Furthermore, the problem isn't that stuff like cell towers and pig farms exist. It's that people who want "ideal neighbourhoods" come into an area that has an established lifestyle, and try to change it to suit themselves.
Did I agree to have MY property's rural aspects destroyed by a big development? Hell no. Yes, the net effect is that my property's *monetary* value goes way up, but its value to MY desired lifestyle, and the very reason I bought it in the first place, are destroyed. And if my business depends on that rural lifestyle, my livelihood can be destroyed as well.
Unfortunately, when there's a fight over this sort of thing, whoever has the most money always wins in the end. I've seen a number of established, fully-legal rural businesses forcibly terminated by the courts, because of the well-heeled B.H. types moving in next door and demanding that things be citified to their liking.
BTW, the mailbox example was a piece of property I was looking at some years ago. It wasn't even anything so pretty that anyone would notice if you had a dump in the front yard -- it was at the very end of the road and right next to the oil lease. Yet the owner before last (an architect) had put all sorts of weird covenants on it, including building a house of a minimum size that exceeded the lot's available buildable space (short of moving an entire hillside).
Come to think of it... given the many disguises that already exist, there's no reason they can't be custom-rigged to look like anything you want. Stuff that instantly come to my twisted mind... a dirigible mooring; Paul Bunyan; Jack's beanstalk; the silver alien dude from The Day the Earth Stood Still... mix and match, or create your own!
The day could come when the novelty would be to disguise a tower as... a tower!!:)
There's one here that I drive by all the time, and even tho I'm a bit of a tree freak, it just looked like a mildly-odd-shaped evergreen (not obviously different from a redwood that's been trimmed up a bit). It didn't draw my notice enough to realise it was a fake tree, until an identical specimen sprouted across the freeway from the first one. Whoa, "Jack and the Beanstalk" isn't fiction!!:)
Such links also fuck up my existing NYT cookie, so it forgets who I am until I manually log in again. And since this sort of almost-linkspam has become a regular thing here, methinks from now on I'll just extract my own damn links from those provided, thank you.
BTW I've had my NYT login for 8 years now, and it is absolutely harmless. Why it gets the brunt of the "We hate logins" crowd is beyond me, especially since it's a fair bet that most of 'em have a login ID for/. and many other such sites.
Do this. Don't do that. Stay back of line. Where's tax receipt? Fill out form. Let's see license. Submit six copies. Exit only. No left turn. No right turn. Queue up to pay fine. Take back and get stamped. Drop dead--but first get permit.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
If you want Beverly Hills, stay in B.H. Don't all move out to the country together, then try to make it into B.H. -- all that does is destroy the rural character that made it an attractive place to live in the first place.
In fact, we LIKE our local trailer trash and their junkyard, because hopefully they'll make it look bad to B.H. types, so they'll go build their fancy custom homes somewhere else, where they won't negatively impact OUR rural lifestyle.
The problem with "neighbour control" is that it tends to snowball. Today you can't have a pig farm, tomorrow you can't have horses or put up a barn, next year you're required to landscape your property with N-many trees and X-much lawn (do they offer to pay your increased water bills? hell no!), and the year after that you're forced to ALWAYS keep your non-running car in the garage (don't have a garage? Tough, you may be required to build one.) Yes, ALL of these are realworld scenarios I've either actually encountered, or have seen proposed.
Most bizarre case I've seen, even the colour of your MAILBOX was controlled. And this was clear out in the boonies, as Los Angeles County goes, with exactly ONE neighbour in sight.
The palm-tree variety would be an amusing novelty here, since even tho I'm in SoCal, I'm also in the high desert where palms tend to freeze to death. I'd get a lot of people asking how I got the damn thing to grow here.:)
And properly placed, it could be useful for shade, too. (We never have enough trees, real or otherwise.)
And for $28k a year, they could enforest my back lot... in fact, where do I sign up? I've got 10 acres and NO neighbours!
Don't know about now, but I remember when I was a kid in Montana (1960s), local folks would bring booze in from Canada, because it was so much cheaper there than in the U.S. Most likely a difference in how it was taxed. (No idea what the price diffs are now, tho.)
I know a guy who sometimes quotes it out of the blue, which for some unknown reason causes everyone in earshot to fall down laughing. I guess we're easily amused:)
Anyway, after posting that (naturally:) I went looking, and seems the earliest documentable attribution is to a Jim Harkins' Usenet sig in 1993, but the article I found thought it might have been "from Emo Phillips appearing on a show such as Friday Night Live, the late-night comedy show which was the UK version of the US Saturday Night Live, back in the latter half of the 1980s." http://www.horrible.demon.co.uk/die_peacefully_in_ my_sleep.htm
Maybe taglines should be blackboxed too;)
[now let's see if/.'s stupid URL mangling bug is fixed.. they look normal in preview, die on posting]
I *am* a U.S. taxpayer. However, despite your post being possibly sarcasm, that's not a bad point. The weather data we collect and provide is also available to "them damn foreigners". It therefore occurs to me that such services should count for something in the balance of trade and/or debt, or at the very least as international charity.
KNBC in Los Angeles has used AccuWeather for a long time, and I watched their evening news for over a decade, so my observation of their *consistent* INaccuracy goes back a LONG ways. I have a suspicion that they just plug a limited dataset into a formula, and whatever it automagically spits out is what they sell. I have come to doubt it's ever vetted by a human, because even a halfway experienced amateur can do better (I certainly do).
If it weren't that "clear and sunny" applies to SoCal 9 months a year, their record would be even worse!
I was thinking about what sort of marketing it takes to sell such a product to the TV news, and it has to revolve around "shiny things attract more eyeballs, which will increase your advertising revenue", hence all their nifty-looking but useless graphics. It sure as hell doesn't derive from "give your viewers a BETTER product".
KABC still has two for-really meteorologists on staff, and while they're not 100% either, they sure as hell get it right a lot more often than any of the commercial weather services I've seen.
One of the channels I watched in Montana in the late 1970s had a weather guy who was remarkably good; in fact, I learned to make accurate forecasts largely from watching this guy. Then about 1980 the station decided to bring in one of the early "weather services" (I forget its name) and accuracy went down the toilet. I know they got a lot of complaints from viewers, but it stayed regardless.
I'm not sure if that's the case I was thinking of or not?? A good sound ruling, tho. The text of laws, regulations, and similar stuff that public process has generated and the public needs to know, should in no way be encumbered.
In my observation, none of the commercial weather services that feed broadcast-TV are anything to brag about, but AccuWeather is the very WORST weather forecasting service I have ever seen. When I say above that a WAG is more likely to be accurate, I am not exaggerating. (Especially noticeable to me, since I'm a pretty good amateur forecaster, and am very seldom surprised by the weather.)
I very much wish broadcast services would go back to the era of having a real meteorologist on staff, rather than a mediocre comic who moonlights by reading off today's AccuWeather forecast. ("Fritz said it would be like this!")
Is there any centralized listing of ALL the wacky bills introduced by congresscritters, whether they were passed, killed in committee, or whatever their fate?
ISTM that a better gauge of a congresscritter's mindset is not how many of his bills get passed, nor how he votes on others' bills, but rather, what looney ideas he himself comes up with.
1.In several of these activities, such as schools and the police, the stated goals of the public organization is to offer services at least as good as their private conterparts, but for no cost whatsoever to the consumer of the service."
Well, no. My tax dollars already paid for those "free" school and police services. Just as in this case, my tax dollars have already paid for the "free" NOAA data.
From TFA: Santorum made similar arguments April 14 when introducing his bill. He also said expanded federal services threaten the livelihoods of private weather companies.
Since when does the government owe any corporation a living? If the corporation can't find a market and compete within it, that's just tough shit.
But back to your point -- this bill is the exact equivalent of banning "free" public schools, because they "unfairly compete" with tuition-based private schools.
More from TFA: "It is not an easy prospect for a business to attract advertisers, subscribers or investors when the government is providing
similar products and services for free," Santorum said.
Evidently that market must be pretty damned good even with the NOAA's "free competition" -- otherwise how the hell did AccuWeather and its kin become multi-billion dollar businesses in the first place??
More from TFA: AccuWeather has been an especially vocal critic of the weather service and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration. The company has accused the federal agencies of withholding data on hurricanes and other hazards, and failing to ensure that employees don't feed upcoming forecasts to favored investors in farming and energy markets.
This from the very worst weather service I have ever seen in my 50 years on the planet. Even wild-assed guessing is more accurate than their forecasts!!
You'd think, but haven't some states passed laws to the effect that the only way to READ their legal code is by way of a lawyer? (It was tangled up with copyright somehow, but that was the net effect -- no more public access to the legal code. I forget the details.)
Not only that, but AccuWeather is by far the most INACCURATE weather service I've ever seen. When I see some TV news channel touting their AccuWeather forecast, I know I might as well change the channel, because if their forecast CAN be wrong, it WILL be.
Point being, if the only way to get NOAA data is secondhand, filtered through some commercial forecaster of dubious competence, people who rely on accurate weather forecasting are going to suffer for it.
As an alternative bill, I suggest that commercial entities like AccuWeather be required to gather their own data, at their own expense, and be forbidden from using taxpayer-funded services like NOAA.
And now that you mention it... doesn't the copyright on the DATA in the photo belong to the person who CREATED the photo??
So isn't Nikon's encryption preventing you from accessing your own data, on which YOU own the copyright...??
How is decrypting your own data, on which you own the copyright, against the DMCA?
Now, reverse-engineering the encryption itself might be another argument, but ISTM that Nikon's encryption of YOUR data, thus preventing YOU from accessing YOUR data in the manner of YOUR choosing, might be unlawful. (At least until Trusted Computing rules all...)
[Yes, I RTFA, and various ones linked therefrom. My brain hurts.]
I use old Netscape 3.04 myself, with images and js both disabled. Ad banners? Popups?? what are you talking about??:)
A lot of what I like about this setup is exactly what attracts other folks to textmode browsers -- it's simple, fast, seldom misbehaves, and never annoys me with useless junk.
BTW I dragged home elinks a while back, but my first attempt to use it... er, well, it refused to run.... I'd hate to have to RTFM!!:)
But try it with higher compression -- acto ACDSee, your image is only compressed about 8%, which is why it still looks so good. I think the parent's point was -- that's about as much compression as you can do in Photoshop before you get a lot of those icky "cubic-looking" artifacts (I forget the proper name for 'em).
I use Corel Photopaint for JPGs -- at the same *visual* quality they are on average about 1/3rd smaller than Photoshop output, with fewer compression artifacts, and the more-compressed images don't have that nasty "cubic" look.
Also, if you have to resave a JPG, Photopaint doesn't seem to damage the file as much as other editors do after multiple saves.
Slashdot Mirror
Bingo!! Exactly what I was ranting about.
Furthermore, the problem isn't that stuff like cell towers and pig farms exist. It's that people who want "ideal neighbourhoods" come into an area that has an established lifestyle, and try to change it to suit themselves.
Did I agree to have MY property's rural aspects destroyed by a big development? Hell no. Yes, the net effect is that my property's *monetary* value goes way up, but its value to MY desired lifestyle, and the very reason I bought it in the first place, are destroyed. And if my business depends on that rural lifestyle, my livelihood can be destroyed as well.
Unfortunately, when there's a fight over this sort of thing, whoever has the most money always wins in the end. I've seen a number of established, fully-legal rural businesses forcibly terminated by the courts, because of the well-heeled B.H. types moving in next door and demanding that things be citified to their liking.
BTW, the mailbox example was a piece of property I was looking at some years ago. It wasn't even anything so pretty that anyone would notice if you had a dump in the front yard -- it was at the very end of the road and right next to the oil lease. Yet the owner before last (an architect) had put all sorts of weird covenants on it, including building a house of a minimum size that exceeded the lot's available buildable space (short of moving an entire hillside).
LOL!! Or better yet, if you live in say, Alaska :)
... mix and match, or create your own!
:)
Come to think of it... given the many disguises that already exist, there's no reason they can't be custom-rigged to look like anything you want. Stuff that instantly come to my twisted mind... a dirigible mooring; Paul Bunyan; Jack's beanstalk; the silver alien dude from The Day the Earth Stood Still
The day could come when the novelty would be to disguise a tower as... a tower!!
There's one here that I drive by all the time, and even tho I'm a bit of a tree freak, it just looked like a mildly-odd-shaped evergreen (not obviously different from a redwood that's been trimmed up a bit). It didn't draw my notice enough to realise it was a fake tree, until an identical specimen sprouted across the freeway from the first one. :)
Whoa, "Jack and the Beanstalk" isn't fiction!!
Such links also fuck up my existing NYT cookie, so it forgets who I am until I manually log in again. And since this sort of almost-linkspam has become a regular thing here, methinks from now on I'll just extract my own damn links from those provided, thank you.
/. and many other such sites.
BTW I've had my NYT login for 8 years now, and it is absolutely harmless. Why it gets the brunt of the "We hate logins" crowd is beyond me, especially since it's a fair bet that most of 'em have a login ID for
Do this. Don't do that. Stay back of line. Where's tax receipt? Fill out form. Let's see license. Submit six copies. Exit only. No left turn. No right turn. Queue up to pay fine. Take back and get stamped. Drop dead--but first get permit.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
[Sadly, he was exactly correct.]
[rant voice="farmboy"]
If you want Beverly Hills, stay in B.H. Don't all move out to the country together, then try to make it into B.H. -- all that does is destroy the rural character that made it an attractive place to live in the first place.
In fact, we LIKE our local trailer trash and their junkyard, because hopefully they'll make it look bad to B.H. types, so they'll go build their fancy custom homes somewhere else, where they won't negatively impact OUR rural lifestyle.
The problem with "neighbour control" is that it tends to snowball. Today you can't have a pig farm, tomorrow you can't have horses or put up a barn, next year you're required to landscape your property with N-many trees and X-much lawn (do they offer to pay your increased water bills? hell no!), and the year after that you're forced to ALWAYS keep your non-running car in the garage (don't have a garage? Tough, you may be required to build one.) Yes, ALL of these are realworld scenarios I've either actually encountered, or have seen proposed.
Most bizarre case I've seen, even the colour of your MAILBOX was controlled. And this was clear out in the boonies, as Los Angeles County goes, with exactly ONE neighbour in sight.
The palm-tree variety would be an amusing novelty here, since even tho I'm in SoCal, I'm also in the high desert where palms tend to freeze to death. I'd get a lot of people asking how I got the damn thing to grow here. :)
And properly placed, it could be useful for shade, too. (We never have enough trees, real or otherwise.)
And for $28k a year, they could enforest my back lot... in fact, where do I sign up? I've got 10 acres and NO neighbours!
Don't know about now, but I remember when I was a kid in Montana (1960s), local folks would bring booze in from Canada, because it was so much cheaper there than in the U.S. Most likely a difference in how it was taxed. (No idea what the price diffs are now, tho.)
Good insights and advice. Saved for reference.
Just curious, what else is on your "ban list", and why?
(And I wholly agree that such customer-hostile companies should do without our money!)
He suffered a fatal system error. ;)
I know a guy who sometimes quotes it out of the blue, which for some unknown reason causes everyone in earshot to fall down laughing. I guess we're easily amused :)
:) I went looking, and seems the earliest documentable attribution is to a Jim Harkins' Usenet sig in 1993, but the article I found thought it might have been "from Emo Phillips appearing on a show such as Friday Night Live, the late-night comedy show which was the UK version of the US Saturday Night Live, back in the latter half of the 1980s."_ my_sleep.htm
;)
/.'s stupid URL mangling bug is fixed.. they look normal in preview, die on posting]
Anyway, after posting that (naturally
http://www.horrible.demon.co.uk/die_peacefully_in
Maybe taglines should be blackboxed too
[now let's see if
Oh man... I was just thinking of posting that very quote!
(Where the heck is it from originally, anyway??)
And remember what happened to ol' Luke about two seconds after HE tries using that line...
I *am* a U.S. taxpayer. However, despite your post being possibly sarcasm, that's not a bad point. The weather data we collect and provide is also available to "them damn foreigners". It therefore occurs to me that such services should count for something in the balance of trade and/or debt, or at the very least as international charity.
KNBC in Los Angeles has used AccuWeather for a long time, and I watched their evening news for over a decade, so my observation of their *consistent* INaccuracy goes back a LONG ways. I have a suspicion that they just plug a limited dataset into a formula, and whatever it automagically spits out is what they sell. I have come to doubt it's ever vetted by a human, because even a halfway experienced amateur can do better (I certainly do).
If it weren't that "clear and sunny" applies to SoCal 9 months a year, their record would be even worse!
I was thinking about what sort of marketing it takes to sell such a product to the TV news, and it has to revolve around "shiny things attract more eyeballs, which will increase your advertising revenue", hence all their nifty-looking but useless graphics. It sure as hell doesn't derive from "give your viewers a BETTER product".
KABC still has two for-really meteorologists on staff, and while they're not 100% either, they sure as hell get it right a lot more often than any of the commercial weather services I've seen.
One of the channels I watched in Montana in the late 1970s had a weather guy who was remarkably good; in fact, I learned to make accurate forecasts largely from watching this guy. Then about 1980 the station decided to bring in one of the early "weather services" (I forget its name) and accuracy went down the toilet. I know they got a lot of complaints from viewers, but it stayed regardless.
I'm not sure if that's the case I was thinking of or not?? A good sound ruling, tho. The text of laws, regulations, and similar stuff that public process has generated and the public needs to know, should in no way be encumbered.
In my observation, none of the commercial weather services that feed broadcast-TV are anything to brag about, but AccuWeather is the very WORST weather forecasting service I have ever seen. When I say above that a WAG is more likely to be accurate, I am not exaggerating. (Especially noticeable to me, since I'm a pretty good amateur forecaster, and am very seldom surprised by the weather.)
I very much wish broadcast services would go back to the era of having a real meteorologist on staff, rather than a mediocre comic who moonlights by reading off today's AccuWeather forecast. ("Fritz said it would be like this!")
Is there any centralized listing of ALL the wacky bills introduced by congresscritters, whether they were passed, killed in committee, or whatever their fate?
ISTM that a better gauge of a congresscritter's mindset is not how many of his bills get passed, nor how he votes on others' bills, but rather, what looney ideas he himself comes up with.
Well, no. My tax dollars already paid for those "free" school and police services. Just as in this case, my tax dollars have already paid for the "free" NOAA data.
From TFA: Santorum made similar arguments April 14 when introducing his bill. He also said expanded federal services threaten the livelihoods of private weather companies.
Since when does the government owe any corporation a living? If the corporation can't find a market and compete within it, that's just tough shit.
But back to your point -- this bill is the exact equivalent of banning "free" public schools, because they "unfairly compete" with tuition-based private schools.
More from TFA: "It is not an easy prospect for a business to attract advertisers, subscribers or investors when the government is providing similar products and services for free," Santorum said.
Evidently that market must be pretty damned good even with the NOAA's "free competition" -- otherwise how the hell did AccuWeather and its kin become multi-billion dollar businesses in the first place??
More from TFA: AccuWeather has been an especially vocal critic of the weather service and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The company has accused the federal agencies of withholding data on hurricanes and other hazards, and failing to ensure that employees don't feed upcoming forecasts to favored investors in farming and energy markets.
This from the very worst weather service I have ever seen in my 50 years on the planet. Even wild-assed guessing is more accurate than their forecasts!!
Oh man, now I'm sorry I posted earlier, or I'da used one of today's mod points on your post!
;)
[eyeing nym] You might be the man for the job, too
You'd think, but haven't some states passed laws to the effect that the only way to READ their legal code is by way of a lawyer? (It was tangled up with copyright somehow, but that was the net effect -- no more public access to the legal code. I forget the details.)
Not only that, but AccuWeather is by far the most INACCURATE weather service I've ever seen. When I see some TV news channel touting their AccuWeather forecast, I know I might as well change the channel, because if their forecast CAN be wrong, it WILL be.
Point being, if the only way to get NOAA data is secondhand, filtered through some commercial forecaster of dubious competence, people who rely on accurate weather forecasting are going to suffer for it.
As an alternative bill, I suggest that commercial entities like AccuWeather be required to gather their own data, at their own expense, and be forbidden from using taxpayer-funded services like NOAA.
And now that you mention it... doesn't the copyright on the DATA in the photo belong to the person who CREATED the photo??
So isn't Nikon's encryption preventing you from accessing your own data, on which YOU own the copyright...??
How is decrypting your own data, on which you own the copyright, against the DMCA?
Now, reverse-engineering the encryption itself might be another argument, but ISTM that Nikon's encryption of YOUR data, thus preventing YOU from accessing YOUR data in the manner of YOUR choosing, might be unlawful. (At least until Trusted Computing rules all...)
[Yes, I RTFA, and various ones linked therefrom. My brain hurts.]
I use old Netscape 3.04 myself, with images and js both disabled. Ad banners? Popups?? what are you talking about?? :)
:)
A lot of what I like about this setup is exactly what attracts other folks to textmode browsers -- it's simple, fast, seldom misbehaves, and never annoys me with useless junk.
BTW I dragged home elinks a while back, but my first attempt to use it... er, well, it refused to run.... I'd hate to have to RTFM!!
Good tip, thanks. I've noticed large swaths of red in particular refuse to compress gracefully!
But try it with higher compression -- acto ACDSee, your image is only compressed about 8%, which is why it still looks so good. I think the parent's point was -- that's about as much compression as you can do in Photoshop before you get a lot of those icky "cubic-looking" artifacts (I forget the proper name for 'em).
I use Corel Photopaint for JPGs -- at the same *visual* quality they are on average about 1/3rd smaller than Photoshop output, with fewer compression artifacts, and the more-compressed images don't have that nasty "cubic" look.
Also, if you have to resave a JPG, Photopaint doesn't seem to damage the file as much as other editors do after multiple saves.