I love the threads on USENET groups where some wise sage tells everyone how driving without insurance is such a irresponsible thing to do. More often than not, they are in the insurance industry themselves. What's worse is not the pricks, but those who truly believe that the insurance industry provides some benevolent service to mankind. It's enough to piss off the Pope!
Why do we need car insurance? Accidents can cost a lot of money. But why is that? Slimy lawyers and their slimy clients (individuals and the insurance companies themselves).
Never mind the statistical models they use. Why did I suddenly become a better driver, paying less in premiums, when I turned 25 or when I got married? Beats the hell outta me! Worse, they're using credit ratings now. A past bankruptcy earned me higher premiums for a while. I don't recall growing a lead foot after I filed for my bankruptcy.
Smells like a scam to me. And to add insult to injury, I'm required to pay for auto insurance. (Blah-blah-blah! -- driving is a priviledge my ass!) Then there's under/non-insured insurance. Not only must a good law-abiding person pay for to insure himself, he must also pay a premium in case some law-breaking person without insurance hits hit. And in my state, I have to pay a small fee at vehicle registration time to support a vehicle/driver insurance database. W.T.F.?!?
There are so many problems with compulsory insurance -- and the healthy industry which thrives on it -- that my head wants to explode.
I'm waiting for the day that health insurance is ompulsory. The fact that you were born is good enough reason to make you pay money to some company for the rest of your life.
They won't challenge the FCC (well, they might a little, for good publicity). They'll just change the laws instead. I'm sure they already have another "Induce Act" clone ready in some intern's hands, waiting to hand copies to senator hatch (he doens't deserve CAPS anymore) to introduce into law.
In 5 years Tivos will either be illegal or they'll be licensed into bankruptcy and bought by MPAA/NFA member companies (then touted as the greatest modern invention since the Servel Refrigerator).
The dvd::rip package is great for what it does, but for some reason it doesn't have an option to simply "shrink" a >4.5GB pressed DVD to fit on a 4.5GB DVD-R. It's terribly annoying, but I can't find any other good tools like this for Linux.
Of course I care! I care about that poor set designer and his kids' college fund. You know -- the guy on that public service add they play in theaters.
it was built by a pudgy, paranoid guy in a home-built cave in some backwater Canadian costal town. They wanted to interview the creator of this device, but all he would say is some incoherent mumblings about the "damned Winnebago people"
Anybody remember when Judd Nelson was dubbed to say "eat my socks" rather than "eat my shorts" on the broadcasts of The Breakfast Club? I never could figure out the reasoning for that.
Yet... daytime soaps and Fox prime time have steamier bedrooms scenes than most R-Rated movies I've seen in the past few years (except the foreign ones, of course).
After getting my GPS in 1998, I was thinking of all kinds of things to try. I've done the geocaching thing (placed one, found a few), as well as a couple of confluences.
When my kids are older (or gone) and I'm not working full-time, I'd like to visit the following points in all 48 mainland US states: point of highest elevation, point of lowest elevation, and point of geographical center. Certainly these are not original ideas, but the points are well documented and out there on the 'net.
Ples... I'd do it all without using the interstate highways -- back roads are much more fun.:) I figure 6 months (perhaps March to September) would do the trick.
Maybe there are other dumb statistical points of interest about the states which may be available? Point of population "center", point of economic "center". Odd stuff like that. I wonder if these kinds of stats are out there?
But, the confluence project is pretty cool in its own right. What really freaks me out, though, is that most confluences (at least random ones I've plugged into M$ Streets) can be be approched by car except for maybe the last mile or two. Even out here in the West (I'm in Utah), where the road density if much less than the East or the coasts. It really makes you pause to consider just how much we've marked this land of ours.
Yet another way to thicken the book they throw at you when you get busted. It really cracks me up, all these silly laws.
Let's see... committing certain violent crimes (in Utah at least, I assume there's a similar US code) will land you more punishment if you're wearing a bullet-proof vest. Likewise, robbing someone with a gun is somehow more punishable than without a gun. Beating up a person is more punishable if you hate that person for whatever reason (race, religion, etc.) than if you simply beat up that person. Committing fraud is more bad if you use a computer, than without one, more so if you're using crypto to thwart detection.
I can handle the "X is illegal" laws (some of them, anyway). It's the "X is more illegal if you possess Y, or use Z in the process" laws that just burn my britches.
If anyone cares, Creative Vision Technologies, Inc. (CVT) has the Northgate keyboard clones. They can be found here. There's also a fairly current review of them at PC World.
I don't think they're Model M keyboards, but I'm right with you on the IBM built-like-a-tank clickity-clack keyboards. I've scavanged up serveral of them from school district surplus warehouses, thrift stores, and the university that employs me. Heck, my co-workers find them for me and bring them to me, as they know I love them. All of the PCs I use in the home and office are equipped with one.
Great keyboards.
One of my roomies in college had a Northgate PC (so did some of the PC labs), and they had the best keyboards. Ever. The OmniKey, or somesuch. They're still being made and sold (can't recall -- or find online, at the moment -- the name), but I just can't justify the $100+ for one. My IBMs work just fine.
One of these days, when I have money to burn, I may treat myself.
Re:Great, that argument again.
on
Black Hat
·
· Score: 1
To stray a bit off-topic, it's my opinion that if you buy a CD for one song, and hate the rest, you're not giving the rest a chance. You probably like the one song because it was drilled into your head by the radio, not because it's so different from the rest.
I have to agree. There are some exceptions, but if you like the 1 or 2 songs they play on the radio every half-hour, you'll usually like the rest. You just need to let it "grow on you" a bit. You must expose yourself to the rest of the album as often as the radio-played tunes.
I haven't bought any new CDs for quite a while. I only buy through several of the excellent used CD warehouses online. Recently, I've been going back through my back catalog (as it were) of CDs and flushing out entire discographies (actual, real albums, not compilations) of artists that I often purchased for their one radio hit and shevled. As I listen through each performer's collection in chronological order, I often find new gems in the CDs I already owned, as they seem more appealing when listened to in the context of an entire career's work.
It's pretty rare that an artist will have one song that's vastly different from all their others on the same album.
Unfortunately, this can have a down side, too. Some groups/artists put out stuff that sounds all the same. I happened to like the Evanescene tune "Bring Me To Life", so I bought the CD. Turns out almost the entire bloody album sounds the same. Kinda like CCR -- except the fact that Credence actually has some soul to it.:) I actually prefer many artists who have extremely eclectic and contrasting styles, even within the same album. To name a few of my favorites are Suzanne Vega, Jill Sobule, and Kirsty MacColl (what a shame she died in her musical prime -- Tropical Brainstorm was such a great album).
There was a show on NPR (maybe "Science Friday" or "Talk of the Nation") where there was a debate on sex-ed in public schools. There was some contention between 2 of the guests about the CDC changing the statistics about condom failure, allegedly to support a political agenda.
It's not a private site, but I believe the root of this thread had to do with the government altering its own public data on a whim.
I think it was OpenVMS (fuzzy memories of a freshman computer class) that had version control built into the filesystem. I'm amazed that this hasn't been introduced into the more popular filesystem(s) yet. I've wished for it on many occasions.
Or am I just being impatient? Will Reiser4 provide this capability?
This settlement just proves, once again, that Michael Robertson doesn't walk his talk. The same thing happened with MP3.COM. He folded without ever concluding a court battle.
It would have been one thing had he didn't pretend to be some pro-little-guy visionary. If he was up front about being a mere speculator of up-and-coming technologies (MP3, Linux, what's next?), then I could tolerate his actions. I still wouldn't like him, but at least everyone would know what they are dealing with.
If you want Movie information, you can grab the data files from the Internet Movie Database.
Damn, that's cool!
I kinda held a grudge for the IMDB folks for a while, since the data used to be a collection of text files distributed on USENET (eventually binary DB files, along with a simple query tool, distributed via ftp). I contributed a fair bit of stuff back in those days.
I thought that once they went "commercial" on the web, years ago, that it meant the end of all that community-created data. I'm pleased to see that's not the case (though I haven't read their license for the data -- it may be draconian for all I know).
Similarly, one could play around with the CDDB/freedb data sets. I'll kill for the raw data behind the allmusic.com site.:)
The US Census has tons of great info, as does the USDA Nutrition Database. Mortality stats gathered by the CDC are fun in a morbid kind of way.:)
There are some great collections of historical climate data out there for free. Here's a source for the Western US (a similiar compilation for the entire US would be great). Some earthquake data can be found here.
Heck, just enter "raw data" into google, along with your topic of choice, and have fun.
There was some fat bastard prof at Purdue who taught "business 101" -- basics of accounting. He wrote the 1000+ page tome we were forced to use. To salt the wond, he would change the problems every semester, making the $80 book a candidate to replace the Sears Catalog for wiping your ass.
No, no conflict of interest at all. Somehow I doubt the basic accounting principles change all that frequently. The guy was such an asshat. He routinely derided students who dared to express confusion about his lecture to his 500+ seat lecture hall.
When I was a poor lad in college one year, I copied the entire contents of every textbook I needed for the fall semester the summer before. I bought the books, photocopied them in the library a few chapters at a time on my lunch breaks ($0.03/page, at the time, when the the biggest copy card was purchased), then got a full refund.:)
Of course, that was a huge time sink, and it still did cost me about 20% of the books' price when all was said and done (quality data binders cost good money, after all). But man, after years of getting bent over the barrel by the local book cartel, it sure felt good.
I remember during the dot-bomb boom, there was some dude who was working on this product that plugged into your web browser. It was supposed to be the "next big thing" and he made some ungodly sum of money from selling it.
Anyway, if you had the plugin, you could place a post-it style note onto web pages you visited. And people who had the same plugin could see it when they visited it. Seemed a sorta novel idea -- but one which was ripe for abuse (by users and advertisers alike). This cell phone concept sounds just like it.
I remember the particular article because I think the writer said there were either lawsuits already pending (even though the product hadn't really gone "gold" yet) or at least threats of lawsuits. Heaven forbid some disgruntled consumer taint a dot-com brand by placing "The widgets sold here suck ass!" notes on a vendor's web site.
In any case, I never heard of the product again (kinda like Pointcast). Probably best, but I still wonder what the name of the software was, who was the person who came up with it, and what happened to it.
Slashdot Mirror
I love the threads on USENET groups where some wise sage tells everyone how driving without insurance is such a irresponsible thing to do. More often than not, they are in the insurance industry themselves. What's worse is not the pricks, but those who truly believe that the insurance industry provides some benevolent service to mankind. It's enough to piss off the Pope!
Why do we need car insurance? Accidents can cost a lot of money. But why is that? Slimy lawyers and their slimy clients (individuals and the insurance companies themselves).
Never mind the statistical models they use. Why did I suddenly become a better driver, paying less in premiums, when I turned 25 or when I got married? Beats the hell outta me! Worse, they're using credit ratings now. A past bankruptcy earned me higher premiums for a while. I don't recall growing a lead foot after I filed for my bankruptcy.
Smells like a scam to me. And to add insult to injury, I'm required to pay for auto insurance. (Blah-blah-blah! -- driving is a priviledge my ass!) Then there's under/non-insured insurance. Not only must a good law-abiding person pay for to insure himself, he must also pay a premium in case some law-breaking person without insurance hits hit. And in my state, I have to pay a small fee at vehicle registration time to support a vehicle/driver insurance database. W.T.F.?!?
There are so many problems with compulsory insurance -- and the healthy industry which thrives on it -- that my head wants to explode.
I'm waiting for the day that health insurance is ompulsory. The fact that you were born is good enough reason to make you pay money to some company for the rest of your life.
Swell era we live in, eh?
In 5 years Tivos will either be illegal or they'll be licensed into bankruptcy and bought by MPAA/NFA member companies (then touted as the greatest modern invention since the Servel Refrigerator).
The dvd::rip package is great for what it does, but for some reason it doesn't have an option to simply "shrink" a >4.5GB pressed DVD to fit on a 4.5GB DVD-R. It's terribly annoying, but I can't find any other good tools like this for Linux.
Of course I care! I care about that poor set designer and his kids' college fund. You know -- the guy on that public service add they play in theaters.
Copying movies is clear bad. It's baaaaaaad.
(um, yah... that was sarcasm)
Dude, he said emulate, not mutilate.
A holiday for the rest-iv-us! Yay!
it was built by a pudgy, paranoid guy in a home-built cave in some backwater Canadian costal town. They wanted to interview the creator of this device, but all he would say is some incoherent mumblings about the "damned Winnebago people"
Anybody remember when Judd Nelson was dubbed to say "eat my socks" rather than "eat my shorts" on the broadcasts of The Breakfast Club? I never could figure out the reasoning for that.
Yet... daytime soaps and Fox prime time have steamier bedrooms scenes than most R-Rated movies I've seen in the past few years (except the foreign ones, of course).
When my kids are older (or gone) and I'm not working full-time, I'd like to visit the following points in all 48 mainland US states: point of highest elevation, point of lowest elevation, and point of geographical center. Certainly these are not original ideas, but the points are well documented and out there on the 'net.
Ples... I'd do it all without using the interstate highways -- back roads are much more fun. :) I figure 6 months (perhaps March to September) would do the trick.
Maybe there are other dumb statistical points of interest about the states which may be available? Point of population "center", point of economic "center". Odd stuff like that. I wonder if these kinds of stats are out there?
But, the confluence project is pretty cool in its own right. What really freaks me out, though, is that most confluences (at least random ones I've plugged into M$ Streets) can be be approched by car except for maybe the last mile or two. Even out here in the West (I'm in Utah), where the road density if much less than the East or the coasts. It really makes you pause to consider just how much we've marked this land of ours.
Let's see... committing certain violent crimes (in Utah at least, I assume there's a similar US code) will land you more punishment if you're wearing a bullet-proof vest. Likewise, robbing someone with a gun is somehow more punishable than without a gun. Beating up a person is more punishable if you hate that person for whatever reason (race, religion, etc.) than if you simply beat up that person. Committing fraud is more bad if you use a computer, than without one, more so if you're using crypto to thwart detection.
I can handle the "X is illegal" laws (some of them, anyway). It's the "X is more illegal if you possess Y, or use Z in the process" laws that just burn my britches.
If anyone cares, Creative Vision Technologies, Inc. (CVT) has the Northgate keyboard clones. They can be found here. There's also a fairly current review of them at PC World.
Great keyboards.
One of my roomies in college had a Northgate PC (so did some of the PC labs), and they had the best keyboards. Ever. The OmniKey, or somesuch. They're still being made and sold (can't recall -- or find online, at the moment -- the name), but I just can't justify the $100+ for one. My IBMs work just fine.
One of these days, when I have money to burn, I may treat myself.
Twin Peaks fan?
I have to agree. There are some exceptions, but if you like the 1 or 2 songs they play on the radio every half-hour, you'll usually like the rest. You just need to let it "grow on you" a bit. You must expose yourself to the rest of the album as often as the radio-played tunes.
I haven't bought any new CDs for quite a while. I only buy through several of the excellent used CD warehouses online. Recently, I've been going back through my back catalog (as it were) of CDs and flushing out entire discographies (actual, real albums, not compilations) of artists that I often purchased for their one radio hit and shevled. As I listen through each performer's collection in chronological order, I often find new gems in the CDs I already owned, as they seem more appealing when listened to in the context of an entire career's work.
It's pretty rare that an artist will have one song that's vastly different from all their others on the same album.
Unfortunately, this can have a down side, too. Some groups/artists put out stuff that sounds all the same. I happened to like the Evanescene tune "Bring Me To Life", so I bought the CD. Turns out almost the entire bloody album sounds the same. Kinda like CCR -- except the fact that Credence actually has some soul to it. :) I actually prefer many artists who have extremely eclectic and contrasting styles, even within the same album. To name a few of my favorites are Suzanne Vega, Jill Sobule, and Kirsty MacColl (what a shame she died in her musical prime -- Tropical Brainstorm was such a great album).
It's not a private site, but I believe the root of this thread had to do with the government altering its own public data on a whim.
Or am I just being impatient? Will Reiser4 provide this capability?
The various "cybersquatting" laws could affect this lawsuit. But I think that CC would loose in a legal fight.
This settlement just proves, once again, that Michael Robertson doesn't walk his talk. The same thing happened with MP3.COM. He folded without ever concluding a court battle.
It would have been one thing had he didn't pretend to be some pro-little-guy visionary. If he was up front about being a mere speculator of up-and-coming technologies (MP3, Linux, what's next?), then I could tolerate his actions. I still wouldn't like him, but at least everyone would know what they are dealing with.
What a chump.
Damn, even Dr. Laura reads slashdot! Ya learn something new every day!
Damn, that's cool!
I kinda held a grudge for the IMDB folks for a while, since the data used to be a collection of text files distributed on USENET (eventually binary DB files, along with a simple query tool, distributed via ftp). I contributed a fair bit of stuff back in those days.
I thought that once they went "commercial" on the web, years ago, that it meant the end of all that community-created data. I'm pleased to see that's not the case (though I haven't read their license for the data -- it may be draconian for all I know).
Similarly, one could play around with the CDDB/freedb data sets. I'll kill for the raw data behind the allmusic.com site. :)
There are some great collections of historical climate data out there for free. Here's a source for the Western US (a similiar compilation for the entire US would be great). Some earthquake data can be found here.
Heck, just enter "raw data" into google, along with your topic of choice, and have fun.
No, no conflict of interest at all. Somehow I doubt the basic accounting principles change all that frequently. The guy was such an asshat. He routinely derided students who dared to express confusion about his lecture to his 500+ seat lecture hall.
Of course, that was a huge time sink, and it still did cost me about 20% of the books' price when all was said and done (quality data binders cost good money, after all). But man, after years of getting bent over the barrel by the local book cartel, it sure felt good.
Anyway, if you had the plugin, you could place a post-it style note onto web pages you visited. And people who had the same plugin could see it when they visited it. Seemed a sorta novel idea -- but one which was ripe for abuse (by users and advertisers alike). This cell phone concept sounds just like it.
I remember the particular article because I think the writer said there were either lawsuits already pending (even though the product hadn't really gone "gold" yet) or at least threats of lawsuits. Heaven forbid some disgruntled consumer taint a dot-com brand by placing "The widgets sold here suck ass!" notes on a vendor's web site.
In any case, I never heard of the product again (kinda like Pointcast). Probably best, but I still wonder what the name of the software was, who was the person who came up with it, and what happened to it.