So are you seriously saying that you never cycle on the pavement, never cycle through red lights and never position yourself in the blind spots of large vehicles? Because if that's what you're saying, I don't believe you.
Ride a bicycle and you can extend 90% to all drivers. They speed, pass too close and are very impatient.
Let's have them for cyclists too, so that it's all recorded when they swerve in front of cars, nip up the inside of vehicles that are turning left, run through red lights and cycle on the pavement at dangerous speeds close to pedestrians.
Cyclists are all - without exception - the most dangerous road users.
Not to mention that most people growing up in farming areas (at least here in the UK, not sure about other countries) have usually got at least five years more driving experience when they go to sit their driving tests than people from other areas. If you can't drive a tractor, and fit, maintain and operate all the implements for it by the time you're 11, then it's special school time...
Maybe now we won't have cars with catastrophic converters messing up the air. Yeah, let's get rid of carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide, and have hydrogen sulphide instead. What could possibly go wrong?
It's called "managing risk". Most people don't deliberately try to kill people with their cars. Car accidents are unfortunately pretty common, but they are just that - accidents. They happen, get used to it.
The only reason anyone carries a gun around in public is because they intend to kill someone. You can rationalise it with "but it's for self-defence", but it still comes down to one simple thing - you've got it because you intend to murder someone with it if the opportunity and motive arise.
It implies that brain damage would be less if no helmets were worn. This is obviously false, as the helmet prevents, not contributes to, brain damage.
Or more accurately, it prevents brain damage from one mechanism at the risk of causing brain damage by another mechanism. You can get strangled by your car seatbelt in an accident, but wearing seatbelts is still an overall safety win for most people.
What concerns me is there's now going to be a rush of people trying to sue the armed forces for possible brain injuries "caused" by this design of helmet, without looking at the bigger picture. The design may not have been perfect but it was better than no helmet at all, and it's only fairly recently that we've been able to model these things with any accuracy. Without some sort of proof that the design of the helmet was causing problems, most people would assume that the brain damage was really just an artifact of the blast.
because no one considers the possibility of killing someone before texting while driving
Very few people seem to consider the possibility of killing someone while driving *at all*, for any reason. They should, though. You're far more likely to kill someone with a car than anything else.
I've read comments from people going on about the distraction involved in looking at a GPS, or fiddling with the radio or heater controls. Yes, you're still entirely to blame if you run someone over because you weren't doing the main thing you're meant to do - concentrating on driving the car.
There doesn't seem to be a corresponding increase in accidents caused by using handheld microphones. I don't know if anyone knows why. In the UK the law that says you can't use a mobile phone and drive specifically excludes hand-held two-way radio equipment - either HTs or mobile radios. Possibly the halfduplex nature of the conversation is less distracting than trying to phone. Certainly I find using amateur radio equipment with a handheld mike less distracting than using a mobile phone with a handsfree kit.
Even so, you shouldn't really use handheld microphones anyway. Get a proper handsfree kit with a PTT on the gearknob. I tried using VOX but all that did was transmit to everyone listening on the local repeater when I changed down to third.
It's pretty sad that the country that gave us Americans most of the freedoms and traditions that we enjoy has stooped so low as to monitor it's citizens to make sure they aren't operating an illegal television.
Heh, so you don't have the DMCA? Isn't one of the problems described here that it's illegal - Federal-Pound-You-In-The-Ass-Prison illegal - to use a non-approved TV receiver in the US?
How do they catch Britons not paying their TV license? Drive-by eavesdropping vehicles listening for sounds in your home from television channels you're not supposed to be receiving.
Errr, no. Utterly, utterly wrong. What they *used to do* was have a van with a bloody great loop aerial that looked like a marine radar. This could detect the massive interference caused by CRT scan coils. Latterly they could detect the local oscillator in the tuner. Now, with digital TV and LCD flat screens that's pretty much impossible to detect (although plasma TVs chuck out enough RF to detect at over a mile) they just rely on having a list of people who don't have a TV licence who they then send nasty letters to. The solution to this is to send a nasty letter back.
Man, I wish slashdot had a "-1 Just Plain Wrong" moderation.
Actually, the black guy looks "wrong" too - unless he's got some really weird form of acromegaly or something, his head is far too big for the rest of him.
correlation != causation. As it is, we have a STRONG CORRELATION of man's interaction causing global warming, and likewise, there is a strong correlation of lack of sunspot to global cooling, BUT, can it be PROVEN? Nope.
Did you actually read what I wrote, or did you just decide to throw man-made global warming in there as a kneejerk reaction?
Let's try the Wikipedia Simple English-style explanation.
When there are more sunspots, the surface of the Sun is hotter. This makes it radiate more heat than when there are less sunspots. When there are less sunspots, the surface of the sun is cooler. When the sun radiates more heat, the Earth heats up. When the sun radiates less heat, the Earth cools down.
Human activities have no bearing on this process at all.
I don't see what's "unscientific" about claiming that low numbers of sunspots cause global cooling. Fewer sunspots mean less energy from the sun. Although the spot is relatively cool, the area around it is very much hotter.
This is what I've been saying for *years*. Modern drives don't use simple MFM coding, but something more akin to QAM where the phase and amplitude of the signal is what contains the information. This packs more bits into a single "spot" of disk. The theory runs that with MFM, if you measure a 1 and turns out to be just a little bit over the average for 1, it probably was a 1 before and if it was a bit less it probably was a 0 before. Since you've only got two levels to play with, it's easy to guess which is which. You can see then that if you had even four levels to choose from it would be much harder to identify the previous value.
And what the hell? Vacuum tubes over transistors? Seriously?
Seriously. Pretty much all television transmitters use klystron valves - transistors are only used for very low power transmitters, typically below 25kW output.
(Even if you had a solar-power battery charger, what of the power for the cell towers?)
Cell towers last a hell of a lot longer on batteries than telephone exchanges. Furthermore, out here in the sticks they all run standby generators anyway.
I like the old Insight body (faired-in rear wheels look so futuristic, which is why I drive a 22-year-old CX), but I'm not convinced by the hybrid stuff.
Junk that big heavy wasteful battery and motor/gearbox combination, and stick the engine from a VW Polo Bluemotion in there instead. It'll be much more efficient.
I'm not surprised that little walkie-talkies might not work over long distances. FRS radios (which may not be legal for commercial purposes) are limited to 1/2 watt.
That's why you can buy commercial radios, which output up to about 5W, or more for vehicle installations. Of course, you need a licence for those (at least in the UK, and I don't see why it would be different anywhere else). Typically what you'd do is program them to work split (ie. transmit 6.5MHz above the receive frequency) and mount a base station in a nice high spot on your farm. Okay, so you'd effectively only have a single channel, but again depending on your licence you may be able to program the radios to work on the same frequency so people near each other (the guy driving the mower and the guy driving the silage trailer) can talk to each other, without bothering people on the rest of the site.
Why would you jump through the hoops of processing credit card data yourself, instead of getting one of the many - including, as another poster pointed out, Amazon - credit card processing sites to do it for you?
The problem is that Java represents conceptual complexity as a complex tangle of simple code. The very strictness that catches things at compile time ends up adding whole layers of complexity to defeat that where it needs defeating in order for code to ever be reusable or extended. Somewhere in that tangled thicket is a simple elegant expression trying to get out.
I think this aspect of Java is symptomatic of the current "safety at all costs" mentality that a lot of companies have. The hoops you have to jump through to do even the most trivially simple tasks in Java remind me of a job I did a couple of years ago, where I needed to inspect a wireless network link for an oil company. We had to make two trips because the safety induction lasted well into the afternoon on the first day and by the time it finished at 3pm it was getting dark (early February) and there were no lights on the roof where the link was. The next time we came up, I needed to have a high-vis jacket, kevlar gloves, a hard hat, eye protection and a fall arrestor harness to climb a 1.5m tall scaff tower to look at an LED on the base of the unit (which I could clearly see from the fire door onto the flat roof). Thousands of pounds spent to mitigate a non-existent risk of somehow falling off the middle of a flat roof the size of a football pitch.
Slashdot Mirror
Students from Cambridge University have been doing this for a couple of years now.
So are you seriously saying that you never cycle on the pavement, never cycle through red lights and never position yourself in the blind spots of large vehicles? Because if that's what you're saying, I don't believe you.
Ride a bicycle and you can extend 90% to all drivers. They speed, pass too close and are very impatient.
Let's have them for cyclists too, so that it's all recorded when they swerve in front of cars, nip up the inside of vehicles that are turning left, run through red lights and cycle on the pavement at dangerous speeds close to pedestrians.
Cyclists are all - without exception - the most dangerous road users.
Not to mention that most people growing up in farming areas (at least here in the UK, not sure about other countries) have usually got at least five years more driving experience when they go to sit their driving tests than people from other areas. If you can't drive a tractor, and fit, maintain and operate all the implements for it by the time you're 11, then it's special school time...
Maybe now we won't have cars with catastrophic converters messing up the air. Yeah, let's get rid of carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide, and have hydrogen sulphide instead. What could possibly go wrong?
It's called "managing risk". Most people don't deliberately try to kill people with their cars. Car accidents are unfortunately pretty common, but they are just that - accidents. They happen, get used to it.
The only reason anyone carries a gun around in public is because they intend to kill someone. You can rationalise it with "but it's for self-defence", but it still comes down to one simple thing - you've got it because you intend to murder someone with it if the opportunity and motive arise.
... "Knock-off Nigel" buying knock-off DVDs, they're busily pumping out knock-offs and "remakes" and "sequels" of stuff from the 1960s?
Dear film producers,
I will start buying DVDs again when you start producing original content. No, adding an Audi R8 and some explosions doesn't count as original.
It implies that brain damage would be less if no helmets were worn. This is obviously false, as the helmet prevents, not contributes to, brain damage.
Or more accurately, it prevents brain damage from one mechanism at the risk of causing brain damage by another mechanism. You can get strangled by your car seatbelt in an accident, but wearing seatbelts is still an overall safety win for most people.
What concerns me is there's now going to be a rush of people trying to sue the armed forces for possible brain injuries "caused" by this design of helmet, without looking at the bigger picture. The design may not have been perfect but it was better than no helmet at all, and it's only fairly recently that we've been able to model these things with any accuracy. Without some sort of proof that the design of the helmet was causing problems, most people would assume that the brain damage was really just an artifact of the blast.
Not unless you chop them into little bit firsts and that would get the gun powder wet and unable to fire.
Freeze them and then cut them up with a saw. Then wrap the bits in clingfilm.
Incidentally, what's with the stupid broken CSS in Idle? Have we all suddenly switched to reading /. on digital watches?
You may have an anger problem
Tumour on the adrenal gland? I just watched that episode of House with LL Cool J.
because no one considers the possibility of killing someone before texting while driving
Very few people seem to consider the possibility of killing someone while driving *at all*, for any reason. They should, though. You're far more likely to kill someone with a car than anything else.
I've read comments from people going on about the distraction involved in looking at a GPS, or fiddling with the radio or heater controls. Yes, you're still entirely to blame if you run someone over because you weren't doing the main thing you're meant to do - concentrating on driving the car.
There doesn't seem to be a corresponding increase in accidents caused by using handheld microphones. I don't know if anyone knows why. In the UK the law that says you can't use a mobile phone and drive specifically excludes hand-held two-way radio equipment - either HTs or mobile radios. Possibly the halfduplex nature of the conversation is less distracting than trying to phone. Certainly I find using amateur radio equipment with a handheld mike less distracting than using a mobile phone with a handsfree kit.
Even so, you shouldn't really use handheld microphones anyway. Get a proper handsfree kit with a PTT on the gearknob. I tried using VOX but all that did was transmit to everyone listening on the local repeater when I changed down to third.
It's pretty sad that the country that gave us Americans most of the freedoms and traditions that we enjoy has stooped so low as to monitor it's citizens to make sure they aren't operating an illegal television.
Heh, so you don't have the DMCA? Isn't one of the problems described here that it's illegal - Federal-Pound-You-In-The-Ass-Prison illegal - to use a non-approved TV receiver in the US?
How do they catch Britons not paying their TV license? Drive-by eavesdropping vehicles listening for sounds in your home from television channels you're not supposed to be receiving.
Errr, no. Utterly, utterly wrong. What they *used to do* was have a van with a bloody great loop aerial that looked like a marine radar. This could detect the massive interference caused by CRT scan coils. Latterly they could detect the local oscillator in the tuner. Now, with digital TV and LCD flat screens that's pretty much impossible to detect (although plasma TVs chuck out enough RF to detect at over a mile) they just rely on having a list of people who don't have a TV licence who they then send nasty letters to. The solution to this is to send a nasty letter back.
Man, I wish slashdot had a "-1 Just Plain Wrong" moderation.
Actually, the black guy looks "wrong" too - unless he's got some really weird form of acromegaly or something, his head is far too big for the rest of him.
correlation != causation. As it is, we have a STRONG CORRELATION of man's interaction causing global warming, and likewise, there is a strong correlation of lack of sunspot to global cooling, BUT, can it be PROVEN? Nope.
Did you actually read what I wrote, or did you just decide to throw man-made global warming in there as a kneejerk reaction?
Let's try the Wikipedia Simple English-style explanation.
When there are more sunspots, the surface of the Sun is hotter. This makes it radiate more heat than when there are less sunspots. When there are less sunspots, the surface of the sun is cooler. When the sun radiates more heat, the Earth heats up. When the sun radiates less heat, the Earth cools down.
Human activities have no bearing on this process at all.
I don't see what's "unscientific" about claiming that low numbers of sunspots cause global cooling. Fewer sunspots mean less energy from the sun. Although the spot is relatively cool, the area around it is very much hotter.
This is what I've been saying for *years*. Modern drives don't use simple MFM coding, but something more akin to QAM where the phase and amplitude of the signal is what contains the information. This packs more bits into a single "spot" of disk. The theory runs that with MFM, if you measure a 1 and turns out to be just a little bit over the average for 1, it probably was a 1 before and if it was a bit less it probably was a 0 before. Since you've only got two levels to play with, it's easy to guess which is which. You can see then that if you had even four levels to choose from it would be much harder to identify the previous value.
And what the hell? Vacuum tubes over transistors? Seriously?
Seriously. Pretty much all television transmitters use klystron valves - transistors are only used for very low power transmitters, typically below 25kW output.
(Even if you had a solar-power battery charger, what of the power for the cell towers?)
Cell towers last a hell of a lot longer on batteries than telephone exchanges. Furthermore, out here in the sticks they all run standby generators anyway.
I like the old Insight body (faired-in rear wheels look so futuristic, which is why I drive a 22-year-old CX), but I'm not convinced by the hybrid stuff.
Junk that big heavy wasteful battery and motor/gearbox combination, and stick the engine from a VW Polo Bluemotion in there instead. It'll be much more efficient.
I'm not surprised that little walkie-talkies might not work over long distances. FRS radios (which may not be legal for commercial purposes) are limited to 1/2 watt.
That's why you can buy commercial radios, which output up to about 5W, or more for vehicle installations. Of course, you need a licence for those (at least in the UK, and I don't see why it would be different anywhere else). Typically what you'd do is program them to work split (ie. transmit 6.5MHz above the receive frequency) and mount a base station in a nice high spot on your farm. Okay, so you'd effectively only have a single channel, but again depending on your licence you may be able to program the radios to work on the same frequency so people near each other (the guy driving the mower and the guy driving the silage trailer) can talk to each other, without bothering people on the rest of the site.
It all costs money though ;-)
Why would you jump through the hoops of processing credit card data yourself, instead of getting one of the many - including, as another poster pointed out, Amazon - credit card processing sites to do it for you?
The problem is that Java represents conceptual complexity as a complex tangle of simple code. The very strictness that catches things at compile time ends up adding whole layers of complexity to defeat that where it needs defeating in order for code to ever be reusable or extended. Somewhere in that tangled thicket is a simple elegant expression trying to get out.
I think this aspect of Java is symptomatic of the current "safety at all costs" mentality that a lot of companies have. The hoops you have to jump through to do even the most trivially simple tasks in Java remind me of a job I did a couple of years ago, where I needed to inspect a wireless network link for an oil company. We had to make two trips because the safety induction lasted well into the afternoon on the first day and by the time it finished at 3pm it was getting dark (early February) and there were no lights on the roof where the link was. The next time we came up, I needed to have a high-vis jacket, kevlar gloves, a hard hat, eye protection and a fall arrestor harness to climb a 1.5m tall scaff tower to look at an LED on the base of the unit (which I could clearly see from the fire door onto the flat roof). Thousands of pounds spent to mitigate a non-existent risk of somehow falling off the middle of a flat roof the size of a football pitch.
... am I the only one thinking "block the doors, trip the halon"?