Exactly! Who holds the pursestrings here?? Congress!
Bush may have made a series of stupid mistakes, but Congress didn't need to ENABLE his mistakes by continuing to fund them long after it became evident that we were throwing good money after bad!
I noticed this from your link:...the mere concept in the state of California is a violation of state civil code. The law clearly states that "There is no general right in California to carry out routine inspections of the rental unit except that a waterbed or smoke detector installation may be inspected."
Since IIRC California state code requires that all rental units have at least one smoke detector, it follows that there is actually nothing in this statute that prevents "routine inspections"; indeed, quite the reverse.
I don't know where you are, but Palmdale, California, has a relatively-new mandatory rental property inspection process in place. The idea is to root out slumlords by discovering substandard rentals... but what do you bet it's more often used to "inspect" premises where a warrant can't (yet) be reasonably acquired? Remember once any gov't official is in the door, he can write you up for ANYTHING, and that writeup CAN be the basis for a search warrant and police raid. Even something as trivial as a cracked electrical switchplate will do.
If I remember my 5th grade civics correctly, Congress can override a Presidential veto as well.
But your point is valid -- Congress holds the final cards here, so there's really no excuse for being so spineless, either in passing shit without due consideration, or in refusing to be buffaloed by a veto, as the case might be.
And considering that the vast majority of pirated software being SOLD is sold in China and various third-world countries, explain to me how laws covering U.S. soil and U.S. citizens would have the slightest impact, even IF sales of pirated software funded terrorists??
An AC recommends the "Off By One" browser (http://offbyone.com/offbyone/)
Yes, it has its virtues, among them that it operates entirely in RAM, leaving no traces behind when you close it, and it will run from a floppy. Nice to carry in your pocket.
But I use it very seldom, as the interface fails me in numerous ways, not least of which is the inability to parse anything but fully qualified URLs. Way too many little irritations like that to be usable except as a last resort. Tho it does sometimes handle ugly HTML/JS better than the namebrand browsers!
Yeah, figured there was a lot of third-party stuff that couldn't be tracked down/licensed/released. Goes to show that if there's any chance you may =ever= open your source, best not use 3rd party closed libraries.
Of course the trouble with the rebuild from the ground up is that it threw away all the lean functionality of old NS3. ISTM they'd have been better off to strip out the 3rd party code and rebuild just THOSE parts, rather than try to start over entirely (thus losing their formerly dominant marketshare in the confusion that followed).
Aside from that I run mainly Windows and Dillo is *NIX-only... can it disable CSS entirely? can it disable image-loading, yet load single or all images as desired with a single click? (Mozilla does that wrong; it HIDES images rather than preserving position yet merely not LOADING the image. So in Moz it is not possible to load only *desired* images.) Do I have to click twice to Open In New Window? These may seem like small things, but they are critical to my uses, and out of all the dozens of browsers I've tried (and the 15 or so I have installed at any one time) NS3 remains the only one that operates entirely to my everyday needs.
Links and that general style of browser are too tedious to use... despite being an old DOS-head, I generally dislike textmode incarnations of graphical apps.:(
BTW every one of my nearly 10,000/. posts was made with NS3.04.:)
mcom, if it exists, seems to be slashdotted, but the livejournal page was quick... I agree, there's just too much sheer JUNK on the average page today. Most modern sites are now so gunked up that they perform on broadband about like the most primitive 1994-era sites did on 14.4 dialup.
One of the major reasons why on every site that still halfway works with it, I still use (are you sitting down?) Netscape v3, is because it strips most of the sheer JUNK, making web speeds tolerable. The same page can take 10x as long to load in Mozilla (not only because Moz is SLOW to render, but also because of all the JUNK).
IMO, NS3 is still the best, most stable, fastest, and most bug-free of all browsers. It's too bad source code is not available (I asked JWZ about that a while back, he said he'd tried to get it and no joy) as if user-optionable modern features were implemented atop this fast, lean old browser, we'd really HAVE something.
Sometimes the explanations of the day didn't make complete sense, but they weren't always entirely superstition either. Take the practice of bleeding as a medical treatment. Nosebleeds can be a symptom of high blood pressure; seeing a nosebleed, the medieval doctor thinks "this fellow has too much blood and it's forcing its way out, let's remove some of it and relieve the pressure"... which reduces blood pressure, if only temporarily.
I'd guess the idea of trepanning came from something similar -- the patient showed signs of pressure inside the skull (bulging eyes, bleeding from the ears, etc.) and the doctor of the day did the obvious to let the excess out, much as one might puncture a blister to relieve pain and pressure.
The logic may not have been complete by modern medical knowledge and standards, but I think assuming it was all a belief in spirits gives too much credit to concurrent religious powers (the people most likely to keep written records) who didn't want anyone other than their gods to be seen as having any power over your health.
[laughing] Just the other day I was looking at a picture of Stonehenge, and thinking: Why does it *have* to mean ANYTHING? why does it have to be functional? Maybe it was a dance hall. Maybe it was a slaughterhouse. Maybe someone got bored and conned his friends into helping him build a stone junkpile to mystify the tribal elders with.
As to the giant stone-and-lime M on the hill above Bozeman Montana, which has long mystified anthropologists whose life's work is digging the Weans... in truth, it only meant that a large group of fratboys were sober enough on a Sunday morning to pile rocks together and to get random freshmen to tote buckets of whitewash up the hill.
I've often wondered the same thing... instead of reinforcing the notion that only certain combinations work, why not just let 'em play through it and maybe learn something.
Admittedly I've seen it go both ways. But I think the player juggling can paint you into a corner more often than just leaving 'em in catalog order will set you back.
I'm not a fan of slugger-ball, tho... sometimes it's great, but I think it's wrongheaded to *depend* on it.
Exactly the sort of shit I meant. What started off innocently enough as "don't fuck around while at work" has sucked at the teat of political correctness until it dwarfs all other considerations in the workplace.
Consider it in the light of our nanny society, where we must be protected even from the slightest of hurt feelings, and sad to say it is not at all out of line with the rest of where our society is going.:(
More evidence is that sometimes bands are signed for the SOLE purpose of making sure they DON'T get published, because part of having a monopoly is making sure your own products don't compete with themselves, thus diluting their mass-market value.
Also, this "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" policy applied elsewhere -- check out the French and Indian wars in North America, where various tribes allied with or against the French or British, with the goal of wiping out their own tribal enemies. ("The Last of the Mohicans" is a dramatisation of that very effect.)
I don't know about elsewhere, but in Los Angeles there's already a pocket industry of small producers, who do the job for a flat fee of somewhere around $10k including all necessary studio stuff (tho I've heard rates as low as $1k, and a friend of mine will do it at cost just to get his name on the final product).
Same with online radio stations. There are several that I already rely on as "filters" for quality music, since they don't just play every piece of crap that comes down the pipe, but rather play what the station owners feel is good music.
(Of course that's only useful when the internet broadcast includes track info.)
Hell, in 1,230,000 years of baseball games, *I* could get a 56 game hitting streak.;)
True story: I am the world's worst volleyball server. I'm lucky to whack the ball in the correct direction, let alone get it over the net. One day in the 9th grade, I scored 14 spikes in a row. Everyone (including the gym teacher) is staring at me like "WTF?! What have you done with the real Rez??" Needless to say it was a one-time freak event.:?~
Bah, Vulcans could never play baseball; they'd be too caught up in the stats! It'd be exactly like Gene Mauch and the Angels -- everything done right per the stats book, but never, ever would they try anything that was out of spec. It's not the stats that win games; it's the quarter of an inch you reach beyond what your stats say you can. (I love little ball, but Mauch made me crazy.)
I haven't been where I could get sports TV reception (or even radio reception) in 11 years. Before that, I worked my business hours around Angels games.:) But the trend was already there -- too much dwelling on details that don't really tell us anything. I want to see the pitcher's presence on the mound, not the zits behind his ear. I want to see the batter's body language, not his chaw-drip. I want to see the runner's balance between the bases, not his crappy haircut. Baseball may be a game of inches and microcosms, but it's first and foremost a game of *balance*, and that means the whole team, seen as a team.
I think what happened was that because we COULD do extreme zoom and the like, we DID, whether or not we SHOULD. Football is going that way too -- sometimes after a play that was zoomed in too tight, I find myself thinking "Wha'happened?" because the whole view was too lacking.
True story: for a while I had such bad TV reception that all I could see was shadows. I knew every pitcher by his motion, every batter by his stance -- and none of their faces, cuz I'd never seen 'em. My sister comes in and wants to know why I'm intently watching static. "See here," I tell her with great enthusaism, "this is X on the mound, and Y at bat, and watch how that runner is leaning toward second, etc, etc." She peers closely at the TV, and finally says "I don't see *anything*!!"
Having shamefully RTFA, ISTM that the study assumed that baseball players are rather more homogenous in their performance, and in who gets to see whom in the field, and how that affects individual players, than occurs in reality. I wonder what sort of numbers it would come up with if it accounted for how managers juggle players around?
Gene Mauch's strategy when he managed the Angels was so unvarying and consistent that he probably COULD be reduced to an algorithm.
I don't play the game. And when you're outside of a social structure rather than embroiled in it, it sure gives a different view. I don't have any stake in it; makes it easier to be objective.
You sound young and full of hormones, nothing unusual about that... indeed, rather more normal than a lot of slashdotters:) I used to believe much the same as yourself, that it was all learned and society at fault... but after 53 years experience in the world, I've changed my mind [g]
Replied to part of your other one somewhere else in the thread, cuz that's where I got inspired. But anyway...
That some women don't KNOW when they're flirting -- I was going to say something similar, that in some cases it's because they're socially not quite all there. I knew geeky girls in high school who I'm quite sure had no idea what they were doing, but they was socially inept in other ways too. I've also known nerdy guys who had zero clue when they were forcing their attentions on an unwilling girl.
So... flirting starts off as hardwired behaviour. (If this weren't so, it wouldn't exist across cultures and species. See my other reply.) Some learn to control and use it; others don't, which probably IS a form of social retardation. What *constitutes* flirting can vary wildly, and that's where cultural influences come in.
Assuming that flirting works the same in humans as it does in dogs -- that is, as a sort of social lubrication where the endgame (at least in one party's mind) is to get laid -- it does serve a purpose: it brings two people into a social situation where sex is acceptable to both of them, rather than only being one party's idea. After all you're more likely to get laid with a cooperative person than with someone bent on escaping!
I am a dog breeder with almost 40 years professional experience. I assure you, dogs (and horses, and chickens, and every other barnyard animal I've observed) FLIRT. Both males and females do it, and it is definitely not learned -- dogs that have been completely isolated from other dogs from 6 weeks old STILL do it. And some are teases, and others are serious. Oddly enough it appears to have very little to do with how much the individual likes or wants sex (in fact the dogs AND bitches that are most bent on getting laid do the least flirting), but rather serves as social lubrication for those that aren't quite sure if they want sex or not.
There is some learned flirting behaviour in dogs, but it's mostly hardwired. You won't typically see radical changes, other than an upsurge in flirting immediately after their first real sex. But as a rule a dog's "flirting style" doesn't change much lifelong.
As to humans -- what sort of flirting a culture finds acceptable or not, and encourages or suppresses -- that can readily override hardwired behaviour in a species as highly tuned to peer pressure as are humans. Barely-pubescent girls in Belize flirt with grown men, because it's socially acceptable there, and a good way to catch a sugar-daddy. The same behaviour in the U.S. would get the girl's ass tanned by both her parents.
In a Puritan community, showing an ankle was considered outrageous flirting. I'd bet most modern Americans wouldn't even *recognise* as flirting behaviour. But that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly! Who holds the pursestrings here?? Congress!
Bush may have made a series of stupid mistakes, but Congress didn't need to ENABLE his mistakes by continuing to fund them long after it became evident that we were throwing good money after bad!
I noticed this from your link: ...the mere concept in the state of California is a violation of state civil code. The law clearly states that "There is no general right in California to carry out routine inspections of the rental unit except that a waterbed or smoke detector installation may be inspected."
Since IIRC California state code requires that all rental units have at least one smoke detector, it follows that there is actually nothing in this statute that prevents "routine inspections"; indeed, quite the reverse.
I don't know where you are, but Palmdale, California, has a relatively-new mandatory rental property inspection process in place. The idea is to root out slumlords by discovering substandard rentals... but what do you bet it's more often used to "inspect" premises where a warrant can't (yet) be reasonably acquired? Remember once any gov't official is in the door, he can write you up for ANYTHING, and that writeup CAN be the basis for a search warrant and police raid. Even something as trivial as a cracked electrical switchplate will do.
If I remember my 5th grade civics correctly, Congress can override a Presidential veto as well.
But your point is valid -- Congress holds the final cards here, so there's really no excuse for being so spineless, either in passing shit without due consideration, or in refusing to be buffaloed by a veto, as the case might be.
And considering that the vast majority of pirated software being SOLD is sold in China and various third-world countries, explain to me how laws covering U.S. soil and U.S. citizens would have the slightest impact, even IF sales of pirated software funded terrorists??
An AC recommends the "Off By One" browser (http://offbyone.com/offbyone/)
Yes, it has its virtues, among them that it operates entirely in RAM, leaving no traces behind when you close it, and it will run from a floppy. Nice to carry in your pocket.
But I use it very seldom, as the interface fails me in numerous ways, not least of which is the inability to parse anything but fully qualified URLs. Way too many little irritations like that to be usable except as a last resort. Tho it does sometimes handle ugly HTML/JS better than the namebrand browsers!
Yeah, figured there was a lot of third-party stuff that couldn't be tracked down/licensed/released. Goes to show that if there's any chance you may =ever= open your source, best not use 3rd party closed libraries.
Of course the trouble with the rebuild from the ground up is that it threw away all the lean functionality of old NS3. ISTM they'd have been better off to strip out the 3rd party code and rebuild just THOSE parts, rather than try to start over entirely (thus losing their formerly dominant marketshare in the confusion that followed).
Aside from that I run mainly Windows and Dillo is *NIX-only... can it disable CSS entirely? can it disable image-loading, yet load single or all images as desired with a single click? (Mozilla does that wrong; it HIDES images rather than preserving position yet merely not LOADING the image. So in Moz it is not possible to load only *desired* images.) Do I have to click twice to Open In New Window? These may seem like small things, but they are critical to my uses, and out of all the dozens of browsers I've tried (and the 15 or so I have installed at any one time) NS3 remains the only one that operates entirely to my everyday needs.
:(
/. posts was made with NS3.04. :)
Links and that general style of browser are too tedious to use... despite being an old DOS-head, I generally dislike textmode incarnations of graphical apps.
BTW every one of my nearly 10,000
An excellent concept. Surely someone reading here must have connections to get that ball rolling??
mcom, if it exists, seems to be slashdotted, but the livejournal page was quick... I agree, there's just too much sheer JUNK on the average page today. Most modern sites are now so gunked up that they perform on broadband about like the most primitive 1994-era sites did on 14.4 dialup.
One of the major reasons why on every site that still halfway works with it, I still use (are you sitting down?) Netscape v3, is because it strips most of the sheer JUNK, making web speeds tolerable. The same page can take 10x as long to load in Mozilla (not only because Moz is SLOW to render, but also because of all the JUNK).
IMO, NS3 is still the best, most stable, fastest, and most bug-free of all browsers. It's too bad source code is not available (I asked JWZ about that a while back, he said he'd tried to get it and no joy) as if user-optionable modern features were implemented atop this fast, lean old browser, we'd really HAVE something.
What would they say if they were here right now??
Probably, "Get off my lawn!!"
Sometimes the explanations of the day didn't make complete sense, but they weren't always entirely superstition either. Take the practice of bleeding as a medical treatment. Nosebleeds can be a symptom of high blood pressure; seeing a nosebleed, the medieval doctor thinks "this fellow has too much blood and it's forcing its way out, let's remove some of it and relieve the pressure"... which reduces blood pressure, if only temporarily.
I'd guess the idea of trepanning came from something similar -- the patient showed signs of pressure inside the skull (bulging eyes, bleeding from the ears, etc.) and the doctor of the day did the obvious to let the excess out, much as one might puncture a blister to relieve pain and pressure.
The logic may not have been complete by modern medical knowledge and standards, but I think assuming it was all a belief in spirits gives too much credit to concurrent religious powers (the people most likely to keep written records) who didn't want anyone other than their gods to be seen as having any power over your health.
[laughing] Just the other day I was looking at a picture of Stonehenge, and thinking: Why does it *have* to mean ANYTHING? why does it have to be functional? Maybe it was a dance hall. Maybe it was a slaughterhouse. Maybe someone got bored and conned his friends into helping him build a stone junkpile to mystify the tribal elders with.
As to the giant stone-and-lime M on the hill above Bozeman Montana, which has long mystified anthropologists whose life's work is digging the Weans... in truth, it only meant that a large group of fratboys were sober enough on a Sunday morning to pile rocks together and to get random freshmen to tote buckets of whitewash up the hill.
I've often wondered the same thing... instead of reinforcing the notion that only certain combinations work, why not just let 'em play through it and maybe learn something.
Admittedly I've seen it go both ways. But I think the player juggling can paint you into a corner more often than just leaving 'em in catalog order will set you back.
I'm not a fan of slugger-ball, tho... sometimes it's great, but I think it's wrongheaded to *depend* on it.
Exactly the sort of shit I meant. What started off innocently enough as "don't fuck around while at work" has sucked at the teat of political correctness until it dwarfs all other considerations in the workplace.
:(
Consider it in the light of our nanny society, where we must be protected even from the slightest of hurt feelings, and sad to say it is not at all out of line with the rest of where our society is going.
More evidence is that sometimes bands are signed for the SOLE purpose of making sure they DON'T get published, because part of having a monopoly is making sure your own products don't compete with themselves, thus diluting their mass-market value.
Also, this "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" policy applied elsewhere -- check out the French and Indian wars in North America, where various tribes allied with or against the French or British, with the goal of wiping out their own tribal enemies. ("The Last of the Mohicans" is a dramatisation of that very effect.)
I don't know about elsewhere, but in Los Angeles there's already a pocket industry of small producers, who do the job for a flat fee of somewhere around $10k including all necessary studio stuff (tho I've heard rates as low as $1k, and a friend of mine will do it at cost just to get his name on the final product).
Same with online radio stations. There are several that I already rely on as "filters" for quality music, since they don't just play every piece of crap that comes down the pipe, but rather play what the station owners feel is good music.
(Of course that's only useful when the internet broadcast includes track info.)
Hell, in 1,230,000 years of baseball games, *I* could get a 56 game hitting streak. ;)
:?~
True story: I am the world's worst volleyball server. I'm lucky to whack the ball in the correct direction, let alone get it over the net. One day in the 9th grade, I scored 14 spikes in a row. Everyone (including the gym teacher) is staring at me like "WTF?! What have you done with the real Rez??" Needless to say it was a one-time freak event.
Bah, Vulcans could never play baseball; they'd be too caught up in the stats! It'd be exactly like Gene Mauch and the Angels -- everything done right per the stats book, but never, ever would they try anything that was out of spec. It's not the stats that win games; it's the quarter of an inch you reach beyond what your stats say you can. (I love little ball, but Mauch made me crazy.)
:) But the trend was already there -- too much dwelling on details that don't really tell us anything. I want to see the pitcher's presence on the mound, not the zits behind his ear. I want to see the batter's body language, not his chaw-drip. I want to see the runner's balance between the bases, not his crappy haircut. Baseball may be a game of inches and microcosms, but it's first and foremost a game of *balance*, and that means the whole team, seen as a team.
I haven't been where I could get sports TV reception (or even radio reception) in 11 years. Before that, I worked my business hours around Angels games.
I think what happened was that because we COULD do extreme zoom and the like, we DID, whether or not we SHOULD. Football is going that way too -- sometimes after a play that was zoomed in too tight, I find myself thinking "Wha'happened?" because the whole view was too lacking.
True story: for a while I had such bad TV reception that all I could see was shadows. I knew every pitcher by his motion, every batter by his stance -- and none of their faces, cuz I'd never seen 'em. My sister comes in and wants to know why I'm intently watching static. "See here," I tell her with great enthusaism, "this is X on the mound, and Y at bat, and watch how that runner is leaning toward second, etc, etc." She peers closely at the TV, and finally says "I don't see *anything*!!"
Having shamefully RTFA, ISTM that the study assumed that baseball players are rather more homogenous in their performance, and in who gets to see whom in the field, and how that affects individual players, than occurs in reality. I wonder what sort of numbers it would come up with if it accounted for how managers juggle players around?
Gene Mauch's strategy when he managed the Angels was so unvarying and consistent that he probably COULD be reduced to an algorithm.
I don't play the game. And when you're outside of a social structure rather than embroiled in it, it sure gives a different view. I don't have any stake in it; makes it easier to be objective.
... indeed, rather more normal than a lot of slashdotters :) I used to believe much the same as yourself, that it was all learned and society at fault... but after 53 years experience in the world, I've changed my mind [g]
You sound young and full of hormones, nothing unusual about that
Replied to part of your other one somewhere else in the thread, cuz that's where I got inspired. But anyway...
That some women don't KNOW when they're flirting -- I was going to say something similar, that in some cases it's because they're socially not quite all there. I knew geeky girls in high school who I'm quite sure had no idea what they were doing, but they was socially inept in other ways too. I've also known nerdy guys who had zero clue when they were forcing their attentions on an unwilling girl.
So... flirting starts off as hardwired behaviour. (If this weren't so, it wouldn't exist across cultures and species. See my other reply.) Some learn to control and use it; others don't, which probably IS a form of social retardation. What *constitutes* flirting can vary wildly, and that's where cultural influences come in.
Assuming that flirting works the same in humans as it does in dogs -- that is, as a sort of social lubrication where the endgame (at least in one party's mind) is to get laid -- it does serve a purpose: it brings two people into a social situation where sex is acceptable to both of them, rather than only being one party's idea. After all you're more likely to get laid with a cooperative person than with someone bent on escaping!
I am a dog breeder with almost 40 years professional experience. I assure you, dogs (and horses, and chickens, and every other barnyard animal I've observed) FLIRT. Both males and females do it, and it is definitely not learned -- dogs that have been completely isolated from other dogs from 6 weeks old STILL do it. And some are teases, and others are serious. Oddly enough it appears to have very little to do with how much the individual likes or wants sex (in fact the dogs AND bitches that are most bent on getting laid do the least flirting), but rather serves as social lubrication for those that aren't quite sure if they want sex or not.
There is some learned flirting behaviour in dogs, but it's mostly hardwired. You won't typically see radical changes, other than an upsurge in flirting immediately after their first real sex. But as a rule a dog's "flirting style" doesn't change much lifelong.
As to humans -- what sort of flirting a culture finds acceptable or not, and encourages or suppresses -- that can readily override hardwired behaviour in a species as highly tuned to peer pressure as are humans. Barely-pubescent girls in Belize flirt with grown men, because it's socially acceptable there, and a good way to catch a sugar-daddy. The same behaviour in the U.S. would get the girl's ass tanned by both her parents.
In a Puritan community, showing an ankle was considered outrageous flirting. I'd bet most modern Americans wouldn't even *recognise* as flirting behaviour. But that doesn't mean it didn't happen.