In some states, CCW written tests can be given orally. This exception is meant to accomodate people who don't read or speak the language but blind folks can profit from it.
Shooting requirements are also not necessarily a big deal. If you've never taken a CCW range test, you may not realize just how incredibly easy some are. There's nothing to prevent someone blind from having a helper stand behind them and say "Higher" or "More to the right". I've proved it to myself. I once blindfolded myself and managed to shoot the first two distances of the Texas test without a miss. Only a few more hits are necessary to get a low (but passing) score. However, I must admit that I've only known one blind person who got a concealed carry license. He was "legally blind" and had no problem with the shooting test. He just shot for the center of the fuzzy target and got plenty enough hits to pass.
Finally, I do know one fully blind person confined to a wheelchair who carries a revolver. It's a chopped (almost Fitz-style, for the aficionados in the crowd) large-frame double action loaded with 5-in-1 blanks. He would never try to shoot someone across the room. But if someone were to lay hands on him violently, I feel quite confident that a blank to the chest would be a sufficiently devastating blow as to completely discourage the attacker. For those who fear that someone will just take the gun away from the stupid blind man and use it on him - I'll grant that you have a point. I think it would be hard to sneak up on the guy and the fact that he carries a gun is not something he advertises. He considers the probability of losing the gun to an attacker (who is highly unlikely to know the gun even exists until the first shot is fired) to be so low that he doesn't worry about it. I told him about the MagnaTrigger conversion and I know he considered it but I don't know if he went through with it.
Personally, if I didn't work with computers I'd definitely have at least one revolver with the MagnaTrigger.
Speed violations are a matter of degree when punishment is decided. Ignoring a traffic control device isn't.
Or, to take a different tack, I'd be just as aghast if a car club caught drag racing decided to put special effort into fighting their tickets with a goal of simply overwhelming the system and getting off instead of seeing that justice is done.
Remember, the discussion was about attitudes. I don't hold it against anyone if they fight a ticket because they think they shouldn't have gotten it. I do think there's something very wrong with a mob that shows up in court when they absolutely know they've broken the law and uses their sheer numbers to intimidate a legal infrastructure incapable of simultaneously handling this many people who jump into the fray motivated not by justice but merely by a need to be bullies. I have a huge problem when individual members of that mob then proceed to brag to strangers about how they were able to hammer a judge and get away with a crime.
There's plenty of "unjustified sense of entitlement" to go around. It all irritates me.
There's a large group of motorcyclists who meet up near my home to start their Sunday rides. When they're all assembled, they pull out and block intersections (one uncontrolled, 4 with traffic lights) so that they can get out of town without being split up. If you're anywhere in the neighborhood, you're likely to find yourself sitting at a green light, unable to move unless you want to run over the leather-suited boy-racer sitting in front of you with his hand up.
There's a huge cemetery near my home, just off a freeway. When a funeral procession moves from the freeway to that cemetery, there's always a delay, but you can bypass the whole mess by just staying to the far left and passing the funeral procession (which will be in the right lane approaching the exit.) EXCEPT, of course, when the person being buried is a cop. Then, for some reason that's never in play when a civilian is being buried, the procession escort feels the need to completely shut down the freeway. I've seen it closed for the better part of an hour for NO good reason other than the fact that they want everybody to stop and pay homage to one of their own.
You want to talk about gross negligence? Twice in the last 5 years I've been sitting at a red light, it turns green, I take off, and *then* some idiot on the cross-street comes flying through the red light *behind* me. Twice! (Both times were on New Year's Eve when it gets drunk out early.)
Believe me, I hold no special ill will toward bicyclists. I've seen jerks on the roads in all sorts of situations, operating all sorts of vehicles. I hold them all in equal contempt. That's why I'm seriously considering doing without a car when I retire fairly soon.
I bet you weren't nearly as upset when the local real estate developers got their way.
I see you've read a couple of my posts today.
And made a very wrong assumption. If you're in Houston, you know what the 4th Ward redevelopment was all about. I sat in my office, high up in a building on the southwest corner of downtown, and watched it happen. Every Monday, I'd come in and scan out the window to see how many old folks had gotten burned out over the weekend. When the church burned, I knew that ward was done for.
In fact, I do get a bit upset when I see developers running roughshod over history. But this is Houston. That's the way things are done here. If it's over 50 years old, knock it down and re-develop it. I find that attitude sad, maddening, and shortsighted but it's part of the mindset around here.
(And if your comment about developers wasn't related to my other post in this thread...then...never mind.)
Re:Great, still doesn't fix the Houston problem.
on
The Year of the E-Bicycle
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· Score: 4, Informative
I guess bikers are too insecure to ride in single file, I see packs of them on the weekends riding 4 and 5 deep, taking up half the right lane in their funny outfits, even with a clearly marked bike lane. They run stop lights, and dart out across traffic without hand signals.
What you're describing is very common. However, what irritates me is the undeserved sense of entitlement evidenced by such bechavior, more so than the actual breaking of the law.
Some years ago, a nurse who was tending to my mother in the hospital was making conversation during some lengthy time he was forced to spend in her room due to her condition. The conversation ranged broadly and it eventually came out that he was a weekend cyclist (one of those funny-tight-pants guys) and he regaled us with his account of a recent run-in with the law. It seems that the rural folks where his (apparently rather large) group rides had complained to local law enforcement about the bikers who were running lights, failing to yield, taking up too much road space by riding abreast, etc. The local lawdogs set at a stop sign on their customary route. As was their habit, the entire group simply blew through the sign without stopping. The cops pulled over about 30 of them and wrote tickets.
Come court day, the entire group showed up to fight the tickets. There were a couple of lawyers amongst them. They simply stood up in court and started talking about how they'd fight using some sort of (spurious, it seemed to me) argument that if each rider stopped at the sign, the group would get so strung out that various hazards would be created for both the group and other traffic. In a bit of a mob scene in the tiny traffic court of this tiny, rural courthouse, they vowed to gum up the works with enough paperwork and motions so as to keep the entire city legal staff occupied doing nothing else for as long as possible.
It was a sort of "We're a big enough mob that we can get away with breaking the law" confrontation. The judge grabbed onto a technicality in the first case and simply dismissed them all.
I said all that to say this - If I were part of a mob that managed to break the law and get away with it simply because the mob was big enough to overwhelm the resources of a small town, I'd be pretty embarrassed at getting away with such a thing. This guy wasn't. He was actually *proud* that he was able to get away with breaking the law. He felt that he was such a righteous person for riding a bike that he deserved to be allowed to run stop signs. Now, why on earth does riding a bike make someone a better person? Where do bicyclists get this attitude? I don't get it. I just don't get it. But I do know that I have a very low opinion of bicyclists because of this incident and so many others I've experienced on the road where cyclists seem to have an attitude of "The rules don't apply to us."
I love to ride my bike, but Houston is a city built by politicians with pockets lined from oil companies.
Not exactly.
Houston looks the way it does and sprawls the way it does because it's traditionally been run by real estate developers. There have actually been a couple of points in Houston's history when every single city council seat was simultaneously filled by someone who made their money in real estate.
Thus, we have no zoning. Yes, that's right; except for a few minor ordinances about heavy industry and "adult" businesses, we have essentially no zoning. While we do have private agreements between land owners called "deed restrictions" that, in newer neighborhoods, prevent you from knocking down your house and putting in a used car lot, for the most part you're free to find a sizable plot of land, carve it up, and build what you want. There's almost no central planning and certainly no sense of "development projects should work together" to achieve diverse mobility solutions or any other lofty goal. The point to the development is to build it, sell it, and move on. Thus, we annex more land (the city is theoretically, legally capable of annexing everything all the way up to Dallas) so that more developers can buy out more plots and throw up more cookie-cutter subdivisions. We build gigantic roads to nowhere because someone with money owns some rural land and as soon as a freeway gets out there, they can bulldoze it and build some more cookie-cutter subdivisions. To the developer, the notion of responsibility to a public good is served by putting up another cookie-cutter subdivision, setting aside a bunch of land in the front for strip malls, and then calling it a "planned community." The notion that the sidewalks should actually meet up with each other from block to block, project to project is simply insane to them.
After all, everybody has a car. Right?
I'm about to retire in Houston. For all its warts, I love it. I'm considering doing it without a car and documenting my travails online. Should be an interesting project.
Hint - If you want to live in or successfully visit Houston without a car, your domicile must be within two blocks of a light rail station. We have just one light rail line. Luckily, it passes close to about half of all the things in Houston worth seeing or doing. You can live on that rail line without a car.
If you try to live somewhere else and make do with a bicycle, then you just have a death wish.
In 1939, there was a ubiquitous text-sending technology (that, by the way, requires multiple keystrokes per letter unlike this new texting record-setter who used a QWERTY keyboard) and the best operator at the time could easily send text more than three times as fast as this new record-holder.
Have I got this right?
Harumph. These young whippersnappers, I swear, one of these days they're gonna be convinced they invented the orgasm.
So how does this rate a Slashdot tag other than "NetNegativeTechProgress"?
Child pornography, possession or production, is always illegal.
Good God, man, get your facts straight! I like what you're saying but when you make such a basic error, it reflects poorly on your entire argument.
Child porn is legal in most countries. When you add together the countries in which it is illegal (U.S., France, Canada, etc.) with the countries that theoretically ban all porn (China, India, most Muslim-influenced states), then it's true that for the majority of the world's population, child porn is at least somewhat illegal.
But in most countries, it's legal to possess. In a lesser number, it's legal to sell. There are a few places where it's technically legal to make (though other laws tend to get broken in the process).
I was on the phone with HP Premium Printer Support when the official announcement was made in their office that Carly was leaving.
All hell broke loose. People were screaming, crying, shouting for joy. It sounded like total pandemonium. It sounded like the celebrations of slaves suddenly freed from a cruel master.
It was nearly impossible to finish the call. Having worked under cruel/crazy/incompetent bosses before and known the joy of release when they move on, I couldn't help but be happy for them. HP may have never recovered but for at least a few minutes those poor folks had hope, God bless 'em.
I've yet to see a serious roll out of Unix desktops...
I have. We had two SAs who handled everything on that rollout. I was one of the two. We installed and maintained all software (that was written and pushed to a central server by a different staff). We installed and maintained all equipment, both field and server room. The standard setup was each group was 10 to 15 people. One secretary used a desktop and everybody else had a laptop. All laptop users got an individual laser printer for home use. Each group had two impact printers for forms and one networked laser. Each group connected to their own database server. There were three additional servers that controlled other functions. Every single machine ran SCO OSR 3-point-something. Hardware was IBM for everything.
Us 2 SAs did everything. It didn't matter how small or large the problem, from replacing a USB-to-ethernet dongle to rebuidling a server (I could fully build a server, pulling spare hardware, imaging from tape, and restoring all databases from online backup in under two hours. We had that shit wired, I tell ya!) to taking calls from people who didn't know how to turn off the reveal codes in WordPerfect, we did it all.
Everything that could be scripted was. Our morning checklists and reports took a half hour, tops. On a good day, that was all we had to do all day. On the worst of days, we might work hard. But bad days were rare. We could take our vacations and know that no matter what shit hit the fan, the one of us who was on-site could handle it. We had the wonderful luxury of being able to walk around the user groups and ask people if they needed anything. They almost never did.
Our total user base was about 300 people. So I'd say if things are designed right, 2 people can handle 300 easily.
Of course, there were 25 or so admins and desktop people on the Windows side of the house, taking care of about 1200 users. They ran around looking like they were doing important stuff all the time. And I guess they were. Their stuff broke so much, they were constantly being rewarded for rescuing some project from the jaws of disaster or fixing some irritating problem that had plagued their users for years. Those poor sods hid in their cubicles most of the time; they didn't dare walk among the user population for fear of someone throwing something at them or, at minimum, being constantly harrassed by users pleading "Could you take a quick look at this?"
Our users just did their jobs, working on hardware and software that just worked, reliable as gravity (well, nearly) with no drama at all.
You can see what's coming, can't you?
The higher-ups started wondering aloud why those two SAs over in the corner never seemed to be running around in a panic fixing things. "Don't they have any work to do?" The higher-up attitude toward the Windows guys was completely different. Hell, I remember one of them getting an award for recovering data from a crashed server. They actually rewarded the guy with a certificate and a little ceremony because he had backups, something we took for granted in our little world.
Obviously, it couldn't last. All our apps got re-written to Windows. All the Unix stuff got ashcanned. Our user population got folded in with everyone else and forced to use the standard Windows-image machines.
And we now run around putting out fires with no time to catch our breath.
Man, those were the days. 1 to 150 was a breeze. Nowadays, deskside support is at about the same ratio and we're always on the verge of burnout, always working harder, always falling a little further behind. As much as I love my work (and I do, dearly, love helping alleviate the pain of a user who can't get their work done until I fix something), I'm *seriously* looking forward to retirement.
I see your point but there are other ways to look at the situation.
I'm terrible at pretty much all computer games of any sort. However, I like some shooters. I can turn on God Mode in Serious Sam and then the game completely transforms. There's a certain challenge to seeing how quickly I can kill everything and complete a level. That's not a FPS any more. It becomes a puzzle game. Apparently, I like puzzle games.
But a realistic shooter is, to my mind, a non-starter. I've got too many real guns and I enjoy shooting them far too much to spend any time with a computerized simulation.
if that sort of thing was done intentionally to see how I responded, I might have just kept packing my stuff up...
Then how would you suggest a security audit be done? How else can we find out if someone will violate security policy than by giving them a chance to do exactly that?
I've been subjected to those kinds of audits on several occasions. Yes, they're mildly insulting. But they're also necessary, aren't they?
Why not rent rackspace in some well-connected country not friendly to the one in which you reside? Is it that difficult to set up your own personal proxy with encypted tunnel to and from?
I'm surprised there isn't some entrepeneur out there selling "The "ProxyBox(TM), Your Internet Privacy Solution!" or some such little appliance-box for people to mail off to the bulletproof hosting and colo company of their choice. Venezuala, maybe?
After Richard Nixon misused the agency, Congress slapped the IRS with certain restrictions. To de-politicize the agency, the executive structure was purged of political appointees. All other agencies have a myriad (literally dozens, even at small agencies) of political appointees floating around whose jobs they got because they kissed some politicians ass. The IRS has only two.
There is a "Taxpayer Advocate" office that watches over the agency and is quite effective in getting the word out to Congress and the public when the agency starts being in the least bit abusive. There's a Privacy Office. There's extensive yearly training in on privacy matters. Beyond that, a privacy breach at the IRS gets you hauled away in handcuffs by officers of the Treasury Inspector Generals Office. The union for IRS workers, in fact, complains loud and long that employees are too closely monitored, sometimes being investigated, for example, for unauthorized disclosure of information just because the customer they helped happened to live near them.
If the guy got a bribe, he can report it to the IRS without the slightest worry.
Some posts are overrated at the default posting level. Now, I figure that means they should attract a "Troll" mod or one of the other negatives but I'm not going to assume that anyone who puts "Overrated" on a previously unrated post is up to no good. Maybe they just couldn't see anything else that fit the particular sort of problems they saw in your post.
Note: I'm not trying to be obtuse. I recognize the need for copyright law. But lots of folks who read slashdot don't. Since you're one of the few well-reasoned voices that stands up for anything other than anarchy in this area, I thought I'd invite you to summarize the more basic concepts from your pov. Just a thought.
In my first line, I alluded to a time when AOL didn't violate their own TOS by monitoring private chats. That's where it happened. At one time, it was possible to create private rooms on AOL and talk to other adults about adult things. If you were of a mind to, you could arrange phone calls and meetups. (I'm straight and I was pretty naive but even I was aware that some referred to AOL as "GayOL" back then.)
It all happened around the time that the evil scourge known as AOLs Community Action Team (CATWatch01, may you burn in hell!!) started invading chat rooms and began the completely unregulated enforcement of their incredibly puritan sensibilities by screwing with the accounts of anyone who dared enter an adult-themed room. At about the same time, LEOs started popping up on AOL, too. For a while, until they got better at it, it was drop dead easy to spot the donut-munchers in, say, the "phone sex" room by their immediate, over-enthusiastic responses to your initial IM. And half the time they were 14/f/CA and either a cheerleader or a gymnast.
I ran across the "guys of questionable sexuality" and "some later age teens" but the cops were fundamentally different in their approach. They tried aggressively to get people to make clearly incriminating statements and weren't willing to carry on much of a conversation for very long if you didn't. I remember reading about some upstate New York publicity-hound county prosecutor who had set up a task force of local cops specifically to troll chat rooms and lure men to her jurisdiction so she could prosecute them and, most important, get her face in the papers. At the time, I remember thinking "Gee, I think I've talked to some of those bozos."
At the time, I thought it was funny and sad. Now that I better understand the anti-liberty implications of the police routinely using advanced technology to invade our confidential lives, I just find it scary and infuriating.
What's next? Radar that can see us through the walls of our homes?
I didn't realize they didn't have double jeopardy in Canada.
How many times can a person be tried for the same offense in Canada? Is there a limit? Do prosecutors and courts just keep changing the rules and re-filing charges until they get a conviction?
I'm not being intentionally obtuse, here. I'm legitimately curious.
Slashdot Mirror
A note of explanation -
In some states, CCW written tests can be given orally. This exception is meant to accomodate people who don't read or speak the language but blind folks can profit from it.
Shooting requirements are also not necessarily a big deal. If you've never taken a CCW range test, you may not realize just how incredibly easy some are. There's nothing to prevent someone blind from having a helper stand behind them and say "Higher" or "More to the right". I've proved it to myself. I once blindfolded myself and managed to shoot the first two distances of the Texas test without a miss. Only a few more hits are necessary to get a low (but passing) score. However, I must admit that I've only known one blind person who got a concealed carry license. He was "legally blind" and had no problem with the shooting test. He just shot for the center of the fuzzy target and got plenty enough hits to pass.
Finally, I do know one fully blind person confined to a wheelchair who carries a revolver. It's a chopped (almost Fitz-style, for the aficionados in the crowd) large-frame double action loaded with 5-in-1 blanks. He would never try to shoot someone across the room. But if someone were to lay hands on him violently, I feel quite confident that a blank to the chest would be a sufficiently devastating blow as to completely discourage the attacker. For those who fear that someone will just take the gun away from the stupid blind man and use it on him - I'll grant that you have a point. I think it would be hard to sneak up on the guy and the fact that he carries a gun is not something he advertises. He considers the probability of losing the gun to an attacker (who is highly unlikely to know the gun even exists until the first shot is fired) to be so low that he doesn't worry about it. I told him about the MagnaTrigger conversion and I know he considered it but I don't know if he went through with it.
Personally, if I didn't work with computers I'd definitely have at least one revolver with the MagnaTrigger.
Things harmless at range can kill at contact distance. That's why some blind people with licenses to carry concealed handguns use blanks.
That sounds so completely crazy that I'm going to indulge (believe me, this is a rarity for me) in a rather trollish comeback -
"Cite, please."
Big difference.
Speed violations are a matter of degree when punishment is decided. Ignoring a traffic control device isn't.
Or, to take a different tack, I'd be just as aghast if a car club caught drag racing decided to put special effort into fighting their tickets with a goal of simply overwhelming the system and getting off instead of seeing that justice is done.
Remember, the discussion was about attitudes. I don't hold it against anyone if they fight a ticket because they think they shouldn't have gotten it. I do think there's something very wrong with a mob that shows up in court when they absolutely know they've broken the law and uses their sheer numbers to intimidate a legal infrastructure incapable of simultaneously handling this many people who jump into the fray motivated not by justice but merely by a need to be bullies. I have a huge problem when individual members of that mob then proceed to brag to strangers about how they were able to hammer a judge and get away with a crime.
Most un-pukka, to my mind.
There's plenty of "unjustified sense of entitlement" to go around. It all irritates me.
There's a large group of motorcyclists who meet up near my home to start their Sunday rides. When they're all assembled, they pull out and block intersections (one uncontrolled, 4 with traffic lights) so that they can get out of town without being split up. If you're anywhere in the neighborhood, you're likely to find yourself sitting at a green light, unable to move unless you want to run over the leather-suited boy-racer sitting in front of you with his hand up.
There's a huge cemetery near my home, just off a freeway. When a funeral procession moves from the freeway to that cemetery, there's always a delay, but you can bypass the whole mess by just staying to the far left and passing the funeral procession (which will be in the right lane approaching the exit.) EXCEPT, of course, when the person being buried is a cop. Then, for some reason that's never in play when a civilian is being buried, the procession escort feels the need to completely shut down the freeway. I've seen it closed for the better part of an hour for NO good reason other than the fact that they want everybody to stop and pay homage to one of their own.
You want to talk about gross negligence? Twice in the last 5 years I've been sitting at a red light, it turns green, I take off, and *then* some idiot on the cross-street comes flying through the red light *behind* me. Twice! (Both times were on New Year's Eve when it gets drunk out early.)
Believe me, I hold no special ill will toward bicyclists. I've seen jerks on the roads in all sorts of situations, operating all sorts of vehicles. I hold them all in equal contempt. That's why I'm seriously considering doing without a car when I retire fairly soon.
I see you've read a couple of my posts today.
And made a very wrong assumption. If you're in Houston, you know what the 4th Ward redevelopment was all about. I sat in my office, high up in a building on the southwest corner of downtown, and watched it happen. Every Monday, I'd come in and scan out the window to see how many old folks had gotten burned out over the weekend. When the church burned, I knew that ward was done for.
In fact, I do get a bit upset when I see developers running roughshod over history. But this is Houston. That's the way things are done here. If it's over 50 years old, knock it down and re-develop it. I find that attitude sad, maddening, and shortsighted but it's part of the mindset around here.
(And if your comment about developers wasn't related to my other post in this thread...then...never mind.)
What you're describing is very common. However, what irritates me is the undeserved sense of entitlement evidenced by such bechavior, more so than the actual breaking of the law.
Some years ago, a nurse who was tending to my mother in the hospital was making conversation during some lengthy time he was forced to spend in her room due to her condition. The conversation ranged broadly and it eventually came out that he was a weekend cyclist (one of those funny-tight-pants guys) and he regaled us with his account of a recent run-in with the law. It seems that the rural folks where his (apparently rather large) group rides had complained to local law enforcement about the bikers who were running lights, failing to yield, taking up too much road space by riding abreast, etc. The local lawdogs set at a stop sign on their customary route. As was their habit, the entire group simply blew through the sign without stopping. The cops pulled over about 30 of them and wrote tickets.
Come court day, the entire group showed up to fight the tickets. There were a couple of lawyers amongst them. They simply stood up in court and started talking about how they'd fight using some sort of (spurious, it seemed to me) argument that if each rider stopped at the sign, the group would get so strung out that various hazards would be created for both the group and other traffic. In a bit of a mob scene in the tiny traffic court of this tiny, rural courthouse, they vowed to gum up the works with enough paperwork and motions so as to keep the entire city legal staff occupied doing nothing else for as long as possible.
It was a sort of "We're a big enough mob that we can get away with breaking the law" confrontation. The judge grabbed onto a technicality in the first case and simply dismissed them all.
I said all that to say this - If I were part of a mob that managed to break the law and get away with it simply because the mob was big enough to overwhelm the resources of a small town, I'd be pretty embarrassed at getting away with such a thing. This guy wasn't. He was actually *proud* that he was able to get away with breaking the law. He felt that he was such a righteous person for riding a bike that he deserved to be allowed to run stop signs. Now, why on earth does riding a bike make someone a better person? Where do bicyclists get this attitude? I don't get it. I just don't get it. But I do know that I have a very low opinion of bicyclists because of this incident and so many others I've experienced on the road where cyclists seem to have an attitude of "The rules don't apply to us."
Not exactly.
Houston looks the way it does and sprawls the way it does because it's traditionally been run by real estate developers. There have actually been a couple of points in Houston's history when every single city council seat was simultaneously filled by someone who made their money in real estate.
Thus, we have no zoning. Yes, that's right; except for a few minor ordinances about heavy industry and "adult" businesses, we have essentially no zoning. While we do have private agreements between land owners called "deed restrictions" that, in newer neighborhoods, prevent you from knocking down your house and putting in a used car lot, for the most part you're free to find a sizable plot of land, carve it up, and build what you want. There's almost no central planning and certainly no sense of "development projects should work together" to achieve diverse mobility solutions or any other lofty goal. The point to the development is to build it, sell it, and move on. Thus, we annex more land (the city is theoretically, legally capable of annexing everything all the way up to Dallas) so that more developers can buy out more plots and throw up more cookie-cutter subdivisions. We build gigantic roads to nowhere because someone with money owns some rural land and as soon as a freeway gets out there, they can bulldoze it and build some more cookie-cutter subdivisions. To the developer, the notion of responsibility to a public good is served by putting up another cookie-cutter subdivision, setting aside a bunch of land in the front for strip malls, and then calling it a "planned community." The notion that the sidewalks should actually meet up with each other from block to block, project to project is simply insane to them.
After all, everybody has a car. Right?
I'm about to retire in Houston. For all its warts, I love it. I'm considering doing it without a car and documenting my travails online. Should be an interesting project.
Hint - If you want to live in or successfully visit Houston without a car, your domicile must be within two blocks of a light rail station. We have just one light rail line. Luckily, it passes close to about half of all the things in Houston worth seeing or doing. You can live on that rail line without a car.
If you try to live somewhere else and make do with a bicycle, then you just have a death wish.
In 1939, there was a ubiquitous text-sending technology (that, by the way, requires multiple keystrokes per letter unlike this new texting record-setter who used a QWERTY keyboard) and the best operator at the time could easily send text more than three times as fast as this new record-holder.
Have I got this right?
Harumph. These young whippersnappers, I swear, one of these days they're gonna be convinced they invented the orgasm.
So how does this rate a Slashdot tag other than "NetNegativeTechProgress"?
Good God, man, get your facts straight! I like what you're saying but when you make such a basic error, it reflects poorly on your entire argument.
Child porn is legal in most countries. When you add together the countries in which it is illegal (U.S., France, Canada, etc.) with the countries that theoretically ban all porn (China, India, most Muslim-influenced states), then it's true that for the majority of the world's population, child porn is at least somewhat illegal.
But in most countries, it's legal to possess. In a lesser number, it's legal to sell. There are a few places where it's technically legal to make (though other laws tend to get broken in the process).
While I feel sure the number has gotten higher over the last 3-4 years, according to the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children, as of the date of their last full study of the issue in 2006, only 5 countries in the world completely and specifically outlaw child porn.
I was on the phone with HP Premium Printer Support when the official announcement was made in their office that Carly was leaving.
All hell broke loose. People were screaming, crying, shouting for joy. It sounded like total pandemonium. It sounded like the celebrations of slaves suddenly freed from a cruel master.
It was nearly impossible to finish the call. Having worked under cruel/crazy/incompetent bosses before and known the joy of release when they move on, I couldn't help but be happy for them. HP may have never recovered but for at least a few minutes those poor folks had hope, God bless 'em.
I have. We had two SAs who handled everything on that rollout. I was one of the two. We installed and maintained all software (that was written and pushed to a central server by a different staff). We installed and maintained all equipment, both field and server room. The standard setup was each group was 10 to 15 people. One secretary used a desktop and everybody else had a laptop. All laptop users got an individual laser printer for home use. Each group had two impact printers for forms and one networked laser. Each group connected to their own database server. There were three additional servers that controlled other functions. Every single machine ran SCO OSR 3-point-something. Hardware was IBM for everything.
Us 2 SAs did everything. It didn't matter how small or large the problem, from replacing a USB-to-ethernet dongle to rebuidling a server (I could fully build a server, pulling spare hardware, imaging from tape, and restoring all databases from online backup in under two hours. We had that shit wired, I tell ya!) to taking calls from people who didn't know how to turn off the reveal codes in WordPerfect, we did it all.
Everything that could be scripted was. Our morning checklists and reports took a half hour, tops. On a good day, that was all we had to do all day. On the worst of days, we might work hard. But bad days were rare. We could take our vacations and know that no matter what shit hit the fan, the one of us who was on-site could handle it. We had the wonderful luxury of being able to walk around the user groups and ask people if they needed anything. They almost never did.
Our total user base was about 300 people. So I'd say if things are designed right, 2 people can handle 300 easily.
Of course, there were 25 or so admins and desktop people on the Windows side of the house, taking care of about 1200 users. They ran around looking like they were doing important stuff all the time. And I guess they were. Their stuff broke so much, they were constantly being rewarded for rescuing some project from the jaws of disaster or fixing some irritating problem that had plagued their users for years. Those poor sods hid in their cubicles most of the time; they didn't dare walk among the user population for fear of someone throwing something at them or, at minimum, being constantly harrassed by users pleading "Could you take a quick look at this?"
Our users just did their jobs, working on hardware and software that just worked, reliable as gravity (well, nearly) with no drama at all.
You can see what's coming, can't you?
The higher-ups started wondering aloud why those two SAs over in the corner never seemed to be running around in a panic fixing things. "Don't they have any work to do?" The higher-up attitude toward the Windows guys was completely different. Hell, I remember one of them getting an award for recovering data from a crashed server. They actually rewarded the guy with a certificate and a little ceremony because he had backups, something we took for granted in our little world.
Obviously, it couldn't last. All our apps got re-written to Windows. All the Unix stuff got ashcanned. Our user population got folded in with everyone else and forced to use the standard Windows-image machines.
And we now run around putting out fires with no time to catch our breath.
Man, those were the days. 1 to 150 was a breeze. Nowadays, deskside support is at about the same ratio and we're always on the verge of burnout, always working harder, always falling a little further behind. As much as I love my work (and I do, dearly, love helping alleviate the pain of a user who can't get their work done until I fix something), I'm *seriously* looking forward to retirement.
I see your point but there are other ways to look at the situation.
I'm terrible at pretty much all computer games of any sort. However, I like some shooters. I can turn on God Mode in Serious Sam and then the game completely transforms. There's a certain challenge to seeing how quickly I can kill everything and complete a level. That's not a FPS any more. It becomes a puzzle game. Apparently, I like puzzle games.
But a realistic shooter is, to my mind, a non-starter. I've got too many real guns and I enjoy shooting them far too much to spend any time with a computerized simulation.
Then how would you suggest a security audit be done? How else can we find out if someone will violate security policy than by giving them a chance to do exactly that?
I've been subjected to those kinds of audits on several occasions. Yes, they're mildly insulting. But they're also necessary, aren't they?
For God's sake, that's circletimessquare! If you don't know who that is, lurk more. Until then, DO NOT FEED THE TROLLS!
Use the "clear thinking" tag.
Just a thought experiment, here.
Why not rent rackspace in some well-connected country not friendly to the one in which you reside? Is it that difficult to set up your own personal proxy with encypted tunnel to and from?
I'm surprised there isn't some entrepeneur out there selling "The "ProxyBox(TM), Your Internet Privacy Solution!" or some such little appliance-box for people to mail off to the bulletproof hosting and colo company of their choice. Venezuala, maybe?
Lousy reference, there. The IRS takes privacy more seriously than just about anybody.
After Richard Nixon misused the agency, Congress slapped the IRS with certain restrictions. To de-politicize the agency, the executive structure was purged of political appointees. All other agencies have a myriad (literally dozens, even at small agencies) of political appointees floating around whose jobs they got because they kissed some politicians ass. The IRS has only two.
There is a "Taxpayer Advocate" office that watches over the agency and is quite effective in getting the word out to Congress and the public when the agency starts being in the least bit abusive. There's a Privacy Office. There's extensive yearly training in on privacy matters. Beyond that, a privacy breach at the IRS gets you hauled away in handcuffs by officers of the Treasury Inspector Generals Office. The union for IRS workers, in fact, complains loud and long that employees are too closely monitored, sometimes being investigated, for example, for unauthorized disclosure of information just because the customer they helped happened to live near them.
If the guy got a bribe, he can report it to the IRS without the slightest worry.
Some posts are overrated at the default posting level. Now, I figure that means they should attract a "Troll" mod or one of the other negatives but I'm not going to assume that anyone who puts "Overrated" on a previously unrated post is up to no good. Maybe they just couldn't see anything else that fit the particular sort of problems they saw in your post.
I'm just sayin...
Which would be bad...exactly how?
Note: I'm not trying to be obtuse. I recognize the need for copyright law. But lots of folks who read slashdot don't. Since you're one of the few well-reasoned voices that stands up for anything other than anarchy in this area, I thought I'd invite you to summarize the more basic concepts from your pov. Just a thought.
In my first line, I alluded to a time when AOL didn't violate their own TOS by monitoring private chats. That's where it happened. At one time, it was possible to create private rooms on AOL and talk to other adults about adult things. If you were of a mind to, you could arrange phone calls and meetups. (I'm straight and I was pretty naive but even I was aware that some referred to AOL as "GayOL" back then.)
It all happened around the time that the evil scourge known as AOLs Community Action Team (CATWatch01, may you burn in hell!!) started invading chat rooms and began the completely unregulated enforcement of their incredibly puritan sensibilities by screwing with the accounts of anyone who dared enter an adult-themed room. At about the same time, LEOs started popping up on AOL, too. For a while, until they got better at it, it was drop dead easy to spot the donut-munchers in, say, the "phone sex" room by their immediate, over-enthusiastic responses to your initial IM. And half the time they were 14/f/CA and either a cheerleader or a gymnast.
I ran across the "guys of questionable sexuality" and "some later age teens" but the cops were fundamentally different in their approach. They tried aggressively to get people to make clearly incriminating statements and weren't willing to carry on much of a conversation for very long if you didn't. I remember reading about some upstate New York publicity-hound county prosecutor who had set up a task force of local cops specifically to troll chat rooms and lure men to her jurisdiction so she could prosecute them and, most important, get her face in the papers. At the time, I remember thinking "Gee, I think I've talked to some of those bozos."
At the time, I thought it was funny and sad. Now that I better understand the anti-liberty implications of the police routinely using advanced technology to invade our confidential lives, I just find it scary and infuriating.
What's next? Radar that can see us through the walls of our homes?
Oh, wait...
I don't know if it's accurate, but this post is the only one that actually answered my questions.
The first time I read his little take on barrels and bungholes, I thought it was funny. Now, it looks weirdly prescient.
Reasonable thinking should be rewarded.
I RTFA.
I didn't realize they didn't have double jeopardy in Canada.
How many times can a person be tried for the same offense in Canada? Is there a limit? Do prosecutors and courts just keep changing the rules and re-filing charges until they get a conviction?
I'm not being intentionally obtuse, here. I'm legitimately curious.