quickly as possible with little insight into the overall system may or may not produce optimal results. It can lead to lots of spaghetti code. Or maybe not. Certainly in my career that approach sometimes *has* led to cleverer solutions as I was forced to think up the best, simplest way to imlement them. But often it can lead to massive amounts of spaghetti code that doesn't make much sense or capture any insights into the problem.
Actually, according to D&D 3.5 rules, if you are invisible (as with improved invisibility), but are detected (ie enemies know where you are due to listen checks and/or maybe you just cast a spell, etc) you get a concealment bonus of 50%, which is better than that 20% evasion that you are talking about. So given a cloak of evasion or a cloak of invisibility, I would much rather have the invisibility, thank you very much. Even with regular invisibility I think it's a 25% concealment bonus -- still better than 20%.
Yeah but most idiots that move to New York from out-of-town think that Manhattan is the only borough of New York and they are afraid to go to Brooklyn or Queens or The Bronx for fear of getting lost.
Yeah you're probably right. Hell I am not really a car guy. And I do know air-cooled engines do run hot, which is never good for an engine -- so that must limit how hard an air-cooled design can 'push' the engine heat-wise. (I guess it is a direct parallel to why air-cooling limits how hard we can push CPUs).
Anyway I just like the fact that mechanically computers are pretty simple. Just about the only thing I ever have problems with on my machine is the moving bits -- the fans and the hard drives. If we add yet another moving part that's one more thing that can go wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
How did you catch HIV? Was it IV drug use? I only ask because I think it's exceedingly rare to catch HIV through straight sex -- I know like 15 HIV+ people (a friend of mine works in a clinic) and it's funny because to us we wonder who the straight people are that get it. It's almost always homosexual males that practice anal sex or IV drug users.
Just wondering.
> The levy will only be in effect during business hours, move the couch at night. It's a sensible plan that doesn't ream natives too hard imho
I dunno, maybe you are right. Maybe it's not a big deal. Maybe it will make life better for all of us. To me it just screams that Bloomberg is trying really hard to get more money out of use somehow, and that's it.
And who knows what other machinations are going on that we don't know about. I mean he is also going to have to install cameras everywhere, and pay for all that infrastructure using government funds. Where do those contracts go? Who gets them? Who gets to install all the cameras? Who gets to staff the department(s) created to maintain and monitor all of us and to enforce the So86th rule?
And then when it's all said and done government will have grown a little bit -- maybe not a lot. Maybe just 1% larger -- and that's public money being spent on bullshit. And in the meantime I will have to pay $10 every time I want to drive to Manhattan.
It's just one small reason why life in NYC will suck even more..
PS: I live in Sunnyside LIC too. Where do you live? I'm on 47th St. and Skillman..
> This just isn't true. You can get a very nice 1k sqft apartment in a great bldg in Manhattan for $5k/month (which > is still incredibly high). $5/sqft/month is the going rate for apartments in lux bldgs - walkups are less, and I
> don't know of ANYWHERE renting for $10/sqft/month.
Ok, so I made a mistake in the math. It is not a linear function. Yes, as you increase the square footage the price drops off.
At the LOW end (like 400- 600 sq foot -- which is ALL most people can afford) it is $5 for crappy, $10 for luxury, which is what I originally said,
Who can afford 1000 sq.ft. of ANYTHING in Manhattan? Noone I know -- only the finance dicks or the millionaires can.
Yes, if you can splurge on 1000 square feet the price drops DOWN to $5 a square foot. Sure. But can you afford $5k a month? I know I can't. I suppose if I could it would be a deal compared to $5/sq.ft. for non-luxury. And I also suppose that if I could I wouldn't be bitching here...
Anyway it doesn't help me any. My original numbers still stand, and yes, it's expensive and yes, it fucking sucks.
One other poster mentioned living in an outer borough as an option. Sure, it is, but then you have to deal with the subway. Either scenario sucks in some way -- and then you still end up probably spending just about as much for just a different lifestyle (which may be quieter on weekends with more space, but has the added commute annoyance thrown in during the week).
And living in an outer-borough without a car kind of sucks. And now that Bloomberg wants to charge us for driving into Manhattan -- it will suck even MORE! YAY!
Wow. That inspires me to do something. Actually I look at San Francisco as paradise compared to NYC -- but I know it has its problems too. It's just smaller and nicer than NYC so to me that place would be a welcome relief.
Where did you move to anyway?
I really don't think charging $10 per car is going to fix the problem. Already the traffic is bad enough that most commuters do NOT drive to work. That is a myth. Do you know ANYONE that drives to work that is not rich?
Yes, rich people will pay the $10. They already pay $50/day to park their cars in private lots -- to them it's not a big deal.
To use average folk it means that the occasional time we want to drive into Manhattan during that time (yes, I have had to move furniture during work hours occasionally), we will be charged for it by the government.
That's just wrong. Why should I part with my money? Why should Bloomberg's fucking city government get more of my hard-earned $$? I already give that fucking guy hundreds of dollars in parking tickets each year -- why does he get even more money from me?
I like having the option of putting up with the traffic in order to drive to Manhattan. I sometimes NEED to. Charging me for it will definitely suck.
And on top of all the other things that suck about NYC -- having to pay this fine is probably just a straw on the camel's back.. the the camel's back is probably far from breaking -- but GOD I wish it would break soon and people would fucking say "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!! STOP FUCKING WITH US!! BUILD AFFORDABLE HOUSING!! FIX THE ROADS!! MAKE THE SUBWAY BETTER!! FINISH THE SECOND AVENUE LINE!!", etc..
> That made me chuckle, very true. I live in Sunnyside LIC, come in to the city every day, don't drive... And yet
> somehow avoid the horrors of the rush hour subway experience... It's called a bicycle. This is a great city to be
> a cyclist! Aside from this one issue.. oh what was it.
I agree with you mostly. I bike around everywhere too. But there are times when bikes are not convenient. When you have to move furniture, or when you are traveling as a group and you don't all have bikes. For those times I want to be able to not be subjected to the inhumanity of the subway. Cabs are nice then. And having to pay a premium to take cabs would suck.
Anyway you argue against cabs and against cars so I can't really agree with most of what you say. Yes I would like the city to be more bike friendly but penalizing drivers and cabs is not the right way to go about it. Just because it makes you happy doesn't mean it will make this world a better place...
> Spoken by someone who, despite having 20 (I'll not argue claimed) years in the city, doesnt know it.
;)
I know the city quite well. Fuck you!
> I've never had any problem getting move tickets. I go to movie openings and first day showings all the time with my friends, it's a question of calling up moviefone, seeing which of a dozen theatres are playing the movie,
Okay yeah so in Brooklyn it's a little easier to get tickets. Big deal. My point was more about the crowding and the inconvenience and misery it causes. Anyway who goes to the movies in Brooklyn? I don't... and neither does most of the city except for the people ALREADY IN Brooklyn. I live in Queens. To get to brooklyn it takes me about 2+ hours because ALL THE TRAINS THERE EXCEPT THE G (which runs like once in a blue moon) HAVE TO GO THROUGH MANHATTAN FIRST. I can walk to Brooklyn faster.
> While I don't like Bloomberg's plan either..
Amen. It's fucked. Really it is.
> The subway really is one of most impressive things in the world. I've been all over the world, and I've *never* seen another system that compares (and I've lived in NY for 20+ years myself). I can't imagine, say, living in DC and having the subway stop running at night.
The subway runs "in theory" at night. By that it means that between the hours of 2am and 5am maybe you'll get home, or maybe not. Oh and it runs great if you live in Manhattan -- but try taking it to Queens. Maybe yuor Brooklyn lines are better -- but the 7 trains run so few and far between (really the 7 train which is my line has 1 train between 2am and 4am!!) that you are better off WALKING home. I frankly never take the subway at night... it takes too damned long. I'll pay the $20+ in cab fare rather than sit in the station for 1.5 hours waiting for the next train...
Anyway so what if the subway is open 24/7? It sucks all the other times so hard that doesn't make up for it. And sorry -- the DC subway is cleaner and if you've ever been to Europe the subways there are better. The Moscow subway is much better than NY's for any number of reasons...
> Dude, that's called supply and demand. What is your problem? Do you prefer rents to be lower and unavailable to anyone? Your complaint makes no sense.
... ". "Public transport" is a Britishism for public transportation. Anyway -- whatever. My point is that life in NYC sucks. You don't know the half of it. I can go on and on as to why it sucks. It just does. Until you have lived here you DO NOT UNDERSTAND!! ;)
Hmm that old Adam-smith argument. Yes clearly I am a communist that deserves to be burned alive. I also probably like Hitler and I killed all the Jews. It was me.
No man, my point is that it sucks. That's all. It fucking does. And you clearly have never lived here. From the sounds of it you are British -- "The public transport in
I am sure people in concentration camps tell you it sucked. It is just an abstract notion. Misery always is. Until you have lived that misery it's abstract and doesn't resonate with you at all. Fair enough -- move along. You clearly don't give a shit -- I never hoped everyone would. I just hoped some people would read this and care.
Already they have and that's what counts.
Aside from the fact that you only lived there 1 year so that's not quite enough time to get annoyed, let's go over what you said:
> Lived in Manhattan for a year. Commuted to NJ for a job, so I had a car. Parked on the street. Never got a ticket. Not even once.
I don't believe you. Sorry. I think you are lying. You probably mean well -- maybe you got 1 or 2 tickets and fought them or you just didn't care and paid them and so your lie is a white lie -- your point is you were never annoyed by the tickets. I believe that. You were only there for a year so getting annoyed wasn't going to be likely anyway.
While it is technically possible to NOT get any tickets within a year, it is so unlikely I am willing to risk calling you a liar and being wrong than to believe you. Also, your first year is the one where the notoriously complicated parking rules don't yet make sense so you are BOUND to screw it up. Oh also if you move your car as little as 1 minute after some restricted time takes effect you get a ticket immediately. The meter maids are like ninjas. I just don't believe you never ONCE fucked up -- parking your car every day.
You either parked in a garage or had REALLY good advice from people about where it is okay to park and/or you are extremely smart about figuring out the parking regulations. Sorry -- I don't believe you because I have known about 40 people like you that lived in Manhattan or Queens or Brooklyn and kept a car and were from out of town and EACH AND EVERY ONE of them got at least 1 ticket for something stupid -- ESPECIALLY in their first year. It is bound to happen because the parking rules are so complex and they take newcomers by surprise.
> Local bar was very low key. Everybody knew each other. No jaded BS, just casual folk out for a beer or a cocktail in the evening.
Yeah ok. I'll buy this. There are some decent local bars where people do know each other. True. I exaggerated the nightlife bit -- but really what town DOESN'T have at least 1 local bar where people know each other? Big whoop. I mean that's no different than anything else. Now.. the stuff that makes NY famous is all the other nightlife -- the big crazy bars or the clubs or whatnot. And that is what sucks and is a superficial existence.
> Subway is a drag during the commute hours, but if you get going a half hour early you miss the crowd
The commute hours are long. They are between 8am and 10:30 am or so. That's a huge window. Yeah, if you get on the subway at 7:50am it isn't so insane as at 8:50, granted. But try taking the subway every day to work. It's like chinese water torture. Even if you take it late enough to miss the morning rush (good luck arranging that since the highest paying jobs are in finance and finance people are stichlers about being to work on time and before the market opens!). Anyway -- even if you intend to take it and miss the rush hour window -- inevitably you will one day take it at 8:50 or at 4:00PM -- and when you do you will have one of the most dehumanizing experiences a person in any first world nation can possibly have. I know women that say they actually get GROPED by anonymous hands on the train. This can happen because of the crowding. You are literally smooshed against each other in inhuman and horribly uncomfortably hot and smelly ways.
Anyway my point is it all sucks.
I know what you are getting at -- it's an interesting question about leaving open the possibility for some sort of illegal activity in the interests of social progress.
;)
I probably agree with you.
In a corrupt society with immoral laws, moral action may illegal in some or all circumstances. It is thus desirable for illegality to be allowed to take place in the interests of moral action, and possibly in the hopes that you can correct or overthrow the (immoral) social order in the first place.
Since there is no guarantee that our current society is now or always will be properly moral -- and that all laws are moral or that all illegal activity is immoral -- it is in the interest of morality to allow for some fraction of illegal activity to remain uncaught or unpunished.
Definitely true.
However, the way you phrased it it sounds pretty scary and you are going to lose the argument. Leave out the part about the rape and murder..
No no, you are right. Normally fix it rather than move -- which is what I meant to do. But it's too hard and I am tired already.
Yes, it is family and friends keeping me here. But I may have to start fresh somewhere else. Because honestly, life here is HORRIBLE. It's just all about working really hard with little to show for it and paying bills and that's it. There's little inherent beauty in it. And it wears on people and that's why everyone here is so stressed out and cold. It's not their fault.. a lot of competing for resources and hard work does that.
Yeah I want to get out. Unfortunately I never chose to live here. I was raised here and all my friends and family are here. I happen to really value both of those things -- it's hard to just move somewhere by yourself and be all alone and lose touch with the people that matter to you.
But I am beginning to convince myself I need to do that. Maybe I can convince a friend or two to join me. Who knows..
You know, life in NYC is so difficult. Here let me run through the million and 1 annoying things about living here:
- You want to live somewhere? Cool. So does everyone else. Rents are ridiculously high -- Manhattan rents START at $5 per square foot per month in rent -- and that's for a REALLY crappy tenement built in the 1920s with ROACHES and it may or may not have an elevator. "Luxury" apartments (what in other places you would consider just barely acceptable normal places to live) start at $10/sq foot per month.
- You want to go to the movies? Awesome! Plan on either buying your tickets 5 hours in advance online or not going at all or going at midnight on a Wednesday the second week the movie is out. Almost all the good shows are sold out. Oh also movie tickets start at $10 for your basic crappy theater.
- You want to have a car in Manhattan? Sorry it's impossible because there is NO PARKING. However, you can perhaps keep a car in one of the other boroughs like Brooklyn or Queens -- but don't forget to move your car twice a week because of "alternate side parking rules". It sounds simple enough but the average car owner in Queens spends about $250 per year on parking tickets because this alternate side system inevitably leads to your forgetting to move your car and getting a ticket. I personally spent about $400 in parking tickets last year. That's the cost of insurance in most states.
- You want to go to the beach on the weekend? Well you probably don't have a car (see previous point) so you either have to rent one (plan on spending at least $100/day for a crappy economy car) *or* you can take the Long Island Railroad with all the other schmucks. There's nothing like schlepping a cooler up and down stairs to catch a train that makes you just feel like a winner. Oh and if you do rent that car plan on spending 2 hours each way in bumper-to-bumper weekend traffic on the notoriously overburdened LIE.
- They say the subway is great. They are people that haven't really lived in NY for longer than 1 year. The first year is fun -- the subway feels new and exciting and it's very NEW YORK so newbies get into it. However, after taking it for 20+ years to school, work, etc I can say it is a horribly dehumanizing experience. I have gotten yelled at, pushed, mugged, lost, been stuck in trains for hours, and been subjected to all sorts of gruesome sounds and sights and smells. Also, at rush hour it's really a very unhappy experience since it's so crowded you literally have to push and fight people for a spot to stand. It's really quite uncivilized.
- The nightlife is cool, but people are jaded and cold and it's a bit of a superficial existence.
- And NOW Bloomberg wants to charge us money to drive down below 86th St. He is creating a straw man problem -- there is NO PROBLEM with traffic in Manhattan! Most people don't have cars anyway, and the pollution argument is just stupid (it really is -- I agree people shouldn't be driving -- but charging them money to drive in Manhattan is idiotic and doesn't help with pollution at all -- or if it does it's a drop in the bucket). Bloomberg just wants to create new and exciting ways to charge people money and to rip off the common taxpayer. He already doubled most city fines (everything from sanitation to parking to health and safety fines, etc). Now he wants to invent new fines. It's madness!
- The police here really don't care. Unless it's a major felony -- you can call them and you will be treated as if you are insane for having called them.
- Spying on the citizenry is just going to make it even more fun. Since the police hardly give a shit -- now they can have all this high tech gear with which to harass us.
Here's an actually useful function that makes some iota of sense and doesn't even need the gotos:
Um, most software is written in C++. And a lot of other code out there is in C. The Linux kernel being one of them.
No, C is not ancient, and C++ is very much alive. In fact, it might be one of the most popular languages on the planet.
The file format is called ELF, the executable and linking format. Not .elf. It isn't a file extension. This isn't windows. Bah.
Seriously, this glaring spelling error completely distracted me and I was unable to even read the article. It annoys me that despite
Wait: Is that clip real? It looks almost ridiculously stupid but too well done to be a fake.
I'm totally confused now.
What the hell is wrong with our society? I don't believe that such a thing exists as being addicted to non-narcotics (such as games, sex, your friends, a good book). I think that's just called ENJOYING LIFE.
For example: Would we have called Leonardo DaVinci addicted to science because he spent long 20 hour days cutting up cadavers or studying mechanics?
Would we have called Einstein a hopeless physics junkie?
It's called having a passion. Doing what you love. What's so bad about it?
In this work-obsessed culture we live in, if you aren't working and doing something THE MAN tells you to do, you must be doing something wrong. You don't see clinics popping up for people that work at overtime at McDonalds because they can't pay their bills -- we find it absolutely OK to not see your family most of the week because your job makes you work from 8 till 8, but when a person comes home and wants to spend 3-4 hours doing something *they want to do* you have people thinking its some sort of a disease.
I don't get it. Where are the priorities? I really am an advocate of being a professional idler and trying to get out of wage slavery. What's so bad about playing a game for 40 hours a week (something you CHOOSE to do, and ENJOY)? Compare that to working which is something you HAVE to do or else you get evicted by some property owning assholes and end up living on the streets and going crazy!
Wtf are you talking about?
Even if what you are saying about GCC is true, in general, you don't get that much of a performance benefit for desktop apps from the compiler you choose. Nope, not for desktop apps. Probably the shared library loader, the windowing/rendering environment, the kernel's responsiveness to interrupts and scheduling policies (kernel preemption is good for peppiness) and other things have a much bigger impact on the desktop experience than a few perecentage points of efficiency gained from a compiler.
Really native code is damned fast anyway, and compiler optimization is just icing on the speed-cake. And anyway GCC is a pretty good optimizing compiler. I take issue with the assertion that Microsoft or Borland's (bleh, Borland) compiler are that much better.
Now Intel's compiler is another matter altogether (which, by the way, you can use to compile an entire distro if you had the license and the time!).
Anyway, as far as Windows apps go: most apps you are likely to run *today* were compiled under Visual Studio 6 (which is a 1998 compiler), which is arguably worse than GCC 3.3.6 (the most common compiler used on most distros today) at optimization.
Why do developers still use VS 6? I am not sure -- but it seems to still be the most popular windows compiler for most windows developers to out there -- probably because it took microsoft so damned long to replace it that it got ingrained into everything people do.
Agile development with C++? Sure, it can be done. But one of the nice features of that language is its ability to model the application domain using Classes, Objects, Inheritance. If you don't take the time to model the problem correctly, you can painfully pay for it later on. Sometimes you get faster development times if you actually take a day or a week and model your problem so that it captures the essense of what you are trying to solve using objects, etc.
An iterative approach where you use a greedy method of implementing each new feature as quickly as possible with little insight into the overall system may or may not produce optimal results. It can lead to lots of spaghetti code. Or maybe not. Certainly in my career that approach sometimes *has* led to cleverer solutions as I was forced to think up the best, simplest way to imlement them. But often it can lead to massive amounts of spaghetti code that doesn't make much sense or capture any insights into the problem.
Actually, according to D&D 3.5 rules, if you are invisible (as with improved invisibility), but are detected (ie enemies know where you are due to listen checks and/or maybe you just cast a spell, etc) you get a concealment bonus of 50%, which is better than that 20% evasion that you are talking about. So given a cloak of evasion or a cloak of invisibility, I would much rather have the invisibility, thank you very much. Even with regular invisibility I think it's a 25% concealment bonus -- still better than 20%.
Yeah but most idiots that move to New York from out-of-town think that Manhattan is the only borough of New York and they are afraid to go to Brooklyn or Queens or The Bronx for fear of getting lost.
Insensitive clods.
Yeah you're probably right. Hell I am not really a car guy. And I do know air-cooled engines do run hot, which is never good for an engine -- so that must limit how hard an air-cooled design can 'push' the engine heat-wise. (I guess it is a direct parallel to why air-cooling limits how hard we can push CPUs).
Anyway I just like the fact that mechanically computers are pretty simple. Just about the only thing I ever have problems with on my machine is the moving bits -- the fans and the hard drives. If we add yet another moving part that's one more thing that can go wrong.
I didn't know that. But the fact of the matter is that the VW Beetle lacked:
1. A water pump
2. A radiator
3. A water pump belt.
All 3 of those components, at some point have broken down for me. In the beetle, those were just 3 fewer things that can go wrong.
And yes, I know the VW may have had some radiator-like device -- but water+antifreeze rusts metal faster than oil does.