Believe it or not, there are people who don't live in NY or LA.
Actually, LA is a perfect example of a city where this wouldn't. Unlike NY, the "city" has no center, it's just a huge semi-dense, mostly lo-rise sprawl of thoroughly mixed commercial, residential, and industrial areas. There'll never be more than a patchy ad-hoc WiFi system here in Los Angeles for the same reason we won't ever have a decent public transportation system. There is no heart to the city where you can get a reasonable benefit for your infrastructure investment. Either you spend billions to put a WiFi hub on every third street light, or you got nuthin'...
The parts about having too many lawyers and therapists and not being adult enough to solve one's problems without resorting to violence is particularly spot-on.
Too many lawyers and therapists, maybe, but the violence thing is a problem with humanity. In Manchester pubs they no longer serve beer in glass mugs and are considering also not serving in bottles because of their use as weapons by drunken yobs.
The second point, that as a nation we are a bully, can easily be illuminated by the nation of Iran.
Funny you should bring up Operation Alex: it was a joint operation with UK intelligence, with some aid provided by the French and the Dutch. It was essentially a NATO plot intended to rid Iran of it's potentially communist friendly leader. Fear of communism wasn't limited to the US during the cold war.
You're american, you can tell, because you don't get it.
No, he's right. It's obviously not something by Cleese because the entire thing contains only one thing that could be called a joke (the JFK thing), and it doesn't actually make any sense. The only thing that makes it even vaguely humorous is imagining it read aloud by John Cleese, but he could read a grocery list and make it sound funny. No, if Cleese wrote it, it would be much sillier and not contain pointlessly dull items like the one about petrol prices (yawn).
That's because the current crop of academics and artists hate transcendence just as much, love arbitrary power just as much, want to throw off individual moral constraints just as much, and allow race to define character just as much as the early fascists
Who are these academics and artists?
He probably means college educated white liberal democrats who attack any public display of religion as violation of the separation of church and state, think the answer to most problems is a fresh new government bureaucracy, believe all morality os relative, and think the only way the negro will ever achieve parity is via enforced reverse discrimination.
(please note: I hold neither this view nor the reverse. I'm rephrasing what it seemed he was getting at)
What an absolute load of crap. This "lost productivity" number is about as real as the RIAA's estimates of lost sales due to piracy. They even admit that they're making a guess based on an estimate, i.e. pulling numbers out of their ass. The main assumption among them is that you can somehow say this time away from work would have been productive had they stayed at work. When calculating "lost time" you have to first calculate what you had to lose in the first place. 99% of people spend at least half their day reading email, posting to slashdot, daydreaming about Natalie Portman + hot grits, or any one of the standard types of shirking, slacking, or goldbricking. Time = T *.5 then. Of the time spent doing work, 25% of it is spent covering up your previous mistakes, fixing the mistakes that can't be covered up, or shifting blame for mistakes that can't be covered up or fixed. Time = T *.5 *.25 then. The remaining work being done is generally fifty percent bureaucratic nonsense, redundant/doomed projects, or make-work foolishness designed to make your boss look good to his boss. Time = T *.5 *.25 *.5 then. Of the small remaining amount of "productivity", fully 85% of it is being done in departments with names like "marketing", "human resources", or "accounting". These people don't actually produce anything. In fact, they're a millstone around the others' necks. But let's give them the benefit of the doubt and just call them simply "unproductive", rather than "anti-productive". Time = T *.5 *.25 *.5 *.25 =.009375 then. That's right. For every hundred lightsaber fetishizing nerds who skipped work standing in line that first day, less than one of them actually counts as lost productivity.
I'm the one who modded you as flamebait. I did it because you called him "a fucking twit", when he's not. His statements are more correct than yours.
Your assertion is incorrect.
And your reply here is even worse. You claim that he's making generalizations based on one data point. What do you think you're doing?
I'm making an assertion based on a second data point, which is all that I need to disprove his. Look at his assertion. He claims that all motorcycle accidents are the result of rider error, based on his own perfect record. My assertion is that there are some accidents that no amount of rider skill will prevent. Feel free to actually address my argument this time, rather than a straw man.
You're claiming that an accident on a motorcyle is inevitable, he says that need not be.
No, that's a straw man. He claims "a safe, observant rider need not have any problems". I claim that sometimes, for some people, the accident is unavoidable despite safe and observant riding. I repeated a witty saying common among riders to illustrate a point-- that it's not conventional wisdom that all accidents can be avoided.
Not knowing the full details of your accident, I can only speculate, but you may have indeed been riding unsafely. As you know, a left-turning vehicle is your biggest threat in an intersection. You should be making eye contact with him to make sure you know he knows you're there. If the truck pulled out when you were 15 feet away, then I doubt that you did that.
Please, spare me the monday morning quarterbacking. You're not speculating, you're fishing for blame. Not every left-turn driver makes eye contact, and avoiding a non-eye-contact situation is often a dangerous maneuver in itself, particularly in hevy traffic. But if it makes you feel safer on the road to think that I was negligent in not avoiding that particular situation, feel free to think what you like. I could name two or three other accidents involving friends and acquaintances that are harder to handwave with a comment like "you should make eye contact". Eye contact won't stop a drunk going 90mph coming the other way on a 2 way road from trying to pass a car in front of him and hitting you head on when you're going 60.
If you started riding at 8, then you were probably on dirt bikes. Trail riding doesn't translate much to the conditions on the street. You could have 30 years on dirt bikes, but if it's your first ride on a crotch rocket, you don't really count as an experienced rider.
Cripes, your reading comprehension sucks. I never claimed that I was an experienced rider-- it doesn't matter whether I am or not in this case. I only claimed that the original poster saying "after riding motorcycles for over half of my adult life" is a totally meaningless metric-- a point which you have gone on to reaffirm above-- and as such further weakens his anecdotal statistics.
I've heard that phrase, too. That doesn't mean it's correct.
I never claimed it was correct. This is the reason I put it in quotation marks in my original post. If you want to be obnoxious about it, we can rephrase the quote to reflect reality: "there are two types of riders: ones who've been in an accident, and ones who have not, but face a sizeable statistical probability approaching (but never actually reaching) one that they will be in an accident the longer they ride".
Posting anon so's not to cancel my moderation on Dun Malg.
Checking the "post anonymously" box isn't enough. You need to actually log out. The moderation appears to be gone. Thanks!
I have no steel in my body at all after riding motorcycles for over half of my adult life that says a safe, observant rider need not have any problems. People say motorcycles are dangerous; it's not true. Just as firearms don't kill people, motorcycles are perfectly safe; what's not safe is the people who ride them.
Patently untrue. Guys like you who have managed to not get hit are irritating. While it is true that the rider can mitigate a large portion of potential danger by attentive and skillful riding, the danger can never be eliminated. You're probably the sort of jackass that would say that you would have been able to avoid the left turning truck that lurched in front of me at a range of about 15 feet. You're full of shit. My commute took me through a highly congested area full of bad drivers on a daily basis. It was practically an inevitability. I suppose one could argue that the unsafe aspect of my riding was my choice of starting point and destination, but that's not a function of riding skill. You're a fucking twit.
Who modded the above "flamebait"? The guy is a fucking twit. He basically said that anyone who is involved in an accident on a motorcycle is an unskilled and/or unobservant rider, and as proof cites the statistically useless single anecdotal example of he himself having not been in an accident for "half his life", however the fuck long THAT is (I had been riding motorcycles "half my life" at age 16, and more than "two-thirds my life" at 25 when I got hit). So not only is this guy totally ignorant of the principles of statistics, he arrogantly swings this ignorance around like a twelve-inch dick, closing with the assertion that "motorcycles are perfectly safe; what's not safe is the people who ride them". Yes, is lack of accidents is probably partly the result of judicious and skillful riding, but there's a large amount of luck involved as well. There's a reason his assertion is not commonly believed among motorcycle riders. The one you'll generally hear is: "There are two types of riders- those who've been in an accident, and those who haven't been in an accident yet."
There was absolutely no way for me to avoid that accident. If I had been on my bike, no matter how attentive I could be, no matter how awesomely my bike could accelerate, steer, or brake, there would have been no way I could have avoided it. The only difference is that if I had been on my bike I would have been dead instead of just stiffened up. In the same situation, the most highly skilled rider having his best day on the best-performing bike in the world would have been just as dead.
Indeed. It's just those impossible to avoid 7-sigma events that make it dangerous. In my case, I was going less than 30mph in faitly heavy traffic. Big turbo-diesel panel truck stomped the gas to slip through a small opening in traffic-- an opening which was actually full of me and my bike. Nowhere to go, and no time to go there even if there was. An acquaintance of mine in the army was killed on a 2-lane road in texas. A guy going the other way "didn't see him" (also, he was drunk) and pulled out to pass the car in front of him. Whack. Witness behind the drunkie said it was so fast, he probably never knew what hit him. I'd love to see Mr Skillful Rider avoid a car at a range of 40 feet and a relative speed of 150mph+ (220feet per second!).
I now prefer to be surrounded by a sizable quantity of metal.
Not exactly responsive: I saw both Matrix movies in the theater (Reloaded at Grauman's), but because of the reviews, and what friends said, I, to this day, have not seen Revolutions. I'd rather just pretend that the Matrix was a one-shot movie and try to forget that I saw the sequel.
There's this crazy lady who claims that the Wachowski brothers stole her script for the Matrix. She sounds like a total nutcase, but after seeing the fumbling hack job they did on Reloaded and Revolutions, I'm inclined to believe her. If nothing else, I firmly believe the Wachowski's got the original Matrix script from someone else, because there's no way that someone who wrote the first would come up with the juvenile drivel that made up the other two. Good directors they may be, but writers they are not.
I have no steel in my body at all after riding motorcycles for over half of my adult life that says a safe, observant rider need not have any problems.
People say motorcycles are dangerous; it's not true. Just as firearms don't kill people, motorcycles are perfectly safe; what's not safe is the people who ride them.
Patently untrue. Guys like you who have managed to not get hit are irritating. While it is true that the rider can mitigate a large portion of potential danger by attentive and skillful riding, the danger can never be eliminated. You're probably the sort of jackass that would say that you would have been able to avoid the left turning truck that lurched in front of me at a range of about 15 feet. You're full of shit. My commute took me through a highly congested area full of bad drivers on a daily basis. It was practically an inevitability. I suppose one could argue that the unsafe aspect of my riding was my choice of starting point and destination, but that's not a function of riding skill. You're a fucking twit.
I have 700 grams of stainless steel in my left leg
I have titanium in mine. I assume your American, you should have come to a first world country to get your healthcare
Heh. Very humorous. This was fifteen years ago. Stainless steel was how the particular appliance I required came in those days. I had to have the larger of two rods removed later. It says "Made in West Germany".
And would that be there if every vehicle on the road was a motorbike? I suspect if everyone switched to motorbikes the roads would be safer - the other person usually comes out much better off after colliding with a motorbike. If you drive a tank you'll ensure you personally don't get hurt, but overall you're decreasing the safety of the road, because whoever you crash into is going to die.
I was hit by a left-turning truck delivering mattresses. It the mattress delivery service going to switch to motorcycles? I don't think so. Use your brain, man. A fairly large percentage of vehicles on the road are used for something other than personal transportation, which is all that motorcycles are really good for.
Everyone should have motorcycles and have less cars. Even though motorcycles are less efficient they take a lot less petrol/gasoline to run.
I have 700 grams of stainless steel in my left leg that says that the potential price of a motorcycle is much higher than any amount of fuel efficiency.
I have a 2004 Honda CR-V that gets a rated 24 MPG Highway:...
Drive smoothly for the whole tank (tried to never let RPMs go above 2500)...
Drive through another tank of gas, but this time very agreessively....
You know what I found, I got 25 MPG in BOTH cases.
Those little Honda engines are pretty much tuned entirely for efficiency. I got the same results with my Civic. That stingy fuel injection system uses about the same gas going 0-60 in 15 seconds as it does 0-60 in 60 seconds. The whole "avoid jackrabbit starts" advice, I think, is a leftover from the bad ol' days of the early 70's, when every car weighed 5000lbs, had a giant, blunt, chrome-grilled nose, and was driven by a 350cid V8 with a 4 barrel carb and a hydramatic transmission.
Like I said - "state issued". The real problem is that identification cards - whether mandated or burned into our foreheads at birth - don't do anything to significantly increase security.
Ah, I see what you mean. I thought you meant "security" in reference to the integrity of the card issuing system itself. Indeed, a secure card system doesn't mean squat for national security unless it also comes with a "papers please?" style police state.
KISS suggests that you roll the boom up against a coiled spring, and then release the coiled extender slowly through an escapement....
Hey, clockwork has worked for a few hundred years, don't knock it.
KISS actually suggests that you make only small portions of the antenna springy and flexible, then fold it at those points (rather than essintially bending it along its entire length). This allows you to use a lightweight tubular shape for the rigid portions and add extra structural reinforcement to the flexible joint, plus some means of locking it open. I suppose it could be argued that a very simple spring-wound escapement mechanism is as reliable as a dozen spring-loaded locking pawls, but the end result of the latter is a stronger, more rigid antenna less likely to suffer catastrophic failure (ever bent a tape measure?).
Appending anything to a domain name that you typed is plain stupid, even if server cannot be found. It's annoying when you mis-type a domain and that auto-guessing feature is invoked. I'd rather have "page cannot be displayed" error.
That's my thought as well, although I do have Google's "search from toolbar" installed on my "dodo machine*", and it seems to work adequately.
* Dodo machine: simple laptop with wireless in my living room for visitors to use when they say "can I [look something up | check my yahoo mail | accidentally install the latest dialer.exe] on teh intarweb?" No way in hell are they going to touch my production machine or my work laptop.
Define "verifiable"? What most people mean in that context is "state-issued". Hmmm, back to square one.
Driver's licensee/ID card is Square Two. Square One is, for just about anything and everything, naturalization papers or green card, issued by federal government, or birth certificate, issued by the county. In the old paper records days, before they put them all in a database and cross referenced with death records, birth certificates were a major back door. In my younger days I used to make fake birth certificates (for getting legit ID's) with a xerox machine and a potato stamp, but nowadays any ID issuing agency is going to flag duplicate or invalid certificate info (they all have some sort of serial or issuance number) and you'll get an "error message" in the mail instead of your ID card/driver's license. Papers issued to immigrants are similarly difficult to fabricate, and legit ones generally indicate some minimum amount of investigation was done to verify the initial claims of identity.
A driver's license is just that, a license to drive a car.
Untrue. If that were the case, then states wouldn't alternatively issue an ID card that, with the exception of it not licensing you to drive, is identical to the driver's license. One might argue that it shouldn't be anything but a license to drive, but it is, in fact, your de jure state issued identification as well.
Bruce Schneier's weblog has some thoughts on RealID and why it's a terrible idea and won't increase security. Highly recommended.
I normally agree with Bruce on security and privacy matters, but some of his arguments don't make much sense. It seems one of his premises is that the driver's license is only supposed to be a license to drive and not ID; but the fact that state motor vehicles bureaus also will issue an "ID card" that is in all ways the same as a driver's license except that it doesn't license the issuee to drive, shows that they are, and for decades have been our de jure state issued identification.
OK, so bulk faxes aren't a good idea; would you care to enlighten us further? Unless you have loads of money, how do you influence the democratic process in a 'smart' way?
Hand written letters, sent by US Mail, postmarked from the house member's district or senator's state, individually written and uniquely phrased, from a whole lot of different people, expressing their disapproval. Emails and faxes are generally given little or no weight because they require almost no time investment to send. Phone calls are only slightly better than emails or faxes. Old-fashioned letters in large enough quantities do make a difference.
There is nothing that hasn't already been done to D.L.'s that can do anything to improve security, but much to improve Big Brotherism.
How about requiring that states demand verifiable documents available to US citizens or legal resident aliens only when accepting license applications? Or should states be allowed to issue ID based on a Mexican matricular card, or a note from someone's mom, or maybe one of those personalized novelty license plates from the amusement park? "Yes, my name Bort. Bort Johnson."
What kind of stupidity is it to blindly append a TLD to a URL that already ends in a valid TLD?
When ".museum" was first added, how would existing browsers know that it is a valid TLD?
They wouldn't, at least not until the next software update. But while turning "baddomain.museum" into "baddomain.museum.com" might be excusable, turning "baddomain.net" into "baddomain.net.com", when the.net TLD predates the creation of web browsers themselves, is just brain-dead programming.
A better idea is to not have such brain-dead DWIM "features" in the browser. What kind of stupidity is it to blindly append a TLD to a URL that already ends in a valid TLD?
After reading this, I noticed one thing, seems like the idea has been stuck into the same idea this whole time, a simple 2d screen. Even vr googles use two 2d screens. Hopefully this will change more as the development of layered LCD's and other technologies start comming up. True 3d gui's are what I am waiting for now.
Why? We can't see in 3 dimensions. Our visual organs only see two dimensional pictures. Our brains use the parallax from two 2D images to give us depth perception, but this really isn't true 3D vision. What is it that you think a 3D display is going to add? How much additional information is really conveyed by depth cues? It's just not that useful a trick on its own. Now, if you were somehow able to add a 3D controller and tactile feedback, then that might be worthwhile.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, LA is a perfect example of a city where this wouldn't. Unlike NY, the "city" has no center, it's just a huge semi-dense, mostly lo-rise sprawl of thoroughly mixed commercial, residential, and industrial areas. There'll never be more than a patchy ad-hoc WiFi system here in Los Angeles for the same reason we won't ever have a decent public transportation system. There is no heart to the city where you can get a reasonable benefit for your infrastructure investment. Either you spend billions to put a WiFi hub on every third street light, or you got nuthin'...
Too many lawyers and therapists, maybe, but the violence thing is a problem with humanity. In Manchester pubs they no longer serve beer in glass mugs and are considering also not serving in bottles because of their use as weapons by drunken yobs.
The second point, that as a nation we are a bully, can easily be illuminated by the nation of Iran.
Funny you should bring up Operation Alex: it was a joint operation with UK intelligence, with some aid provided by the French and the Dutch. It was essentially a NATO plot intended to rid Iran of it's potentially communist friendly leader. Fear of communism wasn't limited to the US during the cold war.
No, he's right. It's obviously not something by Cleese because the entire thing contains only one thing that could be called a joke (the JFK thing), and it doesn't actually make any sense. The only thing that makes it even vaguely humorous is imagining it read aloud by John Cleese, but he could read a grocery list and make it sound funny. No, if Cleese wrote it, it would be much sillier and not contain pointlessly dull items like the one about petrol prices (yawn).
Who are these academics and artists?
He probably means college educated white liberal democrats who attack any public display of religion as violation of the separation of church and state, think the answer to most problems is a fresh new government bureaucracy, believe all morality os relative, and think the only way the negro will ever achieve parity is via enforced reverse discrimination.
(please note: I hold neither this view nor the reverse. I'm rephrasing what it seemed he was getting at)
What an absolute load of crap. This "lost productivity" number is about as real as the RIAA's estimates of lost sales due to piracy. They even admit that they're making a guess based on an estimate, i.e. pulling numbers out of their ass. The main assumption among them is that you can somehow say this time away from work would have been productive had they stayed at work. When calculating "lost time" you have to first calculate what you had to lose in the first place. 99% of people spend at least half their day reading email, posting to slashdot, daydreaming about Natalie Portman + hot grits, or any one of the standard types of shirking, slacking, or goldbricking. Time = T * .5 then. Of the time spent doing work, 25% of it is spent covering up your previous mistakes, fixing the mistakes that can't be covered up, or shifting blame for mistakes that can't be covered up or fixed. Time = T * .5 * .25 then. The remaining work being done is generally fifty percent bureaucratic nonsense, redundant/doomed projects, or make-work foolishness designed to make your boss look good to his boss. Time = T * .5 * .25 * .5 then. Of the small remaining amount of "productivity", fully 85% of it is being done in departments with names like "marketing", "human resources", or "accounting". These people don't actually produce anything. In fact, they're a millstone around the others' necks. But let's give them the benefit of the doubt and just call them simply "unproductive", rather than "anti-productive". Time = T * .5 * .25 * .5 * .25 = .009375 then. That's right. For every hundred lightsaber fetishizing nerds who skipped work standing in line that first day, less than one of them actually counts as lost productivity.
Your assertion is incorrect.
And your reply here is even worse. You claim that he's making generalizations based on one data point. What do you think you're doing?
I'm making an assertion based on a second data point, which is all that I need to disprove his. Look at his assertion. He claims that all motorcycle accidents are the result of rider error, based on his own perfect record. My assertion is that there are some accidents that no amount of rider skill will prevent. Feel free to actually address my argument this time, rather than a straw man.
You're claiming that an accident on a motorcyle is inevitable, he says that need not be.
No, that's a straw man. He claims "a safe, observant rider need not have any problems". I claim that sometimes, for some people, the accident is unavoidable despite safe and observant riding. I repeated a witty saying common among riders to illustrate a point-- that it's not conventional wisdom that all accidents can be avoided.
Not knowing the full details of your accident, I can only speculate, but you may have indeed been riding unsafely. As you know, a left-turning vehicle is your biggest threat in an intersection. You should be making eye contact with him to make sure you know he knows you're there. If the truck pulled out when you were 15 feet away, then I doubt that you did that.
Please, spare me the monday morning quarterbacking. You're not speculating, you're fishing for blame. Not every left-turn driver makes eye contact, and avoiding a non-eye-contact situation is often a dangerous maneuver in itself, particularly in hevy traffic. But if it makes you feel safer on the road to think that I was negligent in not avoiding that particular situation, feel free to think what you like. I could name two or three other accidents involving friends and acquaintances that are harder to handwave with a comment like "you should make eye contact". Eye contact won't stop a drunk going 90mph coming the other way on a 2 way road from trying to pass a car in front of him and hitting you head on when you're going 60.
If you started riding at 8, then you were probably on dirt bikes. Trail riding doesn't translate much to the conditions on the street. You could have 30 years on dirt bikes, but if it's your first ride on a crotch rocket, you don't really count as an experienced rider.
Cripes, your reading comprehension sucks. I never claimed that I was an experienced rider-- it doesn't matter whether I am or not in this case. I only claimed that the original poster saying "after riding motorcycles for over half of my adult life" is a totally meaningless metric-- a point which you have gone on to reaffirm above-- and as such further weakens his anecdotal statistics.
I've heard that phrase, too. That doesn't mean it's correct.
I never claimed it was correct. This is the reason I put it in quotation marks in my original post. If you want to be obnoxious about it, we can rephrase the quote to reflect reality: "there are two types of riders: ones who've been in an accident, and ones who have not, but face a sizeable statistical probability approaching (but never actually reaching) one that they will be in an accident the longer they ride".
Posting anon so's not to cancel my moderation on Dun Malg.
Checking the "post anonymously" box isn't enough. You need to actually log out. The moderation appears to be gone. Thanks!
Patently untrue. Guys like you who have managed to not get hit are irritating. While it is true that the rider can mitigate a large portion of potential danger by attentive and skillful riding, the danger can never be eliminated. You're probably the sort of jackass that would say that you would have been able to avoid the left turning truck that lurched in front of me at a range of about 15 feet. You're full of shit. My commute took me through a highly congested area full of bad drivers on a daily basis. It was practically an inevitability. I suppose one could argue that the unsafe aspect of my riding was my choice of starting point and destination, but that's not a function of riding skill. You're a fucking twit.
Who modded the above "flamebait"? The guy is a fucking twit. He basically said that anyone who is involved in an accident on a motorcycle is an unskilled and/or unobservant rider, and as proof cites the statistically useless single anecdotal example of he himself having not been in an accident for "half his life", however the fuck long THAT is (I had been riding motorcycles "half my life" at age 16, and more than "two-thirds my life" at 25 when I got hit). So not only is this guy totally ignorant of the principles of statistics, he arrogantly swings this ignorance around like a twelve-inch dick, closing with the assertion that "motorcycles are perfectly safe; what's not safe is the people who ride them". Yes, is lack of accidents is probably partly the result of judicious and skillful riding, but there's a large amount of luck involved as well. There's a reason his assertion is not commonly believed among motorcycle riders. The one you'll generally hear is: "There are two types of riders- those who've been in an accident, and those who haven't been in an accident yet."
Indeed. It's just those impossible to avoid 7-sigma events that make it dangerous. In my case, I was going less than 30mph in faitly heavy traffic. Big turbo-diesel panel truck stomped the gas to slip through a small opening in traffic-- an opening which was actually full of me and my bike. Nowhere to go, and no time to go there even if there was. An acquaintance of mine in the army was killed on a 2-lane road in texas. A guy going the other way "didn't see him" (also, he was drunk) and pulled out to pass the car in front of him. Whack. Witness behind the drunkie said it was so fast, he probably never knew what hit him. I'd love to see Mr Skillful Rider avoid a car at a range of 40 feet and a relative speed of 150mph+ (220feet per second!).
I now prefer to be surrounded by a sizable quantity of metal.
Damn straight!
There's this crazy lady who claims that the Wachowski brothers stole her script for the Matrix. She sounds like a total nutcase, but after seeing the fumbling hack job they did on Reloaded and Revolutions, I'm inclined to believe her. If nothing else, I firmly believe the Wachowski's got the original Matrix script from someone else, because there's no way that someone who wrote the first would come up with the juvenile drivel that made up the other two. Good directors they may be, but writers they are not.
Patently untrue. Guys like you who have managed to not get hit are irritating. While it is true that the rider can mitigate a large portion of potential danger by attentive and skillful riding, the danger can never be eliminated. You're probably the sort of jackass that would say that you would have been able to avoid the left turning truck that lurched in front of me at a range of about 15 feet. You're full of shit. My commute took me through a highly congested area full of bad drivers on a daily basis. It was practically an inevitability. I suppose one could argue that the unsafe aspect of my riding was my choice of starting point and destination, but that's not a function of riding skill. You're a fucking twit.
I have titanium in mine. I assume your American, you should have come to a first world country to get your healthcare
Heh. Very humorous. This was fifteen years ago. Stainless steel was how the particular appliance I required came in those days. I had to have the larger of two rods removed later. It says "Made in West Germany".
I was hit by a left-turning truck delivering mattresses. It the mattress delivery service going to switch to motorcycles? I don't think so. Use your brain, man. A fairly large percentage of vehicles on the road are used for something other than personal transportation, which is all that motorcycles are really good for.
I have 700 grams of stainless steel in my left leg that says that the potential price of a motorcycle is much higher than any amount of fuel efficiency.
Those little Honda engines are pretty much tuned entirely for efficiency. I got the same results with my Civic. That stingy fuel injection system uses about the same gas going 0-60 in 15 seconds as it does 0-60 in 60 seconds. The whole "avoid jackrabbit starts" advice, I think, is a leftover from the bad ol' days of the early 70's, when every car weighed 5000lbs, had a giant, blunt, chrome-grilled nose, and was driven by a 350cid V8 with a 4 barrel carb and a hydramatic transmission.
Ah, I see what you mean. I thought you meant "security" in reference to the integrity of the card issuing system itself. Indeed, a secure card system doesn't mean squat for national security unless it also comes with a "papers please?" style police state.
KISS actually suggests that you make only small portions of the antenna springy and flexible, then fold it at those points (rather than essintially bending it along its entire length). This allows you to use a lightweight tubular shape for the rigid portions and add extra structural reinforcement to the flexible joint, plus some means of locking it open. I suppose it could be argued that a very simple spring-wound escapement mechanism is as reliable as a dozen spring-loaded locking pawls, but the end result of the latter is a stronger, more rigid antenna less likely to suffer catastrophic failure (ever bent a tape measure?).
That's my thought as well, although I do have Google's "search from toolbar" installed on my "dodo machine*", and it seems to work adequately.
* Dodo machine: simple laptop with wireless in my living room for visitors to use when they say "can I [look something up | check my yahoo mail | accidentally install the latest dialer.exe] on teh intarweb?" No way in hell are they going to touch my production machine or my work laptop.
Driver's licensee/ID card is Square Two. Square One is, for just about anything and everything, naturalization papers or green card, issued by federal government, or birth certificate, issued by the county. In the old paper records days, before they put them all in a database and cross referenced with death records, birth certificates were a major back door. In my younger days I used to make fake birth certificates (for getting legit ID's) with a xerox machine and a potato stamp, but nowadays any ID issuing agency is going to flag duplicate or invalid certificate info (they all have some sort of serial or issuance number) and you'll get an "error message" in the mail instead of your ID card/driver's license. Papers issued to immigrants are similarly difficult to fabricate, and legit ones generally indicate some minimum amount of investigation was done to verify the initial claims of identity.
Untrue. If that were the case, then states wouldn't alternatively issue an ID card that, with the exception of it not licensing you to drive, is identical to the driver's license. One might argue that it shouldn't be anything but a license to drive, but it is, in fact, your de jure state issued identification as well.
I normally agree with Bruce on security and privacy matters, but some of his arguments don't make much sense. It seems one of his premises is that the driver's license is only supposed to be a license to drive and not ID; but the fact that state motor vehicles bureaus also will issue an "ID card" that is in all ways the same as a driver's license except that it doesn't license the issuee to drive, shows that they are, and for decades have been our de jure state issued identification.
Hand written letters, sent by US Mail, postmarked from the house member's district or senator's state, individually written and uniquely phrased, from a whole lot of different people, expressing their disapproval. Emails and faxes are generally given little or no weight because they require almost no time investment to send. Phone calls are only slightly better than emails or faxes. Old-fashioned letters in large enough quantities do make a difference.
How about requiring that states demand verifiable documents available to US citizens or legal resident aliens only when accepting license applications? Or should states be allowed to issue ID based on a Mexican matricular card, or a note from someone's mom, or maybe one of those personalized novelty license plates from the amusement park? "Yes, my name Bort. Bort Johnson."
When ".museum" was first added, how would existing browsers know that it is a valid TLD?
They wouldn't, at least not until the next software update. But while turning "baddomain.museum" into "baddomain.museum.com" might be excusable, turning "baddomain.net" into "baddomain.net.com", when the .net TLD predates the creation of web browsers themselves, is just brain-dead programming.
A better idea is to not have such brain-dead DWIM "features" in the browser. What kind of stupidity is it to blindly append a TLD to a URL that already ends in a valid TLD?
Why? We can't see in 3 dimensions. Our visual organs only see two dimensional pictures. Our brains use the parallax from two 2D images to give us depth perception, but this really isn't true 3D vision. What is it that you think a 3D display is going to add? How much additional information is really conveyed by depth cues? It's just not that useful a trick on its own. Now, if you were somehow able to add a 3D controller and tactile feedback, then that might be worthwhile.