Then you should do what any sensible engineer would do and identify your target browsers and choose a sensible subset of CSS that works across all of them. Alternatively write code that adapts to the 'odd' ones out.
Six months ago when I started on a brand new app, I doubted that CSS was ready for prime time, but our UI designer convinced me otherwise. It's fantastic.
With a carefully chosen subset of CSS, we've eliminated almost all the look-related from the HTML we generate; the only thing left is using some tables for basic page structuring. Most changes to the look only require CSS tinkering on rare occasions he'll ask us programmers to put in a div tag or change the class assigned to something.
The stuff looks great on all the common browsers, and on the 3% of people using other things, it still looks ok and is very functional. I believe that he started with these guidelines, following the "CSS with minimal tables" approach.
Hey, Boss, we're going to do all the development work needed to create the product, then we're going to pitch it, take what we've learned and start over.
Well, as long as you're being honest about one approach, you could be honest about the traditional other approach:
Hey, Boss, you've given us eighteen months to build something that nobody has ever seen before. You have vague and conflicting notions about the product, some of which are frankly impossible. So we're going to spend a bunch of time jawing and theorizing, and then produce some documents that nobody will ever look at closely again.
Then we'll spend a lot more time apparently working hard, although we'll have very little to show you, so you'll always be nagged by suspicion that we're not being very productive. Then we'll miss a couple of artificial deadlines. Somewhere in the last month of the plan, we'll finally show you a working version. We will discover to our mutual horror that although what we built bears some resemblance to what you asked for, it is not much in the way of what you wanted, and it's even less what you want now after 18 months of changes in the market.
You'll ask us to change things, but your changes aren't ones we have anticipated, so it will be very expensive. You will be faced with the unfortunate decision between shipping something second rate or starting from scratch. You will declare victory, ship it, and then quickly slink off to a new job before anybody realizes how hollow your triumph is.
The secret to the build-one-to-throw-away aproach is to do it in small increments. Is the boss eager for a dubious feature? Is a developer all hot and bothered over some new technical approach? Try it for a week, producing a new version of the app at the end of it.
If the idea turns out to be a complete turkey, then the worst case is you've lost a week of work. But generally, the idea has some merit, even if it's only as a stepping-stone to a better idea, so it's rare that it's a 100% loss.
So at the very least, back it up on a real copy of Palm Desktop before you experiment.
Considering Palm Desktop doesn't run on Linux, that is not an option for me. However, pilot-xfer (part of pilot-link) works quite nicely for commandline backup and restore.
Isn't pilot-link the thing that evolution uses for syncing? Having had my data corrupted by Evolution or some part of the sync chain that it uses, I'd still recommend finding some way (friend's Windows box, VMWare, etc.) to use the official software.
Evolution [...] works quite nicely when synchronizing to my Palm m500 over serial.
Perhaps they've improved it in the last year or so, but when I synced with Evolution it eventually lost all my careful categorization of contacts, put in multiple duplicates of some records, and completely deleted others.
So at the very least, back it up on a real copy of Palm Desktop before you experiment.
I agree that allowing the driver to punch in estimates is a great idea. However, why is the following the only way of doing things?
The arrival time would have to be calculated from the speed of the bus, either averaged or real time.
If you collect data for a while before you put up the sign, then you should be able to establish reasonable milestones. E.g., when the bus hits point A, it's within 20 minutes 95% of the time and within 15 minutes 80% of the time. This will of course vary according to outside factors, but the drivers should be able to give you a good idea what those factors are (time of day, weather, sheep-shearing season, etc).
With that kind of data planned, you should be able to usually have a good-enough ETA as a default. Then the driver can tweak it up or down as needed.
Yep! I have one of these and it's a pretty swell box. There have been a couple things that xine will play that the DVP642 won't, but by and large it's been great. It also plays music and will show photos. The firmware could be a little better and the remote needs a better UI, but for the basic functions it's a fantastic value.
I haven't had a TV in years, and have been reluctant to get anything with a tuner; it's too easy to "just see what's on" and suddenly realize that you've watsted two hours that you'll never get back. But this in combination with a projector, a GreenCine subscription, and an occasional download via my computer's CD-RW drive has been great.
I, for one, can't believe this got posted. Oh, wait, yes I can.
From an editorial perspective, generally one doesn't care so much about "good" as "interesting". And although the question was, frankly, stupid, the ensuing game of pile-on-the-retard is fun for both participants and watchers. And the other gazillion half-wit potential entrepreneurs out there have a great opportunity to learn how to critique business ideas, including their own.
This technology opens us up to all sorts of new privacy abuses--oh, wait, no it doesn't. We've had cameras for years. It's the display that's new.
I think the poster is worried that they'll replace his tin-foil hat with one of these optical camo dealies. Then all his hard work will be for nought; everybody he meets will be able to see his thoughts, his filthy, filthy thoughts.
Of course the treo 180 that I have has terrible software bugs. bugs tied to the apearantly shoddy integration of cellphone and pda technology. Im hoping the newer models don't suffer this...
I have the 300. It's not particularly buggy, but I still don't know that I'd recommend it to others at the current price. The phone integration is only ok, it has a short battery life, it's pretty pokey, and it's not physically robust. My friends who have the Treo 600 say it's a much better device.
you don't have to take stupid, boring, and irrelevant to your interests classes
I'm sure there must be people whose interests at 18 are perfectly tuned to match what they'll need to know over the next 30-50 years. But I don't think I've ever met one.
When I was just starting college, I didn't take much in the way of advice, so I'm not sure it will do any good to offer it. But just in case, here's my take:
I would have been better off in college had I done the exact opposite of my instincts on a regular basis. Instead of following my muse all the time, I would have come out better had I picked one thing and stuck with it, come hell or high water. But because I could get away with hop-scotching across the departments, I reinforced the same bad habits that I had developed in high school, the same bad habits that many bright kids develop. And I avoided learning a lot of things that would have served me well later.
One tip I can offer is that you should work assiduously at knowing and challenging yourself. Through careful observation and experimentation, learn exactly why and how some things are hard for you, and some easy. Then constantly push those limits. Focus especially on cutting through your own bullshit; smart people are often incredibly good at fooling themselves.
The other is to do nothing half-assedly. Before you commit to college, figure out exactly what it will take for you personally to come through it with flying colors. Then when you commit, really commit. Or if you aren't sure you can do it, then find some easier stepping stone (like a 1-year program, an apprenticeship, or even a single college class) and learn how to play and win that game before proceeding to the big leagues.
Another way to develop the character necessary to tackle college is to try getting by without it. As soon as you're done with high school, get a job and move out of your mom's house. You will soon discover that what matters is not your raw talent, but what you manage to accomplish with it.
None of this should dissuade anybody from nurturing their muse; their are more important things in life than churning out widgets. But I know a lot of bright people who did fuck-all with their talents, doing nothing but dreaming their lives away.
I wonder what OJ Simpson thinks about all this....
Oh, I'm sure he's out there looking for the real author of the Linux kernal.
Good luck finding the author of a kernel on a golf course. It's not like he was having much luck tracking down a murderer there, but kernel authors are, unfortunately rarer. And they spend much less time in the sun.
The "cost" may drop, but the "value" could stay the same, or increase due to the possibly increased functionality (among other things) that running Linux on these devices allows.
That's spot on. I can't believe that he doesn't understand basic economics.
By his logic, the massive drop in prices for long distance phone calls over the decades must be really bad for the economy. And Moore's Law must be decimating the computer industry.
Given how much money Microsoft has, it would be nice if they bribed somebody smart to tell lies about Linux; this drooler isn't even a challenge. I hope they got a good deal.
I'm pretty confident you've never worked in a place that develops real, big commercial software, especially a version 1, or if you did you didn't last very long. Death marches are a near inevitability unless the software you are developing is trivial stupid or your company is willing to ship buggy software.
Wrong! Death marches are a sign of poor planning, nothing more. In particular, it's usually due to a combination of poor estimation and poor scope control.
If you have good people working with a good process, death marches aren't just unnecessary, they're impossible. Why? Because death marches have side effects, like buggy code and employee burnout. This is inefficient, and poor value for the business. A good team will notice those effects early and push things back to a sane schedule.
Ever since adopting agile techniques (like those used in Extreme Programming), I've had a string of happy product managers and no death marches. I'd never go back to the old ways; they're all pain and no gain.
Oh, and for the record, my main effort right now is at a very ambitious startup. We're cranking out great code, have extensive unit and acceptance test coverage, and have never had more than one open bug. We've been at it five months now, and people almost never stay past six.
Re:Don't Play Their Game - Make a New One!
on
Becoming a CLEC?
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· Score: 1
This is kinda sneaky but you could pull a Microsoft and offer free wireless to everybody until the DSL competition dies out.:)
'Course you'd have to have the bandwidth and the financial cojones to stick it out but it might still be less than $500k...
But waiting until the DSL competition dies out? You realize, of course, that his main competitor will be the ILEC? This morning, the ILEC in my area is worth 79.3 billion dollars. The PUCs, their government regulators, would let them sell your kidneys before they'd let them go out of business.
you are shooting yourself in the foot by open sourcing the drivers
That sounds like the case.
As a programmer, I always like the idea of open-sourcing stuff. But from a business perspective, I can only think of two cases where it makes sense. The first is with the parts of your code that you think of as boring, commodity stuff. An operating system is a good example of that; if I have a patch for some Linux thing, I'm glad to share it because the value of a free, community-developed operating system is very high to me, but my slight improvement to it gives my competitors little additional advantage. Other good examples include the stuff from the Apache foundation, like their httpd and Struts.
The other case is where I want to gain mindshare. For example, the program Anthill has an open-source version and a commercial version. People who use the free one are much more likely to buy the commercial one. In essence, they give away the old version of their app in exchange for patches, suggestions, and attention from potential buyers.
So in the case of a hardware vendor like yourselves, you could try this strategy by, say, open-sourcing a basic API layer and related device management tools, while keeping much of your device-related code proprietary. Done right, this could establish a standard that your competitors would have to hustle to follow.
The best example I can think of in the hardware space is the Hayes modem protocol. Of course, it didn't guarantee them success, but the fact that all of their competitors had to put "Hayes-compatible" on their boxes sure didn't hurt them any.
Won't these costs just be forced down onto the customers? Sure, it funds Spamhaus, but why is this a good thing for a user who doesn't have to deal with spam? I get maybe one spam e-mail a day.
I was just about to blast you for your apparent refusal to spend a whole five seconds thinking this through, but I see that you have an AOL address, so I'll assume your question was asked with all sincerity.
There are several ways you benefit from this:
First is that you might already be benefiting. Since you currently get spam, that means that spammers have your address. Getting only one a day probably means that your ISP already is using spam filtering. How do you know that Spamhaus's databases aren't part of it?
Good spam filtering helps keep costs down, lowering your bills. A network engineer at a major ISP told me that if they removed their spam defenses, they'd promptly crash; they don't have the capacity to handle the doubling or tripling of mail traffic that would result. $15k per year is nothing compared to tripling your ISP's mail handling and storage capacity.
People will see your messages. If I turned off my filters, less then one in ten of the items in my inbox would be real mail. Without good filtering, I'd accidentally delete a lot of real messages, especially ones from unknown correspondents.
The people you want to communicate with will still use email. Some people, especially marginal internet users like grandparents and small children, are already starting to abandon email as a medium, despite our best efforts at keeping the spam out. Without good tools like Spamhaus's lists, more and more people will just give up on their spam-choked inboxes.
So basically, if you use email at all, it's worth supporting the fight against spam, even if you don't personally get any at the moment.
Rather, I read his post to indicate that it's important to understand the fear that led to the creation of the PATRIOT Act
Although I agree completely with your point, I don't think that he meant something so pleasant or sensible. Take a look at his other posts in this thread. E.g.:
We are at war with Afghanistan and Iraq. Why? Because they are part of a terrorist network which routinely seeks to destroy US interests, and not just on 911.
He's actually a fine example of the misdirection of the (completely legitimate) fear and anger that Americans felt after 9/11. Although I'm sure the government has managed to do some good as far as improving security, many of the actions, from the Patriot Act to the dubious detentions in the US and Guantanamo to the arrest of an Oregon lawyer to the invasion of Iraq have had a clear negative effect on our security.
I'm no fan of certain clauses of the patriot act, including the allowance for feds to search property without presenting a warrant. But to suggest that there is no reason for this, other than to create a militant police state ignores facts which are fully in evidence.
Really? A quick quiz then: Which portions of the PATRIOT Act, had they been in force in early 2001, would have prevented the 9/11 attack?
If "your friend" hasn't done anything, "he" shouldn't have anything to worry about.
I recognize the humorous aspect of your post, but that first sentence really summed up a scary, but all-too-commonly-voiced, sentiment about this subject.
Agreed! The implicit assumption is that government workers never make mistakes or do anything improper. Even in the best of times this is a dubious notion. and it's especially unlikely to be true during times of crisis.
Take, for example, the big abuses of power by the FBI and others during the anti-Communist witch hunts. Or look at the high quantity and low quality of terrorism arrests and detainings immediately after 9/11. Or just look at today's New York Times, which talks about the dubious grounds and shoddy evidence that put people in Abu Ghraib.
The only things you have to worry about these databases is that they don't get into the wrong hands. Any other worrying would be because you either did something wrong, or are thinking about it.
That's some pretty big handwaving there. The ordinary citizen probably doesn't have to worry; nobody will bother digging up the dirt on them. But what if you decide to become politically active? Or if you get in the way of somebody with a lot of money and few scruples?
It's a guarantee that databases like this will be misused; the only question is how much it happens.
According to the American Automobile Association, not exactly known for an anti-car bias, says that owning a new car this year will cost the average American a total of $8,431. That breaks down like this:
$3,782 in depreciation
$1,603 in insurance
$975 in fuel
$915 in maintenance
$741 in finance costs
$415 in other costs
And that doesn't account for the stress and hassle of driving, parking, breakdowns, repairs, breakins, and tickets.
I haven't owned a car for more than a decade, and I rarely miss it. The costs of living within biking distance of work are more than offset by the amount I save by not owning a car. And when I need one, there are always taxis, rentals, and even by-the-hour car-sharing organizations. And my stress level is so much lower that it's impossible to convey in words.
I personally feel motorcycles should be banned from the highways because they're hard to see and 90% of the asshats I see riding them are riding recklessly. I can't even begin to tell you the number of times that jackasses on high powered motorcycles zoomed past me doing 120+ mph weaving in and out of traffic.
And I know plenty of motorcyclists who feel that cars should be banned as they're all driven by slow-witted, fat-assed suburbanite marshmallows who devote most of their limited brain capacity to fiddling with their stereos, watching their in-car DVD players, talking on their cellphones, and stuffing their faces rather than, say, paying attention the the other vehicles on the road, not all of which happen to be needlessly oversized.
Or at least that's their take on it. As somebody who gets around mostly by bicycle, I think there's some accuracy in each of those cartoons, albeit not much. But the truth is that we're all citizens getting around in the ways we think best. And really, the only options are to learn to share the road or to start shooting one another. Which, honestly, will probably cross my mind next time I get doored by some drooler who doesn't quite get that a bike lane might have bikes in it.
100% financing is the new way. Its going to be a real wake-up call when interest rates go up.
How so? When you finance your car, you do so at a certain fixed rate. They can't raise your interest rate after you've started finanacing it.
Because when you go to buy your next car, you'll be paying much more than you are now. Or you'll have to settle for substantially less car.
Also, it will likely reduce the resale value of your current car; a higher finance cost means that poenential purchasers of your car won't be able to afford to pay you as much.
The only time I began to become better was when I stopped believing in meds and thrust my salvation and deliverance into the hands of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Who, conveniently, turned out to be living in the same hospital ward as you.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you should do what any sensible engineer would do and identify your target browsers and choose a sensible subset of CSS that works across all of them. Alternatively write code that adapts to the 'odd' ones out.
Six months ago when I started on a brand new app, I doubted that CSS was ready for prime time, but our UI designer convinced me otherwise. It's fantastic.
With a carefully chosen subset of CSS, we've eliminated almost all the look-related from the HTML we generate; the only thing left is using some tables for basic page structuring. Most changes to the look only require CSS tinkering on rare occasions he'll ask us programmers to put in a div tag or change the class assigned to something.
The stuff looks great on all the common browsers, and on the 3% of people using other things, it still looks ok and is very functional. I believe that he started with these guidelines, following the "CSS with minimal tables" approach.
Well, as long as you're being honest about one approach, you could be honest about the traditional other approach:
The secret to the build-one-to-throw-away aproach is to do it in small increments. Is the boss eager for a dubious feature? Is a developer all hot and bothered over some new technical approach? Try it for a week, producing a new version of the app at the end of it.
If the idea turns out to be a complete turkey, then the worst case is you've lost a week of work. But generally, the idea has some merit, even if it's only as a stepping-stone to a better idea, so it's rare that it's a 100% loss.
Isn't pilot-link the thing that evolution uses for syncing? Having had my data corrupted by Evolution or some part of the sync chain that it uses, I'd still recommend finding some way (friend's Windows box, VMWare, etc.) to use the official software.
Evolution [...] works quite nicely when synchronizing to my Palm m500 over serial.
Perhaps they've improved it in the last year or so, but when I synced with Evolution it eventually lost all my careful categorization of contacts, put in multiple duplicates of some records, and completely deleted others.
So at the very least, back it up on a real copy of Palm Desktop before you experiment.
I agree that allowing the driver to punch in estimates is a great idea. However, why is the following the only way of doing things?
The arrival time would have to be calculated from the speed of the bus, either averaged or real time.
If you collect data for a while before you put up the sign, then you should be able to establish reasonable milestones. E.g., when the bus hits point A, it's within 20 minutes 95% of the time and within 15 minutes 80% of the time. This will of course vary according to outside factors, but the drivers should be able to give you a good idea what those factors are (time of day, weather, sheep-shearing season, etc).
With that kind of data planned, you should be able to usually have a good-enough ETA as a default. Then the driver can tweak it up or down as needed.
Yep! I have one of these and it's a pretty swell box. There have been a couple things that xine will play that the DVP642 won't, but by and large it's been great. It also plays music and will show photos. The firmware could be a little better and the remote needs a better UI, but for the basic functions it's a fantastic value.
I haven't had a TV in years, and have been reluctant to get anything with a tuner; it's too easy to "just see what's on" and suddenly realize that you've watsted two hours that you'll never get back. But this in combination with a projector, a GreenCine subscription, and an occasional download via my computer's CD-RW drive has been great.
I, for one, can't believe this got posted. Oh, wait, yes I can.
From an editorial perspective, generally one doesn't care so much about "good" as "interesting". And although the question was, frankly, stupid, the ensuing game of pile-on-the-retard is fun for both participants and watchers. And the other gazillion half-wit potential entrepreneurs out there have a great opportunity to learn how to critique business ideas, including their own.
This technology opens us up to all sorts of new privacy abuses--oh, wait, no it doesn't. We've had cameras for years. It's the display that's new.
I think the poster is worried that they'll replace his tin-foil hat with one of these optical camo dealies. Then all his hard work will be for nought; everybody he meets will be able to see his thoughts, his filthy, filthy thoughts.
Of course the treo 180 that I have has terrible software bugs. bugs tied to the apearantly shoddy integration of cellphone and pda technology. Im hoping the newer models don't suffer this...
I have the 300. It's not particularly buggy, but I still don't know that I'd recommend it to others at the current price. The phone integration is only ok, it has a short battery life, it's pretty pokey, and it's not physically robust. My friends who have the Treo 600 say it's a much better device.
you don't have to take stupid, boring, and irrelevant to your interests classes
I'm sure there must be people whose interests at 18 are perfectly tuned to match what they'll need to know over the next 30-50 years. But I don't think I've ever met one.
When I was just starting college, I didn't take much in the way of advice, so I'm not sure it will do any good to offer it. But just in case, here's my take:
I would have been better off in college had I done the exact opposite of my instincts on a regular basis. Instead of following my muse all the time, I would have come out better had I picked one thing and stuck with it, come hell or high water. But because I could get away with hop-scotching across the departments, I reinforced the same bad habits that I had developed in high school, the same bad habits that many bright kids develop. And I avoided learning a lot of things that would have served me well later.
One tip I can offer is that you should work assiduously at knowing and challenging yourself. Through careful observation and experimentation, learn exactly why and how some things are hard for you, and some easy. Then constantly push those limits. Focus especially on cutting through your own bullshit; smart people are often incredibly good at fooling themselves.
The other is to do nothing half-assedly. Before you commit to college, figure out exactly what it will take for you personally to come through it with flying colors. Then when you commit, really commit. Or if you aren't sure you can do it, then find some easier stepping stone (like a 1-year program, an apprenticeship, or even a single college class) and learn how to play and win that game before proceeding to the big leagues.
Another way to develop the character necessary to tackle college is to try getting by without it. As soon as you're done with high school, get a job and move out of your mom's house. You will soon discover that what matters is not your raw talent, but what you manage to accomplish with it.
None of this should dissuade anybody from nurturing their muse; their are more important things in life than churning out widgets. But I know a lot of bright people who did fuck-all with their talents, doing nothing but dreaming their lives away.
Good luck finding the author of a kernel on a golf course. It's not like he was having much luck tracking down a murderer there, but kernel authors are, unfortunately rarer. And they spend much less time in the sun.
His spelling-checker tool is borken too. Count the number of times he uses noone in that article (instead of no one).
Well, noone is actually a common Scottish slang word meaning "one's own penis".
The "cost" may drop, but the "value" could stay the same, or increase due to the possibly increased functionality (among other things) that running Linux on these devices allows.
That's spot on. I can't believe that he doesn't understand basic economics.
By his logic, the massive drop in prices for long distance phone calls over the decades must be really bad for the economy. And Moore's Law must be decimating the computer industry.
Given how much money Microsoft has, it would be nice if they bribed somebody smart to tell lies about Linux; this drooler isn't even a challenge. I hope they got a good deal.
I'm pretty confident you've never worked in a place that develops real, big commercial software, especially a version 1, or if you did you didn't last very long. Death marches are a near inevitability unless the software you are developing is trivial stupid or your company is willing to ship buggy software.
Wrong! Death marches are a sign of poor planning, nothing more. In particular, it's usually due to a combination of poor estimation and poor scope control.
If you have good people working with a good process, death marches aren't just unnecessary, they're impossible. Why? Because death marches have side effects, like buggy code and employee burnout. This is inefficient, and poor value for the business. A good team will notice those effects early and push things back to a sane schedule.
Ever since adopting agile techniques (like those used in Extreme Programming), I've had a string of happy product managers and no death marches. I'd never go back to the old ways; they're all pain and no gain.
Oh, and for the record, my main effort right now is at a very ambitious startup. We're cranking out great code, have extensive unit and acceptance test coverage, and have never had more than one open bug. We've been at it five months now, and people almost never stay past six.
This is kinda sneaky but you could pull a Microsoft and offer free wireless to everybody until the DSL competition dies out. :)
'Course you'd have to have the bandwidth and the financial cojones to stick it out but it might still be less than $500k...
Free wireless to build a user base may not be a bad idea, especially if those people are serving as relays to increase your service footprint.
But waiting until the DSL competition dies out? You realize, of course, that his main competitor will be the ILEC? This morning, the ILEC in my area is worth 79.3 billion dollars. The PUCs, their government regulators, would let them sell your kidneys before they'd let them go out of business.
So I'm thinking 500k won't quite cut it.
you are shooting yourself in the foot by open sourcing the drivers
That sounds like the case.
As a programmer, I always like the idea of open-sourcing stuff. But from a business perspective, I can only think of two cases where it makes sense. The first is with the parts of your code that you think of as boring, commodity stuff. An operating system is a good example of that; if I have a patch for some Linux thing, I'm glad to share it because the value of a free, community-developed operating system is very high to me, but my slight improvement to it gives my competitors little additional advantage. Other good examples include the stuff from the Apache foundation, like their httpd and Struts.
The other case is where I want to gain mindshare. For example, the program Anthill has an open-source version and a commercial version. People who use the free one are much more likely to buy the commercial one. In essence, they give away the old version of their app in exchange for patches, suggestions, and attention from potential buyers.
So in the case of a hardware vendor like yourselves, you could try this strategy by, say, open-sourcing a basic API layer and related device management tools, while keeping much of your device-related code proprietary. Done right, this could establish a standard that your competitors would have to hustle to follow.
The best example I can think of in the hardware space is the Hayes modem protocol. Of course, it didn't guarantee them success, but the fact that all of their competitors had to put "Hayes-compatible" on their boxes sure didn't hurt them any.
I was just about to blast you for your apparent refusal to spend a whole five seconds thinking this through, but I see that you have an AOL address, so I'll assume your question was asked with all sincerity.
There are several ways you benefit from this:
- First is that you might already be benefiting. Since you currently get spam, that means that spammers have your address. Getting only one a day probably means that your ISP already is using spam filtering. How do you know that Spamhaus's databases aren't part of it?
- Good spam filtering helps keep costs down, lowering your bills. A network engineer at a major ISP told me that if they removed their spam defenses, they'd promptly crash; they don't have the capacity to handle the doubling or tripling of mail traffic that would result. $15k per year is nothing compared to tripling your ISP's mail handling and storage capacity.
- People will see your messages. If I turned off my filters, less then one in ten of the items in my inbox would be real mail. Without good filtering, I'd accidentally delete a lot of real messages, especially ones from unknown correspondents.
- The people you want to communicate with will still use email. Some people, especially marginal internet users like grandparents and small children, are already starting to abandon email as a medium, despite our best efforts at keeping the spam out. Without good tools like Spamhaus's lists, more and more people will just give up on their spam-choked inboxes.
So basically, if you use email at all, it's worth supporting the fight against spam, even if you don't personally get any at the moment.Rather, I read his post to indicate that it's important to understand the fear that led to the creation of the PATRIOT Act
Although I agree completely with your point, I don't think that he meant something so pleasant or sensible. Take a look at his other posts in this thread. E.g.:
We are at war with Afghanistan and Iraq. Why? Because they are part of a terrorist network which routinely seeks to destroy US interests, and not just on 911.
He's actually a fine example of the misdirection of the (completely legitimate) fear and anger that Americans felt after 9/11. Although I'm sure the government has managed to do some good as far as improving security, many of the actions, from the Patriot Act to the dubious detentions in the US and Guantanamo to the arrest of an Oregon lawyer to the invasion of Iraq have had a clear negative effect on our security.
I'm no fan of certain clauses of the patriot act, including the allowance for feds to search property without presenting a warrant. But to suggest that there is no reason for this, other than to create a militant police state ignores facts which are fully in evidence.
Really? A quick quiz then: Which portions of the PATRIOT Act, had they been in force in early 2001, would have prevented the 9/11 attack?
Agreed! The implicit assumption is that government workers never make mistakes or do anything improper. Even in the best of times this is a dubious notion. and it's especially unlikely to be true during times of crisis.
Take, for example, the big abuses of power by the FBI and others during the anti-Communist witch hunts. Or look at the high quantity and low quality of terrorism arrests and detainings immediately after 9/11. Or just look at today's New York Times, which talks about the dubious grounds and shoddy evidence that put people in Abu Ghraib.
The only things you have to worry about these databases is that they don't get into the wrong hands. Any other worrying would be because you either did something wrong, or are thinking about it.
That's some pretty big handwaving there. The ordinary citizen probably doesn't have to worry; nobody will bother digging up the dirt on them. But what if you decide to become politically active? Or if you get in the way of somebody with a lot of money and few scruples?
It's a guarantee that databases like this will be misused; the only question is how much it happens.
- $3,782 in depreciation
- $1,603 in insurance
- $975 in fuel
- $915 in maintenance
- $741 in finance costs
- $415 in other costs
And that doesn't account for the stress and hassle of driving, parking, breakdowns, repairs, breakins, and tickets.I haven't owned a car for more than a decade, and I rarely miss it. The costs of living within biking distance of work are more than offset by the amount I save by not owning a car. And when I need one, there are always taxis, rentals, and even by-the-hour car-sharing organizations. And my stress level is so much lower that it's impossible to convey in words.
I personally feel motorcycles should be banned from the highways because they're hard to see and 90% of the asshats I see riding them are riding recklessly. I can't even begin to tell you the number of times that jackasses on high powered motorcycles zoomed past me doing 120+ mph weaving in and out of traffic.
And I know plenty of motorcyclists who feel that cars should be banned as they're all driven by slow-witted, fat-assed suburbanite marshmallows who devote most of their limited brain capacity to fiddling with their stereos, watching their in-car DVD players, talking on their cellphones, and stuffing their faces rather than, say, paying attention the the other vehicles on the road, not all of which happen to be needlessly oversized.
Or at least that's their take on it. As somebody who gets around mostly by bicycle, I think there's some accuracy in each of those cartoons, albeit not much. But the truth is that we're all citizens getting around in the ways we think best. And really, the only options are to learn to share the road or to start shooting one another. Which, honestly, will probably cross my mind next time I get doored by some drooler who doesn't quite get that a bike lane might have bikes in it.
Because when you go to buy your next car, you'll be paying much more than you are now. Or you'll have to settle for substantially less car.
Also, it will likely reduce the resale value of your current car; a higher finance cost means that poenential purchasers of your car won't be able to afford to pay you as much.
The only time I began to become better was when I stopped believing in meds and thrust my salvation and deliverance into the hands of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Who, conveniently, turned out to be living in the same hospital ward as you.