Of course, you can turn off the ringer. Then, the problem becomes, "Huh-NEEEEEEE... Why didn't you answer the phone when I called? What were you doing?"
This is actually quite simple to deal with. I resisted a cell phone for a long, long time, because of all your points. But now that I have one, I set it up so if I'm out of range/turned off/battery's dead/or (crucially) I hit ignore, it rings through to my house. I know who's likely to call me about stupid shit, and who isn't. If an abuser is calling me and I'm not in the mood, I hit ignore, and they leave a message at my house. Or preferably, realize it's not important enough to leave a message, and e-mail me later.
I've also conditioned people to realize that a text message on my phone is the best way to get a response to a simple question. It's like e-mail, I don't have to answer right away, and I don't look like a jack-ass answering my phone in public. I can go duck behind something to write my response, and hide my shame.:)
The key to avoid the expectation of an answer you're talking about is to never build it in the first place. Last month I used 8 minutes of airtime, but sent 50 text messages. It was great.
Don't be. I worked as a student with the CDN Governmetn for 16 months last year, and their official policy was that they do not do direct deposit for students. Which meant I had to go to a differnt building an hour bus ride away (that I didn't normally visit) to pick up my cheque every two weeks for the duration. From what I hear it's much easier on the people in finance to direct deposit than print cheques.
Another example - any bank in Canada that still offers a passbook for keeping track of transactions now charges you $5 a month for the service, whereas they'll MAIL you statements for free. The theory is that the machine maintenance may have cost them more than postage, but it's still a little screwy.
Sounds like you could use a bike, good sir. Since I traded in my bus pas for a bicycle, I'm finding I'm getting to most places almost as fast (or faster), and don't need to worry about checking the schedules, etc., etc.
It's also nice because it forces you to take smallish loads from the grocery store...which means you have to go more often and can keep perishables in stock.
And I damn well agree with checking out the small local shows. There's fewer silly kids there as well.
Apparently you're operating under a unique definition, or you're visiting the wrong weblogs. The commentary on many good blogs is just as useful as the articles they cite. Sometimes other bloggers write those very same articles.
The problem is that in general most people are using google to find information, rather than the high quality commentary they may or may not provide. When people want commentary, they usually seek out the opinion of someone they know and trust. When they're reduced to hitting google, they just want the facts, please.
Not everyone who reads slashdot reads LKML, yet many who read slashdot want to know if the Kernel is buggy before they try it. I'm happy to see bug reports, at least for major bugs.
It's all marketing. If they brought out the full range of products in a new line at once, most people would take a mid (or even low) range one. Whereas if you only bring out the high end ones first, the people who absolutely must have the newest thing will be stuck buying high, and then once they've mined that market, they put out the value stuff for the patient people.
It's the same with graphics cards, and I'm sure many other things.
The best deal for a credit company is the customer who almost goes bankrupt, but never does. i.e. you pay stuff off many times over in interest, making them money, but never default, losing them money.
Wasn't Game Boy first out the door by a long shot? And NES perhaps a fair bit ahead of the Master System (I'm less sure of that one).
The handheld market Game Boy entered upon release was filled with those Tiger Double Dragon games. Then the race was obviously on for someone to make a colour competitor. But I don't think those colour parts can be considered same generation, Game Boy just lasted a truly disgusting amount of time in the market. Isn't it still the highest selling game unit of all time?
One of the big plot points in the "Will XBox survive" debates was that Nintendo was actually able to sell their machine at a profit, until MS, which was/is taking a bath. A comment earlier up mentioned that they may not be taking a profit at the new lower price, though, which is the reverse of the usual trend you mention.
Have you READ half the crap that's been nominated for the Hugo/Nebula recently? I tried reading Greg Bear's Moving Mars, and I just wanted to throw it against the wall every 10 minutes. And I LIKE Mars, and am willing to put up with a lot of crap to hear a story about it.
I personally think American Gods is excellent. Gaiman and Connie Willis are the recent sci-fi writers I can really get into, and that I find award-worthy. Sawyer's pretty good, but I mainly appreciate him as a fellow almost-Torontonian, and don't think he should be getting quite as many awards as he is.
Stephenson is, of course, amazing, but not really sci-fi.
....because they're noticed too quickly. If you destroy your host immediately you're not going to propogate too far, now are you?
Yes, you could make it a little more complex with time-outs or a way to select certain targets as hosts for more sending and others to destroy, but it wouldn't last and last like some of the recent worms, because it's effects would be so noticeable.
Mozilla/Netscape/Thunderbird have read the same mail file format for years, and you can even share them between versions (I point my linux profile settings at my windows partition, and get to keep my folders across reboots....score).
So even if you have to make a new profile on an upgrade (you probably won't....the worst I've had to do with thunderbird is kill the program directory and re-install engimail) you can still copy your old mail/news files into it.
Funny, I found the U.S. far more tolerant of dissent than Canada -- not so much government, as much as ordinary people -- Canadians strike me as scared of their government, so they toe the line, and act like low-level functionaries in a Naziesque regime: not necessarily supporting the status quo, but finding it more comfortable for themselves to not rock the boat.
FWIW, I had lived in a small northwest suburb of Chicago (pop. about 17,000), as well as a north suburb of of Dallas -- what struck me the most about Texas was the peaceful live and let live attitude, and respect for others' person and property. Equally stunning was the apparent racial harmony I observed (biased, no doubt, by my white honkey ass) I saw in Texas, when compared to Chicago, Montreal, or Toronto.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Could it be that the reason there was 'racial harmony' in Texas that people of colour are AFRAID of SPEAKING OUT?
An area where there's complete 'racial harmony' speaks to me of something far more Naziesque than anything your descrbing in Canada. People DO NOT always get along. And if they're not speaking up about it, it's because they're being AFRAID and being REPRESSED as you claim Canada's doing to its citizens.
Your argument is null and void.
Do you think a bunch of protestors could have got naked and smoked up on Capitol Hill, or anywhere in DC for that matter?? Meanwhile, when it happened on Parliament Hill, they were showing it live and unedited, on CPAC (the Canadian Parliamentary Channel), which is entirely government funded.
Get a fucking grip. I can't believe you called Texas more tolerant than Canada.
The site is slashdotted. The page isn't in Google's cache (at least when I checked). I managed to get the first few paragraphs, but others may not have been so lucky....since you apparently have no problem with offering your opinion on a document you haven't seen all of. Good show of irony.
Since presently the only people who can benefeit from patents are the ones with million-patent-portfolios and a peck of lawyers to defend them, it seems to me that the current system is merely a means by which the rich can get richer.
In the software industry, yes. Look further than that and you might be surprised.
Just because you don't have access to a particle accelerator and radioactive substances doesn't mean that your ideas about nuclear physics are automatically invalid.
Same goes for rocket fuel, super computer clusters, or anything. What you're describing is a way to allow only the rich to get richer.
Have you met girls in university? They waste as much or more time playing stupid flash and java games than boys, in my experience. Some of them had to delete their IM clients to avoid failing out.
Um, not necessarily, I'm afraid. Witness the DeCSS judgement.
'"Disclosure of this highly technical information adds nothing to the public debate over the use of encryption software or the DVD industry's efforts to limit unauthorized copying of movies on DVDs," the court wrote.'
Whereas, ESR's public contribution to the SCO debate would, assumedly, adding something to the public debate over SCO.
Speech is still protected by free speech laws, even if code might not be(/always be?).
What was very interesting was the case of a famous Holocaust denyer and author who was on trial in Canada a number of years ago. Basically they had to prove that he didn't actually BELIEVE his own misleading evidence, in order for what he was claiming to be hate speech.
That distinction is important, even though he's doing is hateful, because otherwise you could be prevented from publishing anything that reflected badly on any specific group, true or no.
One - What about overtaking on a two-lane highway? You sure as shit don't want to be in the oncoming lane any longer than possible. It would in fact probably be illegal (dangerous driving) if you pulled out to pass a guy doing 80 in a 90, and only did so at 82. It's stupid and dangerous and wrong. In at least one case, the limit is not absolute.
Two - Alberta, for one, has 110 km/h posted highways. Why should I have to get my governor adjusted just to drive somewhere else in the SAME COUNTRY.
Three - there's many cars out there that DO have governors, they're just at 160 or 170 or so.
Four - I've been to drag strips in Quebec where people take their street cars to race. This would burden people doing something legal unnecessarily.
Five - the safety reasons brought up by others. You never know when you're going to need to avoid something to safe your life. And any emergency shut-off system could easily be exploited.
Also, there's lots of things that you can be sold (guns, knives, noxious chemicals) that could be used to break the law, but as the title suggest, there ARE non-infringing uses for going over 100 km/h, and so the car should not be crippled. This is libertarian city (a.k.a./.), after all.
Basically, stop breaking the damn law yourself, or go back to kindergarten! No one's holding your hand to make sure you don't assault someone with it. Hell, you can break the speed limit coasting your bicycle down a hill sometimes, that doesn't mean all bikes should have auto-engage breaks. You just need to not be an idiot and use them yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, if you don't want colourmap clashing... :)
You need your desktop resolution set to 32 bits to avoid that, yes, but the picture can be sent as an 8 bit image with its colourmap.
Of course, you can turn off the ringer. Then, the problem becomes, "Huh-NEEEEEEE... Why didn't you answer the phone when I called? What were you doing?"
:)
This is actually quite simple to deal with. I resisted a cell phone for a long, long time, because of all your points. But now that I have one, I set it up so if I'm out of range/turned off/battery's dead/or (crucially) I hit ignore, it rings through to my house. I know who's likely to call me about stupid shit, and who isn't. If an abuser is calling me and I'm not in the mood, I hit ignore, and they leave a message at my house. Or preferably, realize it's not important enough to leave a message, and e-mail me later.
I've also conditioned people to realize that a text message on my phone is the best way to get a response to a simple question. It's like e-mail, I don't have to answer right away, and I don't look like a jack-ass answering my phone in public. I can go duck behind something to write my response, and hide my shame.
The key to avoid the expectation of an answer you're talking about is to never build it in the first place. Last month I used 8 minutes of airtime, but sent 50 text messages. It was great.
Don't be. I worked as a student with the CDN Governmetn for 16 months last year, and their official policy was that they do not do direct deposit for students. Which meant I had to go to a differnt building an hour bus ride away (that I didn't normally visit) to pick up my cheque every two weeks for the duration. From what I hear it's much easier on the people in finance to direct deposit than print cheques.
Another example - any bank in Canada that still offers a passbook for keeping track of transactions now charges you $5 a month for the service, whereas they'll MAIL you statements for free. The theory is that the machine maintenance may have cost them more than postage, but it's still a little screwy.
Nah...most software nowadays can be downloaded for free from freshrpms or sourceforge (even lots of windows projects are on sourceforge).
Sounds like you could use a bike, good sir. Since I traded in my bus pas for a bicycle, I'm finding I'm getting to most places almost as fast (or faster), and don't need to worry about checking the schedules, etc., etc.
It's also nice because it forces you to take smallish loads from the grocery store...which means you have to go more often and can keep perishables in stock.
And I damn well agree with checking out the small local shows. There's fewer silly kids there as well.
Apparently you're operating under a unique definition, or you're visiting the wrong weblogs. The commentary on many good blogs is just as useful as the articles they cite. Sometimes other bloggers write those very same articles.
The problem is that in general most people are using google to find information, rather than the high quality commentary they may or may not provide. When people want commentary, they usually seek out the opinion of someone they know and trust. When they're reduced to hitting google, they just want the facts, please.
Not everyone who reads slashdot reads LKML, yet many who read slashdot want to know if the Kernel is buggy before they try it. I'm happy to see bug reports, at least for major bugs.
It's all marketing. If they brought out the full range of products in a new line at once, most people would take a mid (or even low) range one. Whereas if you only bring out the high end ones first, the people who absolutely must have the newest thing will be stuck buying high, and then once they've mined that market, they put out the value stuff for the patient people.
It's the same with graphics cards, and I'm sure many other things.
The best deal for a credit company is the customer who almost goes bankrupt, but never does. i.e. you pay stuff off many times over in interest, making them money, but never default, losing them money.
Wasn't Game Boy first out the door by a long shot? And NES perhaps a fair bit ahead of the Master System (I'm less sure of that one).
The handheld market Game Boy entered upon release was filled with those Tiger Double Dragon games. Then the race was obviously on for someone to make a colour competitor. But I don't think those colour parts can be considered same generation, Game Boy just lasted a truly disgusting amount of time in the market. Isn't it still the highest selling game unit of all time?
One of the big plot points in the "Will XBox survive" debates was that Nintendo was actually able to sell their machine at a profit, until MS, which was/is taking a bath. A comment earlier up mentioned that they may not be taking a profit at the new lower price, though, which is the reverse of the usual trend you mention.
Wouldn't he have to pay capital gains for acquiring the asteroid?
Have you READ half the crap that's been nominated for the Hugo/Nebula recently? I tried reading Greg Bear's Moving Mars, and I just wanted to throw it against the wall every 10 minutes. And I LIKE Mars, and am willing to put up with a lot of crap to hear a story about it.
I personally think American Gods is excellent. Gaiman and Connie Willis are the recent sci-fi writers I can really get into, and that I find award-worthy. Sawyer's pretty good, but I mainly appreciate him as a fellow almost-Torontonian, and don't think he should be getting quite as many awards as he is.
Stephenson is, of course, amazing, but not really sci-fi.
He meant that you didn't post the link that you WANTED the submitter to link to, INSTEAD OF the newsgroup post. Don't you read your own posts?
Also note that submitters != slashdot.
Yeah, and I'm on your network and I had no clue there was a 1.1...I'm apparently still on 1.0b.
....because they're noticed too quickly. If you destroy your host immediately you're not going to propogate too far, now are you?
Yes, you could make it a little more complex with time-outs or a way to select certain targets as hosts for more sending and others to destroy, but it wouldn't last and last like some of the recent worms, because it's effects would be so noticeable.
Mozilla/Netscape/Thunderbird have read the same mail file format for years, and you can even share them between versions (I point my linux profile settings at my windows partition, and get to keep my folders across reboots....score).
So even if you have to make a new profile on an upgrade (you probably won't....the worst I've had to do with thunderbird is kill the program directory and re-install engimail) you can still copy your old mail/news files into it.
Funny, I found the U.S. far more tolerant of dissent than Canada -- not so much government, as much as ordinary people -- Canadians strike me as scared of their government, so they toe the line, and act like low-level functionaries in a Naziesque regime: not necessarily supporting the status quo, but finding it more comfortable for themselves to not rock the boat.
FWIW, I had lived in a small northwest suburb of Chicago (pop. about 17,000), as well as a north suburb of of Dallas -- what struck me the most about Texas was the peaceful live and let live attitude, and respect for others' person and property. Equally stunning was the apparent racial harmony I observed (biased, no doubt, by my white honkey ass) I saw in Texas, when compared to Chicago, Montreal, or Toronto.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Could it be that the reason there was 'racial harmony' in Texas that people of colour are AFRAID of SPEAKING OUT?
An area where there's complete 'racial harmony' speaks to me of something far more Naziesque than anything your descrbing in Canada. People DO NOT always get along. And if they're not speaking up about it, it's because they're being AFRAID and being REPRESSED as you claim Canada's doing to its citizens.
Your argument is null and void.
Do you think a bunch of protestors could have got naked and smoked up on Capitol Hill, or anywhere in DC for that matter?? Meanwhile, when it happened on Parliament Hill, they were showing it live and unedited, on CPAC (the Canadian Parliamentary Channel), which is entirely government funded.
Get a fucking grip. I can't believe you called Texas more tolerant than Canada.
The site is slashdotted. The page isn't in Google's cache (at least when I checked). I managed to get the first few paragraphs, but others may not have been so lucky. ...since you apparently have no problem with offering your opinion on a document you haven't seen all of. Good show of irony.
Since presently the only people who can benefeit from patents are the ones with million-patent-portfolios and a peck of lawyers to defend them, it seems to me that the current system is merely a means by which the rich can get richer.
In the software industry, yes. Look further than that and you might be surprised.
Just because you don't have access to a particle accelerator and radioactive substances doesn't mean that your ideas about nuclear physics are automatically invalid.
Same goes for rocket fuel, super computer clusters, or anything. What you're describing is a way to allow only the rich to get richer.
Have you met girls in university? They waste as much or more time playing stupid flash and java games than boys, in my experience. Some of them had to delete their IM clients to avoid failing out.
Um, not necessarily, I'm afraid. Witness the DeCSS judgement.
'"Disclosure of this highly technical information adds nothing to the public debate over the use of encryption software or the DVD industry's efforts to limit unauthorized copying of movies on DVDs," the court wrote.'
Whereas, ESR's public contribution to the SCO debate would, assumedly, adding something to the public debate over SCO.
Speech is still protected by free speech laws, even if code might not be(/always be?).
What was very interesting was the case of a famous Holocaust denyer and author who was on trial in Canada a number of years ago. Basically they had to prove that he didn't actually BELIEVE his own misleading evidence, in order for what he was claiming to be hate speech.
That distinction is important, even though he's doing is hateful, because otherwise you could be prevented from publishing anything that reflected badly on any specific group, true or no.
I agree, the truth is complicated.
One - What about overtaking on a two-lane highway? You sure as shit don't want to be in the oncoming lane any longer than possible. It would in fact probably be illegal (dangerous driving) if you pulled out to pass a guy doing 80 in a 90, and only did so at 82. It's stupid and dangerous and wrong. In at least one case, the limit is not absolute.
/.), after all.
Two - Alberta, for one, has 110 km/h posted highways. Why should I have to get my governor adjusted just to drive somewhere else in the SAME COUNTRY.
Three - there's many cars out there that DO have governors, they're just at 160 or 170 or so.
Four - I've been to drag strips in Quebec where people take their street cars to race. This would burden people doing something legal unnecessarily.
Five - the safety reasons brought up by others. You never know when you're going to need to avoid something to safe your life. And any emergency shut-off system could easily be exploited.
Also, there's lots of things that you can be sold (guns, knives, noxious chemicals) that could be used to break the law, but as the title suggest, there ARE non-infringing uses for going over 100 km/h, and so the car should not be crippled. This is libertarian city (a.k.a.
Basically, stop breaking the damn law yourself, or go back to kindergarten! No one's holding your hand to make sure you don't assault someone with it. Hell, you can break the speed limit coasting your bicycle down a hill sometimes, that doesn't mean all bikes should have auto-engage breaks. You just need to not be an idiot and use them yourself.