So, essentially, you're willing to take the word of one man referenced in a sound-byte in a Liberatarian rag with the usual anti-regulation bias over the word of two national safety organizations? The NHTSA is a government agency whose job it is to gather all the statistics that any research on the matter will be based on, and the IIHS is a statistic analysis group funded by auto insurance companies whose job it is to determine what provides the most risk for those companies. Since we have two people saying the opposite thing, it's clearly a question of who has less bias as well as who is closest to the real data. I'll pick the agency that gathered the data and the bottom-line focused insurance group over some random name invoked in an editorial.
You say my data is "just no good" and that yours is unbiased? Sir, I'm filing you under the same mental category as people who say that real unbiased research shows that cigarettes aren't bad for you and that global warming isn't real because the data from those other nineteen out of twenty scientists is "just no good." Much like those people, you're going to just latch onto whatever "researcher" makes an argument that comforts your present behavior and ignore the true body of evidence that points to the contrary, all while conjuring spectres of bias in neutral agencies. Believe what you want. Just don't go poisoning others with your "unbiased" view.
I'll see your pundit quote and raise you an article based on research from the National Highway Traffic Safety Association and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety:
Federal information shows that although light trucks account for one-third of all registered vehicles, traffic crashes between a light truck and any other vehicle now account for the majority of fatalities in vehicle-to-vehicle collisions. Of the 5,259 fatalities caused when light trucks struck cars in 1996, 81 percent of the fatally injured were occupants of the car. In multiple-vehicle crashes, the occupants of the car are four times more likely to be killed than the occupants of the SUV. In a side-impact collision with an SUV, car occupants are 27 times more likely to die.
People defending SUVs (usually SUV owners and manufacturers) also have an agenda. I don't think you're going to get much more unbiased than the NHTSA and IIHS.
SUVs [...] are the safest vehicles on the road when judged by the only statistic that matters: occupant fatality rate.
This is exactly the mentality that angers me most about SUV drivers. The only statistic that matters is how likely are they to die. The poor stopping distance, poor handling, higher center of gravity, and larger blindspots on the sides of SUVs add up to a less stable vehicle that is more likely to get into accidents with other vehicles. Worse, their excess weight, high bumpers, and battering-ram ladder frame design makes them more likely to injure other drivers.
Safety is not a one-way street. Driving on the highway should not have to be an arms race.
Sorry, but you are wrong. Ringo is an apple. Ingo is a secret/code language, like the transposition slang of the Japanese criminal underworld which you can read more about in this wonderful, yet instantly dated book.
Yeah, well, I can't really claim higher moral ground there after mispelling "it's" in the sentence where I berate someone else on spelling. However, I almost always see "DCMA" in the posts of people who honestly don't know anything about it. I should've just deleted that line, but it's a major pet peeve of mine, and I couldn't make myself let it go.
Oh, the angst! Nail the back of my hand to my forehead.
You know nothing of hell, kid. Ask a Vietnam vet sometime what hell is. Ask someone who's been in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison with violent offenders sometime what hell is. Ask a victim of child abuse what hell is. Ask a battered woman what hell is.
I don't know what sort of pampered life you've lived up until now, but face the fact that you will done day have to fill out paperwork and give up large chunks of your hard-earned cash to the government or face jail-time. It's called paying taxes, and millions of people deal with it every year without slitting their wrists or crying themselves to sleep while listening to emo.
If you can't think of a way to live happily after being sued into poverty, then maybe your life had no meaning without your material wealth, and that's just fucking sad. If you think life is only worth living when all your options are open, and you're completely free to go wherever and do whatever you want to, then prepare for a rude, cold splash of water in the face once you get out of college. The world out there is all mortgages, childrearing, and 40+ hour weeks for the vast majority of Americans. You know what? That too lasts for decades, and it's called life. People deal with it.
Hopes and dreams are what you make of them. Slaves had hopes and dreams. Prisoners have hopes and dreams. Crippled veterans of war have hopes and dreams, and even people who have lost everything to the courts can still have hopes and dreams. People who've never seen the inside of a courtroom can fritter them away, and it's completely up to as to whether or not you have them.
American courts don't have power to ruin lives anywhere close to the power that the secret police and prisons of dictators have. You need to read some books on torture psychology and treatment as well as some testimonials of torture survivors before equating legal trouble in America with the sort of hardship that some people in other countries have to go through. If you knew any POWs, you'd whine a lot less about litigation. Being sued is nothing compared to being physically and then mentally broken. Nothing.
A) We've been party to the Berne Convention since 1988 after we made changes to our copyright laws. The Berne Convention has been administered by WIPO since 1967 and has since then been superceded and extended by the TRIPS agreement and the WIPO treaties that the DMCA is an implementation of.
B) The DMCA's alternate title the WIPO Treaty Implementing Legislation. It was passed to fulfill the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treatry which we both pushed for as part of an economic strategy to strengthen IP. It was our diplomats who behind closed doors helped force this upon the world, and it's our diplomats who are continuing to campaign for even stronger treaties as an end-run around the democratic process in our own nation.
C) It wasn't written to "buddy up to Europe." The EU didn't even pass their own implementation of the treaty until 2001 whereas the DMCA was passed via unaccountable voice vote in 1998 (along with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act the next day) to avoid media attention. EU member states are still in the process of ratifying it and implementing their own local versions of it.
D) Finally, tt's the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998, or DMCA, for crying out loud. Spelling it wrong twice is a clear warning flag that you haven't researched it at all and are just regurgitating half-truths and misinformation that you've heard elsewhere.
Being flayed alive to death doesn't quite match being nickel-and-dimed to death. One torment lasts hours, another lasts decades.
The hyperbole here's too thick even more me. If you'd honestly pick having your skin slowly stripped off by lashes or knives over being poor and in debt to the court system for life, you've got some serious priority issues. Having no financial future isn't that bad. Sheesh.
Ouch. I didn't know that. I'd just always assumed that the original author had to be dead for it to be that trite and repetitive. Then again, there's always Garfield, which fell into a rut in the mid-80s, and I didn't list Brenda Starr or Snuffy Smith because I wasn't positive that their authors were dead too. They all belong on the cannonical list of Comics That Should Be Put To Pasture.
The sad thing is that if you can find books of those two from during their heyday, they were damn good comic strips. With every single comic that has been listed so far, the strip long outlasted the life of their creators, and new artists have come along to prop up their strips' corpses like some sick publishing equivalent of "Weekend at Bernie's." I'm worried that one day someone will try to pick up Peanuts (even though the strip was never as good during its last two decades as it was in the old 60's collections that I have). It's sad enough to see the old strips still being rerun in my local papers rather than let some newcomer take a stab at success.
I'm just glad that Pogo was allowed to retire gracefully and that Bill Watterson will never let Calvin and Hobbes be turned into the sort of undead shadow of itself that all the strips we've listed here have become.
No offense, but the fact that someone would suggest that the little yellow line on televised football games and touch-tone phones make up for the lack of commercial space flight is a good sign of exactly how lame the 21st century is turning out to be.
I can't believe that we're all still living, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, on "an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think [touch-tone phones] are a pretty neat idea."
You are going directly onto my Friends list just for the link to the new Zelazny collection alone! I'll sign up for just about anything to get any new works from my favorite author. That it contains all 5 of the hard to find Amber short stories is just icing on the cake.
Let's start a game...
on
Bay of Souls
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Valdrax writes "Imagine if William Golding wrote a Hardy Boys novel in which Joe Hardy meets Frank Hardy and begins a downward spiral of nihilism and testosterone addiction that leads to the creation of underground 'Fight Clubs' and the anarcho-terrorist group 'Project Mayhem' that culminates in the realization that Frank Hardy is nothing more than a schizoid projection of his own id-driven desires created by the frustrated desire for a woman. Now replace Joe Hardy with a white-collar wage slave touring support groups to cure his insomnia. And target the writing to intelligent adults, rather than adolescents. That should give you an idea of the latest novel from Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club."
Ask Slashdot: How do I get moderators to like me? Ask Slashdot: How does one get on national TV? Ask Slashdot: Gimme Attention! NOW!
... or going with the theme of destroying a public commons instead of being attention-starved...
Ask Slashdot: PC dumping-friendly states? Ask Slashdot: Cheap ways to set up a 10 kW ham radio antenna? Ask Slashdot: Hacking ILECs for better bandwidth?
But really, I don't think you can top this question for both sad, pathetic attention cravings and deliberate attempts to ruin a public resource combined together. I can try, though...
Ask Slashdot: Using USENET to advertise my webcam site?
"Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" was no "indy" film. The film studio that made the movie was Sony Pictures Classics, one of the largest and best funded film houses in Asia and a part of the same Sony that is a member of the MPAA. A mere glance at the film should tell you that this was a high-budget feature backed by a large company. Just because something's not made by Hollyhood doesn't mean that it's "indy."
He made his comments after the Findings of Fact phase during the time period when he was supposed to be deciding on the level of punishment, right? I'm pretty sure that the case had been effectively judged at that point -- it was just a question of assigning remedies, wasn't it?...Or has my memory gone fuzzy about the chronology?
I still don't understand exactly how Jackson's actions were grounds for an appeal. From the start of the case, Jackson seemed to have no bias one way or another. He didn't even use a computer for doing his paperwork from what I understand. By the end of the trial, he'd had to deal with Gates's Clinton-esque waffling over the meaning of commonly used English words, repeated use of faked evidence, and mountains of testimony of contemptuous monopolous action. Why exactly would forming a negative opinion about a company that had so blatantly flaunted their disregard for the law and for his own court room be a bad thing? It seems utterly natural to me that Jackson would come out of the case with a severe distaste for a company that had pulled such flagrantly disrepectful antics in his own court room.
Ah, thanks. Now that you've told me, I found that it was right there in the man pages all along. [sound of palm smacking forehead]
Now, I can't think of anything that tcsh can do that bash can't. Too bad I'm still stuck with it at work thanks to the way our arcane login setup works (I'd have to rewrite several of the "sourced" scripts), but I guess I have nothing to worry about in the way of everyday use for my Mac OS X box at home.
Stupid question: How do you redirect both stdout & stderr to the same file in bash? That one question has always bugged me ever since I got used to tcsh almost as much as the inability to separately redirect stderr in tcsh has.
Personally, I use tcsh for my shell because it's what we use at work (and all our build scripts are based off of it). I use Python and Perl for scripting. Shell scripting (even sh/bash scripting) has always been tedious to me.
Slashdot Mirror
So, essentially, you're willing to take the word of one man referenced in a sound-byte in a Liberatarian rag with the usual anti-regulation bias over the word of two national safety organizations? The NHTSA is a government agency whose job it is to gather all the statistics that any research on the matter will be based on, and the IIHS is a statistic analysis group funded by auto insurance companies whose job it is to determine what provides the most risk for those companies. Since we have two people saying the opposite thing, it's clearly a question of who has less bias as well as who is closest to the real data. I'll pick the agency that gathered the data and the bottom-line focused insurance group over some random name invoked in an editorial.
You say my data is "just no good" and that yours is unbiased? Sir, I'm filing you under the same mental category as people who say that real unbiased research shows that cigarettes aren't bad for you and that global warming isn't real because the data from those other nineteen out of twenty scientists is "just no good." Much like those people, you're going to just latch onto whatever "researcher" makes an argument that comforts your present behavior and ignore the true body of evidence that points to the contrary, all while conjuring spectres of bias in neutral agencies. Believe what you want. Just don't go poisoning others with your "unbiased" view.
I'll see your pundit quote and raise you an article based on research from the National Highway Traffic Safety Association and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety:
People defending SUVs (usually SUV owners and manufacturers) also have an agenda. I don't think you're going to get much more unbiased than the NHTSA and IIHS.
SUVs [...] are the safest vehicles on the road when judged by the only statistic that matters: occupant fatality rate.
This is exactly the mentality that angers me most about SUV drivers. The only statistic that matters is how likely are they to die. The poor stopping distance, poor handling, higher center of gravity, and larger blindspots on the sides of SUVs add up to a less stable vehicle that is more likely to get into accidents with other vehicles. Worse, their excess weight, high bumpers, and battering-ram ladder frame design makes them more likely to injure other drivers.
Safety is not a one-way street. Driving on the highway should not have to be an arms race.
Well, percent sign, ampersand, dollar sign! (...and colon, semi-colon too!)
Sorry, but you are wrong.
Ringo is an apple.
Ingo is a secret/code language, like the transposition slang of the Japanese criminal underworld which you can read more about in this wonderful, yet instantly dated book.
Yeah, well, I can't really claim higher moral ground there after mispelling "it's" in the sentence where I berate someone else on spelling. However, I almost always see "DCMA" in the posts of people who honestly don't know anything about it. I should've just deleted that line, but it's a major pet peeve of mine, and I couldn't make myself let it go.
Oh, the angst! Nail the back of my hand to my forehead.
You know nothing of hell, kid. Ask a Vietnam vet sometime what hell is. Ask someone who's been in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison with violent offenders sometime what hell is. Ask a victim of child abuse what hell is. Ask a battered woman what hell is.
I don't know what sort of pampered life you've lived up until now, but face the fact that you will done day have to fill out paperwork and give up large chunks of your hard-earned cash to the government or face jail-time. It's called paying taxes, and millions of people deal with it every year without slitting their wrists or crying themselves to sleep while listening to emo.
If you can't think of a way to live happily after being sued into poverty, then maybe your life had no meaning without your material wealth, and that's just fucking sad. If you think life is only worth living when all your options are open, and you're completely free to go wherever and do whatever you want to, then prepare for a rude, cold splash of water in the face once you get out of college. The world out there is all mortgages, childrearing, and 40+ hour weeks for the vast majority of Americans. You know what? That too lasts for decades, and it's called life. People deal with it.
Hopes and dreams are what you make of them. Slaves had hopes and dreams. Prisoners have hopes and dreams. Crippled veterans of war have hopes and dreams, and even people who have lost everything to the courts can still have hopes and dreams. People who've never seen the inside of a courtroom can fritter them away, and it's completely up to as to whether or not you have them.
American courts don't have power to ruin lives anywhere close to the power that the secret police and prisons of dictators have. You need to read some books on torture psychology and treatment as well as some testimonials of torture survivors before equating legal trouble in America with the sort of hardship that some people in other countries have to go through. If you knew any POWs, you'd whine a lot less about litigation. Being sued is nothing compared to being physically and then mentally broken. Nothing.
A) We've been party to the Berne Convention since 1988 after we made changes to our copyright laws. The Berne Convention has been administered by WIPO since 1967 and has since then been superceded and extended by the TRIPS agreement and the WIPO treaties that the DMCA is an implementation of.
B) The DMCA's alternate title the WIPO Treaty Implementing Legislation. It was passed to fulfill the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treatry which we both pushed for as part of an economic strategy to strengthen IP. It was our diplomats who behind closed doors helped force this upon the world, and it's our diplomats who are continuing to campaign for even stronger treaties as an end-run around the democratic process in our own nation.
C) It wasn't written to "buddy up to Europe." The EU didn't even pass their own implementation of the treaty until 2001 whereas the DMCA was passed via unaccountable voice vote in 1998 (along with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act the next day) to avoid media attention. EU member states are still in the process of ratifying it and implementing their own local versions of it.
D) Finally, tt's the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998, or DMCA, for crying out loud. Spelling it wrong twice is a clear warning flag that you haven't researched it at all and are just regurgitating half-truths and misinformation that you've heard elsewhere.
Being flayed alive to death doesn't quite match being nickel-and-dimed to death. One torment lasts hours, another lasts decades.
The hyperbole here's too thick even more me. If you'd honestly pick having your skin slowly stripped off by lashes or knives over being poor and in debt to the court system for life, you've got some serious priority issues. Having no financial future isn't that bad. Sheesh.
Ouch. I didn't know that. I'd just always assumed that the original author had to be dead for it to be that trite and repetitive. Then again, there's always Garfield, which fell into a rut in the mid-80s, and I didn't list Brenda Starr or Snuffy Smith because I wasn't positive that their authors were dead too. They all belong on the cannonical list of Comics That Should Be Put To Pasture.
I'll chime in with a few of my own:
The Phantom
Nancy
The sad thing is that if you can find books of those two from during their heyday, they were damn good comic strips. With every single comic that has been listed so far, the strip long outlasted the life of their creators, and new artists have come along to prop up their strips' corpses like some sick publishing equivalent of "Weekend at Bernie's." I'm worried that one day someone will try to pick up Peanuts (even though the strip was never as good during its last two decades as it was in the old 60's collections that I have). It's sad enough to see the old strips still being rerun in my local papers rather than let some newcomer take a stab at success.
I'm just glad that Pogo was allowed to retire gracefully and that Bill Watterson will never let Calvin and Hobbes be turned into the sort of undead shadow of itself that all the strips we've listed here have become.
Yeah. You're right. Once again, not one of my brightest posts. I blame getting less than 3 hours sleep this morning.
sorry you missed the (implied) sarcasm tags there.
[Insert sound of palm smacking forehead.]
Yep. Went right over my head.
No offense, but the fact that someone would suggest that the little yellow line on televised football games and touch-tone phones make up for the lack of commercial space flight is a good sign of exactly how lame the 21st century is turning out to be.
I can't believe that we're all still living, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, on "an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think [touch-tone phones] are a pretty neat idea."
You are going directly onto my Friends list just for the link to the new Zelazny collection alone! I'll sign up for just about anything to get any new works from my favorite author. That it contains all 5 of the hard to find Amber short stories is just icing on the cake.
Valdrax writes "Imagine if William Golding wrote a Hardy Boys novel in which Joe Hardy meets Frank Hardy and begins a downward spiral of nihilism and testosterone addiction that leads to the creation of underground 'Fight Clubs' and the anarcho-terrorist group 'Project Mayhem' that culminates in the realization that Frank Hardy is nothing more than a schizoid projection of his own id-driven desires created by the frustrated desire for a woman. Now replace Joe Hardy with a white-collar wage slave touring support groups to cure his insomnia. And target the writing to intelligent adults, rather than adolescents. That should give you an idea of the latest novel from Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club."
Come on -- it's fun! Now you try.
Ask Slashdot: How do I get moderators to like me?
... or going with the theme of destroying a public commons instead of being attention-starved ...
Ask Slashdot: How does one get on national TV?
Ask Slashdot: Gimme Attention! NOW!
Ask Slashdot: PC dumping-friendly states?
Ask Slashdot: Cheap ways to set up a 10 kW ham radio antenna?
Ask Slashdot: Hacking ILECs for better bandwidth?
But really, I don't think you can top this question for both sad, pathetic attention cravings and deliberate attempts to ruin a public resource combined together. I can try, though...
Ask Slashdot: Using USENET to advertise my webcam site?
"Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" was no "indy" film. The film studio that made the movie was Sony Pictures Classics, one of the largest and best funded film houses in Asia and a part of the same Sony that is a member of the MPAA. A mere glance at the film should tell you that this was a high-budget feature backed by a large company. Just because something's not made by Hollyhood doesn't mean that it's "indy."
He made his comments after the Findings of Fact phase during the time period when he was supposed to be deciding on the level of punishment, right? I'm pretty sure that the case had been effectively judged at that point -- it was just a question of assigning remedies, wasn't it? ...Or has my memory gone fuzzy about the chronology?
I still don't understand exactly how Jackson's actions were grounds for an appeal. From the start of the case, Jackson seemed to have no bias one way or another. He didn't even use a computer for doing his paperwork from what I understand. By the end of the trial, he'd had to deal with Gates's Clinton-esque waffling over the meaning of commonly used English words, repeated use of faked evidence, and mountains of testimony of contemptuous monopolous action. Why exactly would forming a negative opinion about a company that had so blatantly flaunted their disregard for the law and for his own court room be a bad thing? It seems utterly natural to me that Jackson would come out of the case with a severe distaste for a company that had pulled such flagrantly disrepectful antics in his own court room.
[W]e should be funding the fucking Americans without jobs ...
Now, now. The current administration's new "Fucking Americans Without Jobs" initiative has been doing quite well for itself.
I don't think Bad Boy Records will have anything bad to say about it.
Ah, thanks. Now that you've told me, I found that it was right there in the man pages all along. [sound of palm smacking forehead]
Now, I can't think of anything that tcsh can do that bash can't. Too bad I'm still stuck with it at work thanks to the way our arcane login setup works (I'd have to rewrite several of the "sourced" scripts), but I guess I have nothing to worry about in the way of everyday use for my Mac OS X box at home.
Stupid question:
How do you redirect both stdout & stderr to the same file in bash? That one question has always bugged me ever since I got used to tcsh almost as much as the inability to separately redirect stderr in tcsh has.
Personally, I use tcsh for my shell because it's what we use at work (and all our build scripts are based off of it). I use Python and Perl for scripting. Shell scripting (even sh/bash scripting) has always been tedious to me.
Anyone here reminded of The Terrible Secret of Space?
"We are the product activators."
"We are here to protect you."
"We are here to protect you from the terrible counterfeit copies."