Then why are most speed limits posted below the 85% percentile? Government research determined that there is no correlation between speed limits and actual speed travelled.
Couple that with the fact the most municipalities get the much of their funding from... (wait for it)... traffic fines and you have your tinfoil hat issue---that just happens to be true.
Pick a city, any city. Check out NTSB stats on that city's traffic accident rates. Now check out that city's municipal revenue from the traffic courts. For bonus points, do a time series.
Many neighbors are so peeved with the popularity of the road that they didn't want a traffic signal at all at Montevino because it would allow traffic to flow better than the stop sign it replaced. At least the stop signs made speeding impossible and persuaded some commuters to steer clear, neighbors said.
As far as speeding tickets goes, it is a doucmented fact that traffic laws are not for safety but revenue generation. This bad boy will probably pay for itself in no time and continue to reap dividends for years to come.
Combine the "smart" light with the auto ticket-giving camera (don't need to pay for the copy to write tickets!) and city budget problems will be cured overnight. Oh, and when people get smart and start slowing down, just decrease the yellow-light time and watch your profits rise!
America: Best profit-making government money can buy.
You have no more right to shut off someone else's
phone for bothering you than you do duct tape someone who's
talking too loud at the mall.
I have the right to
control the decorum in my restaurant. If you are such the selfish
prick that you have to hold a banal conversation such as "What
are you doing?... uh-huh... nothing... yeah... just getting
dinner... okay talk to you later," at the expense of my other
customers, then you can go slag off.
Sorry, but you are not as
important as you make yourself out to be, and that "important
call" you're waiting for is 99% crap. If something is going on in
your life that is truly urgent, perhaps you need to be in a place
where you won't be a danger to others (e.g., off the road) or
inconsiderate to people who have better things to do than listen
to your stupid conversation (e.g., away from any public place
where talking loudly is not a norm).
In all interest of
fairness, I say let businesses who care about decorum and style
have placards or signs that say, "Cell Phone Blockers in Use" and
all the people like you can belly up to the trough at a
place more suited to your lifestyle, like McDonalds or Ryan's Family Steakhouse; with all the people screaming into their cell phones
about those "highly important" things, you'll be right at home.
~ but remember at the exit interview, the correct answer ~
The correct answer to any exit interview is to not go through it, or answer "no comment" to every question. The reasons are many:
Any suggestions you give will not help you; if they really cared about making the place better, they would've asked the employees before they quit
ANYTHING you say will be used against you in the event of legal proceedings. So if you later talk to a laywer and find out they terminated you illegally and you want to sue them, all of your remarks at the exit interview will be used by their lawyers to prove that you are full of it.
Bottom line: belly-ache to your SO, say nothing to your soon-to-be-former employer.
~ after you are fired without severance or unemployment benefits.
Maybe not where you are, but here in Texas you get unemployment if you are fired through no fault of your own. If you are anything but a trainer, I could see you making a case for being asked to do something that you are not qualified to do.
I personally think that web browsers should barf on pages that don't validate.
Well, that would eliminate many* sites. In fact, there'd probably be only two sites left on the whole i-net.
* No wonder it is blocked; they get failing remarks for their "master development" skillz:
File: Slashdot.htm Doctype: Encoding:
I was not able to extract a character encoding labeling from any of the valid sources for such information. Without encoding information it is impossible to validate the document. The sources I tried are:
Since none of these sources yielded any usable information, I will not be able to validate this document. Sorry. Please make sure you specify the character encoding in use.
I don't have enough fingers or toes to count the number of "small apps" that some wonk wrote to make life easier for a few folk (maybe an excel spreadsheet + macros) that ended up living long after their creator left the company. The people who use the app have no clue how to do the job manually, just how to run the macro ("Simply open whtzits.xls and click the "RUN" button"). Then something breaks or they need new functionality and it is YOUR job to wade though that crappy code rewrite it in a more suitable language/platform.
Oh, and there are several Fortune 100 companies who have their core business running on, or key business decisions based upon this crappy "software."
So you agree that many doctors should have to have
malpractice insurance that runs $50,000 - $100,000 a
year?
Wrong.
Despite the so-called "tort
reform," medical liability insurance premiums have
NOT decreased--in fact, they've gone up.
Why is
that? Because the entities pushing for the cap on damages was in
fact the insurance industry. Now they have the best of both
worlds: less chance of payout and more money by soaking the
doctors (with the costs passed on to you!).
The problem is not
runaway lawsuits, but the lack of competition in the insurance
industry. There are only a handful of providers (all operating
under various sub-owned entities so it seems like there are more),
so the prices are unnaturally high. Were there a true competitive
market, prices would go lower without the lawsuit cap.
My father died because a doctor misdiagnosed a problem with his heart. I have failed to see how my mother or I would should be allowed to sue for $X million because of that.
Suppose that your dad was was the sole provider and earned $250k/year. Now he's dead and you have 6 years left of school, then off to college. Well, you're going to sue for at least 6 years of Dad's wages ($1.5mm) to keep you in the same lifestyle/opportunity (this will probably be reduced). Obviously, you're going to sue for the cost of the botched procedure (most likely get the few thousand, no reductions). Finally, you'll sue for punitive damages; and this is the one that will be "tsked" on/. because some punk guy got 5 million because of his dad dying, when the facts of the case were that the doctor was incompetent and the hospital knew he was---but let him stay on, anyway.
"The `Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation Act of 2004' (aka the PIRATE Act) is designed to criminalize P2P filesharing by lowering the burden of proof for law enforcement and proposing jail terms of up to 10 years."
approach to fighting copyright violation. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws based upon your lack of understanding how the internet works.)
(x) People outside the reach of US law can easily continue to swap copyrighted works ( ) Networking and other legitimate p2p uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or slam him in the clink (x) It is defenseless against encryption/sourcehiding ( ) It will stop p2p sharing for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of p2p networks will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from ISPs ( ) Assumes that no Freenet-style p2p networks will be developed ( ) Many p2p filesharers are children; when you bust them they will be paraded on TeeVee as an example of government excess ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for the internet ( ) Open p2p networks in foreign countries ( ) Ease of developing circumventive technology ( ) Asshats (x) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new laws ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all monitoring approaches ( ) Extreme availability of copyrighted files online ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (x) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme intelligence of people who will fight you ( ) Kazaa
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on filename matching is unacceptable (x) Network protocols should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Witchhunts suck (x) We should be able to trade indi songs (that they themselves post to p2p) without being busted ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sharing any non-copyrighted files should be allowed ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatibility with open source or open source licenses (x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Roving bands of vigilantes tend to attack more innocent people than those who are committing crimes ( ) I don't want the government monitoring my net access (x) Supporting a failed business model via the legal system is not sustainable over the long term (see SCO)
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
~ any band should be able to just go ahead and use Frank Zappa's image and name in their own commercial work, without any oversight whatsoever?
Uh, yeah, seeing as he stopped benefiting from his image and/or name on December 4, 1993, why shouldn't his name and work pass to the public domain? He is not gaining further financial benefit; the dead can't own property.
Wait, wait! I propose that dead people get perpetual license to restrict use of their ideas. Do you know how liberating that will be?! That means that virtually ALL COMEDY (which traces its lineage to Menander) will become illegal. No more vacuous shows like Family Guy, King of Queens, Friends, Will & Grace, etc. Oh ye gods, one can only hope...
He can't; he already bought the license, and it is "non-refundable." That's like downloading Britney's "Toxic" from iTunes, then coming to your senses and trying to get your money back.
Boycott IE, and boycott sites that only work in IE ~.
You're advocating boycotting the POS browser that at least 95% of people use. While a noble cause, IE is here to stay, warts, bugs 'n all. The best you can probably do it get your friends/family converted (no more popups!), but corp America won't go for it, and neither will Grandmaw who can't install jack shit (except for gator and hotbar, of course).
If only FireFox would take a page from these slimebags and make it as easy to install the better browser as it is to install Hotbar. We could get way more people converted that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Couple that with the fact the most municipalities get the much of their funding from... (wait for it) ... traffic fines and you have your tinfoil hat issue---that just happens to be true.
Pick a city, any city. Check out NTSB stats on that city's traffic accident rates. Now check out that city's municipal revenue from the traffic courts. For bonus points, do a time series.
Correlate, interpret, conclude.
As far as speeding tickets goes, it is a doucmented fact that traffic laws are not for safety but revenue generation. This bad boy will probably pay for itself in no time and continue to reap dividends for years to come.
Combine the "smart" light with the auto ticket-giving camera (don't need to pay for the copy to write tickets!) and city budget problems will be cured overnight. Oh, and when people get smart and start slowing down, just decrease the yellow-light time and watch your profits rise!
America: Best profit-making government money can buy.
By your standing by and doing nothing other than bellyaching (do you even know who your reps/MPs are?), you are ruining it for everybody.
(Warning: if you're a girly-man, don't click!!) Some of the best ones are
Courtesy of Mickey
Google payola .
Sorry, but you are not as important as you make yourself out to be, and that "important call" you're waiting for is 99% crap. If something is going on in your life that is truly urgent, perhaps you need to be in a place where you won't be a danger to others (e.g., off the road) or inconsiderate to people who have better things to do than listen to your stupid conversation (e.g., away from any public place where talking loudly is not a norm).
In all interest of fairness, I say let businesses who care about decorum and style have placards or signs that say, "Cell Phone Blockers in Use" and all the people like you can belly up to the trough at a place more suited to your lifestyle, like McDonalds or Ryan's Family Steakhouse; with all the people screaming into their cell phones about those "highly important" things, you'll be right at home.
- Any suggestions you give will not help you; if they really cared about making the place better, they would've asked the employees before they quit
- ANYTHING you say will be used against you in the event of legal proceedings. So if you later talk to a laywer and find out they terminated you illegally and you want to sue them, all of your remarks at the exit interview will be used by their lawyers to prove that you are full of it.
Bottom line: belly-ache to your SO, say nothing to your soon-to-be-former employer.* No wonder it is blocked; they get failing remarks for their "master development" skillz:
File: Slashdot.htm
Doctype:
Encoding:
I was not able to extract a character encoding labeling from any of the valid sources for such information. Without encoding information it is impossible to validate the document. The sources I tried are:
And I even tried to autodetect it using the algorithm defined in Appendix F of the XML 1.0 Recommendation.
Since none of these sources yielded any usable information, I will not be able to validate this document. Sorry. Please make sure you specify the character encoding in use.
IANA maintains the list of official names for character sets.
...if you live in Missouri (microscope not included).
But, hey - he's using .NET, 'cause it is a mature, feature-complete language, right?
I don't have enough fingers or toes to count the number of "small apps" that some wonk wrote to make life easier for a few folk (maybe an excel spreadsheet + macros) that ended up living long after their creator left the company. The people who use the app have no clue how to do the job manually, just how to run the macro ("Simply open whtzits.xls and click the "RUN" button"). Then something breaks or they need new functionality and it is YOUR job to wade though that crappy code rewrite it in a more suitable language/platform.
Oh, and there are several Fortune 100 companies who have their core business running on, or key business decisions based upon this crappy "software."
Despite the so-called "tort reform," medical liability insurance premiums have NOT decreased--in fact, they've gone up.
Why is that? Because the entities pushing for the cap on damages was in fact the insurance industry. Now they have the best of both worlds: less chance of payout and more money by soaking the doctors (with the costs passed on to you!).
The problem is not runaway lawsuits, but the lack of competition in the insurance industry. There are only a handful of providers (all operating under various sub-owned entities so it seems like there are more), so the prices are unnaturally high. Were there a true competitive market, prices would go lower without the lawsuit cap.
Suppose that your dad was was the sole provider and earned $250k/year. Now he's dead and you have 6 years left of school, then off to college. Well, you're going to sue for at least 6 years of Dad's wages ($1.5mm) to keep you in the same lifestyle/opportunity (this will probably be reduced). Obviously, you're going to sue for the cost of the botched procedure (most likely get the few thousand, no reductions). Finally, you'll sue for punitive damages; and this is the one that will be "tsked" on /. because some punk guy got 5 million because of his dad dying, when the facts of the case were that the doctor was incompetent and the hospital knew he was---but let him stay on, anyway.
Wait, wait! I propose that dead people get perpetual license to restrict use of their ideas. Do you know how liberating that will be?! That means that virtually ALL COMEDY (which traces its lineage to Menander) will become illegal. No more vacuous shows like Family Guy, King of Queens, Friends, Will & Grace, etc. Oh ye gods, one can only hope...
If only FireFox would take a page from these slimebags and make it as easy to install the better browser as it is to install Hotbar. We could get way more people converted that way.