Yeah, when I see averages like this, I am reminded of a report I read on world population growth. It said the average age of the world's population is 26.4 years. It's a perfectly cromulent calculation for tracking long term shifts in birth rate, but it does say squat about how old any individual I meet will be. Same thing here with 3G speed. If AT&T's average bit rate went up by a significant amount over last year, you could confidently say their 3G data network is improving.... but I would still have had to step outside onto the sidewalk just to get even a half-assed connection at 100kbps where I used to work.
I've noticed other important differences between AT&T and the others: when I go outside the US, my phone isn't a fucking useless brick. I'm also not stuck driving to a tech support office if my phone craps out, I can just put the SIM card in a different phone. I can also order phones with interesting features from foreign countries and they work.
I wonder why they left T-Mobile out. I'm with AT&T currently would love to see where the other major GSM carrier stands.
you can just hang the RFID tag reader on the truck's ramp and let it read the tags as the cattle enter the truck
I want to live in your magical world where handheld RFID scanners just need to be pointed in the general direction of the tags and can be depended on to catch 100% of the tags without human supervision.
I suspect you are lumping all RFID reader products into the same category as the large, stationary units like Wal-Mart uses to scan pallet-loads of stuff at once. Portable units are generally not that far above a barcode scanner. The cattle ranchers' issues are legitimate.
it could offer seamless transitions from local cellular, voip over wifi, and satellite based communication
I've used portable satcom equipment before, and I guarantee the transition won't be seamless. When your conversation switches from terrestrial antenna (1 mile) to geostationary relay (44K mile round trip), you are able to discern a subtle change and conversational timing when the latency goes up to HALF A FUCKING SECOND.
Not sure who the bigger fool is, the guy that embezzled all the in-game money or the schmuck that paid $5000 of real money for it.
Try as I might, I can't find a single thing the embezzler did that makes him a fool. He ditched a real-life time and money sink of a habit (EVE Online) and managed to trade it for real-life money and pay some bills. Might qualify slightly as "jerk", but not even a little as "fool".
Those, and other tedious work can be fully automated
Nice handwave. You've clearly never tried to develop a fully automated system. But hey, since they have robots building cars, it must be easy, right?
or at the very least break it up into much shorter shifts
So when the septic tank needs pumping out, and it's the database engineer's turn to run the pumper, we just let the trained pumper try to manage the database? And we let the DB engineer try to operate a solid waste pump? I love you cartoon communists. You all seem to think that unpleasant jobs require no skill or training, and that everyone can just take turns doing them so it's "fair".
But they don't appear interested in having real world laws used against the guy.
That's because he didn't break any real-world laws. He violated the terms of service for the game. All that means is that they won't let him play anymore. There's no law against taking real money in exchange for a minor data modification (setting a variable to 200,000,000) that's utterly inconsequential in real life.
True, it's a presumption that prosecution of "pornographers" begun under Bush43 has a religious component to it.... but you have to admit that it's not statistically likely that it's an incorrect assumption.
No, what we have there is fourth hand hearsay, a friend of a friend of a friend, none of them named, posted anonymously to the internet. Try again, this time with sources.
With "Two girls, one cup" everybody can imagine things. Unfortunately what has been seen can not be unseen.
thanks very much, I had almost managed to erase that god awful image out of my mind!
No, you are deluding yourself. That image is permanent. It hides, out of sight, biding its time until conditions are right, and will rear its ugly head unbidden periodically for the rest of your life. You will never truly forget it. This is the true horror of "what is seen cannot be unseen".
I'm all for standing up for free speech and freedom in general but this is not the fight you should take it to. Don't defend some fucked up porn stars for their 'freedom of speech'. If there is a case where free speech really matters, stand up for it then and there.
You don't wait until they come after something you care about. You defend all speech, even if you find it disagreeable. If you sit around and say "it's OK to throw the pornographers in jail, or break up the Illinois Nazis when they try to parade" you leave them too much weasel room. The government must be held to a standard that allows only such specific bans on speech as the classic "fire in a crowded theater". Once you grant them leave to start judging free vs prohibited based on notions like "decency", they'll go all over the fucking place with it.
How much of your mileage isn't on public roads? For most people, I'd guess almost none (up and down the driveway doesn't account for much for my trip into work each day). So, tough shit. No system is going to be perfect.
Once again, it has to be pointed out to a dumbfuck slashdotter that not everyone in the US is driving a car to a fucking office building and back every day, and a tax law based upon such an idiotic presumption would never pass. There are a lot of miles logged on private roads, particularly in states with significant agriculture.
Why not the same thing for electric cars?? Why not create a law that says users have to have a special meter installed in their house to plug it in. Get really fancy and require that all electric cars won't recharge unless they sense a special signal from the electrical wiring.
Electricity doesn't have a single point of manufacture where you can mandate it be "dyed" like heating oil vs diesel. With liquid fuels, mandating dye is cheap. With electricity, you're talking about a multi-hundred dollar device that has to be installed by a professional. Not only are you requiring a ridiculously expensive infrastructure be fielded simply to collect a small tax, you are also making it impossible to recharge an electric car anywhere except its owner's home. Congratulations, you've just rendered the electric car much more expensive to own and much less flexible.
Or reporting of mileage is to be performed during vehicle inspection (I assume that all states require that?)
You assume incorrectly. 16 states require no inspection of any sort. Are the feds going to pay to administer such a system for those states? Un-fucking likely.
They'll likely design the thing to compare what the GPS records with your odometer (and tampering with that is already a federal offense)
How the fuck are they going to design a one-size fits all electronic GPS unit that can compare its readings with those of a mechanical odometer? Stick a little camera on it and screw it to your steering column? Like fuck they will! People would revolt.
Besides, tampering with the odometer is regulated only as far as it applies to car sellers knowingly misstating the mileage. A non-functional odometer is still legal, so long as a note to that effect is located on the left door frame. Forcing people to have functional a device that may not be repairable on a car they purchased before the law was passed simply isn't something the feds can enforce.
I wouldn't be surprised to have the NTSB admit they can't find that maintenance log either.
Why would the United States National Transportation Safety Board have maintenance logs for an Air France plane flying from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Paris France?
Look, I admit that their claims sound unlikely, but you can't just dismiss all claims out of hand because "they break the laws of physics". The fact is that they break the current laws of physics.
There seems to be this mistaken notion that the discovered "laws of nature" are periodically overthrown and rewritten based on major new discoveries. This is not actually how it has happened. Major discoveries that "violate" the previously held laws never do so in a universal sense. What happens is that there are marginal exceptions at the edges that are subtly different from the norm. For example, Einstein's theories didn't invalidate Newton, they only explained things beyond the areas Newton covered.
What this means is that you can safely dismiss most claims that seem to violate the laws of physics based on the fact that they fly in the face of core principles without introducing anything that hasn't been discovered already. A scientist who claims he can (say) produce a superconducting material using esoteric methods only recently developed might have something. A man claiming to have invented a superconductor that works by adding "magnets" or "inductors" to an otherwise normal piece of copper wire is full of shit. There is nothing about the nature of magnets that's not understood that could provide a large enough loophole to pull off superconductivity.
Believers not understanding the difference between the cutting edge and the beaten-to-death aspects of a given scientific discipline is the problem, not some imagined lack of "open mindedness" on the part of disbelievers.
Sheesh. We "nutjobs" would take you guys a lot more seriously if you stopped calling this practice "mutilation" or "child abuse." It's long-ingrained in many cultures that love and dote on children.
See, this is an example of exactly the flaw with dogmatic beliefs. Just because something is a time honored tradition amongst otherwise perfectly reasonable people doesn't make it not a horrible practice.
I'm circumcised and enjoy sex a lot. Maybe I'd enjoy it "more" without it, but I don't really care.
Your attitude is common among circumcised males. Most people don't want to dwell on the fact that their parents cut off a piece of their body unnecessarily when they were infants. I've even had circumcised men get angry when it's suggested that they don't feel as much as uncircumcised men. It is, unfortunately, very obviously true. Ask any woman who has performed oral sex on both which one is more sensitive.
Circumcision may have only slight health benefits for men in the Western world today, but it also offers only very slight risks as well. Lots of us do it for religious or cultural reasons, and to my knowledge there's no greater incidence of sexual dysfunction or other problems like that in societies where that behavior is prevalent.
Unnecessary is unnecessary, no matter how minor the consequences.
And of course no discussion on the matter of the crazy dogma of circumcision and it's intersection with otherwise reasonable people would be complete without a link to Christopher Hitchens blowing his top at a rabbi for making light of a seriously fucked up practice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wQbHT8PDuE
Infantile phimosis, which is a partial/i> blockage of urination due to a narrowed opening (not a complete blockage) is treated with topical steroidal cream, or (as a last resort) minor corrective surgery to enlarge the opening.
What it comes down to is only uninformed, ignorant fools still circumcise infants.
So if any of these people or these people need a liver transplant, they should be front and center in line to get a brand new liver, well ahead of a supportive member of society that regularly pays his contribution to society?
Strawman. No one is suggesting elevating them to a higher status and pushing them to the front. What we're saying is that being arrested for shoplifting, DUI, or driving on a suspended license should not get you kicked from the "first come, first served, weighted for urgency" organ transplant list.
I would say that anybody who has lived a moral, decent life should receive the same level of medical care, and that should be the highest available at the time. The only people that I would say might not deserve this are serious/career criminals.
I don't see why criminals should have to suffer medically for what are unrelated judicial issues. I say give "career criminals" transplants before you give a single liver to someone who is "moral, decent" but drank too much.
Corporations don't help unless you're trying to deal with a fairly large cash flow. Your average joe making $30K/yr won't do better as a corporation. As far as liability, what would happen is that both you AND your corporation would be named in the suit, so you've gained no protection. You need to have enough cash flow to hire a suitably large number of [employees/minions] to shift blame when the subpoenas show up. Corps are only really good for walking away from creditors who loaned you money.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. Compare a coverage map for Telestra, Australia's carrier with by far the widest coverage, and a map of Verizon's coverage.
Average is useless.
Yeah, when I see averages like this, I am reminded of a report I read on world population growth. It said the average age of the world's population is 26.4 years. It's a perfectly cromulent calculation for tracking long term shifts in birth rate, but it does say squat about how old any individual I meet will be. Same thing here with 3G speed. If AT&T's average bit rate went up by a significant amount over last year, you could confidently say their 3G data network is improving.... but I would still have had to step outside onto the sidewalk just to get even a half-assed connection at 100kbps where I used to work.
I've noticed other important differences between AT&T and the others: when I go outside the US, my phone isn't a fucking useless brick. I'm also not stuck driving to a tech support office if my phone craps out, I can just put the SIM card in a different phone. I can also order phones with interesting features from foreign countries and they work.
I wonder why they left T-Mobile out. I'm with AT&T currently would love to see where the other major GSM carrier stands.
you can just hang the RFID tag reader on the truck's ramp and let it read the tags as the cattle enter the truck
I want to live in your magical world where handheld RFID scanners just need to be pointed in the general direction of the tags and can be depended on to catch 100% of the tags without human supervision.
I suspect you are lumping all RFID reader products into the same category as the large, stationary units like Wal-Mart uses to scan pallet-loads of stuff at once. Portable units are generally not that far above a barcode scanner. The cattle ranchers' issues are legitimate.
it could offer seamless transitions from local cellular, voip over wifi, and satellite based communication
I've used portable satcom equipment before, and I guarantee the transition won't be seamless. When your conversation switches from terrestrial antenna (1 mile) to geostationary relay (44K mile round trip), you are able to discern a subtle change and conversational timing when the latency goes up to HALF A FUCKING SECOND.
Not sure who the bigger fool is, the guy that embezzled all the in-game money or the schmuck that paid $5000 of real money for it.
Try as I might, I can't find a single thing the embezzler did that makes him a fool. He ditched a real-life time and money sink of a habit (EVE Online) and managed to trade it for real-life money and pay some bills. Might qualify slightly as "jerk", but not even a little as "fool".
Those, and other tedious work can be fully automated
Nice handwave. You've clearly never tried to develop a fully automated system. But hey, since they have robots building cars, it must be easy, right?
or at the very least break it up into much shorter shifts
So when the septic tank needs pumping out, and it's the database engineer's turn to run the pumper, we just let the trained pumper try to manage the database? And we let the DB engineer try to operate a solid waste pump? I love you cartoon communists. You all seem to think that unpleasant jobs require no skill or training, and that everyone can just take turns doing them so it's "fair".
But they don't appear interested in having real world laws used against the guy.
That's because he didn't break any real-world laws. He violated the terms of service for the game. All that means is that they won't let him play anymore. There's no law against taking real money in exchange for a minor data modification (setting a variable to 200,000,000) that's utterly inconsequential in real life.
True, it's a presumption that prosecution of "pornographers" begun under Bush43 has a religious component to it.... but you have to admit that it's not statistically likely that it's an incorrect assumption.
No, what we have there is fourth hand hearsay, a friend of a friend of a friend, none of them named, posted anonymously to the internet. Try again, this time with sources.
With "Two girls, one cup" everybody can imagine things. Unfortunately what has been seen can not be unseen.
thanks very much, I had almost managed to erase that god awful image out of my mind!
No, you are deluding yourself. That image is permanent. It hides, out of sight, biding its time until conditions are right, and will rear its ugly head unbidden periodically for the rest of your life. You will never truly forget it. This is the true horror of "what is seen cannot be unseen".
I'm all for standing up for free speech and freedom in general but this is not the fight you should take it to. Don't defend some fucked up porn stars for their 'freedom of speech'. If there is a case where free speech really matters, stand up for it then and there.
You don't wait until they come after something you care about. You defend all speech, even if you find it disagreeable. If you sit around and say "it's OK to throw the pornographers in jail, or break up the Illinois Nazis when they try to parade" you leave them too much weasel room. The government must be held to a standard that allows only such specific bans on speech as the classic "fire in a crowded theater". Once you grant them leave to start judging free vs prohibited based on notions like "decency", they'll go all over the fucking place with it.
At what percentage public vs private road usage does this exception kick in, and how do you justify it?
How much of your mileage isn't on public roads? For most people, I'd guess almost none (up and down the driveway doesn't account for much for my trip into work each day). So, tough shit. No system is going to be perfect.
Once again, it has to be pointed out to a dumbfuck slashdotter that not everyone in the US is driving a car to a fucking office building and back every day, and a tax law based upon such an idiotic presumption would never pass. There are a lot of miles logged on private roads, particularly in states with significant agriculture.
Why not the same thing for electric cars?? Why not create a law that says users have to have a special meter installed in their house to plug it in. Get really fancy and require that all electric cars won't recharge unless they sense a special signal from the electrical wiring.
Electricity doesn't have a single point of manufacture where you can mandate it be "dyed" like heating oil vs diesel. With liquid fuels, mandating dye is cheap. With electricity, you're talking about a multi-hundred dollar device that has to be installed by a professional. Not only are you requiring a ridiculously expensive infrastructure be fielded simply to collect a small tax, you are also making it impossible to recharge an electric car anywhere except its owner's home. Congratulations, you've just rendered the electric car much more expensive to own and much less flexible.
GPS embedded in license plate
How the fuck would you expect that to even remotely be possible?
Or reporting of mileage is to be performed during vehicle inspection (I assume that all states require that?)
You assume incorrectly. 16 states require no inspection of any sort. Are the feds going to pay to administer such a system for those states? Un-fucking likely.
They'll likely design the thing to compare what the GPS records with your odometer (and tampering with that is already a federal offense)
How the fuck are they going to design a one-size fits all electronic GPS unit that can compare its readings with those of a mechanical odometer? Stick a little camera on it and screw it to your steering column? Like fuck they will! People would revolt.
Besides, tampering with the odometer is regulated only as far as it applies to car sellers knowingly misstating the mileage. A non-functional odometer is still legal, so long as a note to that effect is located on the left door frame. Forcing people to have functional a device that may not be repairable on a car they purchased before the law was passed simply isn't something the feds can enforce.
I wouldn't be surprised to have the NTSB admit they can't find that maintenance log either.
Why would the United States National Transportation Safety Board have maintenance logs for an Air France plane flying from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Paris France?
Look, I admit that their claims sound unlikely, but you can't just dismiss all claims out of hand because "they break the laws of physics". The fact is that they break the current laws of physics.
There seems to be this mistaken notion that the discovered "laws of nature" are periodically overthrown and rewritten based on major new discoveries. This is not actually how it has happened. Major discoveries that "violate" the previously held laws never do so in a universal sense. What happens is that there are marginal exceptions at the edges that are subtly different from the norm. For example, Einstein's theories didn't invalidate Newton, they only explained things beyond the areas Newton covered.
What this means is that you can safely dismiss most claims that seem to violate the laws of physics based on the fact that they fly in the face of core principles without introducing anything that hasn't been discovered already. A scientist who claims he can (say) produce a superconducting material using esoteric methods only recently developed might have something. A man claiming to have invented a superconductor that works by adding "magnets" or "inductors" to an otherwise normal piece of copper wire is full of shit. There is nothing about the nature of magnets that's not understood that could provide a large enough loophole to pull off superconductivity.
Believers not understanding the difference between the cutting edge and the beaten-to-death aspects of a given scientific discipline is the problem, not some imagined lack of "open mindedness" on the part of disbelievers.
Sheesh. We "nutjobs" would take you guys a lot more seriously if you stopped calling this practice "mutilation" or "child abuse." It's long-ingrained in many cultures that love and dote on children.
See, this is an example of exactly the flaw with dogmatic beliefs. Just because something is a time honored tradition amongst otherwise perfectly reasonable people doesn't make it not a horrible practice.
I'm circumcised and enjoy sex a lot. Maybe I'd enjoy it "more" without it, but I don't really care.
Your attitude is common among circumcised males. Most people don't want to dwell on the fact that their parents cut off a piece of their body unnecessarily when they were infants. I've even had circumcised men get angry when it's suggested that they don't feel as much as uncircumcised men. It is, unfortunately, very obviously true. Ask any woman who has performed oral sex on both which one is more sensitive.
Circumcision may have only slight health benefits for men in the Western world today, but it also offers only very slight risks as well. Lots of us do it for religious or cultural reasons, and to my knowledge there's no greater incidence of sexual dysfunction or other problems like that in societies where that behavior is prevalent.
Unnecessary is unnecessary, no matter how minor the consequences.
And of course no discussion on the matter of the crazy dogma of circumcision and it's intersection with otherwise reasonable people would be complete without a link to Christopher Hitchens blowing his top at a rabbi for making light of a seriously fucked up practice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wQbHT8PDuE
You're an idiot.
Infantile phimosis, which is a partial/i> blockage of urination due to a narrowed opening (not a complete blockage) is treated with topical steroidal cream, or (as a last resort) minor corrective surgery to enlarge the opening.
What it comes down to is only uninformed, ignorant fools still circumcise infants.
So if any of these people or these people need a liver transplant, they should be front and center in line to get a brand new liver, well ahead of a supportive member of society that regularly pays his contribution to society?
Strawman. No one is suggesting elevating them to a higher status and pushing them to the front. What we're saying is that being arrested for shoplifting, DUI, or driving on a suspended license should not get you kicked from the "first come, first served, weighted for urgency" organ transplant list.
I would say that anybody who has lived a moral, decent life should receive the same level of medical care, and that should be the highest available at the time. The only people that I would say might not deserve this are serious/career criminals.
I don't see why criminals should have to suffer medically for what are unrelated judicial issues. I say give "career criminals" transplants before you give a single liver to someone who is "moral, decent" but drank too much.
Corporations don't help unless you're trying to deal with a fairly large cash flow. Your average joe making $30K/yr won't do better as a corporation. As far as liability, what would happen is that both you AND your corporation would be named in the suit, so you've gained no protection. You need to have enough cash flow to hire a suitably large number of [employees/minions] to shift blame when the subpoenas show up. Corps are only really good for walking away from creditors who loaned you money.