The problem there is the unspoken, unlawful, but nonetheless very real quota system. If a cop doesn't write his quota of tickets and make his quota of arrests, he will NOT get that promotion, which also means he will NOT get that pay increase. Where is he pretty much guaranteed to fill that ticket/arrest quota every night? The bar district, chasing those 0.081 BACs.
I remember when the limit was dropped from 0.1 to 0.08, and there was much rejoicing among the cops, who now found it much easier to make their quotas.
Yes, ticket/arrest quotas are generally illegal. But so long as tickets and arrests are used as a performance metric inside police departments, this WILL be a problem.
===
"And now bills were passed, not only for national objects but for individual cases, and laws were most numerous when the commonwealth was most corrupt." -- Tacitus, 117 A.D.
Good info, thanks. Tho sad to say, money is presently an Object... contacts were a compromise between "can't stand 'em" and "GOT to have glass sunglasses" (prohibitively expensive in prescription, but doable in plain). I'm just barely legal to drive without correction, but there are times when I need to see clearly... I've developed an essentially fixed focus and tho I can *see* all the letters on the street signs, without correction I can't resolve them well enough to read 'em! (Tho the same correction still works as did 40 years ago, so it's not increased myopia.)
Only lenses I've ever really been happy with are tempered glass (I don't know if it was some special kind, and the wonderful O.D. who did that prescription is long gone) -- I've had 'em since 1968 and they still only have the one small gouge they got when they were new (apparently the glass started off soft but soon hardened -- I recall that it didn't take much to do that damage in their first month). And they're still crystal-clear... and still ALMOST the right prescription. My eyes haven't changed much since I was a kid. I did discover that with contacts, I need a slightly stronger prescription to see as well as I do with the old glass lenses; WTF?
I need that UV filter if I can get it -- I can see far enough into the UV spectrum that... well, black lights are blindingly bright. I've noticed my contacts seem to have a bit of UV filtering -- makes a big difference in how sensitive I am to sun-glare. When I go mono-lens'd, I can sure tell!! But I still don't like the faint haze, especially at night (I have excellent night vision, too).
I hear ya on the artifacts. I too see all sorts of crap on those screens that no one else seems to notice. Can't stand most bigscreens either, they're way too pixelated, not to mention the colour is off! I hoard ViewSonic CRTs, cuz they're the only ones that get colour exactly right, and tend to be free of (most) artifacts.
In some prior era, we'd have been burned as witches, for seeing stuff that "ain't there";)
Or in some cases, since forever. The last big hoo-rah I recall about an EM 'allergy' involved someone who claimed to be allergic to stuff that operates in the same frequencies as a good chunk of normal cosmic background radiation. IOW that couldn't be avoided short of living in a lead-lined room. Which of course they didn't do.
Others have claimed "allergy" to ordinary solar frequencies, having no idea that not all of the sun's output is visible.
I'm reminded of my aunt who always claimed that onions made her sick. We'd sneak onions into whatever we cooked and she ate it without a single complaint -- thus proving it was all in her head.
Witchcraft: proof that some people are looney, and it's not always the witch!
I once asked someone from way-back-when-WP-dev about those F-codes, and was told they were taken directly from the original mainframe/UNIX environment. Goes to show what a bunch of young'uns most of the slashdot *NIX fanatics are... if they knew their history they'd all be rabid WP supporters.;)
I've been trying to come up with an alternative to WP5.1 for writing, partly because the 25 line screen doesn't cut it anymore, but mainly because of the problem of converting cleanly and easily between HTML and WP formats. It can be done, I've got macros that do a lot of the grunt work, but it's still tiresome and tedious. (WPWin's notion of HTML is kinda ugly, so it won't do either. Ironically, the best WP-to-HTML converter I've seen yet was an add-on for WinWord6.)
I've tried RTF editors but they all seem to have issues, most often "disappearing text when it doesn't like how you overlapped formatting options".
Word documents are too subject to corruption due to Word's text-plus-formatting-database structure.
I don't like what OpenOffice does to the internal document structure, and (at least as of last time I tried it) I *hate* how it stores documents (zipped up).
I may wind up writing in HTML, for much the same reason as I like WP: HTML can be viewed and edited as raw codes-plus-text, AND the formatting codes go at the point of application, rather than pointing into the aether like Word's do.
Internally, Word documents are a swath of text plus an appended database that tells the document how it's supposed to be formatted, by pointing at a specific location then applying the formatting. The problem is that sometimes the database gets out of sync, and it has no good way to kill orphan codes. And its code display is too rudimentary to be of much use.
That's why I like WordPerfect -- Reveal Codes shows you everything, plus all the codes are inserted AT their point of application. If something gets really fucked up and all else fails, you can always fix it with a hex editor!
Actually, WP macros are external to the document, and if you need to alter or reproduce their effect, you can always edit or copy the formatting codes directly from the document.
While I never had that problem (grow up in an ag area and you think nothing of picking rocks and sticks out of your eyes on a daily basis:) -- I think the trick may be to look in the mirror (I use a magnifying mirror like women use to apply cosmetics) and watch your finger, not your eye. Kinda makes it look like it's not *your* eye, which might be the trick for folks with a (fairly natural) phobia of stuff in their eyes. And then you don't actually SEE the finger coming at your eye, either.
Is that a function of the LCD, or of the cover screen? If the latter, you've just given me a use for dead LCDs, cuz I could use some polarized filter glass (or something like) over certain windows that presently annoy me. (And I haven't seen, at least not cheap, any large swaths of polarized glass for sale.)
And here I was going to whine about how progressive lenses never seem to be *quite* in focus, no matter how I bend my neck. I suppose it's a YMMV thing.
My other problem with all of 'em is that I really need glass, or water, or something equally clear. I *never* stop SEEING the plastic, even in the best polycarbonate lenses, and that haze over my vision bothers me. I can actually see my contact lenses as a faint haze (one slightly more blue than the other), more so when they start to dry out... and they're so thin it's like wearing Saran wrap (and about as much fun to get to stick to my eyes).
I invest in those glass aviator sunglasses because of this problem. -- Maybe it's a side effect of being one of those freaks who can see colour ranges other folks can't.
It wasn't just the northeast. It was anywhere GTE already had a protected monopoly. I'm in SoCal, and was cursed with GTE after I moved out to a rural area. As you say, they could have called themselves "World's Shittiest Phone Service" and I'd still have had no choice, they were IT if you wanted a landline. Which was all there was back then, for most people.
At the time of the name change, Verizon also had a captive customer base that lacked other choices, since they inherited the protected monopoly territories of their former self, GTE -- General Telephone and Electric. If you lived in a GTE territory, you COULD NOT get phone service from a competing company, so it didn't matter WHAT they called themselves!
Radio Shack has realworld competition; they don't have a captive audience that has no choice about where to buy stuff by any name. People have to actually remember to go to Radio Shack, rather than it being the only default option -- as was the case when Verizon grew that name.
(Out of sheer perversity, I kept writing checks to "GTE" for years afterward. Yes, I was stuck in one of their monopoly territories from the landline era, and lordy did the service suck.)
Well, yeah, but "good enough" is the best standard for regulation anyway. "Perfect" doesn't happen unless you have total control over everyone's behaviour, which obviously isn't going to happen (not even in a totalitarian state). And corner cases make for bad law.
So "perfectly well" really means "good enough for all practical purposes".
Didn't used to be that way. Used to be the average citizen had a well-made medium-calibre handgun for defense, and the thugs had to make do with cheapassed Saturday night specials and baseball bats.
Problem is, that theory doesn't really hold water; it's a handy coincidence but look at the rest of the issue: The previous generation was much more heavily and DIRECTLY exposed to lead in paint and plumbing (remember both were commonly used in every house until -- what was the cutoff date, about 1972 in the U.S?) -- and leaded fuel started being phased out in the U.S. in the early 1970s (and was essentially gone by 1982 or so). If lead exposure is the culprit, it follows that the 1900 thru 1970s generations should be far more violent, and there should have been no hooliganism at all in the most recent generation or two.
I can't think of a single benefit from the "war on drugs", but it's done no end of harm to us as people and as a society. Reducing that harm can't help but reduce hostility and crime.
Legalize, regulate, and tax it. Works perfectly well for alcohol and tobacco!!
Funny thing, that would also reduce the "need" for surveillance.
Good points. And as the number of viable places for people to escape into is reduced, gov't control increases apace.
A nasty voice in the back of my head just whispered that this could be behind certain federal land grabs of remote areas. I think my tinfoil hat leaks.
"Behaviour contracts" tend to select for loonies, since only loonies will agree to them. *Normal* people don't want some third party intruding into their lives to that degree.
Nope... I'd be moaning about how the gov't has disarmed its citizens, so they cannot defend their persons and property against hooligans.
Used to be such behaviour would at the very least get you a load of rock salt in the britches. Maybe we need to return to such direct methods of discouragement -- as any dog trainer knows, an IMMEDIATE on-the-spot punishment works far better than a vague threat of being caught and punished in the remote future.
Slashdot Mirror
DIP ??
(Acronyms vary... when I was a kid it was DWI, now it's DUI.)
But the parent is right... it's not about safety, it's about making those ticket quotas. See my rant above.
The problem there is the unspoken, unlawful, but nonetheless very real quota system. If a cop doesn't write his quota of tickets and make his quota of arrests, he will NOT get that promotion, which also means he will NOT get that pay increase. Where is he pretty much guaranteed to fill that ticket/arrest quota every night? The bar district, chasing those 0.081 BACs.
I remember when the limit was dropped from 0.1 to 0.08, and there was much rejoicing among the cops, who now found it much easier to make their quotas.
Yes, ticket/arrest quotas are generally illegal. But so long as tickets and arrests are used as a performance metric inside police departments, this WILL be a problem.
===
"And now bills were passed, not only for national objects but for individual cases, and laws were most numerous when the commonwealth was most corrupt." -- Tacitus, 117 A.D.
Some things never change.
Good info, thanks. Tho sad to say, money is presently an Object... contacts were a compromise between "can't stand 'em" and "GOT to have glass sunglasses" (prohibitively expensive in prescription, but doable in plain). I'm just barely legal to drive without correction, but there are times when I need to see clearly... I've developed an essentially fixed focus and tho I can *see* all the letters on the street signs, without correction I can't resolve them well enough to read 'em! (Tho the same correction still works as did 40 years ago, so it's not increased myopia.)
Only lenses I've ever really been happy with are tempered glass (I don't know if it was some special kind, and the wonderful O.D. who did that prescription is long gone) -- I've had 'em since 1968 and they still only have the one small gouge they got when they were new (apparently the glass started off soft but soon hardened -- I recall that it didn't take much to do that damage in their first month). And they're still crystal-clear... and still ALMOST the right prescription. My eyes haven't changed much since I was a kid. I did discover that with contacts, I need a slightly stronger prescription to see as well as I do with the old glass lenses; WTF?
I need that UV filter if I can get it -- I can see far enough into the UV spectrum that ... well, black lights are blindingly bright. I've noticed my contacts seem to have a bit of UV filtering -- makes a big difference in how sensitive I am to sun-glare. When I go mono-lens'd, I can sure tell!! But I still don't like the faint haze, especially at night (I have excellent night vision, too).
I hear ya on the artifacts. I too see all sorts of crap on those screens that no one else seems to notice. Can't stand most bigscreens either, they're way too pixelated, not to mention the colour is off! I hoard ViewSonic CRTs, cuz they're the only ones that get colour exactly right, and tend to be free of (most) artifacts.
In some prior era, we'd have been burned as witches, for seeing stuff that "ain't there" ;)
It's so ancient, even itself can't recall its origins ;)
Somewhere around here I've got WP4.something for Xenix. Won't run on modern *NIX, tho.
Ah, something 3M makes, that makes sense. Should be easy enough to find. Thanks for the tips!
Or in some cases, since forever. The last big hoo-rah I recall about an EM 'allergy' involved someone who claimed to be allergic to stuff that operates in the same frequencies as a good chunk of normal cosmic background radiation. IOW that couldn't be avoided short of living in a lead-lined room. Which of course they didn't do.
Others have claimed "allergy" to ordinary solar frequencies, having no idea that not all of the sun's output is visible.
I'm reminded of my aunt who always claimed that onions made her sick. We'd sneak onions into whatever we cooked and she ate it without a single complaint -- thus proving it was all in her head.
Witchcraft: proof that some people are looney, and it's not always the witch!
I once asked someone from way-back-when-WP-dev about those F-codes, and was told they were taken directly from the original mainframe/UNIX environment. Goes to show what a bunch of young'uns most of the slashdot *NIX fanatics are... if they knew their history they'd all be rabid WP supporters. ;)
I've been trying to come up with an alternative to WP5.1 for writing, partly because the 25 line screen doesn't cut it anymore, but mainly because of the problem of converting cleanly and easily between HTML and WP formats. It can be done, I've got macros that do a lot of the grunt work, but it's still tiresome and tedious. (WPWin's notion of HTML is kinda ugly, so it won't do either. Ironically, the best WP-to-HTML converter I've seen yet was an add-on for WinWord6.)
I've tried RTF editors but they all seem to have issues, most often "disappearing text when it doesn't like how you overlapped formatting options".
Word documents are too subject to corruption due to Word's text-plus-formatting-database structure.
I don't like what OpenOffice does to the internal document structure, and (at least as of last time I tried it) I *hate* how it stores documents (zipped up).
I may wind up writing in HTML, for much the same reason as I like WP: HTML can be viewed and edited as raw codes-plus-text, AND the formatting codes go at the point of application, rather than pointing into the aether like Word's do.
Internally, Word documents are a swath of text plus an appended database that tells the document how it's supposed to be formatted, by pointing at a specific location then applying the formatting. The problem is that sometimes the database gets out of sync, and it has no good way to kill orphan codes. And its code display is too rudimentary to be of much use.
That's why I like WordPerfect -- Reveal Codes shows you everything, plus all the codes are inserted AT their point of application. If something gets really fucked up and all else fails, you can always fix it with a hex editor!
Actually, WP macros are external to the document, and if you need to alter or reproduce their effect, you can always edit or copy the formatting codes directly from the document.
Ah. The foil idea is a good one, tho. Is it available at some standard commercial outlet? I don't recall having ever seen it.
While I never had that problem (grow up in an ag area and you think nothing of picking rocks and sticks out of your eyes on a daily basis :) -- I think the trick may be to look in the mirror (I use a magnifying mirror like women use to apply cosmetics) and watch your finger, not your eye. Kinda makes it look like it's not *your* eye, which might be the trick for folks with a (fairly natural) phobia of stuff in their eyes. And then you don't actually SEE the finger coming at your eye, either.
Is that a function of the LCD, or of the cover screen? If the latter, you've just given me a use for dead LCDs, cuz I could use some polarized filter glass (or something like) over certain windows that presently annoy me. (And I haven't seen, at least not cheap, any large swaths of polarized glass for sale.)
Welcome to the older generation, slashdot style :)
And here I was going to whine about how progressive lenses never seem to be *quite* in focus, no matter how I bend my neck. I suppose it's a YMMV thing.
My other problem with all of 'em is that I really need glass, or water, or something equally clear. I *never* stop SEEING the plastic, even in the best polycarbonate lenses, and that haze over my vision bothers me. I can actually see my contact lenses as a faint haze (one slightly more blue than the other), more so when they start to dry out ... and they're so thin it's like wearing Saran wrap (and about as much fun to get to stick to my eyes).
I invest in those glass aviator sunglasses because of this problem. -- Maybe it's a side effect of being one of those freaks who can see colour ranges other folks can't.
(No, I can't abide dirty lenses either.)
Now get off my lawn! ;)
One wonders about the money laundry aspect...
It wasn't just the northeast. It was anywhere GTE already had a protected monopoly. I'm in SoCal, and was cursed with GTE after I moved out to a rural area. As you say, they could have called themselves "World's Shittiest Phone Service" and I'd still have had no choice, they were IT if you wanted a landline. Which was all there was back then, for most people.
At the time of the name change, Verizon also had a captive customer base that lacked other choices, since they inherited the protected monopoly territories of their former self, GTE -- General Telephone and Electric. If you lived in a GTE territory, you COULD NOT get phone service from a competing company, so it didn't matter WHAT they called themselves!
Radio Shack has realworld competition; they don't have a captive audience that has no choice about where to buy stuff by any name. People have to actually remember to go to Radio Shack, rather than it being the only default option -- as was the case when Verizon grew that name.
(Out of sheer perversity, I kept writing checks to "GTE" for years afterward. Yes, I was stuck in one of their monopoly territories from the landline era, and lordy did the service suck.)
Well, yeah, but "good enough" is the best standard for regulation anyway. "Perfect" doesn't happen unless you have total control over everyone's behaviour, which obviously isn't going to happen (not even in a totalitarian state). And corner cases make for bad law.
So "perfectly well" really means "good enough for all practical purposes".
Didn't used to be that way. Used to be the average citizen had a well-made medium-calibre handgun for defense, and the thugs had to make do with cheapassed Saturday night specials and baseball bats.
Problem is, that theory doesn't really hold water; it's a handy coincidence but look at the rest of the issue: The previous generation was much more heavily and DIRECTLY exposed to lead in paint and plumbing (remember both were commonly used in every house until -- what was the cutoff date, about 1972 in the U.S?) -- and leaded fuel started being phased out in the U.S. in the early 1970s (and was essentially gone by 1982 or so). If lead exposure is the culprit, it follows that the 1900 thru 1970s generations should be far more violent, and there should have been no hooliganism at all in the most recent generation or two.
My point exactly :)
I can't think of a single benefit from the "war on drugs", but it's done no end of harm to us as people and as a society. Reducing that harm can't help but reduce hostility and crime.
Legalize, regulate, and tax it. Works perfectly well for alcohol and tobacco!!
Funny thing, that would also reduce the "need" for surveillance.
I suggest rigging the view as a looping video of tubgirl...
Good points. And as the number of viable places for people to escape into is reduced, gov't control increases apace.
A nasty voice in the back of my head just whispered that this could be behind certain federal land grabs of remote areas. I think my tinfoil hat leaks.
"Behaviour contracts" tend to select for loonies, since only loonies will agree to them. *Normal* people don't want some third party intruding into their lives to that degree.
Nope... I'd be moaning about how the gov't has disarmed its citizens, so they cannot defend their persons and property against hooligans.
Used to be such behaviour would at the very least get you a load of rock salt in the britches. Maybe we need to return to such direct methods of discouragement -- as any dog trainer knows, an IMMEDIATE on-the-spot punishment works far better than a vague threat of being caught and punished in the remote future.