I am all for drivers being polite, but they should not confuse other drivers with breaking right-of-way rules. A lot of people seem to not understand 4 way stop rules as it is, without people throwing a wrench I the whole process.
Not only is it inconvenient, but it's also a hazard and a liability risk. Other drivers who aren't necessarily in a position see the exchange of body language and waves yielding right of way when none was present are expecting events to happen in a certain way and get confused if they don't. And if, for example, a pedestrian in a crosswalk waves at you to go when they had right of way but then has second thoughts and jumps out in front of you, guess who's at fault when the police investigate.
Make an arrangements with a car deal to give away cars to people you think deserve it as you encounter them.
Pay the check for an entire restaurant full of people when you leave.
Watch for local foreclosures and intercede on the behalf of those you think are getting a raw deal.
Fund a promising local business for two years.
Set up a charity on the quiet to fly bums to Hawaii (or any other island they'll be unlikely to be able to migrate away from on their own) in twos and threes and see how long until someone notices (if you can keep it up unnoticed for a year it'll be a serious problem by that point).
Anonymously mail small suitcases full of cash to random local politicians to see what happens. (optional: anonymously tip off the media amount said suitcase)
Buy a few hundred drones and then every few weeks send one on a few mile flight to land on the same persons doorstep at 2am (taking a different route and launched from a different place each time). See how long you can keep it up before they either flip out and/or start a side business selling gently used drones.
That would actually be kind of fun. Buy a decent sized bit of farmland, get some high speed internet out to it, hire help as needed in the interim and work on making the place automated and high tech yet as self-sufficient and sustainable as possible.
Also depends on size of family, definition of "nice vacation", and what "some nice things" constitutes. Do you throw everyone in the car and drive 60 miles away to a cabin in the woods for a week, or do you put everyone on a cruise to the Bahamas? You could probably do the cabin trip for less than 1k no matter family size, but flying somewhere adds up quick as you add people. "nice things" could mean that you insist on a brand new BMW every 4-5 years, or that you're fine letting some other guy pay the depreciation and instead going for the low mileage old used cars of whichever make and model has the best reviews and highest reliability.
Doing roughly equivalent things but changing how frugal you are about said things can easily account for 10-20k in a year. There are a lot of small things where the time investment no longer is worth the cost or the aggravation (clipping coupons and buying those weird off-brand poptarts that taste kind of funny, for example). There are also a lot of big things that are easier to justify spending money on when you have money (For example, keeping your gaming PC more current than you used to while making less). Also keep in mind that taxes eat quite a bit more at 100k than they do at 35k.
Without knowing the test setup for a double blind test it's impossible to say how well they isolated the sound (if any) from people (though I'd suspect they did a good job since the idea was not being able to tell if it's running or not). I'd be really curious to see a study on how people who claim EM sensitivity respond to a dummy light on a fake transmitter vs dummy light plus low intensity ~22khz tone.
Mostly what I was referring to was anecdotal evidence from other slashdot users (who weren't kooks claiming to be allergic to wifi) saying that they could reliably tell when a wireless router was plugged in or not by the whine of the AC adapter (the one I use to charge my phone actually developed a barely audible high pitched whine when not under load, it took me a week to figure out that's what was waking me up at night once my phone had completed charging). It's not a big step to imagine someone who's actually psychosomatic and convinced it's the wifi to start showing symptoms whenever they hear a transformer.
What makes it even trickier is that in many cases it very well could be that they're responding to something related to a transmission device being turned on (e.g. the high pitched whine of a switching power supply is audible to them and gives them a headache).
The real question is, Would our troops accept the government telling them to mount an offensive against the populace?
Probably not, but the key here is that we're talking about an offensive. Dragging a few key actors out of a peaceful protest is a completely different thing from dragging those same people out of an armed (but still currently peaceful) protest.
you still couldn't draw enough power from the grid to get enough energy to saturate the battery in that time.
That problem has long since been solved in other applications, generally in the form of inertial energy storage. You spin up a flywheel with a big electric motor (or sometimes the motor itself is heavy enough that it's basically its own flywheel) with whatever constant load the grid will support. Energy is pulled back out using a generator (either attached to the flywheel via mechanical clutch, or by electrically reversing the leads on the motor).
The poll workers look at faces. You do that twice, one hour before closing and see how it goes. It doesn't work, and nobody does it.
Do you even read, I said "different polling place". Also, the poll workers here literally leave the clipboards on the tables for you to pick a name off of. I wouldn't even need to do the play dumb thing.
Next time you go to vote, do this. Then rinse and repeat, ten times within the hour, and see if it works.
No thanks, I'm not going to commit voter fraud to prove a point to you, plus you'd say I was making it up anyway. What I was suggesting you try is to simply get them to show you the list of names to pick out your own, as much of your argument seems to hinge on poll workers keeping those names secret.
My bet is that it wouldn't work; you'd be recognized and fail at making much of a difference at all.
Why would people at different polling places recognize me? Also, you don't even need to vote multiple times to make it work as voter fraud. Just teach some non-english speaking non-citizens to point at a name on a list (I guarantee a poll worker will show it to them to point at a name if they can't understand what's being said. What else can they do? Someone like you might accuse them of disfranchising a minority voter if they don't let them vote) and you've got a small army of people who will vote your way.
You must have an easy to understand and/or spell name then. afaik the poll workers aren't instructed to not show you the clipboard, and even if they are, the reasons why not probably aren't explained to them. Next time you go to vote, try a bit of social engineering and see if you can get them to show you the clipboard. I'd recommend mumbling and/or mispronouncing your name until they get frustrated and tilt the clipboard so you can find your name and point at it.
And when you walk into the polling place in NC, do they show you a list of names with the ones who have voted already crossed out, and ask you which one you are? If I wanted to vote multiple times, all I'd have to do is walk into a polling place maybe an hour before closing (to minimize chances of picking a name that actually does show up) and pick any number of registered names who haven't shown up yet. One could probably hit up about 10 in an hour or so before closing.
There are plenty of places that sell DRM free ebooks. Also, what part about using your phone to read ebooks did you miss? At the very least it'll free up a pocket.
The fact that you're using these weak arguments as justification to avoid even trying ebooks makes you come across as a total luddite. Just admit you don't like these scarey newfangled electronics and stop grasping at straws to try and justify paper over electronic for general book consumption.
Do you frequently drop your phone or leave it in the pub? Because your phone is literally an e-reader (there are a wide variety of both android and apple apps that can handle every ebook format out there).
Going somewhere where charging is a problem?
My phone runs for 2 days without charging if I conserve battery. It can run for much much longer if I bring along my 15000maH external battery (or if I feel like travelling light, my 3500maH external, which is the size of a thing of lipstick). In absence of batteries, I can roll it up in my 15 watt solar panel. The combined weight of phone+solar panel or phone+battery is probably equivalent in weight and volume to that of a medium sized paperback.
As for your concerns about privacy, you're posting on a site for nerds and telling me you don't know how to strip the DRM to make yourself backup copies that can be read them on a device not controlled by amazon/B&N/{giant corporation}? If I lose my reading device (primarily my phone, though I do have an old rooted nook color running CM7 if I want a bigger screen), it's no big deal as far as the ebooks that I own are concerned. It's all backed up on my server, which is accessible to me from anywhere with a network connection. In fact, I'd be more worried about permanently losing my extensive collection of paper books. Unlike my ebooks, my paper books don't exist as multiple copies across multiple locations, so one good fire/flood/natural disaster and they're gone.
Can you imagine a prominent political figure, with an orange vest, spending a few months walking through ditches and picking up trash?
She'd show up for some photo ops, then send an intern to complete the rest of it while the supervisor of said community service looks the other way as long as the work gets done (since having a prominent political figures owe you a favor might be useful later down the road).
Even if you don't, a Slashdot user might live with someone who does care about sportsball or something else that isn't on Netflix.
There are options besides netflix for obtaining content over the internet, you're saying absolutely nowhere online will show it? I've also found that spectator sports are generally more entertaining when spectated with other spectators. To that effect there are always sports bars and friends houses. In absence of those, I won't stop you if you think paying $100/month in order to see college football season live is worth it.
You're probably thinking of the Super Bowl (NFL championship game) or the NBA Finals, which are shown OTA. The College Football Playoff is not; it's on ESPN. Nor are some games of the NHL Stanley Cup Finals; they're on NBCSN (formerly Versus).
Ah yes, thank you. And I guess ESPN doesn't offer their streams over the internet or the ability to buy their channels as an a la carte cable package? Seems like their loss. I'm happy to pay for content if it's relatively easy to obtain and mostly ad-free.
It looks like it could just be artifacts from the "rolling shutter" method of removing vibration from videos, but who knows. Both sides of this story seem pretty sketchy.
As someone who literally hasn't had a TV (in the traditional sense) in their house for 20 years, I'm always shocked at the sheer amount of advertising whenever I'm on business travel and the hotel internet isn't fast enough for netflix. Even if it's a show I'm intensely interested in, I'd much rather wait for it to come out on DVD or arrive on netflix than suffer through all the advertising. A bit at the top and bottom of each hour, sure, but ~5 minutes of commercials every ~5 minutes? How do "normal" people stand for that?
The entire fun of Rama was the exploration though. I think they could pull it off by making something that really showcased the science in the books by paying a lot of attention to how it would actually look (kind of like how gravity pulled off the weightless bits so well). A lot of exposition on the sciency bits could be narrated by the characters doing PR updates back to earth, kind of like Chris Hadfields videos of him playing with water in the ISS. e.g. "here's something neat for everyone watching back home. Observe the coriolis forces in action as I throw this suitcase full of supplies down the stairs". And then actually use the special effects to make it look like how a box of supplies thrown from zero G "down" a flight of stairs inside a giant rotating cylinder would actually look.
Slashdot Mirror
I am all for drivers being polite, but they should not confuse other drivers with breaking right-of-way rules. A lot of people seem to not understand 4 way stop rules as it is, without people throwing a wrench I the whole process.
Not only is it inconvenient, but it's also a hazard and a liability risk. Other drivers who aren't necessarily in a position see the exchange of body language and waves yielding right of way when none was present are expecting events to happen in a certain way and get confused if they don't. And if, for example, a pedestrian in a crosswalk waves at you to go when they had right of way but then has second thoughts and jumps out in front of you, guess who's at fault when the police investigate.
But you can also have fun anonymously...
Make an arrangements with a car deal to give away cars to people you think deserve it as you encounter them.
Pay the check for an entire restaurant full of people when you leave.
Watch for local foreclosures and intercede on the behalf of those you think are getting a raw deal.
Fund a promising local business for two years.
Set up a charity on the quiet to fly bums to Hawaii (or any other island they'll be unlikely to be able to migrate away from on their own) in twos and threes and see how long until someone notices (if you can keep it up unnoticed for a year it'll be a serious problem by that point).
Anonymously mail small suitcases full of cash to random local politicians to see what happens. (optional: anonymously tip off the media amount said suitcase)
Buy a few hundred drones and then every few weeks send one on a few mile flight to land on the same persons doorstep at 2am (taking a different route and launched from a different place each time). See how long you can keep it up before they either flip out and/or start a side business selling gently used drones.
That would actually be kind of fun. Buy a decent sized bit of farmland, get some high speed internet out to it, hire help as needed in the interim and work on making the place automated and high tech yet as self-sufficient and sustainable as possible.
Also depends on size of family, definition of "nice vacation", and what "some nice things" constitutes. Do you throw everyone in the car and drive 60 miles away to a cabin in the woods for a week, or do you put everyone on a cruise to the Bahamas? You could probably do the cabin trip for less than 1k no matter family size, but flying somewhere adds up quick as you add people. "nice things" could mean that you insist on a brand new BMW every 4-5 years, or that you're fine letting some other guy pay the depreciation and instead going for the low mileage old used cars of whichever make and model has the best reviews and highest reliability.
Doing roughly equivalent things but changing how frugal you are about said things can easily account for 10-20k in a year. There are a lot of small things where the time investment no longer is worth the cost or the aggravation (clipping coupons and buying those weird off-brand poptarts that taste kind of funny, for example). There are also a lot of big things that are easier to justify spending money on when you have money (For example, keeping your gaming PC more current than you used to while making less). Also keep in mind that taxes eat quite a bit more at 100k than they do at 35k.
Without knowing the test setup for a double blind test it's impossible to say how well they isolated the sound (if any) from people (though I'd suspect they did a good job since the idea was not being able to tell if it's running or not). I'd be really curious to see a study on how people who claim EM sensitivity respond to a dummy light on a fake transmitter vs dummy light plus low intensity ~22khz tone.
Mostly what I was referring to was anecdotal evidence from other slashdot users (who weren't kooks claiming to be allergic to wifi) saying that they could reliably tell when a wireless router was plugged in or not by the whine of the AC adapter (the one I use to charge my phone actually developed a barely audible high pitched whine when not under load, it took me a week to figure out that's what was waking me up at night once my phone had completed charging). It's not a big step to imagine someone who's actually psychosomatic and convinced it's the wifi to start showing symptoms whenever they hear a transformer.
What makes it even trickier is that in many cases it very well could be that they're responding to something related to a transmission device being turned on (e.g. the high pitched whine of a switching power supply is audible to them and gives them a headache).
The real question is, Would our troops accept the government telling them to mount an offensive against the populace?
Probably not, but the key here is that we're talking about an offensive. Dragging a few key actors out of a peaceful protest is a completely different thing from dragging those same people out of an armed (but still currently peaceful) protest.
you still couldn't draw enough power from the grid to get enough energy to saturate the battery in that time.
That problem has long since been solved in other applications, generally in the form of inertial energy storage. You spin up a flywheel with a big electric motor (or sometimes the motor itself is heavy enough that it's basically its own flywheel) with whatever constant load the grid will support. Energy is pulled back out using a generator (either attached to the flywheel via mechanical clutch, or by electrically reversing the leads on the motor).
Memory leaks are always the fault of the developer, unless they're hardware based.
And the first rule of software development is that it's always a hardware problem until proven otherwise!
The poll workers look at faces. You do that twice, one hour before closing and see how it goes. It doesn't work, and nobody does it.
Do you even read, I said "different polling place". Also, the poll workers here literally leave the clipboards on the tables for you to pick a name off of. I wouldn't even need to do the play dumb thing.
Next time you go to vote, do this. Then rinse and repeat, ten times within the hour, and see if it works.
No thanks, I'm not going to commit voter fraud to prove a point to you, plus you'd say I was making it up anyway. What I was suggesting you try is to simply get them to show you the list of names to pick out your own, as much of your argument seems to hinge on poll workers keeping those names secret.
My bet is that it wouldn't work; you'd be recognized and fail at making much of a difference at all.
Why would people at different polling places recognize me? Also, you don't even need to vote multiple times to make it work as voter fraud. Just teach some non-english speaking non-citizens to point at a name on a list (I guarantee a poll worker will show it to them to point at a name if they can't understand what's being said. What else can they do? Someone like you might accuse them of disfranchising a minority voter if they don't let them vote) and you've got a small army of people who will vote your way.
You must have an easy to understand and/or spell name then. afaik the poll workers aren't instructed to not show you the clipboard, and even if they are, the reasons why not probably aren't explained to them. Next time you go to vote, try a bit of social engineering and see if you can get them to show you the clipboard. I'd recommend mumbling and/or mispronouncing your name until they get frustrated and tilt the clipboard so you can find your name and point at it.
And when you walk into the polling place in NC, do they show you a list of names with the ones who have voted already crossed out, and ask you which one you are? If I wanted to vote multiple times, all I'd have to do is walk into a polling place maybe an hour before closing (to minimize chances of picking a name that actually does show up) and pick any number of registered names who haven't shown up yet. One could probably hit up about 10 in an hour or so before closing.
There are plenty of places that sell DRM free ebooks. Also, what part about using your phone to read ebooks did you miss? At the very least it'll free up a pocket.
The fact that you're using these weak arguments as justification to avoid even trying ebooks makes you come across as a total luddite. Just admit you don't like these scarey newfangled electronics and stop grasping at straws to try and justify paper over electronic for general book consumption.
Leave your paper book in the pub? Drop it?
Do you frequently drop your phone or leave it in the pub? Because your phone is literally an e-reader (there are a wide variety of both android and apple apps that can handle every ebook format out there).
Going somewhere where charging is a problem?
My phone runs for 2 days without charging if I conserve battery. It can run for much much longer if I bring along my 15000maH external battery (or if I feel like travelling light, my 3500maH external, which is the size of a thing of lipstick). In absence of batteries, I can roll it up in my 15 watt solar panel. The combined weight of phone+solar panel or phone+battery is probably equivalent in weight and volume to that of a medium sized paperback.
As for your concerns about privacy, you're posting on a site for nerds and telling me you don't know how to strip the DRM to make yourself backup copies that can be read them on a device not controlled by amazon/B&N/{giant corporation}? If I lose my reading device (primarily my phone, though I do have an old rooted nook color running CM7 if I want a bigger screen), it's no big deal as far as the ebooks that I own are concerned. It's all backed up on my server, which is accessible to me from anywhere with a network connection. In fact, I'd be more worried about permanently losing my extensive collection of paper books. Unlike my ebooks, my paper books don't exist as multiple copies across multiple locations, so one good fire/flood/natural disaster and they're gone.
When I want to read in the tub, ebooks fail.
And so do regular books for that matter.
When I want something that can fit in my pants pocket, ebooks fail - but paperbacks deliver.
er, I read ebooks on my phone, which most definitely fits in my pocket better than any paperback.
When I want to borrow/lend a book, ebooks make it too much trouble, but a paperback is easy.
Easier than messaging them a link to my ebook library hosted on an old laptop in my closet?
When I want to throw a book in a backpack, paperback wins.
Yes, but then why would I want to throw my expensive reading device in a backpack when I can keep it in my pocket?
Time, complexity, and money, in that order.
Can you imagine a prominent political figure, with an orange vest, spending a few months walking through ditches and picking up trash?
She'd show up for some photo ops, then send an intern to complete the rest of it while the supervisor of said community service looks the other way as long as the work gets done (since having a prominent political figures owe you a favor might be useful later down the road).
Even if you don't, a Slashdot user might live with someone who does care about sportsball or something else that isn't on Netflix.
There are options besides netflix for obtaining content over the internet, you're saying absolutely nowhere online will show it? I've also found that spectator sports are generally more entertaining when spectated with other spectators. To that effect there are always sports bars and friends houses. In absence of those, I won't stop you if you think paying $100/month in order to see college football season live is worth it.
You're probably thinking of the Super Bowl (NFL championship game) or the NBA Finals, which are shown OTA. The College Football Playoff is not; it's on ESPN. Nor are some games of the NHL Stanley Cup Finals; they're on NBCSN (formerly Versus).
Ah yes, thank you. And I guess ESPN doesn't offer their streams over the internet or the ability to buy their channels as an a la carte cable package? Seems like their loss. I'm happy to pay for content if it's relatively easy to obtain and mostly ad-free.
Hell, I live in california and I have two shotguns. One setup for home defense and the other is for shooting clays.
Nice summary. I wish I could mod that informative.
I'm posting on slashdot, do I seem like the kind of person who cares about sportsball?
Though sarcasm aside, can't you pick those games up with an antenna if you really want to watch them?
It looks like it could just be artifacts from the "rolling shutter" method of removing vibration from videos, but who knows. Both sides of this story seem pretty sketchy.
As someone who literally hasn't had a TV (in the traditional sense) in their house for 20 years, I'm always shocked at the sheer amount of advertising whenever I'm on business travel and the hotel internet isn't fast enough for netflix. Even if it's a show I'm intensely interested in, I'd much rather wait for it to come out on DVD or arrive on netflix than suffer through all the advertising. A bit at the top and bottom of each hour, sure, but ~5 minutes of commercials every ~5 minutes? How do "normal" people stand for that?
The entire fun of Rama was the exploration though. I think they could pull it off by making something that really showcased the science in the books by paying a lot of attention to how it would actually look (kind of like how gravity pulled off the weightless bits so well). A lot of exposition on the sciency bits could be narrated by the characters doing PR updates back to earth, kind of like Chris Hadfields videos of him playing with water in the ISS. e.g. "here's something neat for everyone watching back home. Observe the coriolis forces in action as I throw this suitcase full of supplies down the stairs". And then actually use the special effects to make it look like how a box of supplies thrown from zero G "down" a flight of stairs inside a giant rotating cylinder would actually look.