Sure. But they don't have oncoming traffic, intersections, kids crossing the street etc.
Having driven cars and bikes at their limits of adhesion, I can assure you that the concentration needed to handle intersections and pedestrians in a neighborhood street at 25-30mph is nothing by comparison.
And I also doubt you have anywhere near the reflexes of a race driver.
I turn a pretty quick lap, so don't be too sure. Besides, most race drivers don't have incredible reflexes. They have coordination and learned skills. The difference between their driving and yours probably has less to do with how quickly they react and more to do with how they react. That's why many race drivers remain competitive into their 40's -- and beyond.
But he did lie about it under oath, and last time I read the law, lying about anything under oath, even if it was what you had for breakfast yesterday morning, is a felony.
But I don't care! He lied when asked a question he should never have been asked during an investigation that should never have been conducted. If he had lied about anything related to his responsibilities as President, then I'd be concerned, but lying about a blowjob? C'mon.
Dubya, on the other hand, did insider trading and hurt other investors. That's also a felony last time I checked.
that did indeed conclude that conversations between the driver and passengers dramatically increased the risk of a fatal accident for newly-licensed drivers.
There seems to be a line of thought that has cropped up in the last few decades that goes something like this: If someone dies, a law must be passed making illegal whatever directly, or indirectly, lead to their death. The people espousing that line of reasoning seem to believe that once we have enough laws, there will be no more deaths. People will become immortal.
Kids can't ride their bicycles without helmets any more. Lawn darts have been banned. Infants must be tucked away in approved child seats in the back seat of the car. All cars are required to have airbags. We've lowered the blood alcohol level for DUI/DWI multiple times while raising the drinking age.
I have sad news for these people: You cannot legislate death out of existence. People are going to die and some of them will die because of accidents rather than old age. Even if cell phones are banned, there will be traffic accidents just as there were before cell phones existed.
It's amazing how many people don't realize that stocks go up, stocks go down, especially small companies.
And stocks tank after a company announces that it has lost a huge sum of money. Bush, an insider in the company, sold right before such an announcement and the stock tanked. That it later recovered is irrelevent.
The same group of right-wing nut-cases that get so morally indignant because Clinton lied about a blowjob think it's fine for Bush to violate securities laws and engage in insider trading. You probably thought the Whitewater investigation into a 20 year old land deal in which the Clintons lost money was $50million well spent, but you all want us to look the other way when Bush violates securities laws. As you said, "it's amazing."
_Everyone_ thinks they're an above average driver.
Half of them aren't.
I've been riding motorcycles on the streets in one of the most congested areas in the country for more than 20 years. I'm not dead or crippled, so I am above average.
One-size-fits-all is the only way to be fair and enforcible.
Police spend way too much time enforcing arbitrary and capricious laws rather than protecting public safety. The majority of tickets written are for speeding on superhighways where speeding has little to do with accidents. What we need is fewer laws about what one can and cannot do in a car and more cops patrolling the roads ticketing people who drive recklessly.
But if you still demand more laws, I'll be happy to give up my ability to use a cell phone in my car when the legislature:
1. Makes it illegal to use rear-view mirrors for looking at children in the back seat.
2. Makes it illegal to do personal grooming while driving.
3. Requires one adult for every child in a vehicle (except buses driven by professional drivers).
4. Makes it illegal to eat while driving.
5. Limits the sound level of in-car radios to a such that it does not interfere with the driver's ability to hear.
6. Makes it illegal to drive with the seat reclined to the lay-down position.
7. Makes it illegal to change CDs while driving.
and so forth.
The reality of it is that there are a million and seven distractions that any given driver can give himself. A good driver minimizes his distractions when in complex traffic patterns, reserving things like cell phones for uncrowded roads or highways.
Your racecar analogy is bogus for reasons that any reasonably intelligent person can see. However, since we're posting on Slashnerd I'll elaborate. A racecar driver has certain commands and phrases that he says to his pit crew that he has said hundreds of times before.
And I've also listened to them explain, in detail, handling eccentricities of the car, problems that they sense with the engine, etc. So please don't pretend that the only thing ever said on those in-car radios are pre-arranged code words.
Clearly arguing with your girlfriend is more demanding on the brain than "I need gas."
And it's even more demanding when she is right there beside me and I have not only verbal processing but also the natural human tendency to look at her while arguing.
I'm sorry, you comparison is wrong. Talking (on the phone, with a passanger) while driving does affect your ability to control the car.
So does eating, listening to the radio, talking with passengers, yelling at kids in the back, looking at them in the mirror, etc. I've decided that the minimal additional risk to you and every other driver on the road when I talk on my cell phone is worth it. And that's my decision to make in most jurisdictions. Sorry if that upsets you, but driving is inherently risky and with the absurdly low speed limits on our roads, combined with bumper-to-bumper traffic, there's a greater risk that the boredom will drive me to have an accident than will talking on a cell phone.
So he filed a bunch of forms late. Big whoop-de-doo.
You missed the key point. G.W. Bush filed the forms late so as to hide the fact that he was engaging in insider trading:
The tardiest --34 weeks late--was his Form 4 report disclosing that he had sold $848,560 of Harken stock on June 22, 1990, just weeks before the company filed a quarterly report revealing that it had hemorrhaged $23 million during that period. Bush had sold his stock for $4 a share. By the end of the year it was trading not much above $1.
Stepping out of the terrorism context, what about the recent wave of corporate fraud investigations? Are all those guys poor?
Are they in jail? We live in a country where kids with no prior record are being jailed for years at a time for having, not selling, drugs at rock concerts. A car thief can expect to spend years in jail, but George W. Bush violated securities laws multiple times and he's in the White House.
Some people can talk on a mobile phone and drive safely at the same time while others can't walk and chew gum at the same time. Pay attention to the drivers around you and you'll find plenty that have trouble even remaining in their lanes while concentrating as hard as possible on the task of driving.
One-size-fits-all laws rarely make sense. Banning all cell phone usage while driving is a gross overreaction to a minority of drivers with limited skills.
A BMW grille badge on a Plexiglass computer case? What's next -- lower the chair, add a "Type R" badge, a turbo boost gauge, and bolt on a big-assed wing on the back?
All this work with a $75 CPU, no CD burner, and integrated video that's two generations out of date? He'd have been a lot better off spending the time earning a paycheck to buy a decent laptop. Then he'd have something that could run off of batteries, burn CDs, play DVDs, and was fully portable.
After further research, it appears that Sun will only be offering Solaris x86 as an option on their own line of x86 hardware. Thus, many of my concerns voiced in the previous post are moot.
Just shows that I should have gone to The Register rather than trusting a half-assed Slashdot rumor.
As a Solaris x86 user, I'm happy that Sun is releasing Solaris 9 for x86, but I continue to be puzzled as to why they are doing so. It makes no business sense to me. A modern x86 running Solaris 9 will spank a Sun Blade 100, so providing an x86 version of Solaris seems likely to hurt sales of lower-end Sun workstations. A decent x86 box is blindingly fast, in fact, and I would not be surprised to see them even hurt sales of low-end UltraSPARC servers. From a business standpoint, I think that Sun should have stuck to their guns and told the world "if you want to run Solaris, you will have to buy a Sun computer."
For the Linux crowd, the Solaris OS has a level of stability, maturity, and unified feel that Linux simply lacks. It's a one-company vision of how a Unix OS should work and, while I don't always agree with them, the consistency is refreshing. No, this isn't flamebait or a troll. I have removable drives with Mandrake 8.2 and Solaris 8 and I'm not bashing Linux, but I'd sooner choose Solaris for a mission-critical application.
Microsoft has no choice but to continually enhance their product, competition or no, or else people will no longer buy upgrades every few years.
The majority of Microsoft's sales are through sales of new computers through companies like Dell. After releasing XP, Microsoft stopped selling Windows 98. So companies that need a consistent platform have no choice but to upgrade to whatever Microsoft is selling as current.
If the license that came with a new PC authorized the user to run the installed XP Pro or any previous Windows OS, there would be a lot fewer sales of XP upgrades.
Hey, I posted the comment and I'm showing up for work in jeans, polo and Birkenstocks *without* socks. But I'm under no illusion that my next job is very likely to be that lenient on dress code.
I have to say that I refuse to wear a suit to work.
I'm with you 100%. When I say that someone dresses like a professional, I don't mean suit and tie. In most places, that means something more like slacks, a button-up shirt, and leather shoes. What so many of the dot-coms had was an atmosphere where shorts, ratty T-shirts, and sandles were the norm and that simply isn't going to cut it anymore.
That was a +5 insightful/funny comment if I ever read one!
For you folks that haven't looked lately, the job market for computer professionals is in the toilet. Restored arcade video games, all the free soda you want, bringing your pets to work, dressing like a you're at a Grateful Dead concert, and running around the office like a kid with ADD who forgot their Ritalin is out. Companies can hire professionals that look, dress, and behave the part. If you refuse to work somewhere unless they have a shiatsu massage chair, then apply at Brookstone because you're not going to find a tech job that does anymore.
I got a +5 underrated/insightful/interesting for saying "read the article"? I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but I didn't really provide anything that 10 seconds of scanning the article would not. Have we all really gotten that lazy?
Take a look at the web page. This is not a PDA. It's a subnotebook with an 800x600 color display and the ability to run Windows 2000, XP, or Linux. If this was just another PDA, I'd agree with you, but the possibilities for this are quite a bit more broad than that.
Why would you be "pissed" at TiVo for allowing you to opt-in to the data collection? No one is taking data without your permission, assuming that the data is theirs to take, etc.
The US government is currently (a) the most expensive government in the world, and (b) the one that has the highest ratio of inmates/population. I seriously doubt this is a conincidence.
You are probably right. In Afghanistan under the Taliban, for instance, people accused of stealing simply had their hands cut off. No jail time was served. In a rural area of Mexico, someone accused of murder was buried alive with his victim -- without even a trial. Ah, the joys of having a small, underfunded government.
I'm in complete agreement. The issue is what to do about anonymous spammers. It's not worth spending $150 and an afternoon at the courthouse trying to get a subpeona compelling ISP X to tell me who was using IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx on 5/3/2002 at 4:04 GMT. That's why I think that the ISP should be required to provide the information when they get proof that their customer was spamming.
Slashdot Mirror
because you fucktards can't even be self-reliant and make your own damn fonts
So, why don't you tell us what fonts you have made?
Sure. But they don't have oncoming traffic, intersections, kids crossing the street etc.
Having driven cars and bikes at their limits of adhesion, I can assure you that the concentration needed to handle intersections and pedestrians in a neighborhood street at 25-30mph is nothing by comparison.
And I also doubt you have anywhere near the reflexes of a race driver.
I turn a pretty quick lap, so don't be too sure. Besides, most race drivers don't have incredible reflexes. They have coordination and learned skills. The difference between their driving and yours probably has less to do with how quickly they react and more to do with how they react. That's why many race drivers remain competitive into their 40's -- and beyond.
But he did lie about it under oath, and last time I read the law, lying about anything under oath, even if it was what you had for breakfast yesterday morning, is a felony.
But I don't care! He lied when asked a question he should never have been asked during an investigation that should never have been conducted. If he had lied about anything related to his responsibilities as President, then I'd be concerned, but lying about a blowjob? C'mon.
Dubya, on the other hand, did insider trading and hurt other investors. That's also a felony last time I checked.
that did indeed conclude that conversations between the driver and passengers dramatically increased the risk of a fatal accident for newly-licensed drivers.
There seems to be a line of thought that has cropped up in the last few decades that goes something like this: If someone dies, a law must be passed making illegal whatever directly, or indirectly, lead to their death. The people espousing that line of reasoning seem to believe that once we have enough laws, there will be no more deaths. People will become immortal.
Kids can't ride their bicycles without helmets any more. Lawn darts have been banned. Infants must be tucked away in approved child seats in the back seat of the car. All cars are required to have airbags. We've lowered the blood alcohol level for DUI/DWI multiple times while raising the drinking age.
I have sad news for these people: You cannot legislate death out of existence. People are going to die and some of them will die because of accidents rather than old age. Even if cell phones are banned, there will be traffic accidents just as there were before cell phones existed.
I know: -1 offtopic.
It's amazing how many people don't realize that stocks go up, stocks go down, especially small companies.
And stocks tank after a company announces that it has lost a huge sum of money. Bush, an insider in the company, sold right before such an announcement and the stock tanked. That it later recovered is irrelevent.
The same group of right-wing nut-cases that get so morally indignant because Clinton lied about a blowjob think it's fine for Bush to violate securities laws and engage in insider trading. You probably thought the Whitewater investigation into a 20 year old land deal in which the Clintons lost money was $50million well spent, but you all want us to look the other way when Bush violates securities laws. As you said, "it's amazing."
_Everyone_ thinks they're an above average driver.
Half of them aren't.
I've been riding motorcycles on the streets in one of the most congested areas in the country for more than 20 years. I'm not dead or crippled, so I am above average.
One-size-fits-all is the only way to be fair and enforcible.
Police spend way too much time enforcing arbitrary and capricious laws rather than protecting public safety. The majority of tickets written are for speeding on superhighways where speeding has little to do with accidents. What we need is fewer laws about what one can and cannot do in a car and more cops patrolling the roads ticketing people who drive recklessly.
But if you still demand more laws, I'll be happy to give up my ability to use a cell phone in my car when the legislature:
1. Makes it illegal to use rear-view mirrors for looking at children in the back seat.
2. Makes it illegal to do personal grooming while driving.
3. Requires one adult for every child in a vehicle (except buses driven by professional drivers).
4. Makes it illegal to eat while driving.
5. Limits the sound level of in-car radios to a such that it does not interfere with the driver's ability to hear.
6. Makes it illegal to drive with the seat reclined to the lay-down position.
7. Makes it illegal to change CDs while driving.
and so forth.
The reality of it is that there are a million and seven distractions that any given driver can give himself. A good driver minimizes his distractions when in complex traffic patterns, reserving things like cell phones for uncrowded roads or highways.
Your racecar analogy is bogus for reasons that any reasonably intelligent person can see. However, since we're posting on Slashnerd I'll elaborate. A racecar driver has certain commands and phrases that he says to his pit crew that he has said hundreds of times before.
And I've also listened to them explain, in detail, handling eccentricities of the car, problems that they sense with the engine, etc. So please don't pretend that the only thing ever said on those in-car radios are pre-arranged code words.
Clearly arguing with your girlfriend is more demanding on the brain than "I need gas."
And it's even more demanding when she is right there beside me and I have not only verbal processing but also the natural human tendency to look at her while arguing.
I'm sorry, you comparison is wrong. Talking (on the phone, with a passanger) while driving does affect your ability to control the car.
So does eating, listening to the radio, talking with passengers, yelling at kids in the back, looking at them in the mirror, etc. I've decided that the minimal additional risk to you and every other driver on the road when I talk on my cell phone is worth it. And that's my decision to make in most jurisdictions. Sorry if that upsets you, but driving is inherently risky and with the absurdly low speed limits on our roads, combined with bumper-to-bumper traffic, there's a greater risk that the boredom will drive me to have an accident than will talking on a cell phone.
But officer, I can handle my liquor!
Absurd comparison. Alcohol measurably impairs coordination and reasoning. Cell phones do not. There is no one who is unimpaired while drunk.
Race drivers regularly use in-car radio systems and if they can do that at 150mph+, then there is nothing inherently dangerous about a cell phone.
So he filed a bunch of forms late. Big whoop-de-doo.
You missed the key point. G.W. Bush filed the forms late so as to hide the fact that he was engaging in insider trading:
The tardiest --34 weeks late--was his Form 4 report disclosing that he had sold $848,560 of Harken stock on June 22, 1990, just weeks before the company filed a quarterly report revealing that it had hemorrhaged $23 million during that period. Bush had sold his stock for $4 a share. By the end of the year it was trading not much above $1.
Stepping out of the terrorism context, what about the recent wave of corporate fraud investigations? Are all those guys poor?
Are they in jail? We live in a country where kids with no prior record are being jailed for years at a time for having, not selling, drugs at rock concerts. A car thief can expect to spend years in jail, but George W. Bush violated securities laws multiple times and he's in the White House.
Some people can talk on a mobile phone and drive safely at the same time while others can't walk and chew gum at the same time. Pay attention to the drivers around you and you'll find plenty that have trouble even remaining in their lanes while concentrating as hard as possible on the task of driving.
One-size-fits-all laws rarely make sense. Banning all cell phone usage while driving is a gross overreaction to a minority of drivers with limited skills.
This is so lame, I don't know where to begin...
A BMW grille badge on a Plexiglass computer case? What's next -- lower the chair, add a "Type R" badge, a turbo boost gauge, and bolt on a big-assed wing on the back?
All this work with a $75 CPU, no CD burner, and integrated video that's two generations out of date? He'd have been a lot better off spending the time earning a paycheck to buy a decent laptop. Then he'd have something that could run off of batteries, burn CDs, play DVDs, and was fully portable.
After further research, it appears that Sun will only be offering Solaris x86 as an option on their own line of x86 hardware. Thus, many of my concerns voiced in the previous post are moot.
Just shows that I should have gone to The Register rather than trusting a half-assed Slashdot rumor.
As a Solaris x86 user, I'm happy that Sun is releasing Solaris 9 for x86, but I continue to be puzzled as to why they are doing so. It makes no business sense to me. A modern x86 running Solaris 9 will spank a Sun Blade 100, so providing an x86 version of Solaris seems likely to hurt sales of lower-end Sun workstations. A decent x86 box is blindingly fast, in fact, and I would not be surprised to see them even hurt sales of low-end UltraSPARC servers. From a business standpoint, I think that Sun should have stuck to their guns and told the world "if you want to run Solaris, you will have to buy a Sun computer."
For the Linux crowd, the Solaris OS has a level of stability, maturity, and unified feel that Linux simply lacks. It's a one-company vision of how a Unix OS should work and, while I don't always agree with them, the consistency is refreshing. No, this isn't flamebait or a troll. I have removable drives with Mandrake 8.2 and Solaris 8 and I'm not bashing Linux, but I'd sooner choose Solaris for a mission-critical application.
Microsoft has no choice but to continually enhance their product, competition or no, or else people will no longer buy upgrades every few years.
The majority of Microsoft's sales are through sales of new computers through companies like Dell. After releasing XP, Microsoft stopped selling Windows 98. So companies that need a consistent platform have no choice but to upgrade to whatever Microsoft is selling as current.
If the license that came with a new PC authorized the user to run the installed XP Pro or any previous Windows OS, there would be a lot fewer sales of XP upgrades.
Hey, I posted the comment and I'm showing up for work in jeans, polo and Birkenstocks *without* socks. But I'm under no illusion that my next job is very likely to be that lenient on dress code.
I have to say that I refuse to wear a suit to work.
I'm with you 100%. When I say that someone dresses like a professional, I don't mean suit and tie. In most places, that means something more like slacks, a button-up shirt, and leather shoes. What so many of the dot-coms had was an atmosphere where shorts, ratty T-shirts, and sandles were the norm and that simply isn't going to cut it anymore.
That was a +5 insightful/funny comment if I ever read one!
For you folks that haven't looked lately, the job market for computer professionals is in the toilet. Restored arcade video games, all the free soda you want, bringing your pets to work, dressing like a you're at a Grateful Dead concert, and running around the office like a kid with ADD who forgot their Ritalin is out. Companies can hire professionals that look, dress, and behave the part. If you refuse to work somewhere unless they have a shiatsu massage chair, then apply at Brookstone because you're not going to find a tech job that does anymore.
The BURP gun just looks like a glorified penis pump.
I wouldn't know...
I got a +5 underrated/insightful/interesting for saying "read the article"? I don't mean to sound ungrateful, but I didn't really provide anything that 10 seconds of scanning the article would not. Have we all really gotten that lazy?
Take a look at the web page. This is not a PDA. It's a subnotebook with an 800x600 color display and the ability to run Windows 2000, XP, or Linux. If this was just another PDA, I'd agree with you, but the possibilities for this are quite a bit more broad than that.
Glad I don't have a tivo, i'd be pissed!
Why would you be "pissed" at TiVo for allowing you to opt-in to the data collection? No one is taking data without your permission, assuming that the data is theirs to take, etc.
The US government is currently (a) the most expensive government in the world, and (b) the one that has the highest ratio of inmates/population. I seriously doubt this is a conincidence.
You are probably right. In Afghanistan under the Taliban, for instance, people accused of stealing simply had their hands cut off. No jail time was served. In a rural area of Mexico, someone accused of murder was buried alive with his victim -- without even a trial. Ah, the joys of having a small, underfunded government.
I'd rather just make spam illegal.
I'm in complete agreement. The issue is what to do about anonymous spammers. It's not worth spending $150 and an afternoon at the courthouse trying to get a subpeona compelling ISP X to tell me who was using IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx on 5/3/2002 at 4:04 GMT. That's why I think that the ISP should be required to provide the information when they get proof that their customer was spamming.