Though the gun crime is pretty low in the ones you've mentioned.
This was my point: that there is no obvious correlation between frequencies of gun ownership and gun crime.
And btw, gun control in Sweden is pretty harsh. In order to get a handgun license, you need to have been an active participant at a licensed shooting range for 6 months - and that will get you a.22 caliber. Another 6 months of owning a.22 will enable you to request a license for larger caliber handguns.
It's even harder to start hunting, with extensive theoretical and practical tests, in order to get a rifle license.
And btw, there are Swedish guys with assault rifles in their homes, too (part of a similar militia, the hemvarn).
America does not have more guns than most other nations.
Yes, read that again: Guns are not more common in the US than in most other Western nations. In rural Canada, hunting is so common that more or less everybody owns a rifle or two. In Sweden (where I live), I was somewhat surprised when a date of mine once took me home to proudly show me her.45 Magnum (note; this was in northern Sweden). In Switzerland, most adult men are equipped with an assault rifle to keep in their homes, in order to make up an effective guerilla militia in case of invasion.
Proliferation of guns alone is not the reason for violence in the US. It may be a factor that worsens the effect of the violence, but looking at other Western cultures, there is not a correlation between gun ownership and violence.
(Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine is an excellent easy-to-inhale piece of work that illustrates this and more.)
I was born on Feb 30, 1969. At least my fake ID says so. Funny; not one person noticed it in the five years or so I used that fake ID consistently. Not even when I asked them straight out what was wrong with the data they were looking at.
People react immediately at Feb 29 of whatever year and check if it's a leap year. Feb 30 just passes as another date.
Hell, I even have a library card using that fake ID. Even though it's been a long time since I used (or needed) the older identity, I still think it's kind of funny that nobody noticed.:-)
This is the first time I've heard FidoNet mentioned in... must be almost a decade. It's like the huge amateur network (which for a brief period outnumbered the Internet in raw node count, mind you) never existed.
Anyway, FidoNet was not without its share of problems. The killing bullet, I'd say today, was the social factor - there were too conservative forces clinging to backwards compatibility at the cost of anything. Anything had to work with the most basic piece of software; this effectively shot progress and evolution dead.
Not that there weren't attempts. There were. They just weren't successful.
Anyway, setting up echoes would have the same problems as FidoNet echoes. The number one problem was typical for Slashdot: DUPES!
Echoes were set up so that one node relayed a message in an echomail forum to its other connected nodes for a particular echo, effectively creating a star topology, different for each forum. However, since each sysop just wanted the echo linked, he would just hook up to somewhere, and forget about it. Then, others would hook up from him, and all of a sudden somebody had hooked up to two different valid uplinks.
The result? The star topology all of a sudden had a loop in it. Messages would keep circling (since FidoNet used dedicated dialup lines, latency between nodes was typically in the hours range) and dupe filters were created.
All of those filters and filter-enabling tags were optional, of course. After all, you couldn't mandate an operational node to change its behavior, you could just ask nicely.
Political play to no ends.:-/
Anyway, there were many other funny effects with EchoMail. Crosslinking was another - when one echo got linked to another at a node, so that all messages in echo X would enter echo Y at that node and vice versa. The most exotic of these was when a religious echo got crosslinked with a fantasy humor one -- through crosslinked physical directories at a node (the FAT pointers for the different directories hosting the two echoes pointed to the same location on the disk). Anyway, much hilarious discussion ensued, and not many understood much what people were trying to say in the crosslinked echo.:-)
/ former sysop and NEC in FidoNet
Summary for mail & network admins
on
SPF Design Frozen
·
· Score: 3, Informative
If your MX record is also the IP(s) used for outgoing mail, as in my case, all you have to do is add this line to your DNS:
[domainname] IN TXT "v=spf1 +mx -all"
That's it. That's really it, at least for publishing your permissions. So simple I already did it for my domains.
The fact that the angular dimensions of both the sun and moon from Earth are nearly identical
Yup, this is one of my two faves. The other one is the lunar orbit coinciding perfectly with the lunar rotation, so that the same side of the moon always faces Earth.
Not as spectacular, but certainly a coincidence with consequences.
That this wealth ("enough energy for everyone alive to live better than the average American") is distributed in some other manner than 99.95% to a few hundred backscratching CEOs, with the rest of the population living below today's poverty line?
Call me socialist if you like, but it's still on my wish list for the scenario.
When stories like this break, I always read al-Jazeera in English to get the other view of the story.
If the news of the West and al-Jazeera coincide in their analysis, as is (mostly!) the case here, then it's fairly safe to say that the news are true. Most of the time, the stories diverge, and you're left to draw your own conclusions.
I mean, look at their Star Wreck 4 1/2. With a plot line that starts with "Those cheapskates have installed a shareware beta operating system on the ship's mainframe, and the trial expires in two days, so we need to go back to Earth to install a crack."
This is what the world needs: More geeks with too much time on their hands. This made my day.:-)
Let me amend my statement slightly to add the helmet, Kevlar-lined jacket and trousers, boots and gloves to the concept of "bike".
Point. Let's add in the added manoeuverability, too, for collision avoidance in the first place. (Has saved me once or twice or so from car drivers.)
Ah, but you conveniently forget the large amount of morons in the statistics.
(I was about to ask what the stats would look like if you counted me out, but I can't really compare to guys like PD [Ghost Rider], Pascal et consortes... guys with the life expectancy of a dropped piano.)
I didn't teach you that, did I?
Naw. IIRC, you usually went at about or just below twice the speed limit, only while sitting backwards or sideways instead. When not picking flowers from by the curb.:-)
It's still "insane, but not stupid", I take it?
(Still haven't learned that flower-picking. OTOH, haven't had the opportunity to go riding with ladies, either.)
The 'busa is quite obviously built for five-foot Japanese people, agree with you there, mate. I'm 6'0 and it's a stretch - I certainly need to hunch to see the instrumentation, that is, when I'm not cruising full throttle; at that point I tend to be lying down behind the windshield (with my boots on the tailpipes; picture of that here to show what I mean), so at that point I actually have the instrumentation in my FoV.
But anyway, my point was that I don't really look much at it. Especially not the speedometer.
I would consider a HUD for a navigation system, though, or something else that I'd otherwise have to look down for (or stop by the roadside). My point is mainly that this HUD displays information I don't consider important enough to be in my field of view.
As for brake fluid (like somebody suggested), I think it's a bit overkill to have a HUD just for catastrophic failure conditions. A fat red blinding light glaring at you from the instrumentation will work just as well, it just needs to be bright enough for your peripheral vision to pick it up. There's a large difference between needing to notice something reddish and looking down to read an instrument in detail.
Bikes are not inherently more dangerous than cars.
Actually, I'd like to challenge that. Given that the car protects you better on a factor of, oh, about infinity squared, I do believe that bikes are inherently more dangerous.
HOWEVER, I also believe that bike drivers have a very different attitude towards their transportation than car drivers. I think this different attitude accounts for a lot of those numbers: Bikes are more dangerous, but also carry more skilled/alert drivers. Crackpots not included, here.
Think about it: I don't think you're going to challenge that bike drivers are more alert to their situation. However, if this is true, and the level of danger was the same, then the number of fatalities should have been much lower?
If all car drivers had the same attitude as bike drivers (and, indeed, most truck drivers), then I think the streets would be a different place. The numbers certainly would.
(...as long as car drivers don't necessarily adopt MY particular attitude of getting aircraft-class wheels and making a principle of going at least twice the posted speed limit...)
You know what? A few minutes after I made the post I changed my mind completely and decided this was a bad idea, mostly for the reasons you now write about.:-)
When going with the flow of traffic, looking at the speedometer is not important. When ignoring speed limits altogether, looking at the speedometer is not important, either. And like you say, you get the rpm info from the engine pitch, which is plenty.
So I swiftly turn 180 degrees to "get that crap outta my eyesight, I don't need it".
I guess what triggered my post was your reflection that it's much safer to look down. That I still don't agree with, but that's another story.
You are right that I haven't had a deer wander into my peripheral vision, vectoring towards where I'm going to be driving in a split second. That's mostly because they're not so common here, though. Pedestrians happen. Cars definitely happen. The guy who taught me to ride always told me to drive like I was wearing fluorescent clothes, and the first car driver to hit me would win the $1 million jackpot. I still think he has a point.
So, mea culpa, you're right, get this crap off my gear.:-) Like you say, the cool factor does not cut it.
(and just for the record, I always wear protective gear: full helmet, bulletproof vest against sharp metal, impact protection jacket, and full-body sliding protection.)
You would still have to defocus then refocus your eyes.
Not so. The company's website lists the system as tuned for when the eyes are focused "at or near infinity". It becomes a red-tinted overlay to what's already in your field of vision, focused on traffic.
You are absolutely correct in your underlying statements about bikers having a lot to pay attention to, yet you don't draw the conclusions. I take it from your comments about bikes being dangerous that you don't drive one yourself?
I drive a Suzuki Hayabusa. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it's a bike basically built for insane speeding. It starts to accelerate seriously around 80 mph, from where it kicks you up to 180-190 mph while leaving your guts behind.
(As a side note here, speeding is not seen as a particularly serious crime where I live. It's regarded more like a sport. A friend of mine referred to speeding tickets as "fun tax".)
Anyway. When you're cruising down the highway at 140-150 mph or so, there's just no looking down at the instrument panel. The concept of looking down does not exist on this planet. Your focus is ahead, on the road, on the traffic. And sharply so.
Therefore, this is something that will actually make you READ the speedometer. Read the speedometer AT ALL. As it currently stands, the only speed indication you have as a sportbiker is the pitch of your engine, because you sure as hell aren't taking your eyes off the road.
In these conditions, the "spare of your glance" which you are talking about, means you are unaware of the road and the traffic for a minimum of 100 yards travelled (about one second to look down, refocus, and interpret what you are seeing).
So, bring on any and all information you can onto my visor. Anything that rests in my field of view is good, if it means I don't need to take the eyes off the road.
Nothing travels faster than light, with the possible exception of bad news.
The Foo people of Bar actually tried to use this fact, and built a spaceship entirely powered by bad news, but found that wherever they went they were so extremely unwelcome that there wasn't really any point in being there.
In case you haven't noticed, that's exactly how the Internet is constructed. Everybody builds their own TCP/IP networks. This has been done since TCP/IP was specced out.
It is the connecting them together that creates the Internet. Just a fraction of the networks that comprise the Internet are US-owned today.
You suggest that those who don't like the US having the final say on everything should go play in their own yard. How unusual. Well, every country has their own TCP/IP networks, already. To say that one particular country should own all worldwide connections BETWEEN such independent networks is arrogant, naive, and unhelpful.
This is something that's built together, so it makes sense that it should be looked over by a common body.
It may interest you that the EU has passed a directive requiring opt-in. Several states have implemented this into national law already.
Fines here in Sweden are stiff, up to $500k for infractions.
This law has no silly exceptions for charities, religious institutions, etc. The notable exception to the spam law is if you have a previous business relationship with the sending party; I think such an exception is reasonable -- assuming an implied acceptance of marketing material from existing business partners, if nothing else has been stated. In the same breath, though, let me mention that such an acceptance of marketing e-mail within a business relationship can be expressly revoked at any time, even if previously expressly permitted, also as mandated by the same law.
In Sweden, this law goes into effect on April 1, 2004 (I don't know if there is a hidden meaning in that, but I hope not).
It is also interesting to note that the law is very broad in scope and covers all text-, video-, and image-based communications where the delivery has a store-and-forward model -- it explicitly covers SMS messaging as well, for example.
Now, with this said, I shouldn't hope too much that the US, like you say, "show up the corrupt U.S. idiots". The current administration is not known for its humility and desire to learn from other people and cultures.
(In fact, as a side note, I am amazed at how this administration has managed to turn the mainstream attitude in Europe from "want to be an American too" to "would pick up arms tomorrow against the US if I had the opportunity" in just a few years. It's absolutely unbelievable how arrogant the current president has managed to come himself across to the world; I'm not sure the sheer level of this is realized within the American borders.)
Slashdot Mirror
Though the gun crime is pretty low in the ones you've mentioned.
.22 caliber. Another 6 months of owning a .22 will enable you to request a license for larger caliber handguns.
This was my point: that there is no obvious correlation between frequencies of gun ownership and gun crime.
And btw, gun control in Sweden is pretty harsh. In order to get a handgun license, you need to have been an active participant at a licensed shooting range for 6 months - and that will get you a
It's even harder to start hunting, with extensive theoretical and practical tests, in order to get a rifle license.
And btw, there are Swedish guys with assault rifles in their homes, too (part of a similar militia, the hemvarn).
America does not have more guns than most other nations.
.45 Magnum (note; this was in northern Sweden). In Switzerland, most adult men are equipped with an assault rifle to keep in their homes, in order to make up an effective guerilla militia in case of invasion.
Yes, read that again: Guns are not more common in the US than in most other Western nations. In rural Canada, hunting is so common that more or less everybody owns a rifle or two. In Sweden (where I live), I was somewhat surprised when a date of mine once took me home to proudly show me her
Proliferation of guns alone is not the reason for violence in the US. It may be a factor that worsens the effect of the violence, but looking at other Western cultures, there is not a correlation between gun ownership and violence.
(Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine is an excellent easy-to-inhale piece of work that illustrates this and more.)
Millimeters of mercury? Pounds per square inch, for heaven's sake?
I thought NASA had gotten over this units thing and started measuring things in comprehensible units.
What is the pressure drop measured in Libraries of Congress?
I was born on Feb 30, 1969. At least my fake ID says so. Funny; not one person noticed it in the five years or so I used that fake ID consistently. Not even when I asked them straight out what was wrong with the data they were looking at.
:-)
People react immediately at Feb 29 of whatever year and check if it's a leap year. Feb 30 just passes as another date.
Hell, I even have a library card using that fake ID. Even though it's been a long time since I used (or needed) the older identity, I still think it's kind of funny that nobody noticed.
in that the Brits, apart from driving on the left hand side, are the ONLY people in the world to measure fuel consumption in miles per liter. :-)
This is the first time I've heard FidoNet mentioned in... must be almost a decade. It's like the huge amateur network (which for a brief period outnumbered the Internet in raw node count, mind you) never existed.
:-/
:-)
Anyway, FidoNet was not without its share of problems. The killing bullet, I'd say today, was the social factor - there were too conservative forces clinging to backwards compatibility at the cost of anything. Anything had to work with the most basic piece of software; this effectively shot progress and evolution dead.
Not that there weren't attempts. There were. They just weren't successful.
Anyway, setting up echoes would have the same problems as FidoNet echoes. The number one problem was typical for Slashdot: DUPES!
Echoes were set up so that one node relayed a message in an echomail forum to its other connected nodes for a particular echo, effectively creating a star topology, different for each forum. However, since each sysop just wanted the echo linked, he would just hook up to somewhere, and forget about it. Then, others would hook up from him, and all of a sudden somebody had hooked up to two different valid uplinks.
The result? The star topology all of a sudden had a loop in it. Messages would keep circling (since FidoNet used dedicated dialup lines, latency between nodes was typically in the hours range) and dupe filters were created.
All of those filters and filter-enabling tags were optional, of course. After all, you couldn't mandate an operational node to change its behavior, you could just ask nicely.
Political play to no ends.
Anyway, there were many other funny effects with EchoMail. Crosslinking was another - when one echo got linked to another at a node, so that all messages in echo X would enter echo Y at that node and vice versa. The most exotic of these was when a religious echo got crosslinked with a fantasy humor one -- through crosslinked physical directories at a node (the FAT pointers for the different directories hosting the two echoes pointed to the same location on the disk). Anyway, much hilarious discussion ensued, and not many understood much what people were trying to say in the crosslinked echo.
/ former sysop and NEC in FidoNet
That's it. That's really it, at least for publishing your permissions. So simple I already did it for my domains.
The fact that the angular dimensions of both the sun and moon from Earth are nearly identical
Yup, this is one of my two faves. The other one is the lunar orbit coinciding perfectly with the lunar rotation, so that the same side of the moon always faces Earth.
Not as spectacular, but certainly a coincidence with consequences.
Or, is this just how the Designers planned this particular planetary system?
All the fjords on Mars have evaporated, so any possible designer signatures are, unfortunately, lost in time.
What more do you want exactly?
That this wealth ("enough energy for everyone alive to live better than the average American") is distributed in some other manner than 99.95% to a few hundred backscratching CEOs, with the rest of the population living below today's poverty line?
Call me socialist if you like, but it's still on my wish list for the scenario.
When stories like this break, I always read al-Jazeera in English to get the other view of the story.
If the news of the West and al-Jazeera coincide in their analysis, as is (mostly!) the case here, then it's fairly safe to say that the news are true. Most of the time, the stories diverge, and you're left to draw your own conclusions.
You seem to have something interesting to say, but I fail to make any sense out of your post.
You are suggesting that something should be viewed or treated differently. Could you explain in more detail? It sounds interesting.
...this one will be at least as amusing.
:-)
I mean, look at their Star Wreck 4 1/2. With a plot line that starts with "Those cheapskates have installed a shareware beta operating system on the ship's mainframe, and the trial expires in two days, so we need to go back to Earth to install a crack."
This is what the world needs: More geeks with too much time on their hands. This made my day.
Let me amend my statement slightly to add the helmet, Kevlar-lined jacket and trousers, boots and gloves to the concept of "bike".
:-)
Point. Let's add in the added manoeuverability, too, for collision avoidance in the first place. (Has saved me once or twice or so from car drivers.)
Ah, but you conveniently forget the large amount of morons in the statistics.
(I was about to ask what the stats would look like if you counted me out, but I can't really compare to guys like PD [Ghost Rider], Pascal et consortes... guys with the life expectancy of a dropped piano.)
I didn't teach you that, did I?
Naw. IIRC, you usually went at about or just below twice the speed limit, only while sitting backwards or sideways instead. When not picking flowers from by the curb.
It's still "insane, but not stupid", I take it?
(Still haven't learned that flower-picking. OTOH, haven't had the opportunity to go riding with ladies, either.)
The 'busa is quite obviously built for five-foot Japanese people, agree with you there, mate. I'm 6'0 and it's a stretch - I certainly need to hunch to see the instrumentation, that is, when I'm not cruising full throttle; at that point I tend to be lying down behind the windshield (with my boots on the tailpipes; picture of that here to show what I mean), so at that point I actually have the instrumentation in my FoV.
But anyway, my point was that I don't really look much at it. Especially not the speedometer.
I would consider a HUD for a navigation system, though, or something else that I'd otherwise have to look down for (or stop by the roadside). My point is mainly that this HUD displays information I don't consider important enough to be in my field of view.
As for brake fluid (like somebody suggested), I think it's a bit overkill to have a HUD just for catastrophic failure conditions. A fat red blinding light glaring at you from the instrumentation will work just as well, it just needs to be bright enough for your peripheral vision to pick it up. There's a large difference between needing to notice something reddish and looking down to read an instrument in detail.
Bikes are not inherently more dangerous than cars.
Actually, I'd like to challenge that. Given that the car protects you better on a factor of, oh, about infinity squared, I do believe that bikes are inherently more dangerous.
HOWEVER, I also believe that bike drivers have a very different attitude towards their transportation than car drivers. I think this different attitude accounts for a lot of those numbers: Bikes are more dangerous, but also carry more skilled/alert drivers. Crackpots not included, here.
Think about it: I don't think you're going to challenge that bike drivers are more alert to their situation. However, if this is true, and the level of danger was the same, then the number of fatalities should have been much lower?
If all car drivers had the same attitude as bike drivers (and, indeed, most truck drivers), then I think the streets would be a different place. The numbers certainly would.
(...as long as car drivers don't necessarily adopt MY particular attitude of getting aircraft-class wheels and making a principle of going at least twice the posted speed limit...)
You know what? A few minutes after I made the post I changed my mind completely and decided this was a bad idea, mostly for the reasons you now write about. :-)
:-) Like you say, the cool factor does not cut it.
When going with the flow of traffic, looking at the speedometer is not important. When ignoring speed limits altogether, looking at the speedometer is not important, either. And like you say, you get the rpm info from the engine pitch, which is plenty.
So I swiftly turn 180 degrees to "get that crap outta my eyesight, I don't need it".
I guess what triggered my post was your reflection that it's much safer to look down. That I still don't agree with, but that's another story.
You are right that I haven't had a deer wander into my peripheral vision, vectoring towards where I'm going to be driving in a split second. That's mostly because they're not so common here, though. Pedestrians happen. Cars definitely happen. The guy who taught me to ride always told me to drive like I was wearing fluorescent clothes, and the first car driver to hit me would win the $1 million jackpot. I still think he has a point.
So, mea culpa, you're right, get this crap off my gear.
(and just for the record, I always wear protective gear: full helmet, bulletproof vest against sharp metal, impact protection jacket, and full-body sliding protection.)
You would still have to defocus then refocus your eyes.
Not so. The company's website lists the system as tuned for when the eyes are focused "at or near infinity". It becomes a red-tinted overlay to what's already in your field of vision, focused on traffic.
You are absolutely correct in your underlying statements about bikers having a lot to pay attention to, yet you don't draw the conclusions. I take it from your comments about bikes being dangerous that you don't drive one yourself?
I drive a Suzuki Hayabusa. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it's a bike basically built for insane speeding. It starts to accelerate seriously around 80 mph, from where it kicks you up to 180-190 mph while leaving your guts behind.
(As a side note here, speeding is not seen as a particularly serious crime where I live. It's regarded more like a sport. A friend of mine referred to speeding tickets as "fun tax".)
Anyway. When you're cruising down the highway at 140-150 mph or so, there's just no looking down at the instrument panel. The concept of looking down does not exist on this planet. Your focus is ahead, on the road, on the traffic. And sharply so.
Therefore, this is something that will actually make you READ the speedometer. Read the speedometer AT ALL. As it currently stands, the only speed indication you have as a sportbiker is the pitch of your engine, because you sure as hell aren't taking your eyes off the road.
In these conditions, the "spare of your glance" which you are talking about, means you are unaware of the road and the traffic for a minimum of 100 yards travelled (about one second to look down, refocus, and interpret what you are seeing).
So, bring on any and all information you can onto my visor. Anything that rests in my field of view is good, if it means I don't need to take the eyes off the road.
Mind if I copy this into my blog? I'll be happy to provide more detailed credit than "argoff, Slashdot" if you like.
Nothing travels faster than light, with the possible exception of bad news.
The Foo people of Bar actually tried to use this fact, and built a spaceship entirely powered by bad news, but found that wherever they went they were so extremely unwelcome that there wasn't really any point in being there.
It was just slashdotted, and completely unable to move under the load.
In case you haven't noticed, that's exactly how the Internet is constructed. Everybody builds their own TCP/IP networks. This has been done since TCP/IP was specced out.
It is the connecting them together that creates the Internet. Just a fraction of the networks that comprise the Internet are US-owned today.
You suggest that those who don't like the US having the final say on everything should go play in their own yard. How unusual. Well, every country has their own TCP/IP networks, already. To say that one particular country should own all worldwide connections BETWEEN such independent networks is arrogant, naive, and unhelpful.
This is something that's built together, so it makes sense that it should be looked over by a common body.
I knew it all the time, Apache and Unix servers are among the most vulnerable on the planet. This could never happen to trusty old Windows boxen.
...oh, wait...
It may interest you that the EU has passed a directive requiring opt-in. Several states have implemented this into national law already.
Fines here in Sweden are stiff, up to $500k for infractions.
This law has no silly exceptions for charities, religious institutions, etc. The notable exception to the spam law is if you have a previous business relationship with the sending party; I think such an exception is reasonable -- assuming an implied acceptance of marketing material from existing business partners, if nothing else has been stated. In the same breath, though, let me mention that such an acceptance of marketing e-mail within a business relationship can be expressly revoked at any time, even if previously expressly permitted, also as mandated by the same law.
In Sweden, this law goes into effect on April 1, 2004 (I don't know if there is a hidden meaning in that, but I hope not).
It is also interesting to note that the law is very broad in scope and covers all text-, video-, and image-based communications where the delivery has a store-and-forward model -- it explicitly covers SMS messaging as well, for example.
Now, with this said, I shouldn't hope too much that the US, like you say, "show up the corrupt U.S. idiots". The current administration is not known for its humility and desire to learn from other people and cultures.
(In fact, as a side note, I am amazed at how this administration has managed to turn the mainstream attitude in Europe from "want to be an American too" to "would pick up arms tomorrow against the US if I had the opportunity" in just a few years. It's absolutely unbelievable how arrogant the current president has managed to come himself across to the world; I'm not sure the sheer level of this is realized within the American borders.)