It took the world 10 years to stop tyrany in WWII. It would take 35 minutes to stop tyrany today.
Okay.... So some dude bent on world domination gets elected in a large industrial powerhouse, like say Hitler did in Germany. Say his name is Bob and he is the president of the USA. Now he invades Canada, Mexico...
Ok, your 35 minutes are up.
You are the chancelor of Germany, is your first move REALLY going to be a large scale nuclear attack on major US cities and the hundreds of military bases you know about? OR are you going (1) kick them out of your country and (2) start building up your military and making alliances with other nations so you can fight a serious conventional war. One lasting at least a decade, simply to beat the villain back behind his borders, where you hope a domestic insurgency will take care of him because you fear actually invading his home soil will mean a nuclear reprisal?
You can't know from the SSID what the conditions of usage for that network are.
Sure you can, my SSID is "nycwireless.net". Which is one of the SSID's recommended by the nycwireless.net users group for people sharing their wireless in NYC. I would assume other cities have similar standard SSID's for someone running an open node.
This doesn't tell you the full conditions of usage, since different node owners have different monitoring policies, etc. But it tells you one thing very clearly, "THIS NODE IS OPEN FOR YOU TO USE".
If someone accidentally used "nycwireless.net" as their SSID and then tried to got the police to arrest their neighbor the Judge would throw out any theft of service charge pretty quickly.
No, I wouldn't think so. I think the danger of the cell phone emissions is the fact that they are so intense (seeing as they originate right next to your head). Unless you live with an AP right next to you all day, it's not going to matter, as these waves lose their intensity quickly with distance.
It's not the AP you should be worried about, but the WiFi card in the laptop. But the answer is still the same, MUCH less radiation plus it is far from your head. Most of EM will go right into your left or right leg muscle, where it is unlikely to cause any damage. Plus there is the R^3 fall-off, after a couple inches 0.033-0.2 Watts is nothing. The problem with cell phones is that they emit up to 2 Watts and their transmitter antennas are used right very near some important organs such as the brain, eyes and ears.
Though I bet in 10-20 years when we figure this out, the solution will probably be something as simple as making the antenna directional away from your head. It means you need a few more cells, but by then we'll more cells for capacity reasons anyway, so this will all be seen as a blip on the health radar like all the kids who had thyroid problems when we first started testing nukes. Because of them we even figured out how to reduce the natural cases of those same thyroid problems. So, assuming you use a cell phone or WiFi device, just consider yourself a Guinea pig who might very well benefit our children by participating in the discovery some new and unusual disease.
You are much more likely to be killed by someone plowing their car into yours than all the health risk combined. The average American is in something like 1.4 car accidents in their lifetime, or 1.6% accidents a year. About one in a hundred of those result in death. Except for eating (heart attacks) and smoking (lung problems), nothing even comes close to being able to shorten your life as efficiently. This is something to study, so we can reduce the number of deaths.
Just a little appendum, always wash your hands after using the bathroom including between your fingers, and up to your elbows after no. 2. Also, do use the anti-bacterial soap when you ARE sick, it will work better if you didn't use it before you were sick.
It's not because not doing it is gross, nor is it for keeping you healthy, it is for the health of the people you interact with. Hand and bandage washing is what extended lifespan in the 19th and early 20th century. It has had an impact comparable to the discovery of anti-biotics in the mid-20th century.
Oh, a bit offtopic, wash your fruit and veggies with a mild solution of soap, the soap removes waxy anti-fungals and anti-insect poisons. The poisons won't kill you (well they shouldn't), but the fruits will taste better. The poisons have a bitter taste, most noticable on sweets such as apples and strawberries.
Imagine if the US had blown up a small ghost town or uninhabited island - maybe even right next to Japan and said "surrender now or this will happen to you."
This would have almost certainly avoided the cold war and saved millions more lives than the A-Bomb purportedly saved in WWII.
The cold war might have still happened just because we probably still wouldn't have shared the nuclear info after the USSR saved our asses in WWII. Which was stupid then as now, only lies and trivia can be hidden, physical truths like how to build a nuke are always discovered. Especially after you advertise their existance with the murder of tens of thousands of civilians.
I don't think I would agree with you that the non-violent means is always better, but do I wish our rulers at least considered the long term damage to America when they murder small children or commit other war crimes. But don't put too much blame on the A-Bomb, we were firebombing Tokyo before we had the A-Bomb.
I never noticed the whole doors-opening-inward thing front doors, until reading this article. And suddenly I thought to myself, hey, that's the way doors ARE, sure, but they should be the other way around. Consider: an outward-opening door is harder to kick down from the outside, and easier to get past in case of a fire. Doors SHOULD open that way.
Doors on the outside of a building on anything but a single family dwelling MUST open outward by law in almost every jurisdiction in the world. It's a fire safety thing, people panic and pileup on the doors so it can't be opened. The door is allowed to open inward as well, but it must open outward. You are also allowed to have an inward opening door, or a revolving door, as long as there is a outward opening door next to it. This outward opening door must not be locked so that it can't be opened freely and easilly from the inside, but it may be alarmed for emergency use only.
Older buildings are often grand-fathered in, so they don't need to bring the building up to code until they do some major renovation. But these things have been in the international model code for decades so you'll rarely see buildings that don't have the outward opening doors. Unfortunately, sometimes landlords add locks to the outward opening doors in between the infrequent fire inspections, or just bribe the fire inspector. Most deaths in apartment buildings, hotels and schools happen when these doors have been locked or chained shut to avoid the $200 per door cost of installing an alarm instead.
In any case, we've been building houses for thousands of years and still they collapse because someone decided to make a small change to what the engineer approved, and burn down because it is built out of, or with a large amount of, some cheap heating fuel, like wood or plastic(=oil).
There is more regulation, and expense, in the building trades. An architect or civil engineer must 'apprentice' with someone licensed for 2-3 years and then take a series of tests. They must each must sign off on a building before it gets sent to the government where another engineer signs off on it, and then while it is being built another outside engineer makes sure they are following the plans the city approved, and again after it is built but before it is occupied all of the minor materials changes made by the builder must be approved by the government, which can deny a certificate of occupancy if they find anything they don't like. If so the builder must either revert to the original plans or get some new set of changes approved to remedy the problem. Even if just the floor tiles are changed, before getting the certificate of occupancy, the city/state inspector can nix it. But even with all this regulation, simple things like windows often get "value engineered" out of the entire first floor of a building to save money. I can't imagine the usability guy would like that.
This is perhaps a nit-pick, but you don't use rabbit ears for over-the-air HDTV. Digial broadcasts are on the UHS band. Rabbit ears are for VHS reception.
Is it ok to nit-pick the nitpicker? Rabbit ears are for VHS, and most HDTV is in the UHS bands, but there are VHS HDTV channels, for instance in New York City UPN is on ch 12...
BTW bow-ties are what you want for UHS, and hence most HDTV transmissions.
For my Mac-based HDTV PVR, I use a YAGI roof antenna. You almost certainly have a "Log Periodic" antenna. Yagis are tuned to just one frequency, and in television are typically only used by cable operators who want a fix on just one channel, for rebroadcast on their systems.
The root of the problem is stupid web developers ignoring RFC 2616 and using the GET method to change state.
Seriously, using POSTs was something we all learned in 1994... Hopefully, this Google accelerator thingy will be popular enough to rid us of these creaky old broken sites.
They went to a University library and obtained help from a trained librarian. If the information was *really* obscure, then they would actually hire a trained librarian experienced in information retrieval.
I used to work at a public library in high school, it was amazing how well that system worked. If you would walked into our library, between about 10 am and 4 pm, you essentially had the whole staff at your disposal. You would ask someone for information about a subject and they would hand you off to the expert in that subject area who would then proceed to find a half dozen books on the subject while giving you a rundown of what the thesis of each book was and their opinion on the quality of each.
Unfortunately, I haven't seen a library work that well since. It seems that cutbacks have left the libraries bereft of librarians.
Athens died under the populism of such "direct democracy".
Actually, Athens had a strong and popular leader who convinced the Senate to go to war against the weak Spartans. But the Spartans were a closed society living on inhospitable terrain. They could not be routed and were able to disrupt the trade routes on which the open society of Athens depended for its strength. After a 70 year siege Athens fell. But then, after a few years of "Spartan Rule", the Spartans realized ruling Athens with a light touch gave better results and Athenean society continued to thrive under their rule.
To avoid the fate of Athens, today's legistlative bodies often require a super majority to go to war. Leaders continue to suffer from hubris and representatives are no less intoxicated by powerful men than the people at large.
For instance, in the USA the Senate is composed of representatives of the people of each state. They voted 99-1 for the war in Iraq. This is a much higher percentage of fools than in the population at large, and shows that representational government is a complete failure as compared to direct democracy. The ease with which representatives can be bribed or fooled with lies and half-truths as compared with direct democracies also testifies to the failure of the system.
The example of Athens as a direct democracy is also flawed. Only old men could serve in the Senate and they were expected to represent the interests of their family.
Easy to vote democrat when your money isn't effected by what the democrats do. Its when you have money that is affected by taxes that you start to question if they are worth it.
I don't know where you've been the last quarter century, but Republicans are the big spenders in American politics and the Democrats are the party of fiscal conservatism. It wasn't always this way, but under Nixon the Republicans captured the poor southern white vote and started slowly bleeding off the capitalists. Today the Dems have about 2/3 of the fiscal conservatives while about 1/3 remain with the Republicans out of a sense of duty, entrapment, or just because they are the party in power. They are a force in neither party, but it's pretty obvious the Christie Whitman's of the Republican party will fail. When the Democratic party recaptures power the Republicans will have the social conservatives and the Democratic party will have the fiscal conservatives.
Whether the social liberals and the fiscal conservatives might have problems getting along once they are back in the same party is an exercise left to the reader. When they were both in the GOP they never had problems before they had power, but once they did they often had so many problems that they lost the next election.
There *is* a legal transgression that is taking place daily and it is impacting the industry in an enormous way. The courts have sided almost exclusively with the consumer (thankfully we haven't started to lose that many civil rights yet), and the RIAA has only one course of action left open to it: lawsuits.
Look EMI sent my ISP a nastygram that resulted in my losing internet service for a week. I work from home so this was a real hardship. I had never heard of the bands listed, the IP address listed wasn't even being used at the time, and I've never downloaded a song at home*. Music just doesn't matter much to me.
*I downloaded a public domain performance of a public domain song from Napster when they first started at work just to show my boss how cool the technology was.
Now lets look at losses: about $1000 for me, about $300 in customer acquisition costs for the ISP I dumped for not informing me of the letter they got before cutting off service. For EMI, $1. They obviously just did some brain dead port scan and hired someone not capable of cut and paste to write the nastygram.
This is a case that never went past the nasty-gram stage, just immagine the legal transgressions they are committing on the scale of our economy... I will gladly join a class action against them when it comes. They are impacting the nation in an enormous way. There is only one course of action left open to freedom loving Americans: lawsuits.
As I understand it though, the RIAA has constructed a "repent" clause in to all of their suits which gives you a get-out-of-jail free card in return for a signed promise of non-recidivism.
The innocent are the most impacted by this type of "repent" clause, it reminds me of our broken criminal "justice" system. Punish the innocent, pardon the guilty. It's just not right.
And the collapse of the stock market had nothing to do with the depression. Right.
Right.
The stock market crashed because the economy crashed.
That's how this market thing works. You should learn something about capitalism, even if you don't believe in it. You do live in a capitalist world.
Why the economy collapsed is a much more complicated issue. Which I'll leave you to discover yourself.
But you should know the market didn't even hold back the recovery in the 1930's, it rebounded quite quickly in fact. But a much smaller portion of economy was heavily influenced by stock market conditions back then, and the dollar was still pegged to a conservative commodity so there was no way for the anyone to deflate the currency quickly except by increasing spending, which Hoover failed to do when it might have helped. Today we can lower interest rates, and only have to resort to borrowing and spending under dire conditions when the interest rates start approaching zero.
But it also has provisions which are designed to catch money launderers, and do a reasonably good job of it.
Only if they use the U.S. banking system to launder their money. I know a few rich people and they have absolutely no problem hiding their money overseas. I would assume terrorists could do the same with the same ease. If you think our borders can prevent someone from throwing a few diamonds into the luggage or shipping container you are sadly out of touch with reality....your fantasy of America being the most intrusive government in the world, but you really should take a look sometime.
I don't think this is a very good strawman you have constructed. Besides, you seem to be one of the few who wants to be compared with North Korea as a bastion of freedom. Even the Bush'n'Dick team seems to have higher ideals.
I still believe the entire cannon of U.S. Laws currently in effect should be read each year by each memeber of the House and each member of the Senate in a public square in their district and State, resp. It would both cut down on the number of laws, and dissuade the bastards from passing laws that would get them tarred and feathered.
Jesus is believed to have been born sometime between 4 and 8 B.C. (Or, B.C.E.) So it's not really centered on Jesus' birth, although that was the plan.
BTW the whole thing sucks since there is no year zero in either system.
I *always* read Slashdot with Firefox and it always looks fine to me....
The problem only occurs when Gecko begins rendering the page before all of it has arrived. Perhaps you have a fast enough connection to slashdot that you always get the full page rather quickly? I've noticed the problem a lot more at home with DSL and a congested ISP than at work with OC-3's and low traffic links to the major POPs.
Web browsers don't prevent disease. That is just not true. Web browsers help people learn, and knowledge is the most powerful weapon in the fight against poverty and disease there is.
Writing open source software might be 'charity' work, if you look at it that way, but it only helps the richest 10% of the world who might have access to a computer at the most.
Woah, you need to spend more time in third world countries. You would be amazed at how much time the poor spend on the internet. Internet cafes are on every street corner and are filled with teens and a few older folks spending 25 cents an hour to sit in plastic seats googling away on little. A good portion of their income, but it is well spent. Even if it just helps them learn English it will greatly enhance their earning potential.
Just the developers of FireFox have done more to save lives than Billy Boy. If he really had any interest in improving the world he would set up a fund to help open source programmers feed their families and maybe subsidise computer hardware and communications equipment.
In recent years I've concentrated all my civil liberties donations to the EFF. They seem to have their act together and not be infested by the professional charity clique that seem to only care about collecting money and using only a small percentage of the money for the charitable ends they supposedly collect it for.
I still get lots of snail mail spam from the ACLU though.
In a "paper trail" situation, the receipt is the ballot! The only purpose of the machine is to give the people who can't punch a hole properly a chance to have their vote count, and maybe you can plug all the machines in at the end and get a quick count, but in the end if something smells fishy, you pull those paper ballots out.
It's more than just improper hole punching. Traditional voter fraud has included many ways to tamper with these ballots. You can produce an overvote by punching out an extra hole, or even by printing the ballots so that the preferred candidates hole practically falls out on its own and the non-preferred candidates chad holds on for dear life. Paper ballots can have extra marks made on them to make them overvotes... Lots of things can go wrong. We called the local election office because they left a voting machine in our unguarded lobby for days before the election. The front of it was "sealed" with the same plain plastic twisty tie I use to secure wires, the back of the machine, the works, were not sealed.
The problem is we run our elections as if they were just for show, they remind me of 'airport security', a thought which frightens me. We need an electronic voting machine which prints a ballot, verified by the voter, deposited in a clear box which needs to be sledgehammered to open, which is then counted at the poll location.
This wouldn't make me feel completely safe, we still need open source voting software, and real procedures for verifying that the software works. There should be pictures of the candidates so the old trick of running five candidates with the same name as your opponent wouldn't work so well.
I did a search on my papers and was a able to view a PDF of them. It looks like they are getting versions posted on distance education websites. These papers are all licensed for free viewing for academic purposes. The only drawback seems to be that supplimentary materials like code and videos are not linked to.
Take Florida for example, According to end-of-day exit polls, 47.6% voted for Kerry, 51.4% for Bush. The actual numbers were Bush 52.1%, Kerry 47.1%. That seems to be pretty close to me, especially considering that the exit poll counted fewer than 3000 votes in FL.
Look closely at the fine print... Those exit polls are 'normalized' to match the 'actual' count. Assuming the official results are accurate this allows the pollster to reduce error on their other questions, like what percentage of voters voted for Bush based on 'values'. But it messes up the 'who voted for who' numbers.
Hopefully, the raw numbers will be published so real mathematicians can have a look at them.
I think the population of each county determines its height on the map, not its volume. If volume were actually proportional to population, the tallest spikes would be the most densely populated counties -- places like San Francisco and the Borough of Manhattan. Instead, the tallest spikes are simply the most populous counties, like Cook County IL and Los Angeles County.
Well then this might make some sense, New York Metro's 20 million is spread over many counties, none with more than 2 million. Maybe the height is directly proportional to the number of voters for the winning candiditate in that county minus the losing candidate.
I do think volume would make more sense, since this is a 3-D map...
I'm not entirely sure what the methodology is though. Maricopa County, AZ (the only one in Arizona with any real height to it on the map) has about 1/3 the population of Los Angeles County, but the height ratio on the map is a lot more than 3:1. Also San Bernardino County looks a lot flatter than it should be.
Maybe it has something to do with the margin of victory?
My statement would go into a pair of safe deposit boxes controlled by attorneys with secret instructions to open the contents and make them public if they don't hear from me in 180 days.
I'd have Diebold by the balls.
A disgruntled former employee claims...
No one would listen, and the order would never be made in writing.
Now the CEO would have credibility, and would need to be passed a few thousand C-notes. This is just a matter of giving his company some contracts, and it is even legal for the federal government to give contracts to political supporters, so he can even channel some of that taxpayer money back into your pocket.
Who do tend to vote heavily democratic and are at the near bottom of the education ladder?
There are many ways to slice this and most do it where it favors their view. However the truth is that many people in those districts where Kerry or Bush got a majority had a very close number of people voting for the other guy. Even in 60/40 splits how can one declare which side the "smart" people voted for?
It's very simple really. It is not the education that makes you tend Republican or Democratic. Living in a city makes you tend Democratic, and living in a rural area makes you tend Republican. The smart and many poor tend to live in cities for different reasons. Both smart and poor people tend more Republican in rural areas.
White middle class males also tend Democratic in urban cities.
Now there may be some feedback going on too. Smart people vote for Democrats, so Democratic politicians might do some things smart people like, getting the Democrats more votes next time around from the smart people outside urban areas.
I personally think the whole feedback loop for both parties is gone now with non-voter verifiable electronic voting machines deployed in all the swing states. The whole idea that Bush won Ohio and Florida or even came close in Wisconsin is just laughable if you look at the exit polls.
New York City is split into several counties/boroughs, and on the map it looks like it was split up that way. There are several tall but narrow sections. Chicago and some surrounding area is shown as one huge Cook County spike.
Yes, but look at New York County, 23 sq. miles, with a population of about 2 million. This spike should be completely off the scale. Kings (Brooklyn, 71 sq.miles) and Queens (109 sq. miles) counties should be about a third and fourth as high, since they have a similar total population, but more area.
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It took the world 10 years to stop tyrany in WWII. It would take 35 minutes to stop tyrany today.
Okay.... So some dude bent on world domination gets elected in a large industrial powerhouse, like say Hitler did in Germany. Say his name is Bob and he is the president of the USA. Now he invades Canada, Mexico...
Ok, your 35 minutes are up.
You are the chancelor of Germany, is your first move REALLY going to be a large scale nuclear attack on major US cities and the hundreds of military bases you know about? OR are you going (1) kick them out of your country and (2) start building up your military and making alliances with other nations so you can fight a serious conventional war. One lasting at least a decade, simply to beat the villain back behind his borders, where you hope a domestic insurgency will take care of him because you fear actually invading his home soil will mean a nuclear reprisal?
You can't know from the SSID what the conditions of usage for that network are.
Sure you can, my SSID is "nycwireless.net". Which is one of the SSID's recommended by the nycwireless.net users group for people sharing their wireless in NYC. I would assume other cities have similar standard SSID's for someone running an open node.
This doesn't tell you the full conditions of usage, since different node owners have different monitoring policies, etc. But it tells you one thing very clearly, "THIS NODE IS OPEN FOR YOU TO USE".
If someone accidentally used "nycwireless.net" as their SSID and then tried to got the police to arrest their neighbor the Judge would throw out any theft of service charge pretty quickly.
No, I wouldn't think so. I think the danger of the cell phone emissions is the fact that they are so intense (seeing as they originate right next to your head). Unless you live with an AP right next to you all day, it's not going to matter, as these waves lose their intensity quickly with distance.
It's not the AP you should be worried about, but the WiFi card in the laptop. But the answer is still the same, MUCH less radiation plus it is far from your head. Most of EM will go right into your left or right leg muscle, where it is unlikely to cause any damage. Plus there is the R^3 fall-off, after a couple inches 0.033-0.2 Watts is nothing. The problem with cell phones is that they emit up
to 2 Watts and their transmitter antennas are used right very near some important organs such as the brain, eyes and ears.
Though I bet in 10-20 years when we figure this out, the solution will probably be something as simple as making the antenna directional away from your head. It means you need a few more cells, but by then we'll more cells for capacity reasons anyway, so this will all be seen as a blip on the health radar like all the kids who had thyroid problems when we first started testing nukes. Because of them we even figured out how to reduce the natural cases of those same thyroid problems. So, assuming you use a cell phone or WiFi device, just consider yourself a Guinea pig who might very well benefit our children by participating in the discovery some new and unusual disease.
You are much more likely to be killed by someone plowing their car into yours than all the health risk combined. The average American is in something like 1.4 car accidents in their lifetime, or 1.6% accidents a year. About one in a hundred of those result in death. Except for eating (heart attacks) and smoking (lung problems), nothing even comes close to being able to shorten your life as efficiently. This is something to study, so we can reduce the number of deaths.
2. Don't be "TOO CLEAN."
Just a little appendum, always wash your hands after using the bathroom including between your fingers, and up to your elbows after no. 2. Also, do use the anti-bacterial soap when you ARE sick, it will work better if you didn't use it before you were sick.
It's not because not doing it is gross, nor is it for keeping you healthy, it is for the health of the people you interact with. Hand and bandage washing is what extended lifespan in the 19th and early 20th century. It has had an impact comparable to the discovery of anti-biotics in the mid-20th century.
Oh, a bit offtopic, wash your fruit and veggies with a mild solution of soap, the soap removes waxy anti-fungals and anti-insect poisons. The poisons won't kill you (well they shouldn't), but the fruits will taste better. The poisons have a bitter taste, most noticable on sweets such as apples and strawberries.
Imagine if the US had blown up a small ghost town or uninhabited island - maybe even right next to Japan and said "surrender now or this will happen to you."
This would have almost certainly avoided the cold war and saved millions more lives than the A-Bomb purportedly saved in WWII.
The cold war might have still happened just because we probably still wouldn't have shared the nuclear info after the USSR saved our asses in WWII. Which was stupid then as now, only lies and trivia can be hidden, physical truths like how to build a nuke are always discovered. Especially after you advertise their existance with the murder of tens of thousands of civilians.
I don't think I would agree with you that the non-violent means is always better, but do I wish our rulers at least considered the long term damage to America when they murder small children or commit other war crimes. But don't put too much blame on the A-Bomb, we were firebombing Tokyo before we had the A-Bomb.
I never noticed the whole doors-opening-inward thing front doors, until reading this article. And suddenly I thought to myself, hey, that's the way doors ARE, sure, but they should be the other way around. Consider: an outward-opening door is harder to kick down from the outside, and easier to get past in case of a fire. Doors SHOULD open that way.
Doors on the outside of a building on anything but a single family dwelling MUST open outward by law in almost every jurisdiction in the world. It's a fire safety thing, people panic and pileup on the doors so it can't be opened. The door is allowed to open inward as well, but it must open outward. You are also allowed to have an inward opening door, or a revolving door, as long as there is a outward opening door next to it. This outward opening door must not be locked so that it can't be opened freely and easilly from the inside, but it may be alarmed for emergency use only.
Older buildings are often grand-fathered in, so they don't need to bring the building up to code until they do some major renovation. But these things have been in the international model code for decades so you'll rarely see buildings that don't have the outward opening doors. Unfortunately, sometimes landlords add locks to the outward opening doors in between the infrequent fire inspections, or just bribe the fire inspector. Most deaths in apartment buildings, hotels and schools happen when these doors have been locked or chained shut to avoid the $200 per door cost of installing an alarm instead.
In any case, we've been building houses for thousands of years and still they collapse because someone decided to make a small change to what the engineer approved, and burn down because it is built out of, or with a large amount of, some cheap heating fuel, like wood or plastic(=oil).
There is more regulation, and expense, in the building trades. An architect or civil engineer must 'apprentice' with someone licensed for 2-3 years and then take a series of tests. They must each must sign off on a building before it gets sent to the government where another engineer signs off on it, and then while it is being built another outside engineer makes sure they are following the plans the city approved, and again after it is built but before it is occupied all of the minor materials changes made by the builder must be approved by the government, which can deny a certificate of occupancy if they find anything they don't like. If so the builder must either revert to the original plans or get some new set of changes approved to remedy the problem. Even if just the floor tiles are changed, before getting the certificate of occupancy, the city/state inspector can nix it. But even with all this regulation, simple things like windows often get "value engineered" out of the entire first floor of a building to save money. I can't imagine the usability guy would like that.
This is perhaps a nit-pick, but you don't use rabbit ears for over-the-air HDTV.
Digial broadcasts are on the UHS band. Rabbit ears are for VHS reception.
Is it ok to nit-pick the nitpicker? Rabbit ears are for VHS, and most HDTV is in the UHS bands, but there are VHS HDTV channels, for instance in New York City UPN is on ch 12...
BTW bow-ties are what you want for UHS, and hence most HDTV transmissions.
For my Mac-based HDTV PVR, I use a YAGI roof antenna.
You almost certainly have a "Log Periodic" antenna. Yagis are tuned to just one frequency, and in television are typically only used by cable operators who want a fix on just one channel, for rebroadcast on their systems.
The root of the problem is stupid web developers ignoring RFC 2616 and using the GET method to change state.
Seriously, using POSTs was something we all learned in 1994... Hopefully, this Google accelerator thingy will be popular enough to rid us of these creaky old broken sites.
They went to a University library and obtained help from a trained librarian. If the information was *really* obscure, then they would actually hire a trained librarian experienced in information retrieval.
I used to work at a public library in high school, it was amazing how well that system worked. If you would walked into our library, between about 10 am and 4 pm, you essentially had the whole staff at your disposal. You would ask someone for information about a subject and they would hand you off to the expert in that subject area who would then proceed to find a half dozen books on the subject while giving you a rundown of what the thesis of each book was and their opinion on the quality of each.
Unfortunately, I haven't seen a library work that well since. It seems that cutbacks have left the libraries bereft of librarians.
Athens died under the populism of such "direct democracy".
Actually, Athens had a strong and popular leader who convinced the Senate to go to war against the weak Spartans. But the Spartans were a closed society living on inhospitable terrain. They could not be routed and were able to disrupt the trade routes on which the open society of Athens depended for its strength. After a 70 year siege Athens fell. But then, after a few years of "Spartan Rule", the Spartans realized ruling Athens with a light touch gave better results and Athenean society continued to thrive under their rule.
To avoid the fate of Athens, today's legistlative bodies often require a super majority to go to war. Leaders continue to suffer from hubris and representatives are no less intoxicated by powerful men than the people at large.
For instance, in the USA the Senate is composed of representatives of the people of each state. They voted 99-1 for the war in Iraq. This is a much higher percentage of fools than in the population at large, and shows that representational government is a complete failure as compared to direct democracy. The ease with which representatives can be bribed or fooled with lies and half-truths as compared with direct democracies also testifies to the failure of the system.
The example of Athens as a direct democracy is also flawed. Only old men could serve in the Senate and they were expected to represent the interests of their family.
Easy to vote democrat when your money isn't effected by what the democrats do. Its when you have money that is affected by taxes that you start to question if they are worth it.
I don't know where you've been the last quarter century, but Republicans are the big spenders in American politics and the Democrats are the party of fiscal conservatism. It wasn't always this way, but under Nixon the Republicans captured the poor southern white vote and started slowly bleeding off the capitalists. Today the Dems have about 2/3 of the fiscal conservatives while about 1/3 remain with the Republicans out of a sense of duty, entrapment, or just because they are the party in power. They are a force in neither party, but it's pretty obvious the Christie Whitman's of the Republican party will fail. When the Democratic party recaptures power the Republicans will have the social conservatives and the Democratic party will have the fiscal conservatives.
Whether the social liberals and the fiscal conservatives might have problems getting along once they are back in the same party is an exercise left to the reader. When they were both in the GOP they never had problems before they had power, but once they did they often had so many problems that they lost the next election.
There *is* a legal transgression that is taking place daily and it is impacting the industry in an enormous way. The courts have sided almost exclusively with the consumer (thankfully we haven't started to lose that many civil rights yet), and the RIAA has only one course of action left open to it: lawsuits.
Look EMI sent my ISP a nastygram that resulted in my losing internet service for a week. I work from home so this was a real hardship. I had never heard of the bands listed, the IP address listed wasn't even being used at the time, and I've never downloaded a song at home*. Music just doesn't matter much to me.
*I downloaded a public domain performance of a public domain song from Napster when they first started at work just to show my boss how cool the technology was.
Now lets look at losses: about $1000 for me, about $300 in customer acquisition costs for the ISP I dumped for not informing me of the letter they got before cutting off service. For EMI, $1. They obviously just did some brain dead port scan and hired someone not capable of cut and paste to write the nastygram.
This is a case that never went past the nasty-gram stage, just immagine the legal transgressions they are committing on the scale of our economy... I will gladly join a class action against them when it comes. They are impacting the nation in an enormous way. There is only one course of action left open to freedom loving Americans: lawsuits.
As I understand it though, the RIAA has constructed a "repent" clause in to all of their suits which gives you a get-out-of-jail free card in return for a signed promise of non-recidivism.
The innocent are the most impacted by this type of "repent" clause, it reminds me of our broken criminal "justice" system. Punish the innocent, pardon the guilty. It's just not right.
And the collapse of the stock market had nothing to do with the depression. Right.
Right.
The stock market crashed because the economy crashed.
That's how this market thing works. You should learn something about capitalism, even if you don't believe in it. You do live in a capitalist world.
Why the economy collapsed is a much more complicated issue. Which I'll leave you to discover yourself.
But you should know the market didn't even hold back the recovery in the 1930's, it rebounded quite quickly in fact. But a much smaller portion of economy was heavily influenced by stock market conditions back then, and the dollar was still pegged to a conservative commodity so there was no way for the anyone to deflate the currency quickly except by increasing spending, which Hoover failed to do when it might have helped. Today we can lower interest rates, and only have to resort to borrowing and spending under dire conditions when the interest rates start approaching zero.
But it also has provisions which are designed to catch money launderers, and do a reasonably good job of it.
...your fantasy of America being the most intrusive government in the world, but you really should take a look sometime.
Only if they use the U.S. banking system to launder their money. I know a few rich people and they have absolutely no problem hiding their money overseas. I would assume terrorists could do the same with the same ease. If you think our borders can prevent someone from throwing a few diamonds into the luggage or shipping container you are sadly out of touch with reality.
I don't think this is a very good strawman you have constructed. Besides, you seem to be one of the few who wants to be compared with North Korea as a bastion of freedom. Even the Bush'n'Dick team seems to have higher ideals.
I still believe the entire cannon of U.S. Laws currently in effect should be read each year by each memeber of the House and each member of the Senate in a public square in their district and State, resp. It would both cut down on the number of laws, and dissuade the bastards from passing laws that would get them tarred and feathered.
"1862 A.D." instead of "1862 A.C.E."
Dude, both of those are wrong.
It should be written "A.D. 1862" or "1862 C.E.".
Jesus is believed to have been born sometime between 4 and 8 B.C. (Or, B.C.E.)
So it's not really centered on Jesus' birth, although that was the plan.
BTW the whole thing sucks since there is no year zero in either system.
Huh?
I *always* read Slashdot with Firefox and it always looks fine to me....
The problem only occurs when Gecko begins rendering the page before all of it has arrived. Perhaps you have a fast enough connection to slashdot that you always get the full page rather quickly? I've noticed the problem a lot more at home with DSL and a congested ISP than at work with OC-3's and low traffic links to the major POPs.
Web browsers don't prevent disease.
That is just not true. Web browsers help people learn, and knowledge is the most powerful weapon in the fight against poverty and disease there is.
Writing open source software might be 'charity' work, if you look at it that way, but it only helps the richest 10% of the world who might have access to a computer at the most.
Woah, you need to spend more time in third world countries. You would be amazed at how much time the poor spend on the internet. Internet cafes are on every street corner and are filled with teens and a few older folks spending 25 cents an hour to sit in plastic seats googling away on little. A good portion of their income, but it is well spent. Even if it just helps them learn English it will greatly enhance their earning potential.
Just the developers of FireFox have done more to save lives than Billy Boy. If he really had any interest in improving the world he would set up a fund to help open source programmers feed their families and maybe subsidise computer hardware and communications equipment.
In recent years I've concentrated all my civil liberties donations to the EFF. They seem to have their act together and not be infested by the professional charity clique that seem to only care about collecting money and using only a small percentage of the money for the charitable ends they supposedly collect it for.
I still get lots of snail mail spam from the ACLU though.
In a "paper trail" situation, the receipt is the ballot! The only purpose of the machine is to give the people who can't punch a hole properly a chance to have their vote count, and maybe you can plug all the machines in at the end and get a quick count, but in the end if something smells fishy, you pull those paper ballots out.
It's more than just improper hole punching. Traditional voter fraud has included many ways to tamper with these ballots. You can produce an overvote by punching out an extra hole, or even by printing the ballots so that the preferred candidates hole practically falls out on its own and the non-preferred candidates chad holds on for dear life. Paper ballots can have extra marks made on them to make them overvotes... Lots of things can go wrong. We called the local election office because they left a voting machine in our unguarded lobby for days before the election. The front of it was "sealed" with the same plain plastic twisty tie I use to secure wires, the back of the machine, the works, were not sealed.
The problem is we run our elections as if they were just for show, they remind me of 'airport security', a thought which frightens me. We need an electronic voting machine which prints a ballot, verified by the voter, deposited in a clear box which needs to be sledgehammered to open, which is then counted at the poll location.
This wouldn't make me feel completely safe, we still need open source voting software, and real procedures for verifying that the software works. There should be pictures of the candidates so the old trick of running five candidates with the same name as your opponent wouldn't work so well.
I did a search on my papers and was a able to view a PDF of them. It looks like they are getting versions posted on distance education websites. These papers are all licensed for free viewing for academic purposes. The only drawback seems to be that supplimentary materials like code and videos are not linked to.
Take Florida for example, According to end-of-day exit polls, 47.6% voted for Kerry, 51.4% for Bush. The actual numbers were Bush 52.1%, Kerry 47.1%. That seems to be pretty close to me, especially considering that the exit poll counted fewer than 3000 votes in FL.
Look closely at the fine print... Those exit polls are 'normalized' to match the 'actual' count. Assuming the official results are accurate this allows the pollster to reduce error on their other questions, like what percentage of voters voted for Bush based on 'values'. But it messes up the 'who voted for who' numbers.
Hopefully, the raw numbers will be published so real mathematicians can have a look at them.
I think the population of each county determines its height on the map, not its volume. If volume were actually proportional to population, the tallest spikes would be the most densely populated counties -- places like San Francisco and the Borough of Manhattan. Instead, the tallest spikes are simply the most populous counties, like Cook County IL and Los Angeles County.
Well then this might make some sense, New York Metro's 20 million is spread over many counties, none with more than 2 million. Maybe the height is directly proportional to the number of voters for the winning candiditate in that county minus the losing candidate.
I do think volume would make more sense, since this is a 3-D map...
I'm not entirely sure what the methodology is though. Maricopa County, AZ (the only one in Arizona with any real height to it on the map) has about 1/3 the population of Los Angeles County, but the height ratio on the map is a lot more than 3:1. Also San Bernardino County looks a lot flatter than it should be.
Maybe it has something to do with the margin of victory?
My statement would go into a pair of safe deposit boxes controlled by attorneys with secret instructions to open the contents and make them public if they don't hear from me in 180 days.
I'd have Diebold by the balls.
A disgruntled former employee claims
No one would listen, and the order would never be made in writing.
Now the CEO would have credibility, and would need to be passed a few thousand C-notes. This is just a matter of giving his company some contracts, and it is even legal for the federal government to give contracts to political supporters, so he can even channel some of that taxpayer money back into your pocket.
Who do tend to vote heavily democratic and are at the near bottom of the education ladder?
There are many ways to slice this and most do it where it favors their view. However the truth is that many people in those districts where Kerry or Bush got a majority had a very close number of people voting for the other guy. Even in 60/40 splits how can one declare which side the "smart" people voted for?
It's very simple really. It is not the education that makes you tend Republican or Democratic. Living in a city makes you tend Democratic, and living in a rural area makes you tend Republican. The smart and many poor tend to live in cities for different reasons. Both smart and poor people tend more Republican in rural areas.
White middle class males also tend Democratic in urban cities.
Now there may be some feedback going on too. Smart people vote for Democrats, so Democratic politicians might do some things smart people like, getting the Democrats more votes next time around from the smart people outside urban areas.
I personally think the whole feedback loop for both parties is gone now with non-voter verifiable electronic voting machines deployed in all the swing states. The whole idea that Bush won Ohio and Florida or even came close in Wisconsin is just laughable if you look at the exit polls.
New York City is split into several counties/boroughs, and on the map it looks like it was split up that way. There are several tall but narrow sections. Chicago and some surrounding area is shown as one huge Cook County spike.
Yes, but look at New York County, 23 sq. miles, with a population of about 2 million. This spike should be completely off the scale. Kings (Brooklyn, 71 sq.miles) and Queens (109 sq. miles) counties should be about a third and fourth as high, since they have a similar total population, but more area.