First off, I don't whine. I have however been known to rant. Second off, I never whine about capatalism. I do take issue with sports that try to extort that that 2 cents they can find a way to wring from their fanbase. While some of the actual numbers may be up, much of this is due to many of the newer, higher capacity stadiums. As a percentage of the seats available, attendance is not on the rise. It is on the decline. Your local stadium may be an exception to this, but ours certainly isn't. Hence all the give ways, free child tickets, etc. They have to find a way to cover the outlay for those nifty new stadiums. Instead of lowering the ticket and concession prices to regularly fill the stadium, they continue to raise the prices, which continues to shrink the number of people who can afford to attend which causes them to raise the prices. It's a bad cycle to be caught it. Part of it is the players.
Do I think they should be paid fairly? Of course. Do I think they deserve as much as they get? No way in hell. And after some these most recent strikes? Yes, I reserve the right to call them whiny wimps. Instead of striking for lower ticket prices or any number of other things, they strike so that the top name players can get a few extra millions but the rest of the MLB, farm teams, etc. gets left out. Do I think thats fair? Again, no way. It's complete crap.
The sport doesn't exsit with out the fans. Here's my message to MLB - QUIT SCREWING YOUR FANS!!!!
This will probably offend all the MLB fans out there, but I really just don't care. These guys are already over paid. Attendance is down because the ticket prices and concession prices, which the teams get a cut of, are already far too high. I don't know about where you live, but it's $5 for a dixie cup full of beer here on top of a $45 ticket. That's a bit too steep. Add in a couple of kids, some hotdogs and some cokes, and you can easily spend $300 for crappy seats at the Baseball game. Now they want to try to wring more money out of the fantasy baseball leageues? These guys are going to corporate themselves to death. The new national sport will be soccer soon until the soccer players become overpaid, whiny, wimps too.
Here's my list of things that almost guarantee that I'll leave your site behind, never to look back.
1 - Music - Your taste in music is not mine. Your music sucks! 2 - Pages that don't load - It's usually the page that looks like it has exactly what you were searching for too! 3 - Pages that don't contain the information "as advertised" - you know the ones...you click on a link and it goes to some search page that tries to reset your home page. 4 - Pages that are more banner ad than web page - Get over it. No one wants to see that much advertising. 5 - Anything that blinks - Thank god the W3C deprecated the blink tag 6 - Anything that demands I install a plug-in for "the user experience" - espeically those stupid cursors 7 - Anything that spawns pop ads 8 - Anything that doesn't present easy to read and use navigation (www.thetrueagency.com/true.html is a prime example of this) 9 - Anything that doesn't have a sufficient amount of contrast between the text and the background. 10 - Anything that uses more than 5 different fonts on the same page - Its a web site, not a comic book. 11 - Sites that redirect to another redirect - We get the idea that you move - a lot. 12 - Anything that uses more than 6 colors on the same page - It looks like a circus barfed on your page.
I can tell you from the experience of working on a network where the end users have very unwisely been made local admins on their workstation that the *only* thing required for a full spyware infection is a nice little surf around the 'net. This is compounded by the problem that they all seem to have some touch of OCD that compels them to click "OK" on anything thing that wants to install itself despite all of our efforts to educate them.
I will say that it is nice to see someone put quantifable numbers to the things I have long known from practical experience, but this isn't exactly news.
You heard it here first - and you can mod me as troll if you want.
1) Goverment bar codes on our foreheads - well, that might be an exaggeration, but this is sure not far from it. All we need now is an RFID tag....
2) Letters of National Security - Any FBI field supervisor can authorize surveillance on anyone for any reason at any time just by sitting down at a typewriter.
3) Senator Dumbass's bill that you can now no longer post anonymously on the internet if the message is "annoying"
4) Giant databases of spending habits, personal habits, etc. that are being collected and "shared with third parties where appropriate" that are not being purged of data on those deemed innocent when they are done
Roll it all up together, and call me paranoid or alarmist or whatever else you want to call me, but it's the beginnings of a police state. WAKE UP PEOPLE! Societies get the rights they are willing to fight for. Join the EFF - send letters to your elected representatives - deal with this now while it's still naescent. Once it becomes full-blown, it will be far to late. Ask the chinese students at Tienamen square what's it's like standing up to an oppressive regieme.
There is a rather large african bird that runs and pack hunts on the African plains even now. I'm sure that one of you will know the name of it, as it escapes me at the moment. It is quite feared in the regions it is known to inhabit because it currently has the rather uncomfortable habit of killing and eating members of our species. People joke about the dragon saying "Humans...yes...I like them. They're crunchy and taste good with ketchup." However, we often forget that being slow, weak, and unarmed (compared to other species and their natural equipment) that we make a tempting meal for a great many things. Since this is true of modern man, even with all of our technology (googling on "man killed by bear" brings up at least 10 pages), this must have been even more true of our early ancestors.
The whole reason that we consider a 30.06 superior to a flint tipped spear or big stick is because it can kill more stuff before that stuff can kill us. I can only imagine what it would have been like to try to fight of a predator armed only with the most basic implements. This leads me to think that early man was on the menu rather often. While this may sound cold to many of you, we have all benefitted from it, so don't feel too bad for the early guys. We know that our ancestors evolved quite a bit from looking at the fossil record. What's the big driving factor behind evolution? Predation. Wolves make the deer smarter and faster by culling the weak and stupid. Birds force moths to shift their coloration patterns by eating anything that "stands out". Why do we have these big brains and not a whole lot else? Predation. Since we didn't have fangs or claws or venom, we had to think our way out of being eaten. This selected for intelligence.
One theory has it that we're here because we're loosers. Now, don't squeal...keep reading. We know that early hominds lived in forests. Why? Plenty of food and plenty of cover. The same reasons that modern apes are found in forests. Given the idea that forest is the most desirable habitat, why did early hominds forsake the forest and creep on to the plains? It's simple...they didn't leave because they suddenly thought "You know, going out there on the plains where there's no food, no water, and a lot of predators we can't out run sounds like a MARVELOUS idea!" They were driven out. Groups of apes, chimps, etc. war over territory constantly. Early hominids lost a battle to retain their territory and were driven out of the forest and on to the plains because they were loosers. That's right, we're all decended from a big bunch of loosers who made the best of what they had left. Sound familiar??? Being on the plains made forced the evolution of walking upright so that we could see over the top of the grass to see predators coming at us. Once we starting walking around as bipeds instead of knuckle draggers, we had these free hands. With free hands and opposable thumbs, well you can just get into all kinds of trouble can't you.
Given that we have a long history of being dinner, I fail to see why these scientists think it's so odd. It seems emminently logical that some predator made the wounds on the skull.
Let's set aside price. Does anyone know what the power consumption for say 100GB of this vs a 100GB hard drive is? If price weren't a consideration, I might be willing to consider a slight drop in speed, if it meant that my batter would last say 5x as long.
All of these games are inherently dependent on storytelling, which is a function tradionally filled by the DM. Since AI's are not to the point yet that they could tell you a story, your best bet for this is from another human.
That said, I've seen some pretty inventive storytelling from some of the RPG games, but only if you stay on or at least near the main quest line. If you deviate from it too much the dialog options, quests, etc. just peter out.
I quit paying attention to what the media outlets had to say about a given game a long time ago. If they want me to shell out my hard earned dollars for a new game, here's my drill:
1) There had better be a demo 2) It had better work on my hardware 3) I had better like the demo
Short of that, the game makers can get stuffed. They bought the reviewers off ages ago and every gamer knows it. We don't listen to the hype when we're picking a new game. We either go with a series we know and trust, or we hear via word of mouth from people we know personally that "X" is good or not. The inverse is equally true, if we hear that "X" is bad, we avoid it like the plague.
The resale value of games on Ebay is a better indicator of their relative "goodness". Prime example is a game called "Sacred". It sells for $4 on ebay used. To give you a relative perspecive, a used copy of Diablo brings in $10.
You have two choices other than dumpster diving - one is to buy really quiet components and other is go with fanless watercooling. I can tell you from experience that the fans make a really big difference. I usually buy the best fans I can afford and they usually run under 10-15 dB. It's hard to tell that stuff is even one, especially once you get the case buttoned up.
I have a case fan that I bought that runs at under 10dB - which less literally than a whisper. Keep the HDD and the CD/DVD drives quiet. Use a quiet power supply - yes, they make them - http://www.tweaknews.net/reviews/silenx/index2.php - that one is well under 15dB.
That means that you should be able to have your system built and running at no more than 30dB, if you choose your parts right, which is really really quiet. Closeted away, in a cabinet or some such, and you'll likely not even know it's on.
Here's the deal and these are my thoughts on experience vs. formal education. You can either get your hands dirty doing the work or you can sit in a class room, talk about doing the work, read books about doing the work, and perform some sort of professor guided labs directing at eventually showing you how to do the work.
Now, given that the project you have is going to be of vital, "mission critical", importance, do you want to give it someone who has a track record in doing what you need or someone who's talked about doing what you need for 4 years?
Well, since the entry bar to web hosting is so very low, it's easy for any dufus to set up shop and call himself a hosting company. Heck, I have a 7MB/sec connection to my house. Frankly, it suprises me that more people don't have problems with hosting.
I've had my share of horror stories - sites down for days and even weeks, nimrods in tech support that don't even know which side of a keyboard goes up, the free consulting I've had to do to get my site(s) back on line, the couple of hacking incidents (neither of which was serious), and the billing issues.
By far, the worst issues I've had have been billing issues. I agree with an earlier poster that you should aways get your domain name from a different company than the one that does your hosting. I've seen charges appear on my card for no reason from hosting companies. When you call to ask what it is, it's either implied or you get told outright "Well, it's only $10. Is it really that important?" That's your first clue to find a new hosting company. If you refuse to pay or dispute the charge, they shut your site down. It's little more than blackmail.
Why not have them replicate some existing work? That's usually a good way for folks to get a feel for what's going on. Since the MD5 collision source code got published recently, why not have them try to replicate that?
I have been the beneficiary of several of their infringed upon patents, enjoying the benefits of cheap memory in almost every device I own. Still, I think that the technology would have gotten much futher had Rambus licensed the patents.
I have to say that most of the worst drivers I've seen here in the states are from overseas. Having been overseas, I've seen how people drive. Bangkok, Italy, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Mexico City - just to name a few. The problem is that these people learned to drive in these places where driving habits are truly atrocious and the come here, bringing their habits with them. Once they get a license, they drive here just like they did back home. While their habits might not have caused traffic problems back where-ever-they-came-from, they certainly aren't what drivers here expect. The biggest problem is not that they themselves get into wrecks but that they cause them by people trying to avoid them.
Here in the states we don't allow farm animals or draft animals on the road except in the most rural of areas. It's certainly not something you'd see downtown in a major metropolis. Yet even elephants are not all that uncommon in downtown Bangkok. Talk about a traffic snarl. We also tend not to tolerate pedestrians in the road either. We build these things called "sidewalks" and we insist that people use them. Yet most places, pedestrians swarm amongst the traffic. Nor do we tolerate the swerving to avoid such obstacles. You have a lane, stay in it. We also tend to build wide fairly straight roads and to keep them up pretty well, considering how many miles of road we have.
I do agree with you that it is far too easy for people to get a driver's license. While all of the street signs (things like "No right on red") are in english, it's not a requirement that you even be able to read much less read english in order to get a driver's license. How are you supposed to obey the sign if you can't read it? In many states, the exams are given in multiple languages even though all the signage is only in one - English.
I'm not sure about where you live, but bankruptcy doesn't always clear all debt. Some specific forms of debt are excluded and this often includes debt incurred by law suits - particulary criminal suits, student loans, and other specific forms of debt. If there is a lawyer out there who knows for sure, please pipe up, since IANAL. It may well be the case that he'll owe them that $11 mil until the day he dies. I wouldn't write this off just yet.
Wouldn't the fact that you are actually "approaching C" in increasing increments imply that you are indeed going faster? While I am aware that most physicists assume that as your speed reaches C, your weight increases porportionately, however, the closer one gets to C, the faster you are moving.
C is the constast for the *speed* of light and speed by definition implies movement. Speed = Distance / Time.
Having had end users crack into closed hard drives on their own, I'm thinking that having a window in the blasted thing will just encourage them to "open the window".
Windows Box - Anti-Spyware Program, Anti-Pop Program, Anti-Virus Program, Patch Management Client, Anti-Hacking Program (only allows approved exectuables), Various Domain Policies to stop the spread of various nasties
OSX Server - Been up for nearly 2 years straight, No anti-virus, no anti-spyware, no popup blocker, OS handles it's own patch managment sufficiently well that we haven't felt the need to add patch management to it
FreeBSD Servers - Been up for over 18 months - only AV is on mail gateway and it's screening email before it gets passed to the Exchange server. Patches handled manually
Gentoo Linux Servers - Been up for over a year - still doesn't have all the crap on the Windows PC
What's the big difference? Well, lets see...the PC hasn't been up for a year. It gets 30 day maintenance reboots since that keeps it from getting grumpy. It has been restored from tape at least once because something managed to snake its way past all of our nifty little extra goodies, hence the "approved executables" stuff that's on it now.
Hmmm....Let's see...what's more secure? The thing you need 47 other products to secure or the thing that works well out of the box because problems with the OS actually get fixed.
I'm also wary of where Microsoft's numbers come from. See Microsoft has this nasty habit of calling things "undocumented features" instead of actually fixing them. "Undocumented features" aren't bugs and don't necessarily need to be counted or even patched, even though the same hack that I used to force a privilege escalation exploit has worked from NT to XP. However, according to Microsoft it's still "not a bug" and "not sufficiently troublesome to enough of our customers" to bother patching.
While this is midly amusing and something of a curiousity (much the same as a two-headed freak), I fail to see why this is "news". Surely, if he has that much time to program regex, he can find a use far more beneficial to the planet.
Slashdot Mirror
First off, I don't whine. I have however been known to rant. Second off, I never whine about capatalism. I do take issue with sports that try to extort that that 2 cents they can find a way to wring from their fanbase. While some of the actual numbers may be up, much of this is due to many of the newer, higher capacity stadiums. As a percentage of the seats available, attendance is not on the rise. It is on the decline. Your local stadium may be an exception to this, but ours certainly isn't. Hence all the give ways, free child tickets, etc. They have to find a way to cover the outlay for those nifty new stadiums. Instead of lowering the ticket and concession prices to regularly fill the stadium, they continue to raise the prices, which continues to shrink the number of people who can afford to attend which causes them to raise the prices. It's a bad cycle to be caught it. Part of it is the players.
Do I think they should be paid fairly? Of course. Do I think they deserve as much as they get? No way in hell. And after some these most recent strikes? Yes, I reserve the right to call them whiny wimps. Instead of striking for lower ticket prices or any number of other things, they strike so that the top name players can get a few extra millions but the rest of the MLB, farm teams, etc. gets left out. Do I think thats fair? Again, no way. It's complete crap.
The sport doesn't exsit with out the fans. Here's my message to MLB - QUIT SCREWING YOUR FANS!!!!
2 cents,
Queen B
If it doubles every 10 months, in about 8 years we should no longer have enough hard drive space to store it.
2 cents,
Queen B
Wow! So it really does exist...I just thought it was movie...
2 cents,
Queen B
This will probably offend all the MLB fans out there, but I really just don't care. These guys are already over paid. Attendance is down because the ticket prices and concession prices, which the teams get a cut of, are already far too high. I don't know about where you live, but it's $5 for a dixie cup full of beer here on top of a $45 ticket. That's a bit too steep. Add in a couple of kids, some hotdogs and some cokes, and you can easily spend $300 for crappy seats at the Baseball game. Now they want to try to wring more money out of the fantasy baseball leageues? These guys are going to corporate themselves to death. The new national sport will be soccer soon until the soccer players become overpaid, whiny, wimps too.
2 cents,
Queen B
50 milliseconds huh?
Here's my list of things that almost guarantee that I'll leave your site behind, never to look back.
1 - Music - Your taste in music is not mine. Your music sucks!
2 - Pages that don't load - It's usually the page that looks like it has exactly what you were searching for too!
3 - Pages that don't contain the information "as advertised" - you know the ones...you click on a link and it goes to some search page that tries to reset your home page.
4 - Pages that are more banner ad than web page - Get over it. No one wants to see that much advertising.
5 - Anything that blinks - Thank god the W3C deprecated the blink tag
6 - Anything that demands I install a plug-in for "the user experience" - espeically those stupid cursors
7 - Anything that spawns pop ads
8 - Anything that doesn't present easy to read and use navigation (www.thetrueagency.com/true.html is a prime example of this)
9 - Anything that doesn't have a sufficient amount of contrast between the text and the background.
10 - Anything that uses more than 5 different fonts on the same page - Its a web site, not a comic book.
11 - Sites that redirect to another redirect - We get the idea that you move - a lot.
12 - Anything that uses more than 6 colors on the same page - It looks like a circus barfed on your page.
2 cents,
Queen B
I can tell you from the experience of working on a network where the end users have very unwisely been made local admins on their workstation that the *only* thing required for a full spyware infection is a nice little surf around the 'net. This is compounded by the problem that they all seem to have some touch of OCD that compels them to click "OK" on anything thing that wants to install itself despite all of our efforts to educate them.
I will say that it is nice to see someone put quantifable numbers to the things I have long known from practical experience, but this isn't exactly news.
2 cents,
Queen B
You heard it here first - and you can mod me as troll if you want.
1) Goverment bar codes on our foreheads - well, that might be an exaggeration, but this is sure not far from it. All we need now is an RFID tag....
2) Letters of National Security - Any FBI field supervisor can authorize surveillance on anyone for any reason at any time just by sitting down at a typewriter.
3) Senator Dumbass's bill that you can now no longer post anonymously on the internet if the message is "annoying"
4) Giant databases of spending habits, personal habits, etc. that are being collected and "shared with third parties where appropriate" that are not being purged of data on those deemed innocent when they are done
Roll it all up together, and call me paranoid or alarmist or whatever else you want to call me, but it's the beginnings of a police state. WAKE UP PEOPLE! Societies get the rights they are willing to fight for. Join the EFF - send letters to your elected representatives - deal with this now while it's still naescent. Once it becomes full-blown, it will be far to late. Ask the chinese students at Tienamen square what's it's like standing up to an oppressive regieme.
2 cents,
Queen B
There is a rather large african bird that runs and pack hunts on the African plains even now. I'm sure that one of you will know the name of it, as it escapes me at the moment. It is quite feared in the regions it is known to inhabit because it currently has the rather uncomfortable habit of killing and eating members of our species. People joke about the dragon saying "Humans...yes...I like them. They're crunchy and taste good with ketchup." However, we often forget that being slow, weak, and unarmed (compared to other species and their natural equipment) that we make a tempting meal for a great many things. Since this is true of modern man, even with all of our technology (googling on "man killed by bear" brings up at least 10 pages), this must have been even more true of our early ancestors.
The whole reason that we consider a 30.06 superior to a flint tipped spear or big stick is because it can kill more stuff before that stuff can kill us. I can only imagine what it would have been like to try to fight of a predator armed only with the most basic implements. This leads me to think that early man was on the menu rather often. While this may sound cold to many of you, we have all benefitted from it, so don't feel too bad for the early guys. We know that our ancestors evolved quite a bit from looking at the fossil record. What's the big driving factor behind evolution? Predation. Wolves make the deer smarter and faster by culling the weak and stupid. Birds force moths to shift their coloration patterns by eating anything that "stands out". Why do we have these big brains and not a whole lot else? Predation. Since we didn't have fangs or claws or venom, we had to think our way out of being eaten. This selected for intelligence.
One theory has it that we're here because we're loosers. Now, don't squeal...keep reading. We know that early hominds lived in forests. Why? Plenty of food and plenty of cover. The same reasons that modern apes are found in forests. Given the idea that forest is the most desirable habitat, why did early hominds forsake the forest and creep on to the plains? It's simple...they didn't leave because they suddenly thought "You know, going out there on the plains where there's no food, no water, and a lot of predators we can't out run sounds like a MARVELOUS idea!" They were driven out. Groups of apes, chimps, etc. war over territory constantly. Early hominids lost a battle to retain their territory and were driven out of the forest and on to the plains because they were loosers. That's right, we're all decended from a big bunch of loosers who made the best of what they had left. Sound familiar??? Being on the plains made forced the evolution of walking upright so that we could see over the top of the grass to see predators coming at us. Once we starting walking around as bipeds instead of knuckle draggers, we had these free hands. With free hands and opposable thumbs, well you can just get into all kinds of trouble can't you.
Given that we have a long history of being dinner, I fail to see why these scientists think it's so odd. It seems emminently logical that some predator made the wounds on the skull.
2 cents,
Queen B
Let's set aside price. Does anyone know what the power consumption for say 100GB of this vs a 100GB hard drive is? If price weren't a consideration, I might be willing to consider a slight drop in speed, if it meant that my batter would last say 5x as long.
2 cents,
Queen B
All of these games are inherently dependent on storytelling, which is a function tradionally filled by the DM. Since AI's are not to the point yet that they could tell you a story, your best bet for this is from another human.
That said, I've seen some pretty inventive storytelling from some of the RPG games, but only if you stay on or at least near the main quest line. If you deviate from it too much the dialog options, quests, etc. just peter out.
2 cents,
Queen B
I quit paying attention to what the media outlets had to say about a given game a long time ago. If they want me to shell out my hard earned dollars for a new game, here's my drill:
1) There had better be a demo
2) It had better work on my hardware
3) I had better like the demo
Short of that, the game makers can get stuffed. They bought the reviewers off ages ago and every gamer knows it. We don't listen to the hype when we're picking a new game. We either go with a series we know and trust, or we hear via word of mouth from people we know personally that "X" is good or not. The inverse is equally true, if we hear that "X" is bad, we avoid it like the plague.
The resale value of games on Ebay is a better indicator of their relative "goodness".
Prime example is a game called "Sacred". It sells for $4 on ebay used. To give you a relative perspecive, a used copy of Diablo brings in $10.
2 cents,
Queen B
You have two choices other than dumpster diving - one is to buy really quiet components and other is go with fanless watercooling. I can tell you from experience that the fans make a really big difference. I usually buy the best fans I can afford and they usually run under 10-15 dB. It's hard to tell that stuff is even one, especially once you get the case buttoned up.
p - that one is well under 15dB.
. It works without a fan at all but is dependent on the case fan/cooling.
I have a case fan that I bought that runs at under 10dB - which less literally than a whisper. Keep the HDD and the CD/DVD drives quiet. Use a quiet power supply - yes, they make them - http://www.tweaknews.net/reviews/silenx/index2.ph
This link is to a quiet video card - http://www.endpcnoise.com/cgi-bin/e/zm80d-hp.html
This link is to fanless CPU cooler - http://www.overclockers.com/tips1218/ - uses a pump and water tank.
That means that you should be able to have your system built and running at no more than 30dB, if you choose your parts right, which is really really quiet. Closeted away, in a cabinet or some such, and you'll likely not even know it's on.
2 cents,
Queen B
Here's the deal and these are my thoughts on experience vs. formal education. You can either get your hands dirty doing the work or you can sit in a class room, talk about doing the work, read books about doing the work, and perform some sort of professor guided labs directing at eventually showing you how to do the work.
Now, given that the project you have is going to be of vital, "mission critical", importance, do you want to give it someone who has a track record in doing what you need or someone who's talked about doing what you need for 4 years?
2 cents,
Queen B.
Well, since the entry bar to web hosting is so very low, it's easy for any dufus to set up shop and call himself a hosting company. Heck, I have a 7MB/sec connection to my house. Frankly, it suprises me that more people don't have problems with hosting.
I've had my share of horror stories - sites down for days and even weeks, nimrods in tech support that don't even know which side of a keyboard goes up, the free consulting I've had to do to get my site(s) back on line, the couple of hacking incidents (neither of which was serious), and the billing issues.
By far, the worst issues I've had have been billing issues. I agree with an earlier poster that you should aways get your domain name from a different company than the one that does your hosting. I've seen charges appear on my card for no reason from hosting companies. When you call to ask what it is, it's either implied or you get told outright "Well, it's only $10. Is it really that important?" That's your first clue to find a new hosting company. If you refuse to pay or dispute the charge, they shut your site down. It's little more than blackmail.
2 cents,
Queen B
Why not have them replicate some existing work? That's usually a good way for folks to get a feel for what's going on. Since the MD5 collision source code got published recently, why not have them try to replicate that?
2 cents,
Queen B
I wonder what kind of DRM Sony will put on these?
2 cents,
Queen B
I have been the beneficiary of several of their infringed upon patents, enjoying the benefits of cheap memory in almost every device I own. Still, I think that the technology would have gotten much futher had Rambus licensed the patents.
2 cents,
Queen B
I have to say that most of the worst drivers I've seen here in the states are from overseas. Having been overseas, I've seen how people drive. Bangkok, Italy, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Mexico City - just to name a few. The problem is that these people learned to drive in these places where driving habits are truly atrocious and the come here, bringing their habits with them. Once they get a license, they drive here just like they did back home. While their habits might not have caused traffic problems back where-ever-they-came-from, they certainly aren't what drivers here expect. The biggest problem is not that they themselves get into wrecks but that they cause them by people trying to avoid them.
Here in the states we don't allow farm animals or draft animals on the road except in the most rural of areas. It's certainly not something you'd see downtown in a major metropolis. Yet even elephants are not all that uncommon in downtown Bangkok. Talk about a traffic snarl. We also tend not to tolerate pedestrians in the road either. We build these things called "sidewalks" and we insist that people use them. Yet most places, pedestrians swarm amongst the traffic. Nor do we tolerate the swerving to avoid such obstacles. You have a lane, stay in it. We also tend to build wide fairly straight roads and to keep them up pretty well, considering how many miles of road we have.
I do agree with you that it is far too easy for people to get a driver's license. While all of the street signs (things like "No right on red") are in english, it's not a requirement that you even be able to read much less read english in order to get a driver's license. How are you supposed to obey the sign if you can't read it? In many states, the exams are given in multiple languages even though all the signage is only in one - English.
2 cents,
Queen B
I'm not sure about where you live, but bankruptcy doesn't always clear all debt. Some specific forms of debt are excluded and this often includes debt incurred by law suits - particulary criminal suits, student loans, and other specific forms of debt. If there is a lawyer out there who knows for sure, please pipe up, since IANAL. It may well be the case that he'll owe them that $11 mil until the day he dies. I wouldn't write this off just yet.
2 cents,
Queen B
Wouldn't the fact that you are actually "approaching C" in increasing increments imply that you are indeed going faster? While I am aware that most physicists assume that as your speed reaches C, your weight increases porportionately, however, the closer one gets to C, the faster you are moving.
C is the constast for the *speed* of light and speed by definition implies movement. Speed = Distance / Time.
Just a quick thought...
Queen B
Now I can be hit on via IM by every perv on the planet in my own badly bruised native tongue. Just what I needed. *Eye Roll*
How did I ever live with out it?
2 cents,
Queen B
Having had end users crack into closed hard drives on their own, I'm thinking that having a window in the blasted thing will just encourage them to "open the window".
2 cents,
Queen B
Ok, lets look at this objectively....
Windows Box - Anti-Spyware Program, Anti-Pop Program, Anti-Virus Program, Patch Management Client, Anti-Hacking Program (only allows approved exectuables), Various Domain Policies to stop the spread of various nasties
OSX Server - Been up for nearly 2 years straight, No anti-virus, no anti-spyware, no popup blocker, OS handles it's own patch managment sufficiently well that we haven't felt the need to add patch management to it
FreeBSD Servers - Been up for over 18 months - only AV is on mail gateway and it's screening email before it gets passed to the Exchange server. Patches handled manually
Gentoo Linux Servers - Been up for over a year - still doesn't have all the crap on the Windows PC
What's the big difference? Well, lets see...the PC hasn't been up for a year. It gets 30 day maintenance reboots since that keeps it from getting grumpy. It has been restored from tape at least once because something managed to snake its way past all of our nifty little extra goodies, hence the "approved executables" stuff that's on it now.
Hmmm....Let's see...what's more secure? The thing you need 47 other products to secure or the thing that works well out of the box because problems with the OS actually get fixed.
I'm also wary of where Microsoft's numbers come from. See Microsoft has this nasty habit of calling things "undocumented features" instead of actually fixing them. "Undocumented features" aren't bugs and don't necessarily need to be counted or even patched, even though the same hack that I used to force a privilege escalation exploit has worked from NT to XP. However, according to Microsoft it's still "not a bug" and "not sufficiently troublesome to enough of our customers" to bother patching.
2 cents,
Queen B
I bet that goes great with that jockstrap on your head....
2 cents,
Queen B
While this is midly amusing and something of a curiousity (much the same as a two-headed freak), I fail to see why this is "news". Surely, if he has that much time to program regex, he can find a use far more beneficial to the planet.
2 cents,
Queen B