As for Google - who knows how they do their rankings nowadays...
I'm pretty sure it has something to to with chicken bones, pig blood, and the Illumanti.
We'll find out soon enough, as M. Night Shaymalan is addressing the topic in his next movie The Page. I saw a preview of it the other night. The tagline?
Seriously, I haven't made a call from home on a land line in about a year. Even when I had DSL, the phone was answered for about a month, then I just stopped answering it. Now I have a cable modem, and no land line at all.
A recent survey by the US internet provider Earthlink found that the average computer was packed with hidden software, such as cookies tracking online habits.
Last I checked, a cookie was NOT a program.
I mean, look... cookies have been around forever in internet terms. You think someone writing a technology article would have at least known to check on what the fuck a cookie actially is.
Thanks to this article, any Joe Sixpack who reads it is now going to be calling his ISP tech support free line screaming "I GOTS ME COOKIES! HOW DOES I GIT RID OF THEM? YOU PUT THEM THERE, DIDNT YA?!?!?!?!"
Lovely.
Then, after he figures out how to turn cookies off, he'll call back screaming about how his "internat dont work no more!"
The fact of the matter is that Joe Sixpack users for the most part are just plain STUPID when they get online and start buying stuff.
I've written a store or two in my day and the points made here to use either JS or backend processing to errorcheck is moot. You should be using BOTH. Catch the error as soon as you can, and then doublecheck it; becuase Ol' Joe is going to come up with bad data in ways you can't even begin to imagine.
They forget things like their own zip code or the abbreviation to their own state or their entire address alltogether or they ignore the fact that EVEN THOUGH THERE IS LARGE TYPE PROCLAIMING "WE CANNOT SHIP OVERNIGHT TO PO BOXES" they will still try to ship overnight to a PO Box.
Users will get javascript messages and then change their inputs to still give bad data but get around the JS checking.
You need to do the checking on BOTH sides, like it or not, or your order processing department is going to be having kiniptions on a daily basis.
Testament to user stupidity: One company I worked for has an Eight Character long name, say it was ABCDEFGH. We got a toll free number, 1-800-ABCDEFG. We listed it on the site as "Call 1-800-ABCDEFGH for support."
One guy, instead of just dialing it, saw that ABCDEFGH was in fact longer than a regular phone number and FAXED US asking what the real phone number was, because 1-800-ABCDEFGH was obviously fake.
I had to go in and change the instances of the phone number to read: 1-800-ABCDEFGH (1-800-222-3334)
Typical.
--
Also, as much as I hate to admit that the suits are right, you need to get your hooks into every. single. customer. the first time.
Good online shopping experiences are told to 2 or 3 friends. Bad online shopping experiences are told to ten times that many. Joe Sixpack has a mouth, and he likes to flap it.
The plain truth is that most muggers are looking for a fast hit with low risk. Crazy people are far from low risk.
When you walk along, take the godamn iPod off and just talk to yourself, quietly, or not-so-quietly.
Twitch a little.
Use the words "kill the bitch" often, emphasizing the word "kill" just a little bit. Exclaiming words like "FUCKERS" to noone in general adds a little spice to the monotony.
Stop on occation and just look randomly at something REAL HARD for a while, then shamble off muttering some more.
Hold your cellphone in your pocket and constantly twiddle with it. "What does that crazy guy got in his pocket? Test him and find out!" is not a game most petty criminals want to play.
If you look crazier then they are, they'll leave you alone.
Lobo - rip of Wolverine Badger - rip off of Wolverine Vindicator - rip off of Batman, with Iron Man tossed in Quicksilver - Flash ripoff Thor/Loki/Odin - Norse ripoff Wolverine - rip of every legendary antihero since the aincent Greeks Blade - The Punisher ripoff cooled by making him half vamipre The Punisher - ripoff of everyones primal urge to fucking kill everyone that does them wrong
I think the only original character is... Stan Lee
...about this mediu is that Pixar isn't simply a digital rendering company.
They're a MOVIE company. The reason their stuff is so well loved by the general populace is that they're first and foremost moviemakers. All of the stuff Ive seen from them so far is incredibly well written. That goes for not only their features but their shorts, too. Even the ones with no dialog in them.
The fact that they take these scripts and make them happen in a totally rendered environment is more than a creative choice than anything else. The script HAS to be good, and dead on, and not have a lot of slop, because the rendering proces is so time consuming and expensive (for now.) The medium in a sense culls out the shit material, because no matter how much you polish up a peice of shit, it's still going to be shit.
Films like Toy Story and Monsters Inc. COULD have been made in the traditional way, with actors and such, but by doing the whole thing as animation they get away from moments in the film where the audience would mentally break off with the thought "Holy Fuck, that's a coolass special effect."
IMHO, The fact that these are marketed and skewed towards a younger audience is mainly because, as a culture, the US isn't ready to accept animated ANYTHING as a serious medium for carying adult themes. If Pixar was a Japanese company, half the stuff they made probably wouldnt be viewable by children. Take Cowboy Bebop as an example. Anime, purely cartoon, but NOT for kids. I wont even go into things like Ghost in the Shell. This cultural disconnect in the States is why you see things like a row full of nine year olds sitting in a theater watching Terrance and Phillip sing songs about how the other likes to anally rape his uncle.
The robot was the woman's husband and he had been murdered. The investigation was about who murdered the robot. The interesting thing was that the murder was comitted by taking the victim and basically forcing him to do a divide by zero, rendering him completely permanently comatose and frying his hardware.
It was a fairly interesting read. The robots are advanced to the point of having fairly human personalities. Giving them a gender helped fill hte personality out, though they didn't really have human drives, like "Jesus Christ I Haven't Been Laid In Weeks! Must Get Some!"
"Don't you see? Its a PHONE, but... get this... wait for it... its shaped like a CAN!" "Brilliant!" "We can leverage the market paradigm of trans-shifting beverage consumption and need-to-speak!" "The Beer Can Holder Hat Demographic will eat this up!"
Marketing ASSHOLES.
I cant wait for the prize SUV to be delivered to a drunken teen party where kids are drinking off half the can and then refilling it with whatever booze that managed to steal from their parents.
When you look at it, whats the cost for a small coffe chop of restaurant to offer free wireless in their place? Maybe $50-70 a month for broadband, then slap in a Linksys wireless router for $100, then maybe figure out how to lock the thing down a little.
Let the customers know that this is a free and open network, and that you're not responsible to what happens to their machines, and thats about it.
Its been my experience that people will go to a place to pay 10 times over cost for a cup of coffee spedifically because they can boot up and be online without having to goof with their settings too much. Like these folks, I will even spend a little more just staying there a little longer because I can sit and read/. for hours on end in a nice environment.
10 people a week spend an extra $2.50 a visit because of the wireless and you get $25. 4.2 weeks in the average month adds up to $105.
Bingo. WiFi cost recovered.
This doesn't even take into account the Evercrack geeks that will sit there for hours on end mainlining shot after shot of espresso into themselves for that extra twitch speed while playing.
This is just yet another attempt at a useless industry trying to insert themselves into a place where they're not wanted or needed.
Hey Marketers, fuck you. We're not going to buy your shit no matter how many times you put it in front of us.
This is a good idea, much like the photographic tickets, but it just doesn't quite do the job.
Proposal One:
People who speed excessively not only get points and fines, but more creative punishments, such as bumper stickers that say I'm an asshole that thinks they are more important that the safety of those sharing the vehicle and the road around them. When I exit my vehicle, you may legally kick my ass. (These will have to be fairly large to be read, and will be placed on all sides of the vehicle.) You will also pay for application, maintenance, and eventual removal of these stickers yourself.
Further punishments will be revocation of privelidges to drive vehicles of certain size and/or horsepower. These restrictions are PERMANENT.
"You can't handle the fact that you need to behave yourself when driving your V-6 Jetta Turbo to and from school? Fine, you can now drive a reconditioned Yugo with a governor on the engine for the rest of your life, fucko."
The next step is not suspension of license, but permanent removal.
"Hunh? Need to get to work? Bus passes are $35. Not close to a bus line? Get active with city council and creata more/better public transportation. Yes, we know, we're unfair jerks. Now get a move on or you'll miss your bus."
Proposal Two:
Instead of mucking with traffic lights, we stick to the mobile side-of-the-road speed detectors that we all run into from time to time (The units could also be modified to be mounted semi-permanently above the highway, one per lane, just above informational signs.) These units would need to be refitted, however.
The radar gun is mounted in a turret that allows it to track vehicles and is reworked for a narrower cone of throw to allow it to target a specific vehicle more accurately. Coaxially mounted with this radar gun is a laser to allow for rangefinding and tracking. This technology is currently available.
Also coaxially mounted with the radar gun is an accurate paintball marker, one of those non-lethal rifles that fire rubber bullets, and something similar to the Navy's Sea-Whiz (CWIS) anti-missile system.
When the unit detects a vehicle speeding, it uses its tracking system to get a lock on the vehicle and displays the message: YOU ARE SPEEDING! SLOW IMMEDIATELY OR CORRECTIVE MEASURES WILL BE TAKEN.
(This may necessetate the teaching of hte meaning of these signs to non-english speakers. Or not. Live here, learn the language.)
If the vehicle does not slow down, The unit continues to track it until the vehicle is in close range, then depending on how much the offender is speeding, they either get a paintball shot into their car, or a nice fat high velocity rubber bullet, or in extreme cases; a couple dozen depleted uranium armor piercing rounds.
In the first two cases, when repairing the damage done to the car, the reason for the damage would be obviously seen and fines could be levied by the state through auto body and paint establishments.
In the third case, the best a family could get for an apology is "Look, we're sorry for the death of your loved one, but the fact it this person though themselves more important than soceity and showed so by flagrantly disobeying the laws imposed by it. The only rational corrective measure for someone who chooses to disrupt soceity so flagrantly is to remove them. Don't forget, driving is a priveledge granted by soceity. If you cant follow the rules, your fault. Deal."
An additional feature could be, in cases where no other vehicles are detected, the road spikes up and punctures all of the vehicles tires. If they wreck horribly, they were obviously going TOO FUCKING FAST. Wrecks be pushed off to the side of the road to a safe distance and LEFT THERE PERMANENTLY. The above apology can be given as needed.
Of course, it would only be a matter of time before countermeasure kits would be available for vehicles, though posessing one would result in an extreme ass-beating by the police followed by instant revocation of your license, permanently.
Neil, you couldn't speak more truth. I used to live in the same area and those lights were timeed impeccably, and people STILL wouldn't get the point. Speeding through that area would actually TAKE LONGER than sticking close to the posted limit. Especially if their driving like an asshole caused an accident, which was pretty much a daily happening.
The picture/banner idea would not only be brilliant, but create a whole slew of jobs in the Jumbotron industry to build and maintain the displays, as well as improve design to ward off the inevitable attempts to destroy them.
Never mind that by lengthening the yellow they could eliminate running stoplights almost entirely
I don't know what utopia you live in where the majority of people are so courteous to share the road with the rest of soceity, but if you couls post it here I'd be much appreciated.
Longer yellow lights equates to longer periods of time where people will floor it to get through the intersection so they can save a few measely seconds, typically so they can go fast enough to catch the NEXT red light down the street.
I won't even go into the "fuck the rest of you, its MY road, and I have to get somewhere" attitude most drivers have in this post, because you all know about it already.
All I know is when I looked in the drivers side window, the screen directly in front of his face WAS NOT the current traffic patterns or any other information a driver would need as an aid for piloting the vehicle.
Also, For the record, it wasn't a family (not that it would have made a difference to me), it was a carload of teens-twenties (you can't tell the diff these days).
I got "Flamebait." Impressive!
and to whomever took the time to correct my wording and then was pussy enough to post as an AC: Suck It. Hard.
I do think an onboard computer for things like navigation is a decent idea.
HOWEVER....
I was driving home the other night and noticed this weird blue glow coming from the car in the lane next to me.
The car was very tricked out, you can imagine the type, and had little tiny LCD screens in the backseats for the back passengers.
Then I noticed the little screens in the flipdown sun visors. Both of which were down.
Everybody in the car seemed to be truly enjoying whatever it was on the television.
Including the driver, who was very into whatever it was that was on. The fact that he had to take his attention away from the screen every so often to avoid hitting some other inconsiderate slob who had the gall to actually be driving on the same street didn't seem to be more than a slight annoyance.
At that moment I really, really hoped to God that they would hit a bridge abuttment and die painful fiery deaths.
Televisions. In cars. Is this really necessary?
Are you so unable to concentrate on the one task of getting where you need to go without slamming your ton and a half of 40 mile an hour vehicle into someone else that you need that big of a diversion?
Are you unable to teach your children the discipline to sit the fuck down and shut up for 20 minutes while you get where you're going?
Does the possibility of holding a conversation with the other people in your private little bubble scare you so badly that you need MORE CRAP in your vehicle to avoid possibly having a slight interaction with others?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you're a waste of space.
Mostly offtopic, but I sure do feel better for sayin' it.
a pretty cool position opening up at one of the premier juice companies.
possibility of what that job is: - Running a Beowulf cluster dedicated to running highly detailed "Pulp Energy Vectoring and Flavor Transfer Simulations"
Probability of what that job is: - "Uh, can you come down here? Yeah. Charlie got apple concentrate in his CDROM again."
i know, i know... offtopic.
for ($i=0;$i<1000;$i++) {
print BLACKBOARD "I will not post Off Topic.\n"; }
What I'm saying is that if you got on a site like this where people actually follow links they see, you'd EASILY get 100k hits within a few days, scpecially when you consider the basic bent of the average/.er
THe really good way to do this is to get a message out on some site like/. that has a huge volume of readers and get them to each do it a couple of times a week. That would make it look like real traffic.
Its like the days of overture where they would list the amount that companies were bidding per click right in the search results. I greatly enjoyed searching "Bulk Mail" and "Mass Mailer" and then clicking through the top ten sites, most of which were paying a buck or two PER CLICK.
Fast way to cost the scumbags a little money and get them nothing for it. Get 100,000 + users all do it in a week and you've suddenly cost them a LOT of money.
try it. It takes about five minutes, is a nice relaxing little clickfest, and its fun!
and you don't even need to know how to write code to do it.
So if Simland is formaing faux governments, does this mark the beginning of the online nation state?
Will the arise of virtual nation states become the same quagmiritic mess of so-called diplomatic relations that exists in the real world today?
If so, then will these diplomatic relations between online communities breakdown and become virtual online hostilities?
Should all of this happen, I'd put my money on Everquest kicking the shit out of Sims Online, using the simoleans to bloat an ever increasing warchest, turning the peoples of Alphaville into nothing but a nation of slaves used for bizzare Orcish sexual practices, and rolling on to conquer even more virtual online lands.
Even after conquering the majority of the internets online lands, The majority of our new internet masters will still remain savagely unlaid.
(I'm very aware that I used the word "faux," and I'm not sorry for it. Nor am I sorry for the cheap shot I took at Everquest players.)
Slashdot Mirror
...now we got 14 year olds sending videos of themselves jerking off to boys they like.
jesus christ.
Anyone remember back when the worst thing 14 year old girls did was let some boy touch her boob after drinking a wine cooler?
ah, nostalgia.
As for Google - who knows how they do their rankings nowadays...
I'm pretty sure it has something to to with chicken bones, pig blood, and the Illumanti.
We'll find out soon enough, as M. Night Shaymalan is addressing the topic in his next movie The Page. I saw a preview of it the other night. The tagline?
"I read background colored text..."
People still use their land lines?
Seriously, I haven't made a call from home on a land line in about a year. Even when I had DSL, the phone was answered for about a month, then I just stopped answering it. Now I have a cable modem, and no land line at all.
They can't call your cell phone.
Fuck them.
A recent survey by the US internet provider Earthlink found that the average computer was packed with hidden software, such as cookies tracking online habits.
Last I checked, a cookie was NOT a program.
I mean, look... cookies have been around forever in internet terms. You think someone writing a technology article would have at least known to check on what the fuck a cookie actially is.
Thanks to this article, any Joe Sixpack who reads it is now going to be calling his ISP tech support free line screaming "I GOTS ME COOKIES! HOW DOES I GIT RID OF THEM? YOU PUT THEM THERE, DIDNT YA?!?!?!?!"
Lovely.
Then, after he figures out how to turn cookies off, he'll call back screaming about how his "internat dont work no more!"
double lovely.
Go ahead, ask me again why I'm a misanthrope.
Offtopic as all hell, but...
You're half right and half wrong.
The fact of the matter is that Joe Sixpack users for the most part are just plain STUPID when they get online and start buying stuff.
I've written a store or two in my day and the points made here to use either JS or backend processing to errorcheck is moot. You should be using BOTH. Catch the error as soon as you can, and then doublecheck it; becuase Ol' Joe is going to come up with bad data in ways you can't even begin to imagine.
They forget things like their own zip code or the abbreviation to their own state or their entire address alltogether or they ignore the fact that EVEN THOUGH THERE IS LARGE TYPE PROCLAIMING "WE CANNOT SHIP OVERNIGHT TO PO BOXES" they will still try to ship overnight to a PO Box.
Users will get javascript messages and then change their inputs to still give bad data but get around the JS checking.
You need to do the checking on BOTH sides, like it or not, or your order processing department is going to be having kiniptions on a daily basis.
Testament to user stupidity:
One company I worked for has an Eight Character long name, say it was ABCDEFGH. We got a toll free number, 1-800-ABCDEFG. We listed it on the site as "Call 1-800-ABCDEFGH for support."
One guy, instead of just dialing it, saw that ABCDEFGH was in fact longer than a regular phone number and FAXED US asking what the real phone number was, because 1-800-ABCDEFGH was obviously fake.
I had to go in and change the instances of the phone number to read:
1-800-ABCDEFGH
(1-800-222-3334)
Typical.
--
Also, as much as I hate to admit that the suits are right, you need to get your hooks into every. single. customer. the first time.
Good online shopping experiences are told to 2 or 3 friends. Bad online shopping experiences are told to ten times that many. Joe Sixpack has a mouth, and he likes to flap it.
The plain truth is that most muggers are looking for a fast hit with low risk. Crazy people are far from low risk.
When you walk along, take the godamn iPod off and just talk to yourself, quietly, or not-so-quietly.
Twitch a little.
Use the words "kill the bitch" often, emphasizing the word "kill" just a little bit. Exclaiming words like "FUCKERS" to noone in general adds a little spice to the monotony.
Stop on occation and just look randomly at something REAL HARD for a while, then shamble off muttering some more.
Hold your cellphone in your pocket and constantly twiddle with it. "What does that crazy guy got in his pocket? Test him and find out!" is not a game most petty criminals want to play.
If you look crazier then they are, they'll leave you alone.
and most importantly: IT'S FUN!
...ripping themselves off for years now.
Let's see now...
Lobo - rip of Wolverine
Badger - rip off of Wolverine
Vindicator - rip off of Batman, with Iron Man tossed in
Quicksilver - Flash ripoff
Thor/Loki/Odin - Norse ripoff
Wolverine - rip of every legendary antihero since the aincent Greeks
Blade - The Punisher ripoff cooled by making him half vamipre
The Punisher - ripoff of everyones primal urge to fucking kill everyone that does them wrong
I think the only original character is... Stan Lee
...about this mediu is that Pixar isn't simply a digital rendering company.
They're a MOVIE company. The reason their stuff is so well loved by the general populace is that they're first and foremost moviemakers. All of the stuff Ive seen from them so far is incredibly well written. That goes for not only their features but their shorts, too. Even the ones with no dialog in them.
The fact that they take these scripts and make them happen in a totally rendered environment is more than a creative choice than anything else. The script HAS to be good, and dead on, and not have a lot of slop, because the rendering proces is so time consuming and expensive (for now.) The medium in a sense culls out the shit material, because no matter how much you polish up a peice of shit, it's still going to be shit.
Films like Toy Story and Monsters Inc. COULD have been made in the traditional way, with actors and such, but by doing the whole thing as animation they get away from moments in the film where the audience would mentally break off with the thought "Holy Fuck, that's a coolass special effect."
IMHO, The fact that these are marketed and skewed towards a younger audience is mainly because, as a culture, the US isn't ready to accept animated ANYTHING as a serious medium for carying adult themes. If Pixar was a Japanese company, half the stuff they made probably wouldnt be viewable by children. Take Cowboy Bebop as an example. Anime, purely cartoon, but NOT for kids. I wont even go into things like Ghost in the Shell. This cultural disconnect in the States is why you see things like a row full of nine year olds sitting in a theater watching Terrance and Phillip sing songs about how the other likes to anally rape his uncle.
Robots of Dawn
I just read this about a year ago.
The robot was the woman's husband and he had been murdered. The investigation was about who murdered the robot. The interesting thing was that the murder was comitted by taking the victim and basically forcing him to do a divide by zero, rendering him completely permanently comatose and frying his hardware.
It was a fairly interesting read. The robots are advanced to the point of having fairly human personalities. Giving them a gender helped fill hte personality out, though they didn't really have human drives, like "Jesus Christ I Haven't Been Laid In Weeks! Must Get Some!"
"Don't you see? Its a PHONE, but... get this... wait for it...
its shaped like a CAN! "
"Brilliant!"
"We can leverage the market paradigm of trans-shifting beverage consumption and need-to-speak!"
"The Beer Can Holder Hat Demographic will eat this up!"
Marketing ASSHOLES.
I cant wait for the prize SUV to be delivered to a drunken teen party where kids are drinking off half the can and then refilling it with whatever booze that managed to steal from their parents.
I completely disagree with this.
"Joe User" generally doesnt take the time to find the free hotspots in the city and seek them out.
Then again, I havent seen a "Joe User" type hanging in very many coffeeshops.
When you look at it, whats the cost for a small coffe chop of restaurant to offer free wireless in their place? Maybe $50-70 a month for broadband, then slap in a Linksys wireless router for $100, then maybe figure out how to lock the thing down a little.
/. for hours on end in a nice environment.
Let the customers know that this is a free and open network, and that you're not responsible to what happens to their machines, and thats about it.
Its been my experience that people will go to a place to pay 10 times over cost for a cup of coffee spedifically because they can boot up and be online without having to goof with their settings too much. Like these folks, I will even spend a little more just staying there a little longer because I can sit and read
10 people a week spend an extra $2.50 a visit because of the wireless and you get $25. 4.2 weeks in the average month adds up to $105.
Bingo. WiFi cost recovered.
This doesn't even take into account the Evercrack geeks that will sit there for hours on end mainlining shot after shot of espresso into themselves for that extra twitch speed while playing.
This is just yet another attempt at a useless industry trying to insert themselves into a place where they're not wanted or needed.
Hey Marketers, fuck you. We're not going to buy your shit no matter how many times you put it in front of us.
Boy Suspended for Questioning MPAA Lecture
This is a good idea, much like the photographic tickets, but it just doesn't quite do the job.
Proposal One:
People who speed excessively not only get points and fines, but more creative punishments, such as bumper stickers that say I'm an asshole that thinks they are more important that the safety of those sharing the vehicle and the road around them. When I exit my vehicle, you may legally kick my ass. (These will have to be fairly large to be read, and will be placed on all sides of the vehicle.) You will also pay for application, maintenance, and eventual removal of these stickers yourself.
Further punishments will be revocation of privelidges to drive vehicles of certain size and/or horsepower. These restrictions are PERMANENT.
"You can't handle the fact that you need to behave yourself when driving your V-6 Jetta Turbo to and from school? Fine, you can now drive a reconditioned Yugo with a governor on the engine for the rest of your life, fucko."
The next step is not suspension of license, but permanent removal.
"Hunh? Need to get to work? Bus passes are $35. Not close to a bus line? Get active with city council and creata more/better public transportation. Yes, we know, we're unfair jerks. Now get a move on or you'll miss your bus."
Proposal Two:
Instead of mucking with traffic lights, we stick to the mobile side-of-the-road speed detectors that we all run into from time to time (The units could also be modified to be mounted semi-permanently above the highway, one per lane, just above informational signs.) These units would need to be refitted, however.
The radar gun is mounted in a turret that allows it to track vehicles and is reworked for a narrower cone of throw to allow it to target a specific vehicle more accurately. Coaxially mounted with this radar gun is a laser to allow for rangefinding and tracking. This technology is currently available.
Also coaxially mounted with the radar gun is an accurate paintball marker, one of those non-lethal rifles that fire rubber bullets, and something similar to the Navy's Sea-Whiz (CWIS) anti-missile system.
When the unit detects a vehicle speeding, it uses its tracking system to get a lock on the vehicle and displays the message: YOU ARE SPEEDING! SLOW IMMEDIATELY OR CORRECTIVE MEASURES WILL BE TAKEN.
(This may necessetate the teaching of hte meaning of these signs to non-english speakers. Or not. Live here, learn the language.)
If the vehicle does not slow down, The unit continues to track it until the vehicle is in close range, then depending on how much the offender is speeding, they either get a paintball shot into their car, or a nice fat high velocity rubber bullet, or in extreme cases; a couple dozen depleted uranium armor piercing rounds.
In the first two cases, when repairing the damage done to the car, the reason for the damage would be obviously seen and fines could be levied by the state through auto body and paint establishments.
In the third case, the best a family could get for an apology is "Look, we're sorry for the death of your loved one, but the fact it this person though themselves more important than soceity and showed so by flagrantly disobeying the laws imposed by it. The only rational corrective measure for someone who chooses to disrupt soceity so flagrantly is to remove them. Don't forget, driving is a priveledge granted by soceity. If you cant follow the rules, your fault. Deal."
An additional feature could be, in cases where no other vehicles are detected, the road spikes up and punctures all of the vehicles tires. If they wreck horribly, they were obviously going TOO FUCKING FAST. Wrecks be pushed off to the side of the road to a safe distance and LEFT THERE PERMANENTLY. The above apology can be given as needed.
Of course, it would only be a matter of time before countermeasure kits would be available for vehicles, though posessing one would result in an extreme ass-beating by the police followed by instant revocation of your license, permanently.
Neil, you couldn't speak more truth. I used to live in the same area and those lights were timeed impeccably, and people STILL wouldn't get the point. Speeding through that area would actually TAKE LONGER than sticking close to the posted limit. Especially if their driving like an asshole caused an accident, which was pretty much a daily happening.
The picture/banner idea would not only be brilliant, but create a whole slew of jobs in the Jumbotron industry to build and maintain the displays, as well as improve design to ward off the inevitable attempts to destroy them.
Never mind that by lengthening the yellow they could eliminate running stoplights almost entirely
I don't know what utopia you live in where the majority of people are so courteous to share the road with the rest of soceity, but if you couls post it here I'd be much appreciated.
Longer yellow lights equates to longer periods of time where people will floor it to get through the intersection so they can save a few measely seconds, typically so they can go fast enough to catch the NEXT red light down the street.
I won't even go into the "fuck the rest of you, its MY road, and I have to get somewhere" attitude most drivers have in this post, because you all know about it already.
Those are pretty friggin cool looking.
Really, they were "watching TV."
Okay, maybe it wasnt TV, but a DVD or something.
All I know is when I looked in the drivers side window, the screen directly in front of his face WAS NOT the current traffic patterns or any other information a driver would need as an aid for piloting the vehicle.
Also, For the record, it wasn't a family (not that it would have made a difference to me), it was a carload of teens-twenties (you can't tell the diff these days).
I got "Flamebait." Impressive!
and to whomever took the time to correct my wording and then was pussy enough to post as an AC: Suck It. Hard.
You had a decent point then had to fuck it up with "Look at what a cool expensive car I have! See how great I am because of my car!"
Like we fucking give a good goddamn that you own a Mercedes.
Fuck you and your posessions.
"You are not yer fuckin' khakis."
I do think an onboard computer for things like navigation is a decent idea.
HOWEVER....
I was driving home the other night and noticed this weird blue glow coming from the car in the lane next to me.
The car was very tricked out, you can imagine the type, and had little tiny LCD screens in the backseats for the back passengers.
Then I noticed the little screens in the flipdown sun visors. Both of which were down.
Everybody in the car seemed to be truly enjoying whatever it was on the television.
Including the driver, who was very into whatever it was that was on. The fact that he had to take his attention away from the screen every so often to avoid hitting some other inconsiderate slob who had the gall to actually be driving on the same street didn't seem to be more than a slight annoyance.
At that moment I really, really hoped to God that they would hit a bridge abuttment and die painful fiery deaths.
Televisions. In cars. Is this really necessary?
Are you so unable to concentrate on the one task of getting where you need to go without slamming your ton and a half of 40 mile an hour vehicle into someone else that you need that big of a diversion?
Are you unable to teach your children the discipline to sit the fuck down and shut up for 20 minutes while you get where you're going?
Does the possibility of holding a conversation with the other people in your private little bubble scare you so badly that you need MORE CRAP in your vehicle to avoid possibly having a slight interaction with others?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you're a waste of space.
Mostly offtopic, but I sure do feel better for sayin' it.
Yes, we all know how baseball lends itself to be heavily broken down statistically, but do we really need statistics like:
Ooh, the numbers are staggering.
America's pasttime, my ass.
possibility of what that job is:
- Running a Beowulf cluster dedicated to running highly detailed "Pulp Energy Vectoring and Flavor Transfer Simulations"
Probability of what that job is:
- "Uh, can you come down here? Yeah. Charlie got apple concentrate in his CDROM again."
i know, i know... offtopic.
What I'm saying is that if you got on a site like this where people actually follow links they see, you'd EASILY get 100k hits within a few days, scpecially when you consider the basic bent of the average /.er
that is all.
THe really good way to do this is to get a message out on some site like /. that has a huge volume of readers and get them to each do it a couple of times a week. That would make it look like real traffic.
Its like the days of overture where they would list the amount that companies were bidding per click right in the search results. I greatly enjoyed searching "Bulk Mail" and "Mass Mailer" and then clicking through the top ten sites, most of which were paying a buck or two PER CLICK.
Fast way to cost the scumbags a little money and get them nothing for it. Get 100,000 + users all do it in a week and you've suddenly cost them a LOT of money.
try it. It takes about five minutes, is a nice relaxing little clickfest, and its fun!
and you don't even need to know how to write code to do it.
So if Simland is formaing faux governments, does this mark the beginning of the online nation state?
Will the arise of virtual nation states become the same quagmiritic mess of so-called diplomatic relations that exists in the real world today?
If so, then will these diplomatic relations between online communities breakdown and become virtual online hostilities?
Should all of this happen, I'd put my money on Everquest kicking the shit out of Sims Online, using the simoleans to bloat an ever increasing warchest, turning the peoples of Alphaville into nothing but a nation of slaves used for bizzare Orcish sexual practices, and rolling on to conquer even more virtual online lands.
Even after conquering the majority of the internets online lands, The majority of our new internet masters will still remain savagely unlaid.
(I'm very aware that I used the word "faux," and I'm not sorry for it.
Nor am I sorry for the cheap shot I took at Everquest players.)