Hey I'm on Slashdot.. and Slashdot loves analogies, right ?
What if I'm in a hardware store, and I use a chainsaw to cut someone in half. Am I guilty of murder, or is the hardware store guilty of allowing me to misuse its goods and services ?
What if I'm on some website, and I use its resources to commit criminal acts. Am I guilty of said act, or is the website guilty of allowing its resources ?
I don't give a flying toaster about how lawyers will try to bend the facts... it seems pretty obvious to me. Does Lexus get named in lawsuits involving drug busts ? Because their cars seem to be quite loved by high-end coke runners, and it could be argued that having a vehicle facilitates the couriering of illicit substances, just like a file backup web site facilitates the couriering of illicit data.
Hell, sue the post office while you're at it. Last I heard, you could buy weed online and have it shipped across the continent right to your mailbox. What the hell?
Problem is, where did the refund money come from ? Nothing's free, especially when dealing with goddamned bankers. They're like accountants with teeth.
What do the big-box stores do to recover theft losses ? They pass the cost on to the customers. If it weren't for shoplifters, everything might cost 3-5% less. In this case, the bank needs to recover 1 million, so when those ATM fees jump another 50 cents next month, you'll know why.
The problem is that a large number of idiots with an HDTV and PS3 will tolerate a surprising level of mediocrity. If they have to jiggle the cable and wave a rubber chicken say, one in five times, a lot of people will put up with it. Maybe ten years they would have called a help line, or complained to their sales person, but after so many years of crappy service and outsourced "help", people have gotten used to it.
Just look at how many people thing a crashing computer is normal... Here I am with my Windows box, I run games, I run torrents, I run all the same crap everyone else does, yet my uptime is mostly dependent on how often I change hardware around. Sometimes I hear stories like "if I try to run Limewire while Outlook is running on my MDG, the thing shuts down so I just don't run those two at the same time". In my head I'm thinking Jesus Christ buddy! He needs a new power supply. At the opposite end of the spectrum, I get one single crash and if I can't precisely pinpoint the source of the problem (and eliminate it), I lose sleep.
If I had an HDTV and PS3 that worked only 80% of the time, I'd spend more than 20% of the time hunting someone down to fix it. People don't buy something for it to work only part time. If someone sold you a car that only runs 6 months a year because of a software glitch that can't be fixed, do you think it's fair that you pay full price ? Would you even pay half price since it works half the time ? I sure wouldn't.
Well I was thinking if they're going to do this weird-ass reverse-DLP type stuff, why not take it to the next level and use a normal-sized CCD...if we could capture an 8 MP photo, twiddle some mirrors or maybe an aperture-grille-type-thing and take a dozen more 8 MP shots.. smush them together using some form of 3d interlacing type stuff and enjoy your 100+ MP shot. If you take that and scale it down to say, 50 MP you'd cut down on the interlacing artifacts and still end up with a high-rez shot for the cost of a low-rez CCD.
What people are overlooking is in the US to sell a drug it has to be FDA approved and goign through that process is expensive.
Well then, Fuck em I say.. you can keep your cancer if that's what the FDA says. Here's to me thinking pharmaceutical companies are a bad idea, but I'm a goddamned squirrel-loving socialist Canadian aren't I ?:P The very fact that there needs to be a financial incentive for these organizations to even look for a cure is pure evil. If medical research is to benefit the population at large, then it should be owned and controlled by the population at large. Up here, we call it the government. It is our proxy to act on behalf of the citizens in the practice of democracy. If the government runs a pharmaceutical operation, it creates the same jobs and produces the same output as a privately-owned company, only it essentially runs as a non-profit, so the drugs are not only fairly priced, but it removes a certain degree of racketeering. If there is no real money to be made anymore, then there will be less of a disincentive to actually cure things versus treating them for life. What if we could cure AIDS, cancer, diabetes ? Right now, a cure to either one of those widespread diseases would severely cripple the economy, either by stripping away a portion of pharmaceutical profits, or by having the cure so expensive that it creates a tyrannical "pay or die" culture that forces people to cripple their finances and their families' as well.
In my book, capitalism and health should not mix.
Re:Performance, anyone?
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 1
If you assume that developers are usually very smart and very lazy, then I want a job where you work.. in real life, developers are usually very dumb and very hard-working.. you know, like a a miner. They will use something anal like Java or C++.Net, spend 80% of the development schedule reinventing features that already exist elsewhere, then bring in consultants to write the actual application logic using the resultant cesspool of code that kind of looks like a Java-based Visual Basic emulator:P
Many years ago I had a wonderful job where the government would pay me to "administer" one such shitpile. The multi-million dollar application's sole purpose was to manage Human Resources, essentially a big old list of employees with their job description and vacation balances; the kind of thing the average non-programmer could cobble together in MS Access in an evening. Well one version of the client would obviously crash after 4-5 queries, and corrupted half the updates. I fed the bug reports back up to the devs and a week later they had a new build ready for me. Well this new one still had the same bugs, but they made numerous cosmetic modifications, like rounded corners and custom-drawn title bars, and let's not forget the sexy dropdown date pickers that defaulted to Jan 1st 2011. What's even better is that this was all done is VB 6, so all these cute "improvements" required 3rd party DLL/OCX hacks.
My favorite though, is how they designed the server side. It used yet more DLL plugins, that were again build in VB 6. The installation procedure involved about 2 hours of dicking around in Windows 2000, changing IIS settings and manually updating database schemas, and of course redoing the ActiveX registration because the Setup program would usually bug out on about half of them.
The point of all this is that most developers are paid by the hour, so doing their work quickly and efficiently is actually detrimental to their bottom line. The people I had to deal with were just making the process as slow and error-prone as humanly possible in order to milk the government for years to come. I no longer work there, partly because all I ever did was bitch and whine about how the developers sucked, to the point where I had built a mostly working app of my own, during the other 36 hours of the work week while I waited for new test builds. Needless to say, I seriously endangered some people's job security, not to mention made an ass of many higher staffed sheep for throwing so much money down that black hole.
What irks me the most is that if you go to a mechanic, and he pulls this kind of shit on you, it's fraud and you can theoretically sue the greasy bastard for "fixing" things that weren't broke. When software developers do it, it's business as usual and nobody gives a damn, they just dig deeper into other people's budgets and pay the poor little MCSE's more money to fix the non-problems. The client has to pay more money for less competent developers ? What the fuck is that shit?!
TANSTAAFL! Yahoo has ads. Slashdot has ads. Just about every site on the net has ads. If you want email without ads, you can pay a real email hosting company that will provide you with POP3/IMAP/SMTP access for a fee. Heck you can even get that from Yahoo, I think it's 30$ a year or so.. if you had been looking at their ads you would know;)
But if you want something for free, you have to pay with your eyeballs. Someone has to foot the bill for the web hosting, and the sysadmins, and the time and effort that go into building a site. Or are you one of those guys who gets HBO for free, spliced off your neighbor's cable ?
The ad blocking game is no different from copy-protection schemes, or product activation, or any other undesirable software trait. They're like human viruses; they start out as a minor nuisance (simple banner ads), then you develop antibodies (adblock), then the virus grows stronger (javascript detection), then come stronger antibodies (adblock++.Net 2.0 GT), and then finally the virus grows so strong and belligerant it just plain kills you (ad company buys out Mozilla and makes you watch 2-minute full-screen noisy ads every time you click, then forces you to complete a "short" survey before letting you read the actual page).
I personally don't employ any kind of ad blocking.. yes, it slows down page loads a little bit, but I don't mind it so much. An extra second or two won't kill me, I'm usually multitasking anyways. The sight of ads doesn't bug me, I just scroll past.. every now and then I'll actually see one that catches my interest and click through, because sometimes I actually discover something I like. The only gimmick I use against ads is FlashMute, because the last thing I need is for the neighbors to call the cops on me, from hearing those stupid screaming smilies pumped through my loud stereo.
News Flash: There is no such thing as philanthropy anymore. This is just another form of lobbying. Does Kraft really need research funding when they already own half the shelf space in every grocery store and 7-11 in North America ? Kraft never helped anyone but its own damned self. What about 3M and their many innovations in the medical and engineering fields ? What about the OLPC project ? I could think of lots of places where research funding would benefit society at large.. Kraft and Ford are not on that list.
Thank you thank you thank you! That is the most important fact about all this bullshit with the **AA. Now why is that simple fact so hard for people to absorb ?
I'd "like" to have money thrown at me everytime someone downloads a file off my site. I'd "like" to get paid everytime some kid at work uses the skills I taught him. Is it right for me to harass, threaten and sue people because I didn't get what I wanted ? Fuck no. Fuck no.
Why can't I setup a tracker with fake copyrighted material, owned by Moi, and harvest "pirate" IP addresses, subpoena the ISP's and sue everyone who tries to download my copyrighted naked pictures of Whoopi Goldberg, that I presumably took myself and suffered greatly throughout the photo shoot, therefore feel like I am entitled to compensation... why can't I do that ? That's exactly what the **AA are doing. They even sue for artists they don't represent. Why can't I go out and sue people for downloading other people's music ? Oh right, that's fraud.. fraud is bad, right ? Fraud happens every goddamned day in this country, and more often than not it's being perpetrated by individuals in a position of power. It's not the 16 year old pulling credit card scams that's destroying our economy, it's the hordes of court-thrashing rackets like RIAA/MPAA/BSA and all these patent holding companies who serve no purpose but to defraud society.
It's easy to defend something so small... not like the enemy can flank you:)
Re:So let the flame wars begin!
on
The Birth of vi
·
· Score: 1
Ok so, isn't there a way we could maybe, I dunno, adjust Linux to downplay the legacy stuff and make it more desktop-friendly ? God I sound like that Linspire twit...
What I mean is, yes it's nice that we have such a flexible and portable OS. I like the fact that I can turn any old PC into a Linux box and actually put it to good use, but so far I've only succeeded at using Linux for servers. Hey, I've tried to run it as a desktop, many many times, it just didn't sit right with me. Jumping through a gazillion hoops to get a graphical desktop which became ubiquitous a decade ago, that just grinds my gears. It's flexibility is its downfall in this scenario. Yes, X-windows was conceived for thin clients, and it's real handy for running a multiuser, multidesktop server. Too bad only a handful of people actually use it that way (productively, that is). I'm a friggin code guru, and yet I clench my teeth everytime I read "No screens found". If I asked an employee to do a job for me, and all they ever did was make up excuses to not do it, I'd fire the bastard. All this code, all this talent, and yet the computer doesn't understand when I type "startx", the only thing I want to happen is for the GUI to come up. If the graphics aren't configured, just shut up and pick some sensible defaults and let me go on with MY work. Crappy old DOS games written by that prepubescent suburbanite Kevin Silverman would autodetect sound and graphics, so why is it in 2007 that I still need to keep my Windows laptop handy to look up FAQ pages and HOWTOs so I can get this modern masterpiece of collaborative development to even load ?
If we want Linux to become a serious desktop contender and hopefully take some power away from Microsoft, then we have to collectively quit reinveinting ever more esoteric apps and one-off scripts whose sole purpose is to spam FreshMeat's news page, and focus on making the existing software usable and livable. No one ever said it would be done at the expense of flexibility and programmability... It certainly would be easier than what I have to do with Windows, starting from the GUI and working my way backwards with scripts and mods and hacks, working blind without source code.
By allocating capital to where it is best used Goldman Sachs produces huge wealth for everyone.
What kind of brainwashed bullcrap is that ? There is no way to "produce wealth for everyone", at least not in material form. Being wealthy essentially means having a lot more money than the average joe. If everyone were equally "wealthy" then the word would lose its meaning. You cannot truly create wealth out of thin air, you simply transfer value from one entity to another. There is no net gain. By giving some guy a 53M bonus, you're just shifting that money (aka POWER) away from an immediate group of people. The recipient, in turn, will probably spend a small portion of it on luxuries (high markup low value), and lock the rest away in the bank (or investments). The money that is spent will recirculate to some extent, trickling back down to the common people but still resulting in a pyramid of profit for the middlemen. The rest of the cash just sits idle and creates a void, which is then filled by inflation.
When you have more money than you can spend, you're actually creating a cascade of economic problems. Way back when money was invented, it represented effort and value. You trade the fruits of your labor for money, which could then by traded for other people's goods and services. Today's money has little to do with its ancestral purpose. What has Lloyd Blankfein done to tangibly benefit the people around him, that is worth 53 million ? 53 million bucks can build a shitload of houses, educate a ton of kids, or feed tens of thousands of people to satiety. Or it can buy one man some short-term entertainment, maybe get his kids through college and pay off a few gold-diggers.
To me, the only currency that matters, the only one whose value is fixed and whose purpose is clear, is energy. We are living on a planet with finite resources, yet population is growing out of control. All the money in the world won't help when there's no more oil to power factories, no more heat to cook our food, no more electricity to run our hospitals. The fact that such a disaster is centuries, perhaps millenia away doesn't make it less of a problem, that's where we're headed and unless something radical comes around to change our course, humankind will be doomed. It's hard to be rich and famous when you're extinct.
Isn't this somewhat similar to the magnetic plug the new Macs use (and subsequently catch fire from) ? My main worry with inductance power is the very fact that it isn't hard-wired. Doesn't that mean you could create varying levels of resistance by affecting the distance between the transformers ? If you were to put a thin object between the two devices, would that make the circuit "work harder" to overcome the distance, generating waste heat either in the gap or in the emitter circuitry as the capacitive circuit tries to compensate for the power loss ? My knowledge of electronics is limited to empirical observations so be gentle!:)
I assure you, America has far more destructive power than any other country. If WMDs in Iraq was considered a threat worth going to war over, then what do you think the rest of the world thinks of the USA ? Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to terrorism, because quite frankly that's the only way smaller nations can hurt the USA. Traditional war won't work because Americans come in greater numbers, are better equipped, and have a larger population to tap for funding and cannon fodder. So instead, they mess with our heads.. they attack the innocent, they scare the shit out of us and watch as we let our once-peaceful lives rapidly degenerate into chaos. In my opinion that does way more damage than any nukes.
Wouldn't it be easier to simply have Halliburton rebuild New Orleans or clean up a former military base or something while the first Bush was Prez? Why go through all the trouble of a war?
No, it wouldn't be easier. One of the biggest advantages of doing it overseas is that it's far far away from our eyes and ears. If Halliburton were doing work in New Orleans, you could drive down and see what they're doing (or not doing), you could have their finances publicly audited. They would be bound by US law. Over in Iraq, there is no law, at least not as far as US corporations are concerned. Anything that happens in Iraq, stays in Iraq unless they specifically allow the media to show it. You could even make people disappear and no one would be the wiser until long after the fact, once the evidence has been sufficiently obfuscated. If you can make a person disappear, then it's trivial to make money "disappear", and that's precisely what's happening.
You know when a relative takes their PC to Best Buy / Circuit City and wind up with a $400 dollar bill for a busted IDE cable ? That's what's happening in Iraq. We don't know what the fuck is really going on over there, but we blindly trust them and throw our money away.
Hey, I didn't say it would fix YOUR life.. all I'm saying is that every force has an equal counter-force. When it comes to humans it tends to take a few years for that counter-force to manifest itself, but it eventually does happen. Push people around too much and they push back. The very fact that you're whining about inactivity is proof that something out there is pissing you off, that something being me. The fact that there are thousands of us whining here on/. has a tangible effect on our perception of the world around us. We're all here, bitching about what we find frustrating and ridiculous, or fascinating and inspiring. All that data feeds into your brain and rattles around in the background. Eventually humankind will find a solution to racial/sexual/digital discrimination, and everything until that time is a process, a series of thought experiments, just like this text you're reading right now.
By that logic, everyone should be using QuickBasic. See, I'd rather invest my time designing functionality than battling wits with the compiler/interpreter. Maybe instead of designing nerf tools for dummies, we could just learn to cull the bad programmers. Just because some people have Down Syndrome doesn't mean we should all be driving around in bumper cars.
Re:So let the flame wars begin!
on
The Birth of vi
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Ok here goes nothing. I'm a DOS veteran, and I treated my DOS like most people treat their Linux, using extensive modifications and addons to improve usability and productivity. Way back there was Edlin, which even in 1984 felt really ghetto. Its saving grace was that it could be easily scripted for batch usage. Some people used Wordstar, but I personally couldn't stand it. Sure enough, I trivially coded my own full-screen editor in BASIC, and all was well. Then came MS-DOS 5.0, with its flashy Dos Shell and Edit.com, which was really just QBasic minus the Basic part. It worked, it had a cutesy little drop-down menu like Windows apps did, and its usage was obvious to even the most ignorant of users.
So then one day I get my hands on Slack 2.0. BLECH! Where's the simple full-screen editor I've grown so fond of over the past decade ?:P vi didn't make any sense to me, and Emacs seemed like a huge mess of plugins that ate up more disk space than the OS itself. Now I'm obviously lacking in history when it comes to the Linux/Unix world, but why the hell do so few apps make use of the Function keys ? It's always Ctrl-something.. I'm fine with Ctrl-X and whatnot because they're where my hands would sit, but how hard would it be to just alias F1 to Help, F2 to Save, F3 to Open, in addition to the classic shortcuts.. It would certainly make it much easier to teach.
And then there's the matter of arrow keys... sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. Ctrk-V or Y for pageup-pagedown, and something else for top/bottom. Now I agree that Unix came first and those shortcuts were probably in use way before Dos ever came along, but why hasn't anyone taken the liberty of adding the "idiot" shortcuts so that Joe Random Switcher can actually try Linux without spending 3 days in complete darkness trying to get a friggin cursor to move ? It's not like those movement keys have anything better to do, most of the time they just spew meta-characters like ^Q^1 or whatever.
If a text editor does anything more complicated than receive text input and save it to disk, it's no longer an editor in my book. Type setting ? it's a word processor. Syntax highlighting ? it's a development environment. Kinky macro processing and pseudo-hypertext Info-page fornication ? it's a dirty old man's poor excuse for an OS. I'm talking about you, Mr Stallman.
Wow, you've just described every goddamned business app I've ever been forced to use. I've yet to find a place where Java is the universally best tool for the job. The only thing Java is any good at is selling more Sun servers because it eats CPU cycles like popcorn. So then, why does every bullshitting developer on the planet know Java and nothing else ? I wouldn't touch it with a double-bagged 10-foot pole. We have a great need for simplified, rapid-development tools for the zillions of business apps out there. How hard should it be to fetch a few records, display them, validate edits and ship them back to the DB ? Ruby on Rails seems to do a fair job of this, but the web browser is a horrible choice for a client.. what the industry needs is something like Visual Ruby on Rails Terminal Server, kinda deal. Ridiculously fast development, easy enough that even if you hired the worst consultant on the planet, he could still produce a working app. The terminal server aspect is to avoid having to maintain client installations and simplify hardware support; just plug in one of those iMac-style terminals like you see at checkout counters and let the server do the heavy lifting... if a terminal quits on ya, rip the sucker out and plug in a spare for minimal downtime.
That's what I would see as a 21st-century replacement for COBOL. The same thin-client model but with a better backend and simplified, pattern-driven development. Every business app is more or less the same set of processes and paradigms, just combined and presented in different arrangements.
The problem is that people aren't yet at the stage where they can honestly look at someone without prejudice. For every incompetent twit abusing the system because he's a "visible minority" or accusing people of sexual harassment left and right, there's at least one bona-fide racist, misogynist or just straight-up asshole. The problem is the accused and the guilty are rarely the same person. It's all a matter of personal perception. The boss who slaps his secretary's ass in the hallway thinks it's perfectly normal to be an undersexed neanderthal, and the secretary also thinks it's perfectly normal in the 21st century to fool around with the boss, file a harassment suit and implicate the wife, splitting the multi-million divorce settlement 50/50. Life's just a game, and people bend the rules however they can to get the edge. If that means exploiting your gender or skin color to an advantage in the fucked up world of the law, then by all means go nuts. Given enough time, the system will balance itself out. The more outrageous suits are won, the more people will be motivated to seek corrective measures.
Kids are smarter than most adults give them credit for
You're absolutely right. That's because we were kids once, and we know all the brains go down the drain after puberty. By falsely labeling children as stupid, we are mentally preparing them for the worst years of their lives. It's far easier to set a low expectation and meet it, than set high expectations and have to explain the shortcomings.
Long story short, kids are smart, just don't tell them I told you so.
USA's #1 cultural contribution to the world: financially-fueled hatred. Seriously, people get killed over their beliefs, their appearance, their race, their family, their actions.. all over the world. Americans kill for profit. You don't need to pull the trigger to kill a man, robbing him of all values and morals is worse than death to some.
Having a 200kb block of text, no matter how well it compresses, will add anywhere from 10 to 40 seconds to download on a dial-up line, and that was for a ridiculously small CAPTCHA. A larger, more human-readable size might use up 500kb or more. Even on a high-speed link that's a noticeable pause. The fact that it only shows up on the sign-up page doesn't make it excuseable; in fact it makes it counter-productive. If I find some cool site, eagerly hit the sign-up link and end up staring at a half-rendered page for more than 15-20 seconds, I'll just leave and find some other site that loads faster, because I really don't care what's going on behind the scenes... I have no compassion for an elaborate security device if it bungles my experience.
This is what happens when bad ideas are brought to life. This will only waste the site owner's bandwidth, maybe slow down the attacker slightly while the algorithm is modified.. we're talking AT MOST a couple days work. You could achieve the same result by adding a 2-second delay to the CAPTCHA cgi, the same idea as adding a delay to failed logins... if you can't properly defeat the attackers, at least slow them down.
We've reached a point where, with security/copy protection, if it is something than can be done by a human sitting at a computer, the human can be removed from the equation. The greatest shortcoming of any system like CAPTCHA, or even asking "human intelligence" questions like "What do monkeys eat" or other things that computers don't innately "know", is that a human has to computerize those actions in the first place. You have to teach YOUR computer what the answer to the monkey question is, and there are only so many answers you will teach it until you run out of ideas (or exhaust the body of humankind's knowledge). Eventually the attacker will know all the answers to your challenges and you've just wasted a whole lot of time.
A better strategy here is the psychological approach. How do you get rid of a tireless attacker ? What motivates an attacker ? They WANT something of value to them. That something can be email addresses, zombie hosts, or in the case of blog spam they just want eyeballs. There are two ways to demotivate them: get rid of what's luring them, or make your prize harder to get than everyone else's. The first solution might mean crippling your site, even making it totally worthless (think site owners that give up, communities that are abandoned after relentless attacks). The second solution only buys you time, because the more vulnerable sites will ramp up their security, sooner or later, and then you're back at square one.
Actually there is a solution 3: find the attackers and attack THEM. Hey it's not the higher road, but it's damn effective.
I'm also greatly frustrated by traffic, and have spent a fair portion of my spare IQ trying to make sense of it, going as far as coding up elaborate simulations as I'm sure others have done before me. Sadly I have no magic solution. The big problem with driving is that just about anyone can get a license, but only a very small portion of those people are skilled enough to really drive. Sure, they know where the controls are and what they do, but they don't have the brains to do watch all the vehicles around them, while figuring out where they're going and real-time physics processing all at once. My favorite analogy for this one is painting: Just because you can tell red from blue, and you know how to hold a paintbrush, doesn't make you an artist.
One thing I hope everyone can relate to is the "invisible choke point". It seems every city has at least one of these, where everyone slows down for no reason whatsoever. Traffic just plain stops at rush hour, and you expect to see a nasty accident blocking two lanes with an idiot cop blocking the 3rd, but instead you just find that people go back to full speed a quarter-mile later with no event.
Then there's the left-lane hogger. I ran into one last night on a half-hour drive. The little bastard was the only car in the left lane, doing about 95 in a 100 zone (kilometers not miles), where most people do 130 or more. Traffic was too dense in the other lanes because of the holiday craze so everyone was stuck because of him. After a few miles of this nonsense, I drove right up to him and tailgated like a murderous psychopath for less than a minute until he finally moved over and let me through. I kept an eye on my rear-view and sure enough, the instant I passed him, he shimmied right back blocking everyone else. My response to that passive-aggressive pansy-boy was to give him a taste of his own medicine, hopefully making him realize how frustrating and dangerous his disrespectful driving had been. I slowed down right in his face forcing him to hit the brakes just a couple feet away from hitting me, then cruised along for a bit until he changed lanes to try and pass me on the right, then I moved in front of him again while everyone else sped through like they were escaping from prison. He was effectively trapped behind me with a long line of angry speeders on either side. Payback's a bitch:) I can only hope he'll learn from that lesson.
I'd say a big part of the problem is that driving requires cooperation. As a driver, your are responsible for the safety of everyone around you, just as they are responsible for yours. You can't go out there, driving selfishly as if you were the only car on the road and expect things to go smoothly. One thing I noticed moving from a smallish city to a bigger one, is the lack of courtesy on the road. You could have your car practically sideways trying to do a left turn, NOBODY will slow down to wave you over, actually they will floor it to cut you off, so you end up waiting a few minutes and holding up the line of cars behind you. Driver A saved 5 seconds by cutting you off instead of letting you turn, but cost the other side of the road 2 minutes each, times 15 cars. Now if Driver A could appreciate that half the time, he's the one wasting his time in a jam and he'd really like it if the incoming assholes would slow down and give him a chance to pass.
Where I live, driving lessons involve 3 evenings of classroom lectures about road signs and safe driving, and 10 hours of driving practice. I think it would be immeasurably beneficial to spend a few extra nights in the classroom, talking about cooperation and respect on the road. Hammer it in people's heads that they're driving a 3000 pound hunk of metal. Hostile driving turns that vehicle into a deadly weapon, and well I wouldn't want to live in a neighborhood where all my neighbors are madly twirling a 3000 lb baseball bat at each others' head.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey I'm on Slashdot.. and Slashdot loves analogies, right ?
What if I'm in a hardware store, and I use a chainsaw to cut someone in half. Am I guilty of murder, or is the hardware store guilty of allowing me to misuse its goods and services ?
What if I'm on some website, and I use its resources to commit criminal acts. Am I guilty of said act, or is the website guilty of allowing its resources ?
I don't give a flying toaster about how lawyers will try to bend the facts... it seems pretty obvious to me. Does Lexus get named in lawsuits involving drug busts ? Because their cars seem to be quite loved by high-end coke runners, and it could be argued that having a vehicle facilitates the couriering of illicit substances, just like a file backup web site facilitates the couriering of illicit data.
Hell, sue the post office while you're at it. Last I heard, you could buy weed online and have it shipped across the continent right to your mailbox. What the hell?
Problem is, where did the refund money come from ? Nothing's free, especially when dealing with goddamned bankers. They're like accountants with teeth.
What do the big-box stores do to recover theft losses ? They pass the cost on to the customers. If it weren't for shoplifters, everything might cost 3-5% less. In this case, the bank needs to recover 1 million, so when those ATM fees jump another 50 cents next month, you'll know why.
The problem is that a large number of idiots with an HDTV and PS3 will tolerate a surprising level of mediocrity. If they have to jiggle the cable and wave a rubber chicken say, one in five times, a lot of people will put up with it. Maybe ten years they would have called a help line, or complained to their sales person, but after so many years of crappy service and outsourced "help", people have gotten used to it.
Just look at how many people thing a crashing computer is normal... Here I am with my Windows box, I run games, I run torrents, I run all the same crap everyone else does, yet my uptime is mostly dependent on how often I change hardware around. Sometimes I hear stories like "if I try to run Limewire while Outlook is running on my MDG, the thing shuts down so I just don't run those two at the same time". In my head I'm thinking Jesus Christ buddy! He needs a new power supply. At the opposite end of the spectrum, I get one single crash and if I can't precisely pinpoint the source of the problem (and eliminate it), I lose sleep.
If I had an HDTV and PS3 that worked only 80% of the time, I'd spend more than 20% of the time hunting someone down to fix it. People don't buy something for it to work only part time. If someone sold you a car that only runs 6 months a year because of a software glitch that can't be fixed, do you think it's fair that you pay full price ? Would you even pay half price since it works half the time ? I sure wouldn't.
Well I was thinking if they're going to do this weird-ass reverse-DLP type stuff, why not take it to the next level and use a normal-sized CCD...if we could capture an 8 MP photo, twiddle some mirrors or maybe an aperture-grille-type-thing and take a dozen more 8 MP shots.. smush them together using some form of 3d interlacing type stuff and enjoy your 100+ MP shot. If you take that and scale it down to say, 50 MP you'd cut down on the interlacing artifacts and still end up with a high-rez shot for the cost of a low-rez CCD.
Hey I'm no engineer so be gentle!
Sir, you make it too easy.
:P The very fact that there needs to be a financial incentive for these organizations to even look for a cure is pure evil. If medical research is to benefit the population at large, then it should be owned and controlled by the population at large. Up here, we call it the government. It is our proxy to act on behalf of the citizens in the practice of democracy. If the government runs a pharmaceutical operation, it creates the same jobs and produces the same output as a privately-owned company, only it essentially runs as a non-profit, so the drugs are not only fairly priced, but it removes a certain degree of racketeering. If there is no real money to be made anymore, then there will be less of a disincentive to actually cure things versus treating them for life. What if we could cure AIDS, cancer, diabetes ? Right now, a cure to either one of those widespread diseases would severely cripple the economy, either by stripping away a portion of pharmaceutical profits, or by having the cure so expensive that it creates a tyrannical "pay or die" culture that forces people to cripple their finances and their families' as well.
What people are overlooking is in the US to sell a drug it has to be FDA approved and goign through that process is expensive.
Well then, Fuck em I say.. you can keep your cancer if that's what the FDA says. Here's to me thinking pharmaceutical companies are a bad idea, but I'm a goddamned squirrel-loving socialist Canadian aren't I ?
In my book, capitalism and health should not mix.
If you assume that developers are usually very smart and very lazy, then I want a job where you work.. in real life, developers are usually very dumb and very hard-working.. you know, like a a miner. They will use something anal like Java or C++.Net, spend 80% of the development schedule reinventing features that already exist elsewhere, then bring in consultants to write the actual application logic using the resultant cesspool of code that kind of looks like a Java-based Visual Basic emulator :P
Many years ago I had a wonderful job where the government would pay me to "administer" one such shitpile. The multi-million dollar application's sole purpose was to manage Human Resources, essentially a big old list of employees with their job description and vacation balances; the kind of thing the average non-programmer could cobble together in MS Access in an evening. Well one version of the client would obviously crash after 4-5 queries, and corrupted half the updates. I fed the bug reports back up to the devs and a week later they had a new build ready for me. Well this new one still had the same bugs, but they made numerous cosmetic modifications, like rounded corners and custom-drawn title bars, and let's not forget the sexy dropdown date pickers that defaulted to Jan 1st 2011. What's even better is that this was all done is VB 6, so all these cute "improvements" required 3rd party DLL/OCX hacks.
My favorite though, is how they designed the server side. It used yet more DLL plugins, that were again build in VB 6. The installation procedure involved about 2 hours of dicking around in Windows 2000, changing IIS settings and manually updating database schemas, and of course redoing the ActiveX registration because the Setup program would usually bug out on about half of them.
The point of all this is that most developers are paid by the hour, so doing their work quickly and efficiently is actually detrimental to their bottom line. The people I had to deal with were just making the process as slow and error-prone as humanly possible in order to milk the government for years to come. I no longer work there, partly because all I ever did was bitch and whine about how the developers sucked, to the point where I had built a mostly working app of my own, during the other 36 hours of the work week while I waited for new test builds. Needless to say, I seriously endangered some people's job security, not to mention made an ass of many higher staffed sheep for throwing so much money down that black hole.
What irks me the most is that if you go to a mechanic, and he pulls this kind of shit on you, it's fraud and you can theoretically sue the greasy bastard for "fixing" things that weren't broke. When software developers do it, it's business as usual and nobody gives a damn, they just dig deeper into other people's budgets and pay the poor little MCSE's more money to fix the non-problems. The client has to pay more money for less competent developers ? What the fuck is that shit?!
TANSTAAFL! Yahoo has ads. Slashdot has ads. Just about every site on the net has ads. If you want email without ads, you can pay a real email hosting company that will provide you with POP3/IMAP/SMTP access for a fee. Heck you can even get that from Yahoo, I think it's 30$ a year or so.. if you had been looking at their ads you would know ;)
But if you want something for free, you have to pay with your eyeballs. Someone has to foot the bill for the web hosting, and the sysadmins, and the time and effort that go into building a site. Or are you one of those guys who gets HBO for free, spliced off your neighbor's cable ?
The ad blocking game is no different from copy-protection schemes, or product activation, or any other undesirable software trait. They're like human viruses; they start out as a minor nuisance (simple banner ads), then you develop antibodies (adblock), then the virus grows stronger (javascript detection), then come stronger antibodies (adblock++.Net 2.0 GT), and then finally the virus grows so strong and belligerant it just plain kills you (ad company buys out Mozilla and makes you watch 2-minute full-screen noisy ads every time you click, then forces you to complete a "short" survey before letting you read the actual page).
I personally don't employ any kind of ad blocking.. yes, it slows down page loads a little bit, but I don't mind it so much. An extra second or two won't kill me, I'm usually multitasking anyways. The sight of ads doesn't bug me, I just scroll past.. every now and then I'll actually see one that catches my interest and click through, because sometimes I actually discover something I like. The only gimmick I use against ads is FlashMute, because the last thing I need is for the neighbors to call the cops on me, from hearing those stupid screaming smilies pumped through my loud stereo.
"American technology, Russion technology -- it's all made in Taiwan anyway."
News Flash: There is no such thing as philanthropy anymore. This is just another form of lobbying. Does Kraft really need research funding when they already own half the shelf space in every grocery store and 7-11 in North America ? Kraft never helped anyone but its own damned self. What about 3M and their many innovations in the medical and engineering fields ? What about the OLPC project ? I could think of lots of places where research funding would benefit society at large.. Kraft and Ford are not on that list.
I am depriving them of income they'd like.
Thank you thank you thank you! That is the most important fact about all this bullshit with the **AA. Now why is that simple fact so hard for people to absorb ?
I'd "like" to have money thrown at me everytime someone downloads a file off my site. I'd "like" to get paid everytime some kid at work uses the skills I taught him. Is it right for me to harass, threaten and sue people because I didn't get what I wanted ? Fuck no. Fuck no.
Why can't I setup a tracker with fake copyrighted material, owned by Moi, and harvest "pirate" IP addresses, subpoena the ISP's and sue everyone who tries to download my copyrighted naked pictures of Whoopi Goldberg, that I presumably took myself and suffered greatly throughout the photo shoot, therefore feel like I am entitled to compensation... why can't I do that ? That's exactly what the **AA are doing. They even sue for artists they don't represent. Why can't I go out and sue people for downloading other people's music ? Oh right, that's fraud.. fraud is bad, right ? Fraud happens every goddamned day in this country, and more often than not it's being perpetrated by individuals in a position of power. It's not the 16 year old pulling credit card scams that's destroying our economy, it's the hordes of court-thrashing rackets like RIAA/MPAA/BSA and all these patent holding companies who serve no purpose but to defraud society.
It's easy to defend something so small... not like the enemy can flank you :)
Ok so, isn't there a way we could maybe, I dunno, adjust Linux to downplay the legacy stuff and make it more desktop-friendly ? God I sound like that Linspire twit...
What I mean is, yes it's nice that we have such a flexible and portable OS. I like the fact that I can turn any old PC into a Linux box and actually put it to good use, but so far I've only succeeded at using Linux for servers. Hey, I've tried to run it as a desktop, many many times, it just didn't sit right with me. Jumping through a gazillion hoops to get a graphical desktop which became ubiquitous a decade ago, that just grinds my gears. It's flexibility is its downfall in this scenario. Yes, X-windows was conceived for thin clients, and it's real handy for running a multiuser, multidesktop server. Too bad only a handful of people actually use it that way (productively, that is). I'm a friggin code guru, and yet I clench my teeth everytime I read "No screens found". If I asked an employee to do a job for me, and all they ever did was make up excuses to not do it, I'd fire the bastard. All this code, all this talent, and yet the computer doesn't understand when I type "startx", the only thing I want to happen is for the GUI to come up. If the graphics aren't configured, just shut up and pick some sensible defaults and let me go on with MY work. Crappy old DOS games written by that prepubescent suburbanite Kevin Silverman would autodetect sound and graphics, so why is it in 2007 that I still need to keep my Windows laptop handy to look up FAQ pages and HOWTOs so I can get this modern masterpiece of collaborative development to even load ?
If we want Linux to become a serious desktop contender and hopefully take some power away from Microsoft, then we have to collectively quit reinveinting ever more esoteric apps and one-off scripts whose sole purpose is to spam FreshMeat's news page, and focus on making the existing software usable and livable. No one ever said it would be done at the expense of flexibility and programmability... It certainly would be easier than what I have to do with Windows, starting from the GUI and working my way backwards with scripts and mods and hacks, working blind without source code.
By allocating capital to where it is best used Goldman Sachs produces huge wealth for everyone.
What kind of brainwashed bullcrap is that ? There is no way to "produce wealth for everyone", at least not in material form. Being wealthy essentially means having a lot more money than the average joe. If everyone were equally "wealthy" then the word would lose its meaning. You cannot truly create wealth out of thin air, you simply transfer value from one entity to another. There is no net gain. By giving some guy a 53M bonus, you're just shifting that money (aka POWER) away from an immediate group of people. The recipient, in turn, will probably spend a small portion of it on luxuries (high markup low value), and lock the rest away in the bank (or investments). The money that is spent will recirculate to some extent, trickling back down to the common people but still resulting in a pyramid of profit for the middlemen. The rest of the cash just sits idle and creates a void, which is then filled by inflation.
When you have more money than you can spend, you're actually creating a cascade of economic problems. Way back when money was invented, it represented effort and value. You trade the fruits of your labor for money, which could then by traded for other people's goods and services. Today's money has little to do with its ancestral purpose. What has Lloyd Blankfein done to tangibly benefit the people around him, that is worth 53 million ? 53 million bucks can build a shitload of houses, educate a ton of kids, or feed tens of thousands of people to satiety. Or it can buy one man some short-term entertainment, maybe get his kids through college and pay off a few gold-diggers.
To me, the only currency that matters, the only one whose value is fixed and whose purpose is clear, is energy. We are living on a planet with finite resources, yet population is growing out of control. All the money in the world won't help when there's no more oil to power factories, no more heat to cook our food, no more electricity to run our hospitals. The fact that such a disaster is centuries, perhaps millenia away doesn't make it less of a problem, that's where we're headed and unless something radical comes around to change our course, humankind will be doomed. It's hard to be rich and famous when you're extinct.
Isn't this somewhat similar to the magnetic plug the new Macs use (and subsequently catch fire from) ? My main worry with inductance power is the very fact that it isn't hard-wired. Doesn't that mean you could create varying levels of resistance by affecting the distance between the transformers ? If you were to put a thin object between the two devices, would that make the circuit "work harder" to overcome the distance, generating waste heat either in the gap or in the emitter circuitry as the capacitive circuit tries to compensate for the power loss ? My knowledge of electronics is limited to empirical observations so be gentle! :)
I assure you, America has far more destructive power than any other country. If WMDs in Iraq was considered a threat worth going to war over, then what do you think the rest of the world thinks of the USA ? Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate leads to terrorism, because quite frankly that's the only way smaller nations can hurt the USA. Traditional war won't work because Americans come in greater numbers, are better equipped, and have a larger population to tap for funding and cannon fodder. So instead, they mess with our heads.. they attack the innocent, they scare the shit out of us and watch as we let our once-peaceful lives rapidly degenerate into chaos. In my opinion that does way more damage than any nukes.
Wouldn't it be easier to simply have Halliburton rebuild New Orleans or clean up a former military base or something while the first Bush was Prez? Why go through all the trouble of a war?
No, it wouldn't be easier. One of the biggest advantages of doing it overseas is that it's far far away from our eyes and ears. If Halliburton were doing work in New Orleans, you could drive down and see what they're doing (or not doing), you could have their finances publicly audited. They would be bound by US law. Over in Iraq, there is no law, at least not as far as US corporations are concerned. Anything that happens in Iraq, stays in Iraq unless they specifically allow the media to show it. You could even make people disappear and no one would be the wiser until long after the fact, once the evidence has been sufficiently obfuscated. If you can make a person disappear, then it's trivial to make money "disappear", and that's precisely what's happening.
You know when a relative takes their PC to Best Buy / Circuit City and wind up with a $400 dollar bill for a busted IDE cable ? That's what's happening in Iraq. We don't know what the fuck is really going on over there, but we blindly trust them and throw our money away.
Hey, I didn't say it would fix YOUR life.. all I'm saying is that every force has an equal counter-force. When it comes to humans it tends to take a few years for that counter-force to manifest itself, but it eventually does happen. Push people around too much and they push back. The very fact that you're whining about inactivity is proof that something out there is pissing you off, that something being me. The fact that there are thousands of us whining here on /. has a tangible effect on our perception of the world around us. We're all here, bitching about what we find frustrating and ridiculous, or fascinating and inspiring. All that data feeds into your brain and rattles around in the background. Eventually humankind will find a solution to racial/sexual/digital discrimination, and everything until that time is a process, a series of thought experiments, just like this text you're reading right now.
By that logic, everyone should be using QuickBasic. See, I'd rather invest my time designing functionality than battling wits with the compiler/interpreter. Maybe instead of designing nerf tools for dummies, we could just learn to cull the bad programmers. Just because some people have Down Syndrome doesn't mean we should all be driving around in bumper cars.
Ok here goes nothing. I'm a DOS veteran, and I treated my DOS like most people treat their Linux, using extensive modifications and addons to improve usability and productivity. Way back there was Edlin, which even in 1984 felt really ghetto. Its saving grace was that it could be easily scripted for batch usage. Some people used Wordstar, but I personally couldn't stand it. Sure enough, I trivially coded my own full-screen editor in BASIC, and all was well. Then came MS-DOS 5.0, with its flashy Dos Shell and Edit.com, which was really just QBasic minus the Basic part. It worked, it had a cutesy little drop-down menu like Windows apps did, and its usage was obvious to even the most ignorant of users.
:P vi didn't make any sense to me, and Emacs seemed like a huge mess of plugins that ate up more disk space than the OS itself. Now I'm obviously lacking in history when it comes to the Linux/Unix world, but why the hell do so few apps make use of the Function keys ? It's always Ctrl-something.. I'm fine with Ctrl-X and whatnot because they're where my hands would sit, but how hard would it be to just alias F1 to Help, F2 to Save, F3 to Open, in addition to the classic shortcuts.. It would certainly make it much easier to teach.
So then one day I get my hands on Slack 2.0. BLECH! Where's the simple full-screen editor I've grown so fond of over the past decade ?
And then there's the matter of arrow keys... sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. Ctrk-V or Y for pageup-pagedown, and something else for top/bottom. Now I agree that Unix came first and those shortcuts were probably in use way before Dos ever came along, but why hasn't anyone taken the liberty of adding the "idiot" shortcuts so that Joe Random Switcher can actually try Linux without spending 3 days in complete darkness trying to get a friggin cursor to move ? It's not like those movement keys have anything better to do, most of the time they just spew meta-characters like ^Q^1 or whatever.
If a text editor does anything more complicated than receive text input and save it to disk, it's no longer an editor in my book. Type setting ? it's a word processor. Syntax highlighting ? it's a development environment. Kinky macro processing and pseudo-hypertext Info-page fornication ? it's a dirty old man's poor excuse for an OS. I'm talking about you, Mr Stallman.
Wow, you've just described every goddamned business app I've ever been forced to use. I've yet to find a place where Java is the universally best tool for the job. The only thing Java is any good at is selling more Sun servers because it eats CPU cycles like popcorn. So then, why does every bullshitting developer on the planet know Java and nothing else ? I wouldn't touch it with a double-bagged 10-foot pole. We have a great need for simplified, rapid-development tools for the zillions of business apps out there. How hard should it be to fetch a few records, display them, validate edits and ship them back to the DB ? Ruby on Rails seems to do a fair job of this, but the web browser is a horrible choice for a client.. what the industry needs is something like Visual Ruby on Rails Terminal Server, kinda deal. Ridiculously fast development, easy enough that even if you hired the worst consultant on the planet, he could still produce a working app. The terminal server aspect is to avoid having to maintain client installations and simplify hardware support; just plug in one of those iMac-style terminals like you see at checkout counters and let the server do the heavy lifting... if a terminal quits on ya, rip the sucker out and plug in a spare for minimal downtime.
That's what I would see as a 21st-century replacement for COBOL. The same thin-client model but with a better backend and simplified, pattern-driven development. Every business app is more or less the same set of processes and paradigms, just combined and presented in different arrangements.
The problem is that people aren't yet at the stage where they can honestly look at someone without prejudice. For every incompetent twit abusing the system because he's a "visible minority" or accusing people of sexual harassment left and right, there's at least one bona-fide racist, misogynist or just straight-up asshole. The problem is the accused and the guilty are rarely the same person. It's all a matter of personal perception. The boss who slaps his secretary's ass in the hallway thinks it's perfectly normal to be an undersexed neanderthal, and the secretary also thinks it's perfectly normal in the 21st century to fool around with the boss, file a harassment suit and implicate the wife, splitting the multi-million divorce settlement 50/50. Life's just a game, and people bend the rules however they can to get the edge. If that means exploiting your gender or skin color to an advantage in the fucked up world of the law, then by all means go nuts. Given enough time, the system will balance itself out. The more outrageous suits are won, the more people will be motivated to seek corrective measures.
Kids are smarter than most adults give them credit for
You're absolutely right. That's because we were kids once, and we know all the brains go down the drain after puberty. By falsely labeling children as stupid, we are mentally preparing them for the worst years of their lives. It's far easier to set a low expectation and meet it, than set high expectations and have to explain the shortcomings.
Long story short, kids are smart, just don't tell them I told you so.
USA's #1 cultural contribution to the world: financially-fueled hatred. Seriously, people get killed over their beliefs, their appearance, their race, their family, their actions.. all over the world. Americans kill for profit. You don't need to pull the trigger to kill a man, robbing him of all values and morals is worse than death to some.
Having a 200kb block of text, no matter how well it compresses, will add anywhere from 10 to 40 seconds to download on a dial-up line, and that was for a ridiculously small CAPTCHA. A larger, more human-readable size might use up 500kb or more. Even on a high-speed link that's a noticeable pause. The fact that it only shows up on the sign-up page doesn't make it excuseable; in fact it makes it counter-productive. If I find some cool site, eagerly hit the sign-up link and end up staring at a half-rendered page for more than 15-20 seconds, I'll just leave and find some other site that loads faster, because I really don't care what's going on behind the scenes... I have no compassion for an elaborate security device if it bungles my experience.
This is what happens when bad ideas are brought to life. This will only waste the site owner's bandwidth, maybe slow down the attacker slightly while the algorithm is modified.. we're talking AT MOST a couple days work. You could achieve the same result by adding a 2-second delay to the CAPTCHA cgi, the same idea as adding a delay to failed logins... if you can't properly defeat the attackers, at least slow them down.
We've reached a point where, with security/copy protection, if it is something than can be done by a human sitting at a computer, the human can be removed from the equation. The greatest shortcoming of any system like CAPTCHA, or even asking "human intelligence" questions like "What do monkeys eat" or other things that computers don't innately "know", is that a human has to computerize those actions in the first place. You have to teach YOUR computer what the answer to the monkey question is, and there are only so many answers you will teach it until you run out of ideas (or exhaust the body of humankind's knowledge). Eventually the attacker will know all the answers to your challenges and you've just wasted a whole lot of time.
A better strategy here is the psychological approach. How do you get rid of a tireless attacker ? What motivates an attacker ? They WANT something of value to them. That something can be email addresses, zombie hosts, or in the case of blog spam they just want eyeballs. There are two ways to demotivate them: get rid of what's luring them, or make your prize harder to get than everyone else's. The first solution might mean crippling your site, even making it totally worthless (think site owners that give up, communities that are abandoned after relentless attacks). The second solution only buys you time, because the more vulnerable sites will ramp up their security, sooner or later, and then you're back at square one.
Actually there is a solution 3: find the attackers and attack THEM. Hey it's not the higher road, but it's damn effective.
I'm also greatly frustrated by traffic, and have spent a fair portion of my spare IQ trying to make sense of it, going as far as coding up elaborate simulations as I'm sure others have done before me. Sadly I have no magic solution. The big problem with driving is that just about anyone can get a license, but only a very small portion of those people are skilled enough to really drive. Sure, they know where the controls are and what they do, but they don't have the brains to do watch all the vehicles around them, while figuring out where they're going and real-time physics processing all at once. My favorite analogy for this one is painting: Just because you can tell red from blue, and you know how to hold a paintbrush, doesn't make you an artist.
:) I can only hope he'll learn from that lesson.
One thing I hope everyone can relate to is the "invisible choke point". It seems every city has at least one of these, where everyone slows down for no reason whatsoever. Traffic just plain stops at rush hour, and you expect to see a nasty accident blocking two lanes with an idiot cop blocking the 3rd, but instead you just find that people go back to full speed a quarter-mile later with no event.
Then there's the left-lane hogger. I ran into one last night on a half-hour drive. The little bastard was the only car in the left lane, doing about 95 in a 100 zone (kilometers not miles), where most people do 130 or more. Traffic was too dense in the other lanes because of the holiday craze so everyone was stuck because of him. After a few miles of this nonsense, I drove right up to him and tailgated like a murderous psychopath for less than a minute until he finally moved over and let me through. I kept an eye on my rear-view and sure enough, the instant I passed him, he shimmied right back blocking everyone else. My response to that passive-aggressive pansy-boy was to give him a taste of his own medicine, hopefully making him realize how frustrating and dangerous his disrespectful driving had been. I slowed down right in his face forcing him to hit the brakes just a couple feet away from hitting me, then cruised along for a bit until he changed lanes to try and pass me on the right, then I moved in front of him again while everyone else sped through like they were escaping from prison. He was effectively trapped behind me with a long line of angry speeders on either side. Payback's a bitch
I'd say a big part of the problem is that driving requires cooperation. As a driver, your are responsible for the safety of everyone around you, just as they are responsible for yours. You can't go out there, driving selfishly as if you were the only car on the road and expect things to go smoothly. One thing I noticed moving from a smallish city to a bigger one, is the lack of courtesy on the road. You could have your car practically sideways trying to do a left turn, NOBODY will slow down to wave you over, actually they will floor it to cut you off, so you end up waiting a few minutes and holding up the line of cars behind you. Driver A saved 5 seconds by cutting you off instead of letting you turn, but cost the other side of the road 2 minutes each, times 15 cars. Now if Driver A could appreciate that half the time, he's the one wasting his time in a jam and he'd really like it if the incoming assholes would slow down and give him a chance to pass.
Where I live, driving lessons involve 3 evenings of classroom lectures about road signs and safe driving, and 10 hours of driving practice. I think it would be immeasurably beneficial to spend a few extra nights in the classroom, talking about cooperation and respect on the road. Hammer it in people's heads that they're driving a 3000 pound hunk of metal. Hostile driving turns that vehicle into a deadly weapon, and well I wouldn't want to live in a neighborhood where all my neighbors are madly twirling a 3000 lb baseball bat at each others' head.